Dec 22, 2008

Why are social housing projects always ugly?

I was wondering why were low cost housing always so ugly and depressing, when building something nice doesn't cost more...and I thought an explanation might be that building nice apartments would drive up their value as the rich and the capitalists would want them. So even with rent controls, this would create a black market for these apartments...by making them ugly, this doesn't happen...makes sense no?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ciao Luigi!

I guess the real problem is indeed corruption. I think building nice houses does indeed cost more money; think about the differences in costs for the material between concrete and red bricks for a whole building...huge no?
So the story goes: the government gives money to a company to build a house, the company presents a project and uses crappy material and crappy architects and pockets the difference.
It would be indeed cool to have a dataset of crappy looking public housing to use as a control for corruption....think of all the nice buildings in concrete in Eastern Europe...same company, same style, same shit!

serge

Veronika said...

which company in Eastern Europe exactly are you talking about? company State?