I increasingly think that for social safety nets to work well, they need to be universalized, if possible.

Otherwise we get welfare traps, ghettoisation or just poor quality (like buses in places where only the poor use em). It doesn't mean everyone has to use it, just that they can. This is common sense in services like health or education, where we're used to it.

That universalism leads to less social stratification is essentially the idea behind the social democratic welfare state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_...

We already have a good solution to avoid ghettoisation or traps called progressive taxation.

However, it doesn't go far enough because the tax rate doesn't take benefits into account, so even though you're getting >$0.80 of every dollar earned, after adjusting for benefits it may instead be $0.20 or even negative. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an especially large contributor to this situation [1].

To avoid a trap, marginal income after taxes and benefits should start high and fall monotonically. It should probably also be concave up (the amount of income to bump you into the next 'adjusted tax' bracket gets bigger and bigger).

[1] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publicati... (page 767, Figure 2)

The issue of capital gains getting preferential tax treatment over wage labor is a much bigger problem than any lack of benefits taxes.

Why? It's just artificial money, what's the concrete negative impact? (I probably agree, I just think it needs to be concrete and justified)

I have also seen this in public housing in Hong Kong. Government built housing for families in the 70s. Children move out. The remaining residents turn grey. The residents in the housing complex are aging along with the buildings.

The street I spent my childhood on there was about 30 kids under 10 years old. Now there is about three. My family moved away but I recently checked and the girl next doors parents have lived there ever since. They're in their 80's.

Mulling it over I think uniform single use zoning/construction is 'bad'. I saw presentation by a guys showing various housing. One of them was a very nice 1920's era apartment building in Redwood city. One of his points was it'd be totally illegal to build something like that today.

And in the US, a lot of upper-middle-class HATE mixed income dwellings.

At least in dense cities, public housing can be mixed into free market housing.

They hate it because it became a one stop shop solution for everything. (Especially the mental illness problems are troubling without any of the very much needed therapy, continuous follow ups, visits from a social worker, etc.)

that would be a bit more believable were it not for the people who make sure that the "poor apartments" in a building have a separate entrance.

While that makes a great headline, how common is it?

enough to have its own wikipedia entry, at the least! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_door

Which seems to imply that while a poor door is not very common, it is becoming more common in response to affordable-housing regulations (requiring a % of market-rate developments to be affordable).

That indicates poor zoning to me. If you have mixed market-rate and social housing you should be building them adjacent to each other or (as is often done now) in the same building.