Re:India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world
by mullingitover on Saturday June 06, 2026 @12:26AM
(#48421379)
> people just don’t want to live near poor people
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
Re:India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world
by ericd on Saturday June 06, 2026 @12:45AM
(#48421470)
Yeah, no argument. I think many in the US want the bar to be higher, though - many want expensive single family housing to be the minimum in their area, apartments would be too affordable, even unsubsidized.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.