There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard, quality-wise, and it certainly may yield savings to the entity commissioning the project.
But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).
Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.
I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
Do you think the wait list for public housing would be longer or shorter if the government enforced your esthetic preferences on apartment construction?
Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse.
I’m not saying that housing quality should never be regulated. I’m saying that regulation can have side effects policy makers need to consider.
The aesthetics of public housing in HK is not a factor in the pace of public housing construction or the amount of public housing made available. Appearance and supply are completely unrelated. Supply is maintained at an always-woefully-inadequate level and many are allowed to live in squalor.
This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's dream is to manage to get a second apartment to lease out and/or emigrate so that they can retire in, for example, Canada, the UK, or the United States on the proceeds of the sale of their small, poorly-built apartment in a copy-paste high-rise.
Coincidentally, in HK, the government owns literally all of the land except for one or two tiny freeholds (e.g. a very old church is one that comes to mind) and derives a great deal of revenue from land sales (selling long-term leases, really, rather than the land) to property developers. The money from land sales is earmarked for infrastructure projects.
To reiterate: the notion that slapping together near-identical residential skyscrapers in HK helps make housing more accessible is incorrect. Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
> Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.
Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.
Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.
What he is saying is, there is no point in turning San Francisco into Hongkong. If you don't find affordable housing in SF, move somewhere else. It's not the only city in the world.
> There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard.
> But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard.
That's my point. Apartments being copy-pasted implies nothing about the build quality, so it's therefore a criticism of the aesthetic, which is what I took issue with.
> I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.
If you want to add more good regulations that enforce build quality, I'll be right there with you. I haven't seen a country or locale where the building code regulations have been good enough.
> being sold at exorbitant prices
> copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg
Okay, so decommodify land, build more good public housing, and allow more private housing by reducing zoning restrictions. But "ugly" and "cookie cutter" and "identical" should not feature into the criticism.
But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).
Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.
I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.