this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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the fact that most of the rent goes to pure landlord profit becomes obvious with municipal housing here in sweden, where we basically only pay for maintenance.
suddenly the rent is so cheap that the americans i've told it to just wanted to cry, 400€/month for a small apartment that's plenty big enough for a single person, and full on family apartments can be had for as low as 600€/month if you look around for a while.
I have municipal housing in my town. Rent is, at most, 15€. That is affordable even for the poorest of the poor.
You're awfully lucky then. That's a form of socialism, assuming that your government is intervening and ensuring affordable rent even for homeless and those on assistance. And what are the quality of those rentals? Have you lived in one personally?
Lived, no. Went there a few times and have coworkers that grew up there and their parents still live there.
The housing was purpose built to house a wave of immigrants that returned to the country in the 70's. It was built with money from a state-funded development initiative to foment building of new houses in the very early 80's, by the municipality, and was overhauled to add external insulation and improved windows somewhere between two or three years ago.
The rents are reviewed yearly by the city hall. On average, rents are around €10. Central government does not interfere.
But homeless people can't be forced to live there. We have had cases in our country where homeless people were housed and simply left some time after. Where I live, to my knowledge, there has been no such cases.
We also have a program - nation wide in this case - where extremely vulnerable people can resort to our Social Security to get aid in finding housing. I know a few cases of single mothers, elderly and even entire families being housed, with the rent being assured by social services, either by directly sourcing a house and paying the rent or providing the monetary support for the people to find one by themselves.
Lately, these programs have even started to relocate these cases inside the country to move population from high density urbam areas, more problematic usually, to low density areas. This creates a flow of people and money to less populated areas.
The reason we don't have federally funded municipal housing in the US is that the Clinton Administration capped the number of units the federal government is allowed to fund