Incoming: Heavy use of scare-quotes to emphasize I don’t agree with certain framings which nonetheless get my point across.
It’s hard not to be suspicious of any new housing built in an American city. A new apartment building intended for low-income tenants was opened in the “poor side” of town in an area I used to live.
For op sec, I won’t share which city, but consider a typical American town with rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, and guess where most of the crime and policing is.
Is this a progressive move?
On the one hand, lowering housing costs is always a good thing, especially when it helps people who have less.
On the other hand, it could be a cynical ploy to continue quarantining “the poors” somewhere far away from the “nice” neighborhoods.
My gut feeling is that some sort of mixed-income housing would be the best progressive stepping stone because, gradually, middle class (ie white) people would have an increasing stake in this neglected part of town. But then again, that could also become a form of gentrification which ends up displacing the poorer tenants, so this solution would have to include some sort of rent control to work.
We don’t really have enough context to answer this question, besides the fact that you live in an american city. But the thing is that you don’t need us to answer your question either. Towns are subject to planning, which is documented and therefore the full context of every decision is available to you and to civil society organizations.
From what I understand the fundamental problem with housing in the imperial core is that the same moneyed interests in charge of rent and real estate speculation are also placed in charge of building housing. Therefore you’ll have just enough housing to expand the market in the name of asset managers and landlords, but never to deflate costs for businesses and workers.
Every city in a capitalist context is gonna have a center and a periphery, with a neglected part of town and a well funded part of town. Gentrification is always gonna happen because there’s no political segregation between those two. People are always moving and economies are always changing. That is not to say that these are natural processes. Only to go back and put more emphasis on what I said earlier. The city is planned. It is planned to move people and businesses around, to extract money for the moneyed interests, to funnel state funds here and there. That is the context that makes a large, low income housing project ‘good’ or ‘bad’.