I’m a YIMBY. I think we need to build a shit load of apartments. I don’t care whether it’s state-owned or private. If we wanted to build a shit ton of public housing, we’d need to implement YIMBY policies anyway.
I don’t really know if Marxism is relevant here, but I see bourgeois NIMBY homeowners trying to keep property values high at the expense of everyone else as a common enemy everyone needs to fight against.
Marxism specifically is relevant here because the housing market in the US and many parts of the imperial core is the premier example of how capitalism turns in on itself and hinders the development of the productive forces in the name of profit. Capitalists will never build enough housing because the market values scarcity and the housing they do build will be as detached from social consequences as it can be.
This doesn’t mean we should want a bunch of ugly concrete apartment blocks built and administered directly by the central government everywhere (no offense to those who do), but socialism would mean structuring our economic system in a way that the state and private sector could be mobilized to build in excess of what we need rather than significantly less than what we need and to build it where it needs to be.
why are you even ceding this point, were commie blocks ever even adminstered directly by a central government? also those “ugly concrete apartment blocks” were the easiest and cheapest way to get people off the streets after the devastation of ww2, weird way to frame it
I’m not really sure what point you think I’m ceding. Is it that we shouldn’t replicate the housing solutions of the post-war Soviet Union because we don’t live in the post-war Soviet Union? My point is that Marxist solutions to the housing question are based on the existing conditions, not caricatures of what the Soviet Union did 70 years ago.
as far as playing into the stereotype part of the comment goes, i meant with you bringing up apartment blocks being “administered directly by the central government”, which i dont think is actually what happened unless im just totally offbase. as far as the ugly aparment blocks goes, it just seems like a weird way to frame it, the common anticommunist narrative is that they just built these apartments like this because communists are souless, and to even use that kind of language helps play into it imo, this is more semantic but i think changing “ugly” to “plain” or “dull” and making sure to include they were in response to mass housing destruction