The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
> The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Ouch: straight to being against others.
No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.
I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.
What freeloaders are you talking about? This is complete nonsense.
Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless. Even if you socialize all the housing in New York, there will be people that want to live in the city but won't be able to. It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
That's why socialized housing requires residency controls, but if those were implemented in the United States, the country could reap the specified benefits of of the Soviet system.
Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
It's so sad to see communists cling to capitalist concepts like that. Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
> Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless.
That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
It might not be practical to build enough housing in one city to house the entire global population, but who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing everywhere.
> Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing there for them anymore.
> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.
> Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
So just describe it as "don't let the greedy landlords have their way" because the greed landlords want to limit housing supply.
> But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious)
I kind of figured, but actual communists will occasionally show up to say the same sort of thing and then it's just Poe's Law again.
> What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
And there are a lot of people who would willingly be serfs if it meant stability.
The trouble is, it actually doesn't. Monopolies and unaccountable bureaucrats have short-term stability, where short-term is often something like a few decades. But being insulated from competitive pressure makes them long-term unfit, and then they eventually crumble. And the years leading up to the fall have a tendency to be increasingly unpleasant.
> The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
This is one of the other reasons that system tends to fall apart.
Suppose you need something that doesn't come from within your jurisdiction. You haven't got any rare earths in the ground where you are etc. Well, you can just buy them from whoever has them, but then that country is never going to want to join your system because then you'd be taking their natural resources and sending back politburos instead of cash money.
Meanwhile the same thing happens to anyone there who is producing more than they consume. They want to leave. The Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep the Americans out.
That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis wrong a century ago. [0].
Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the achievements of Red Vienna.
The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone, and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.
It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's currently considered even close to a world-class city is that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural financial hub for oligarchic capital.
I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that have nothing to do with it's housing policy.
> I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline
That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government built enough units to supply ten percent of the total market and used that leverage to drive down prices. Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.
> But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation
> Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.