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[scriver]

And here we go again with the "Europe is FULL!" meme. Sweden is not full, Finland is not full, and Britain – the fullest of all "full" countries – is definitely not full. Some urban areas with cheap housing are jam-packed with people, but at the same time there are hundreds of thousands of homes sitting cold and empty awaiting more lucrative times.

Nobody wants to live in the countryside. People want to live with others like themselves and will move to the cities to find those people as soon as they can. There is also not enough jobs or prospects to be had in the countryside. There's no social services in the countryside. The only way to keep immigrants there is to assign them a house and somehow forbid them from leaving or they'd move away, just like any sane person would. The Swedish countryside is dying and it is not simply because of a lack of people but because of how the economy work

But God forbid that the fat cats would be forced to rent their empty apartments to immigrants at lower prices – that would be the worst possible human rights violation!

This will never happen in today's political situation (this is a government which won't even legislate a proportional-to-population-and-wealth immigrant distribution of all Swedish communes, which would mean richer communes would be forced to accept more new arrivals and ease the overburdening strain on the often poorer communes that now take in the bulk of the refugees). Instead we would see stuff like what the right-wing coalition did - make it lucrative for capitalists to stack immigrants in "temporary" (but there's nowhere to move from there, so it won't be temporary), substandard housings, keeping people living in less area/person than we allow our cattle to live in, all while the "proprietors" rake home huge winnings in government grants.

And once again - you either have to kick out the citizen's already living in those apartments or end up in places where there's a reason people aren't already living. But I guess Sweden's slumlords (which social services organisations have even admitted is the only places left to place people) and other people who prey on the weak would be overjoyed at this prospect.

Well, the 'everything is a construct' thing is a nice idea, but it has approximately zero practical value. What do you suggest, randomly assigning refugees to homeowners, forcing the latter to give shelter to the former? That's just asking for all sorts of trouble.

I'm rather more of a fan of increasing the construction of cheap housing in the outskirts of big cities, with proper public transportation, some parks, some shops, schools... When this crisis is over they could be used to drive down housing prises without direct intervention in the market.

Huzzah! You have created a ghetto. Have fun with the violently angry, disillusioned second-generation-immigrant youth that will form the recruitment base for your organised crime in the next 20+ years. The only direction it will drive housing prices in other locations is up as everybody with sense desperately attempts to move out of there, and only the downtrodden, the broken, and those with no hope or belief in the future left remain behind.

[Helgoland]

I don't know how this got turned around from "we should at least do the stuff we are able to in that direction" to "we can't provide housing for everyone either way, so rights like that are stupid".

Well, 'right to housing' just has a distinctively idealistic, non-pragmatic ring to it. It's mostly a matter of spin, I think.

Huzzah! You have created a ghetto. Have fun with the violently angry, disillusioned second-generation-immigrant youth that will form the recruitment base for your organised crime in the next 20+ years. The only direction it will drive housing prices in other locations is up as everybody with sense desperately attempts to move out of there, and only the downtrodden, the broken, and those with no hope or belief in the future left remain behind.

Well, we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Instead of creating places to stow away the refugee, we'd need to create places that natives would want to move to as well. Ideally there would be a mix of low-price and medium-price housing, preventing ghettoisation, and enough local attractions - businesses, parks, shops, cultural institutions - to make life there worth living. Sure, these neighborhoods won't be as fancy as other places, but at least they won't be a nekropolis for the living.

[LordSlowpoke]

I can't legally house migrants because I don't own any property. I could probably stash a few illegals under my bed, but there are a few problems with that besides getting evicted...

so you're going to impose things you have no idea about in practice upon everyone around you because of what

just because you said so?

are you from dresden or something

[Helgoland]

Was that a PEGIDA joke?

[LordSlowpoke]

actually it was a reference to how dresden was pretty much the only major city far enough from the inter-german border for the powers that be to jam western media without the west getting pissed, and how dictatorial/socially leftist the course of action appears to be

although if it works as a pegida joke i'll accept it even though getting illegals under one's bed would be running contrary to their interests, i'd wager

[MarcAFK]

But my bed isn't even high enough to shove a pair of shoes under, I would be better off sequestering my allotment of immigrants in my couches or behind a shrubbery.

[SirQuiamus]

I can't legally house migrants because I don't own any property. I could probably stash a few illegals under my bed, but there are a few problems with that besides getting evicted...

so you're going to impose things you have no idea about in practice upon everyone around you because of what

just because you said so?

are you from dresden or something

Of course not, I'm a left-wing populist, remember? I'm only going to impose it on the class enemies, the filthy blood-drinking capitalists in their opulent mansions and penthouses...

...but I get your point – it won't happen because no-one can impose anything on anyone in our free and democratic European Utopia, which is why I'm being a bitter and sarcastic edgelord.

[scriver]

Huzzah! You have created a ghetto. Have fun with the violently angry, disillusioned second-generation-immigrant youth that will form the recruitment base for your organised crime in the next 20+ years. The only direction it will drive housing prices in other locations is up as everybody with sense desperately attempts to move out of there, and only the downtrodden, the broken, and those with no hope or belief in the future left remain behind.

Well, we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Instead of creating places to stow away the refugee, we'd need to create places that natives would want to move to as well. Ideally there would be a mix of low-price and medium-price housing, preventing ghettoisation, and enough local attractions - businesses, parks, shops, cultural institutions - to make life there worth living. Sure, these neighborhoods won't be as fancy as other places, but at least they won't be a nekropolis for the living.

