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It’s not like they do it on purpose rubbing hands
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Housing development happens at random?
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Developers build apartments where they can make money from them, in other words where they can rent them for enough that they'll make back their investment. It's very expensive to build housing, so the only way to make the investment back and have low rental prices is to try to make the building costs as low as possible. A big part of those costs is the price of land.
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What's even the point of this comment?
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The parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.
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People don't build housing to intentionally disadvantage people but they do intentionally build housing for disadvantaged people
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Or, the only places to build houses with reasonable costs are in areas that weren’t already built out with very expensive houses.

Which will tend to be less desirable areas, by definition.

One approach, of course, would be to also make existing houses less expensive/desirable. Notably, wealthy people tend to have the resources to fight efforts to do that.

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The other approach is to expand what land is available to build on. I understand that in the UK, farmers consider it a lottery win if they get planning permission for some of their farmland to become housing.

Despite what many in the UK think about it "being full", this is mostly an illusion from how cramped are the parts in which the houses are allowed to go; the country as a whole is mostly undeveloped.

(There are of course other considerations, with "why did you build on a flood plain?" being one of the failure modes in the UK).

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Well, letting people build houses right next to freeways and/or on things like earthquake faults or flood plains is what is being done here. Which is, uh, also a problem. Since those people are now at much higher risk, eh?

Building on farmland has national security concerns (as countries are slowly realizing), as the country ends up dependent on foreign food imports after awhile. Can't grow food effectively when there is a subdivision there instead eh?

In most high demand areas (which are the ones everyone is complaining about, generally), all the decent land (or even just 'normal' land) is already developed.

Bonus - next time around, even the flood plain land might be 'too expensive' to develop on, and folks will only be able to afford houses at the dump, or in a swamp, or the like. Yay.

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Plus the US literally built highways in the middle of poor neighbourhoods.
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Woke activists love the word "systemic" for a reason.

If a bunch of good people acting in good faith produce a result an evil mastermind would want does it matter if they are good? On many levels obviously yes, on some practical levels the system and the incentives still need to change.

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