I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and even driving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control
Social housing typically doesn't look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn't have to look terrible. Here's some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It's kind of the China Town of Paris.
It's right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
Yeah, that's why I'd like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
They're called commieblocks if they're affordable to the average person. If not, they're "highrise apartments"
I live in a city with neighbourhoods built during Socialism, they're spacious, full of greenery and with important services within walkable/bikeable distance. Meanwhile we have new "urban villas", which are drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
I am so happy I'm not alone seeing it. Modern "development" is such a massive scam, in every country it seems like. It's the new equivalent of logging or mining barons- they buy up land, build shit on it, sell it overpriced, wash their hands and move on to the next project with little regard for long term urban city planning. They are creating forced gentrification.
Soviet development that was driven purely by economic considerations tends to have all the issues of modern development. Well, except car centric planning, but we know why that wasn’t a consideration ever.
Apartment complexes that didn’t focus just on economy, tended to be way better. And that is missing from modern considerations almost always.
Still, there’s a reason pre-Soviet areas to this day remain some of the most sought out ones.
Give me a single structure on a plot of land, 10ft from my neighbours walls, and a lawn to maintain, any day I live for the additional costs on the place I never spend the best hours of my day in. Worth every gallon of commute fuel. My brain is so aerodynamic.
This. It's call a Ranch style house for a reason. Because the kind of place they were initially common had tons of land available in the form of pasture.
I like how living in the countryside lets me disconnect from others in a more healthy way. I live in the suburbs now due to supporting family, but would love to be back in a residence clearly disconnected from anyone outside my household. It doesn't even have to be that far as long as there is separation due to natural barriers like dense foliage or elevation changes.
Stayed in an probably illegal Airbnb in a Samsung apartment in Jeju 10 years ago. It was nice. Apartment complexes are not bad. We have to them in beautiful Switzerland too. If the building is well maintained and the surrounding is full of greenery, and local shops, and entertainment, then they are a valid option and I'd prefer them over sprawl and cul-de-sacs.
Sure, in the end a building like this is going to be what it is. I personally live on the inside of my apartment, so that's what I care most about. If I owned a house and spent a bunch of time looking at it from the garden, I would care more.
Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather.
The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore).
Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they'd look nice.
Dumb question, I know some places where they build quick and ugly and a few decades later they just remodelled the façade to make it pretty an modern. but those are small residential buildings in places where I lived. do you know of places where that happened in large projects like the picture?
Our commie blocks in East Europe tend to get colorful when their owners (either the city or the dwelers) decide to insulate the facade, which often happens across a whole district in a short time.
Random image to ilustrate.
And that is just the façade, some places renew the façade every few decades to keep the place fresh and desirable.
the benefits of high density urban design are also amazing and I assume I do not need to list them here. this is lemmy and I just need to wait for the appropriate autist to list them all.
And how is it controversial to build housing for everyone, instead of some pretty houses for those who can afford it.
Nah man. I lived in Russia most of my life and commie blocks are as depressing as they look on those pictures. You have a point that some are poorly maintained, but that's not some, that's most of the country. Just a mass of featureless grey blocks. Dirty, ugly and inescapable. About them being good quality on the inside is debatable. The flats are small and I could hear my neighbors all the time. Some of them used to be painted, but the paint is peeling off, only hylighting the ugliness. There's very little upside to them in the modern world.
I live in Russia nearly all my life, and I can tell it really is a matter of proper maintancnce. Many cities do a very poor job keeping these buildings in a good shape, but when they do, it looks fairly good. Look through the comment section for examples, they are real, I've seen quite a few.
Not to mention European neighbors where they are still common, but due maintenance makes them look actually good.
The sound issues are fair, but there are ways to limit them.
is a matter of proper maintenance to an extend. You can paint a box, it'll still be a box, just not as grey. And let's not pretend Russia maintains anything. In Moscow maybe, but most of the country looks just as depressing as shown on the picture in OP. Our government never has money for fixing old infrastructure, only for war.
My point is, panel houses don't have to look so ugly anymore. But people here are arguing like it's the only alternative to homelessness. Live in ugly, cramped panel houses or nowhere at all.
More like, "back when these things were built, government had to build the most resource-efficient and mass-constructed housing, responding to a surge in demand for urban living due to industrialization"
It was either this or leaving people without any place to live.
Sure, modern situation is different, and we can have nicer homes.
When the coops that own and manage these houses hire creative architects for renovation, you can these buildings to be much less bleak looking. They mostly miss coloured paint. The gray plaster they used is what makes them look shit.
