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The parasites desire to return our lives to 19th century industrial revolution living standards where entire families lived in open communal basement spaces with only a broom closets worth of space to live in then immediately say your life is still better than the 19th century because at least you have hot chips, T.V., and a smartphone to doomscroll on.
You could easily give each person 150 ft² (15 m²) of their own private space, pretty much anywhere.
You'd just need to bend the building/zoning code, or expropriate some land, or demolish some sacrosanct parking spaces.
If a suite with one kitchen and one bathroom and 3 people's private space takes up 750 ft², and you fit 12 suites per floor with 5 floors, you have 180 people on a building footprint of about 10750 ft² (1075 m²). If the lot is 3 times the area of building's footprint, it is about 0.8 acres (0.325 ha), and you are able to fit 800 of these in a square mile, for a population density of about 144,000 people per square mile. Put a couple roads and parks in-between, and it's still over 120k per square mile. This is not a crazy density, it doesn't deprive anyone of fresh air or sunlight or green space or privacy or accessibility, yet it could fit the populations of the largest cities on earth within a radius of 8 miles.
And you could do this with 19th-century technology too! Keeping people in dark and cramped quarters has always been a choice.
I'll be real with you the one thing I won't compromise on in anything housing related it is having private bathrooms.
One of the pivots I made in the past couple years was on the ubiquity of plumbing. We can snicker about how "the Nacirema measure their status by the number and lavishness of their household shrines dedicated to obscuring and purifying what they see as the innate ugliness of the body", but it really is a measurable aspect of enculturation.
It is a human need to be able to relieve yourself somewhere that is less than 2 minutes away, and also to be able to wash up somewhere reasonably close. After living in a commune where the toilets were all composting and the shower was gravity-fed from a rain barrel with black piping to warm it up with just the sun, I realized that turning a water faucet on ~50 times a day and having 150 feet of water pressure directed to every 100-m³-sized voxel are not really so essential. It takes a lot more consideration in construction to resolve putting water inside a building, when water is something that you're typically trying to keep out of the building. We can build really elaborate structures to accommodate everyone, and they can either be cheap and last a long time, or we can run water all around the interior and have an emergency that pops up whenever it clogs or overflows or leaks.
I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't want your own bathroom, but it drives up the complexity, almost as much as someone saying "I don't want anybody above me". We spend a huge amount of resources on things that we don't really need and that are prone to breaking down. One of the best examples of this is the analyses of how suburbs and exurbs are a net drain on public works. On a planet with finite resources, in the throes of late stage capitalism, we are going to have to respond to many problems and whether they will be solved by exclusive rights or access rights. After all, every demand we make about standards of living for each person translates to a certain amount of labor that someone must be compelled to do.
My conclusion was that I could have a good quality of life with a fraction of the water access that I grew up accustomed to, and maybe a fraction of the electricity access too. My baseline for exclusive rights is 4 walls with a bed, a desk, a chair, a window, enough space to stretch, and maybe a lamp.
theres nothing that'll change a person's mind quicker about having interior plumbing than living in arctic conditions. having to wade through snow just to take a shit in a -20 degree outhouse is a positively miserable experience with the only net positive is that its so cold it doesnt stink anymore. Being able to take a comfortable shit should be a human right and I'll never budge on this issue.
No one said you had to hike outside a dwelling; you can achieve this with an earth-bermed extension with insulated windows and a covered walkway that wraps around the main building to it. (Yes, I've lived in snowy climates)
The question is whether you can provide for said comfortable shit by your own power, or if your lifestyle imposes a requirement upon someone else.
People have made gradual improvements to human-scale solutions for millenia; it's actually easier to do without connecting it to a water main
Or you can have an industrialized state owned or geared in favor of the proletariat under a socialist economy able of providing those amenities and comfortably in mass for millions.
"or if your lifestyle imposes a requirement upon someone else."
Everyone's lifestyle imposes a requirement upon others if you want a reasonably healthy society. Hermits and communes aren't the solution.
I meant a net requirement on others. If everyone requires a net requirement on others, or externalities beyond the rate that the environment can absorb, you have a fundamental instability that will end up making the society untenable.
"Workers owning the means of production" isn't some blanket cure-all statement that you can whip out to answer any problem. It doesn't allow you to bend physics. Running power lines and water pipes have the same engineering challenges whether it's a board-selected CEO or a workers' committee signing off on the project. We want to solve these problems, not just imagine them being solved from our end-user perspective.
