Don't you mean the opposite? Surely the crime comes from the financial instability. I don't see how you could address the crime without addressing the financial instability.
concentrating/diffusing poverty is a different axis of policy vs. housing/not housing the destitute
the unfortunate circumstances surrounding NYCHA properties was due to concentrating poverty, in singapore public housing is economically integrated so as to avoid the same problem
Causation goes both ways. Intelligent, educated, and well-paid Hacker News posters often don't understand the cloud of chaos, crime, poor decision-making, and deflected blame that hovers over the lives of many poor people. Section 8 landlords understand that while such people may comprise a minority of their tenants (or not), it only takes one to ruin a building and the surrounding neighborhood.
On a certain level this is common knowledge, reflected in the real estate markets of all big American cities. Dirt-cheap housing stock can be found in large swaths of Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, et cetera. It's cheap because even the most desperate families would rather live anywhere else, around anyone else.
Prioritising business just concentrates money in the hands of people who already have money while nothing to address the day to day concerns of actual people.
London seems to manage this petty well. I think it’s quite healthy for a city to commingle folk from different income groups rather than house them in specific areas.
How is the government stealing your income or destroying the value of your property? Seems a bit hyperbolic.
And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
Because there is no free market in housing whatsoever.
Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything. You need planning permission - which means permission from the local council, local homeowners and consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much power.
There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough houses at all.
> And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.
The posts you are responding to said "low income", "poor" and "different income groups". The classism required to go from that to "criminals" is very disturbing.
London has sky high rents for young professionals while also taxing them exorbitant amounts that ends up subsidize social housing for "economically inactive" people. I would not call that efficient.
