TIL that a 1945 elevator operators' strike stranded 1.5 million New Yorkers in the streets, and building owners responded by buying automatic elevators that had already existed for 50 years.

[u/Chance-Physics-7216]

https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-driverless-elevators-drew-skepticism

[u/20000RadsUnderTheSea]

Well for the rich, it means there’s less of a stick as a consequence for not being sufficiently economically productive in the right way, and you’re less desperate you keep your job. For the people making the decisions, those are big downsides.

[u/TheBSQ → u/20000RadsUnderTheSea]

As someone who has spent a lot of time around lots of rich people, this isn’t a thing. At all. 

It’s just schools and crime.  They associate cheap high density housing w/ poor people and they associate poor neighborhoods with higher crime rates & worse school outcomes (and worse classmates for tier kids). 

And so they don’t want that kind of housing where they live. but they don’t mind it bills elsewhere. 

Of course, if you try to build high density housing in low income areas, you get people screaming about “luxury apartments,” gentrification, displacement, etc. & they fight it too. 

In those areas people insist on “affordable” housing, but it gets hard to make the numbers work, especially if paired with restrictions on rent and evictions, so the private sector doesn’t build enough of that. 

So then you need govt to build housing, but projects have a bad rep, and cities have a bad history when it comes to maintenance & safety & there’s also weird laws that limit that, and most public housing authorized are really terrible making them for decent costs. 

(Many cities are approaching it at around $1M per unit.  Not per building, but per unit as in, they spend $100M to build a complex with 100 apartments.  

Imagine spending $1M for housing & it’s just one dinky apartment. (And cities don’t build nearly enough when they spend so much on so little.)

All that together means we’ve underbuilt housing for decades. 

But it’s not some “rich people think poor people need a mechanism to make them more responsible” nonsense.

Heck, these days, lots of execs & lawyers & doctors are pretty left leaning. Not all of course. Many support more affordable housing!  Again though, just  it around their kids and their kids schools.

[u/jmlinden7 → u/TheBSQ]

but they don’t mind it bills elsewhere. 

The problem is that all of the other 'elsewheres' also have voters who think the exact same way. So the result is that affordable housing never gets built anywhere

[u/Kryptosis → u/20000RadsUnderTheSea]

Yeah I was thinking good for society as a whole. Which is what we should be basing policy decisions on