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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • In the book “Highrisers”, which is about the Cabrini-Greens housing developement in Chicago, there’s a short section talking about how certain buildings were turned over to the tennents in a management capacity. It didn’t fix all of the problems, and it didn’t save Cabrini-Greens, but it did have some measure of success over beurocratic management by CHA, which was a joke. (FWIW I read this several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt)

    That model has stuck out in my mind since. Why not have a simple budget for each building and let the work of maintenance be managed by the people who live there, with resources from the appropriate housing authority. The US is so fucking paternalistic about poverty and the people living in it. We build huge beurocracies incapable of truly scaling that then result in obsene waste like shown above. With some management some of that could be put on tennents, with them keeping some of benefits as well.