Have you ever wondered why "low income" or "Section 8" housing is so shitty? Why they have shitty linoleum floors, cheap ass appliances, no dishwasher, janky door handles, etc.

It's not because these things are too expensive!

If an average market rate apartment building costs $10m to build, a low income building will cost $9.5-$9.75m. And a high-end swanky building might cost only $11m-$12m to build. The vast majority of the cost comes from the basic construction, not the finishing and furnishing.

Developers, who only build low income housing if forced to, could build their low income units to the exact same finish standard as a midrange market rate unit, rent them out under Section 8, and their net profit at the end of 30 years will be functionally identical.

(Especially when you factor in the cost of repairing shitty appliances and hardware that break constantly)

Developers and landlords build low income units to shitty, barely livable standards because they hate poor people, hate being forced to build homes for poor people, and they want to make their tenants' lives miserable for the crime of not being more profitable.

Anyway some landlords will probably find this thread and complain that they're justified because poor people are animals or some other racist shit, so be ready to cyberbully some guillotine candidates

This was on my mind because I saw a file for a low income housing project I worked on last year, and the GC asked us to value engineer the hardware to the absolute cheapest shit that would pass code, and the owner signed off on it. They only saved $12k off a $4m project