Posted on 08/12/2006 10:49:40 PM PDT by neverdem
On a London street, “social” housing encourages antisocial egotism.
An interesting experiment took place on the London street where I have an apartment. A few years ago, the borough council permitted a developer to build six apartment complexes across from my building, on the condition that he reserve three of them for “social”—what Americans would call public—housing.
The architecture of the buildings, while deeply undistinguished, is far from the worst of the genre and certainly does not suffer from the gigantism that was once the vogue. The street remains leafy, and edges on a fashionable area. A two-bedroom apartment in the private complexes now sells for $900,000. To all appearances, the apartments are identical in the private and public housing complexes.
In front of these apartments is a tiny garden, not more than 15 feet wide. As you walk along the street, you can tell from these gardens exactly at what point the private property ends and the “social” housing begins, in exactly the same way as, overflying the island of Hispaniola, you can tell where the Dominican Republic ends and Haiti begins.
The little gardens in front of the publicly owned apartments are overgrown and jungle-like; they look as if no one really cared for them since the construction of the housing. Litter and household detritus—from diapers to the packaging of fast-food meals—covers them, some of it festooned on the overgrown bushes. At a certain point, private property takes over. The little gardens are cared for and neat; not a single piece of litter clutters them. If one were to appear, a property owner would soon remove it. My apartment, I am glad to say, is opposite a privately owned building.
What accounts for this startling difference? Raw poverty cannot force someone—even someone almost certainly a single mother—to dispose of diapers in the front garden. After all, the council collects trash from the public and private sectors alike.
Could the tenants of the public housing feel hard done by? No doubt they could, given the human capacity for resentment, and perhaps they express it by little acts of nihilism, but surely it is the providers of the “social” housing—that is, the hard-working taxpayers of the borough—who have the right to feel hard done by. The rent that the public tenants pay would be derisory compared with the market rate, and furthermore many such tenants would be exempt from local taxes. Taxpayers are making an involuntary gift, extracted from them by legal force, year after year, and no doubt decade after decade, to people who probably despise them for it. Where, one might ask, is the justice in that?
What is clear from the distribution of litter in the street is that it is the private that is social, and the “social” that is not so much private as solipsistic, egotistical—and antisocial.
Do you know any FReepers who sell books online?
I don't.
There are a lot of Freepers so I have to keep looking, next time I'll ask around in the daytime. Maybe I'll just buy Jeff Head's books or something. He has I think a 5-book series about WW3 (US vs China and Russia). I think you could download them for free but the file is just too big for my dialup.
I sell American history books - primarily on American Indians, the Civil War, the Mountain Men era and on the Wild West.
Always thought that FreeRepublic could use a Amazon affiliate link - we all buy enough books, the revenue could possible deal with a fair portion of the quarterly drives. I know I buy close to three grand in books and videos from there each year, a couple percent is $60 for FR.
I was specifically thinking of science fiction and books like the ones Jeff Head wrote.
Excellent!
Yet another illustration of the world the Democrats dream about as they relentlessly pursue their agenda of turning America into a Euro-style, secular-socialist welfare state.
IIRC, the UK has Labour and the Liberal Democrats to serve that function.
My father built several 4 family homes in a poor black section of Linden, NJ in the late 60's, right when the welfare "revolution" was taking place. In order to get them finished he had to pay the chief of police $500 per week to station police cars in front at night to discourage vandals and thieves. Once the units were constructed, they were high quality, especially compared to what was there. Within 6 months the new tenants had turned them into complete slums. So I'm not sure whether it matters who owns them, but rather who lives in them.
One time a tenant rented a 1 bedroom apartment stating they only had one child. Next week my father goes to check on them and there's 10 kids there and wall to wall matresses. They never made another rent payment and it took my father 6 months to evict them. The judge wouldn't throw them out before Thanksgiving and until after New Year's. Then they came to court claiming they couldn't find an apartment.
As long as liberals run the courts and turn landlords into social welfare dispensers such problems will continue.
I always liked the LOONEY party...
This thread reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the architect for the public housing project actually designed a slaughterhouse with rotating knives and such...
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