Natives won't want to move there because they would be full of immigrants, and you wouldn't want natives to want to move there because that would raise the cost of living and force out immigrants to even worse circumstances.

[LordSlowpoke]

gee, now that we've agreed we can go ahead and do something productive

how about recolonizing north africa? they sure could use some good old european stability

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I am wondering what will EU do if Russian-Ukrainian war will escalate further millions of Ukrainian refugees will move west...

[Sergarr]

So far, they've been mostly moving East. In any case, I'll predict that the EU will do nothing.

[scriver]

EU-rope would likely be likelier to welcome Ukrainian refugees than middle-eastern/African ones. It would probably be so much less of a deal that it wouldn't make much news, actually - the kind of extreme build up at the borders we've seen with Syrians probably wouldn't happen in the first place. But I might be misjudging the sentiment of the people down on the continent.

[Helgoland]

Natives won't want to move there because they would be full of immigrants, and you wouldn't want natives to want to move there because that would raise the cost of living and force out immigrants to even worse circumstances.

That's why you need a mix of housing options there! Bigger, nicer homes for the natives, smaller, less-nice but still fine flats for the refugees. And enough stuff in between to guarantee that there will be a continuum of people there. Mixing the various kinds avoids the ghettoisation that we've admittedly witnessed in many places.

NINJA: Yeah, it tends to be easier to integrate white people. For example I don't hear people in the Rhineland complain about the damn Poles, even though a bunch of them immigrated here back in the 19th century, while the Americans still have race problems 150 years after abolishing slavery.

[Loud Whispers]

And here we go again with the "Europe is FULL!" meme. Sweden is not full, Finland is not full, and Britain – the fullest of all "full" countries – is definitely not full. Some urban areas with cheap housing are jam-packed with people, but at the same time there are hundreds of thousands of homes sitting cold and empty awaiting more lucrative times. But God forbid that the fat cats would be forced to rent their empty apartments to immigrants at lower prices – that would be the worst possible human rights violation!

We have a few tens of thousands of empty homes; we need to build over 250,000 homes a year - attacking fat cats is not enough, and worse still attacking fat cats usually just means taking a dump on Londoners who own a shitty house that by virtue of being in London costs a fortune. I've already got 6 people living in my house and rent prices have been slashed in my area because no one has the same money they had anymore. Britain is full, quite full, and we don't need more immigrant ghettos when we're already dealing with several hundred thousand more migrants every year who are going to assimilate into no one and work towards making Britain become the country they left. And they leave for what, poverty? The population increases in poor nations over the next decades mean that if you have an open door policy you will be helping no one and hurting yourself; hundreds of millions will be poor in poor nations, and your nation will join them.
And it's a joke to quote rationalwiki; it's the leftwing metapedia of wikis. Same idiocy, different flags.

Well, we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Instead of creating places to stow away the refugee, we'd need to create places that natives would want to move to as well. Ideally there would be a mix of low-price and medium-price housing, preventing ghettoisation, and enough local attractions - businesses, parks, shops, cultural institutions - to make life there worth living. Sure, these neighborhoods won't be as fancy as other places, but at least they won't be a nekropolis for the living.

Do you know how much money it would cost to create a new wharf or southbank? We are talking several billions here at a time where we've already cut everything that can be cut, and when you're talking "natives" they've already been pushed out to shitty zone 5 districts all you'd be doing is pushing out zone 3 & 4 immigrants into working class areas using even poorer immigrants who are in turn pushed out by rich immigrants. When I grew up zone 2 was still the go to shitty immigrant area with affordable houses, leisure centers and it was very close via the tube to some fancy areas. The leisure centers were set on fire and ethnic gangs walked the channel split into African, East/Southeast Asian, English and South Asian gangs, who didn't get along friendly and also made the area money repellent for all but the poorest English. It took several billion more arab oil shekels to make this area somewhere where Europeans (not English, just rich Europeans thx EU) wanted to move into. And as they moved in, they kicked the immigrants and working class English out to outer districts or Peckham.

EU-rope would likely be likelier to welcome Ukrainian refugees than middle-eastern/African ones. It would probably be so much less of a deal that it wouldn't make much news, actually - the kind of extreme build up at the borders we've seen with Syrians probably wouldn't happen in the first place. But I might be misjudging the sentiment of the people down on the continent.

It's in the news just no one really cares because no one is dying and no one can sympathize with Ukrainians here, if we could then we would've actually done something by now. At the end of June 2015, one year after the fighting started, there were more than 1.35 million internally displaced people in Ukraine, ranking the country ninth worldwide in terms of IDPs.

There are also more than 900,000 refugees in neighbouring countries and the estimated number of people in need of humanitarian aid is now five million. People face shortages in food, health services, shelter and medicines, which are in worryingly low supply In Ukraine.
People are worried about how well-armed Ukrainian refugees would be but I don't see beyond black market gun running any negative consequence, it's not like Ukrainians are going to raze Frankfurt to the ground.

[Antsan]

Well, we don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Instead of creating places to stow away the refugee, we'd need to create places that natives would want to move to as well. Ideally there would be a mix of low-price and medium-price housing, preventing ghettoisation, and enough local attractions - businesses, parks, shops, cultural institutions - to make life there worth living. Sure, these neighborhoods won't be as fancy as other places, but at least they won't be a nekropolis for the living.

Do you know how much money it would cost to create a new wharf or southbank? We are talking several billions here at a time where we've already cut everything that can be cut

Hey, so we can exchange an airport that's never going to be finished against housing for immigrants? Sounds like a great deal to me.