I grew up on welfare, and I can't tell you how often my mom would talk about section 8 housing and how that would change everything. Having to move was my parents greatest nightmare - they would barely afford day-to-day things, nonetheless first/last/deposit.
> section 8 housing and how that would change everything
Sorry can you clarify - do you mean she wanted to be eligible? Or was eligible but couldn't find a suitable place. I've always wondered if buying a property to rent to section 8 tenants is a good idea or not. (investment wise or charity wise)
Relative did this and found it was not a good move. Usually the types of places that rent to section 8 tenants have very high cap ratios assuming you collect rent every month... just think for a bit why other investors leave those on the table considering how financially advantageous that would be.
Ok I’ll spoil it a bit: first, you still have to do maintenance on these places like fixing the roof, plumbing, etc. and it doesn’t matter if you bought it for pennies, it still has to be livable to rent. Second, section 8 doesn’t cover everything (at least for some) so your tenants will often not make rent: the decision whether to continually take losses on renting or to evict a family (possibly making them homeless) is up to you. And among poor people you will have higher rates of things like hoarding or drugs so your likelihood of dealing with that is high (approaching near certainty as number of properties grows).
He ended up selling off his real estate “empire” in less than 5 years after being threatened with a gun, evicting a family, and having one house get entirely gutted one night (including wires and toilets)
I am constantly thinking about ways to find a satisfying solution to these problems. I feel like China is one of the few countries that actually managed to do it. It's not just about having an export surplus. Before they could export anything they still had to build the factories and get workers to move there.
I think the answer is to find a way to drag up a limited group of people as high as possible and then use the gains from those people to drag up the rest to a medium level of wealth. The conventional theory of trickle down economics completely ignores the second step. It's just an excuse to not do anything.
From what I can tell changing an existing community gradually is possible but it will take much longer than creating an entirely new but also well designed community. Find (or slowly create) a highly successful city and try to build another city that follows the same success model. This is probably a good answer for many developing countries but may not be enough in an already developed country.
I grew up on welfare, and I can't tell you how often my mom would talk about section 8 housing and how that would change everything. Having to move was my parents greatest nightmare - they would barely afford day-to-day things, nonetheless first/last/deposit.