When I think of socialist models of providing amenities, I think of Havana, which produces up to 50% of its food from backyard and municipal horticulture. In places where they don't have access to products that have embodied exploited labor, they need to take the proportional inputs seriously, instead of just assuring themselves that they're cheap enough. The best way to ensure production for direct use instead of for surplus is to do as much as possible locally. This doesn't mean becoming a hermit- in fact, it allows higher population concentrations. It means examining and ruthlessly criticizing all of the conveniences and abstractions that the capitalist world has created. For instance, asserting that to create "a reasonably healthy society" you don't need piped water on tap within 15 steps in any residence, and you definitely don't need to mix your solid waste into black water and pump it into an underground tunnel network when a scoop of sawdust is enough to keep it sanitary until it becomes fertilizer in 6 months.
I should have been more transparent in that I was referring to socialist examples such as China where 70% (paraphrasing, could be 60 or more) is owned by the state who services and provides for the proletariat. I didn't mean it as a generalized "cure-all" statement. There plenty of solutions for those problems though when you have a highly efficient, quickly-mobilized state workforce able to lay down railway lines, highways and hospitals in a matter of months. Your example with Cuba is working with the sanctions and how embargoed they are. I'm sure they would have the amenities of plumbing in each private flat in apartment blocks soviet-style if they could but climate and the embargo prevents them.
There's nothing stopping this from happening in large socialist economies either; Plenty of people garden and have this kind of horticulture in China and even capitalist economies, I know I do. I don't disagree with you on this. Larger horticulture and personal agricultural projects are important!
After living in a household with multiple people and struggling with my intestines for a while, I don't think having two bathrooms in a five-six person household with multiple women is a "luxury" or "abstraction". Nor are those things "luxuries" and "abstractions" for the elderly, disabled or those who genuinely need privacy because of conditions.
There is a reason we don't use human feces as fertilizer anymore. The bacteria in human feces as well as the level of nitrogen in it does not render it as a usable solution. It can work on smaller-scale, sure, but any form of economy of scale renders it unsanitary it is more efficient/cheaper to use other fertilizers than clean human feces of detrimental bacteria. In order to have a highly concentrated density of people, you definitely need sewers and plumbing. I do agree there are better solutions for grey-water storage, though and I get where you're coming from. I have family who have lived in a commune.
Also, plumbing isn't just used for waste solution. There is plenty of industry that needs plumbing. You do not want to mix the things that come from industry with black-water into wherever you are recycling the water.
If we scroll up to the beginning of this discussion, I start out by saying "1 bathroom per 3 people is rather adequate", and I only start pushing to imagine even less when someone replies to me saying "that is not enough, a bathroom to person ratio of 1:1 is required". Yet somehow I'm the hermit advocate.
Idk I just think it would be a lot easier to not rely on redundancies that we survived for millenia without, and can easily conceive of doing without if we imagine a short distance beyond the scope of our civilizational norm.
That was the one line I took an issue with and I was curious to see how far that line of thought extended. It's reasonable and I agree with you. I mentioned earlier that I have family who lived in a commune and despite being left-leaning they had certain "individualist" type mentalities and what could be considered early hippy "anarcho-communalist" ideals that consistently hard-lined against forms of socialism that didn't involve a Kropotkin-style approach, essentially.
Doesn't really seem to be that here and I get/understand more what you mean now. I didn't interpret what the other user was saying as 1:1 plumbing but yeah I don't agree with that either. A half bathroom with no bath/shower and a shower room is better than just one bathroom imo. Also don't see any reason why toilets can't be in the shower itself unless it's for those who struggle to use them.
I was curious about rent in San Diego while vacationing there recently and I ended up finding something sorta similar to what you're describing. 98 sqft, furnished with shared bathrooms and showers, no mention of a kitchen. At 650 a month it was the most affordable thing I found.
This is a modern German prison cell.
Building/zoning laws are not the problem, they're just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem is that the economic system we are part of doesn't create value by building things, it generates value by denying things.
The largest impediment to affordable housing is the fact that it would detract from the value that current property owners created via artificial scarcity. The zoning laws and building codes are just one of many tools that property owners use to create value without ever having to invest in anything.
Right, they're not the core of the problem, but they're the thing you're most likely to run into when you want to live outside the paradigm of "taking up a big expensive chunk of land for yourself and forcing everyone to drive a bit further by pushing them farther away".
Norway has taken this approach, with private flats about that size with not much in terms of qualifying. Not sure if the program encompasses all homeless at this point or was just in certain cities