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Which is easier?
Building new housing for rich people, or
Building new housing for poor people.
If society supplies more of one good than the other, of course the people who participate in the less supplied market are going to earn a larger return, the government is effectively handing them market power. If you want to reduce their income, allow developers to build more housing aimed at poor people.
Building housing for poor people isn’t really a thing. Poor people housing is generally older housing that’s been depreciated and rich people buy the new housing.
Poor people housing is most of housing in poor countries and almost all 20th century housing in the Eastern Bloc, and the lion's share of housing that me and almost everyone I've known, rich or poor, have lived in until relatively recently.
On this note, I've never understood American problem with public housing, and their weird superstition that building a «project» causally leads to social dysfunction (particularly widespread among conservatives). Is it just that they haven't discovered ways for managing their underclass other than a) dispersing them over large territories and b) incarceration?
Because American housing projects are terrible and full of dysfunction and crime.
It’s totally plausible that a country better at running things, or bad at running things in a different way, would have housing projects that aren’t, but that is not what we are.
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It's totally possible to build a functional housing project, just as it's totally possible to run a functioning school, for certain definitions of "function". The problem for Americans are that our currently-enforced definition of "function" is in fact impossible to achieve, and changing it is pretty close to a coup-complete problem. If you try to do things the way that works, the full power of the Government will be turned to wrecking your project.
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In my experience, urban Eastern Europe/Russia doesn't have true ghettoes (excepting aberrant spots like, I dunno, Gypsy communities and hyper-concentrations of immigrant labor), and even the worst spots are massively overhyped by helicoptering same-sex couples (mother and grandma) – you can reasonably safely go there, rent there, do business there, even live your whole life there. If you have normal situational awareness, then the worst that will typically happen is you'll be sometimes woken up by high-pitched screams of fallen women and gopnik cackling as some unlucky bastard is getting the shit kicked out of him; or be asked by the poor wife of your 300 pound neighbor and the district officer to help carry him up the stairs as he struggles and curses under the breath (parse this last scenario as you will).
There's very little in the way of gang activity, wanton murders, arson, high-effort burglary, and other things you positively cannot brush off by reading Aurelius, working out and investing in ear plugs.
Piss and petty vandalism is a bit annoying, but more or less a solved issue in the last two decades. And that's Russia.
Maybe my standards are just low.
So your example looks like an adequate analogy to Eastern Europe conditions (except for prices), which was my point: those are passable conditions, and not deserving of the attitude like they pose mortal danger; tiling cheap land with communalkas and enabling the underclass (and anyone not rich enough for better things) to live in such conditions is preferable to encouraging homelessness and the eviction cycle. I'd hypothesize that the debuffs of «ghetto» and «project» stack in the statistical sense, and Americans expect them to.
More importantly, my frustration has to do with the American belief that dense housing somehow begets dysfunction – I've seen takes riffing off the Universe 25/Behavioral Sink narrative that purported to explain why projects are fucked up, and it just sounds inane.
You're about correct it seems. I'm aware of the «Bad Old Days» mostly theoretically – witnessing a corpse with leaking brain tissue in the yard in the mid-90s, junkies dismembering a dog, hobo pack occupying the hallway etc. is about the maximum of my exposure. Stories of getting beat for venturing into An Alien Neighborhood, which my siblings and people of that cohort have conveyed to me, were kind of stale by then; in my generation, I've only met (somewhat confused) people who LARPed that culture but weren't born into it.
Regardless, this is a present-time discussion, and not specific to Russia.
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Sometimes when people look at things like crime rates in Europe, they note that homicide rates are fairly high in Finland, compared to Western European countries. This often comes as a surprise because welfare state etc.
I've lived in "high-murder" areas pretty much all my life, yet I've often visited the shops at night, gone out for walks etc. and have not felt particularly unsafe. I'm not very physically imposing, yet I don't fear to go out, even when newspapers feature regular stories about murders in my hoods. Why? Because everyone knows there's a very familiar pattern to these Finnish murders: a bunch of alcoholics are having a "party" (ie. drinking booze) to the wee hours of the night, at one point two of them get into an argument over a bottle of booze (or maybe one of them has looked at another one's lady friend the wrong way etc.), one stabs another, in the morning everyone's passed out on the floor and as they start slowly getting up they notice one isn't getting up. As long as you don't go to one of those "parties" - and they're not particularly hard to avoid if you aren't in the bottomed-out alcoholic community - you are very unlikely to get stabbed.
Stories about (immigrant) youth gangs attacking people on the street thus get a rise out of people in a way that "ordinary" murder stories don't, since it's not just "those people" suffering, it might be normal middle-class people and their kids. Which is to be expected, of course.
Is it something like this in these instances, too?
This is the second time in a short while I've come across something interesting about Finnish drinking culture. Do you know more about it? Apparently, you don't drink casually on weeknights but then Friday/Saturday it's literally (I think they have a term for it) "drink until you shit yourself" time?
Yes, that's the stereotypical idea. Like, I don't drink until I shit myself, but then again I have two small kids, and I've cut back on my drinking radically.
There has existed a constant low-level campaign to make Finns drink in a "more European way" (ie. more on the weekdays, less binging on weekends) or reduce alcohol use in general. (mandatory Polandball comic) I don't think the "European way" has ever took hold, but alcohol use is generally down, especially among the youth, possibly because they don't want to repeat the cultural patterns of the older generations.
"Finnish drinking culture" is a very vast topic, is there something more specific you want to know about it?
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Pretty much – we have similar problems with alcohol, if nothing else. Though I'd say such scenarios don't even need stabby activities – one can fall (or be made to fall) on the kitchen table the wrong way; and then the district policeman will recall he has other unsolved cases (since we do have quite a lot of «real» murders and disappearances, with the body discovered in the local woods and no actionable leads). and this low-class scum can't very well plead innocence, so…
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Imagine working Russians never having to buy an apartment in Murino, because they can either earn enough to live and build a house in their own hometown or rent an apartment in St Petersburg proper. Who would remain in the human anthills then?
In a way, it's a cruel mirror image of the American Blacks who were once redlined into specific neighborhoods, the poor and the relatively prosperous forced to live together.
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It's not superstition, it's experience.
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