Otherwise these buildings often have quite clever design in regards to natural light for all flats as well as relative quietness even when next to busy roads.
this is more to do with it being in moscow and built some 50 years ago, not with it being "left-wing" (whatever that means). Social housing around the world can look much better than this
Also seriously who gives a shit about how it looks, it's a place to live. I'll take one of those apartments please, I can't afford to buy a fucking condo for $500K, and that's all they build now because that's what makes them most money. So tired of this bullshit.
Looks matter because it's a place to live. Many commieblocks deal with that just fine by having the green space around them though.
I kind of like the look of some of them though - solid, practical, maintainable. Some of the modern builds in my local city look more like temporary emergency shelters - like the people staying there don't belong.
Yes, we need to stop homelessness, but you also want to avoid creating spaces where nobody wants to live because it's ugly and depressing and guaranteed, the poor end up having to live there, and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas where even police is uneasy
Take a little bit more space, put a little bit more thought into the designs, add spaces for children to play, add parks, make it look nice. Wr don't need luxury villas either, but there has to be something better than this
In my country this type of building came about in a society where many still lived in wood sheds without electricity or running water. Where people shared outhouses with their neighbors in the yard of actual residential buildings. Where every residence on average was overpopulated.
The architecture of the time homed huge amounts of people with running water, indoor toilets and electricity. Indoor heat without needing a fire.
The areas where they were erected weren't much to look at before. The buildings today may be unappreciated but I find them lovely in a way. They're a shadow of a society that cared for it's citizens.
You're forgetting the public transport availability, walkability, and facilities being part of the planning, i.e. the design was to include kindergartens, schools, hospitals, shops, etc., all not too far away to access on foot or a short commute that is regular and predictable and also easy to get to. Admittedly, it didn't always happen, but still resulted in more liveable cities and areas than many of the new neighborhoods being built today in the same cities.
It was built cheap and efficiently, not to please the eye. It could certainly be better, and we know that our environ plays a bigger role in our outlooks than we did before. If they built it today, it would have a few more trees and green spaces but would maintain it's very essence, which is a large domicile to house people for cheap.
Also correct me if I'm wrong but didn't a lot of these have murals and shit painted on them back in the day. Could've sworn I've heard about these building having their outer paint stripped only to reveal a mural or mosaic.
where nobody wants to live because it’s ugly and depressing and guaranteed, the poor end up having to live there, and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas where even police is uneasy
you should not give lectures about something you know from bad tv show at best.
what a suprise, these communities look according to how you maintain them and people who live there are happy to have a place to live. and when it undergoes revitalization, it looks quite nice.
the photo in the post is typical manipulation, everything looks grayish if you capture it in the middle of the winter with bad sky and trees without leaves.
But they aren’t wrong either. Some places with these type of buildings have been build wrong. Like in the Netherlands in the 60’s they build an entire new neighborhood that had only these mega modernists apartment buildings that followed Le Corbusier futuristic vision. And nobody wanted to live there, because other neighborhoods with history were much more pleasant to live in. So eventually only the poor and desperate moved into the neighborhood. And the neighborhood turned into a rundown ghetto. Today almost every one of those 1960’s apartment buildings in that neighborhood has been torn down. Was much cheaper to rebuild from the ground up than to renovate. Same is true in many suburbs of Paris.
thay may very well be true, but that is not problem of the houses. architecture is not responsible for solving issues in the society. if you devastate your neighborhood, it is your fault, not the architect's.
A spot in one of those for a family in Berlin costs 650.000€ because of how great the non-communist economy is doing at creating affordable housing. That is 14 times for median salary before taxes, or 21 times after taxes.
https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165160850
Lots of trees there. That place still looks pretty nice in the summer.
A quick web search had someone say it's Yaroslavsky District, Moscow and while I'm not entirely convinced (having trouble matching the photo to a map), in the summer it will probably look similar to the photo of Yaroslavsky District on Wikipedia.
We lived in similar housing back in the 80's, and the surrounding area was nothing but lovely greenery and forests, by design. Then the 00's came around and they privatized everything, sold the apartments, and cut down all the greenery. I don't know why, it's just something they do, like, they had to create low income jobs somehow and decided the best way is to equip parks&rec with chainsaws and just go around and cut shit down to validate their own existence, so they could show their amazing statistics.
Now everything is barren concrete, and it looks way more like actual grey communist dystopia than it did before. Go figure.
I've seen this posted before. Important points to consider: Imperial Russia had a housing shortage in the cities due to industrialization occurring and the existing housing was often of poor quality. According to one source: "In major cities, a significant portion of housing consisted of barracks, basements, semi-basements, dormitory-style rooms, dugouts, and semi-dugouts."
Then WW1 hit followed by the civil war and housing construction essentially stopped with some housing destroyed in the war. Then in the interwar period, priority was given to industrial construction in the USSR, resulting in low housing construction volumes, with a significant share consisting of temporary housing. Rapid industrialization and increasing population shifts to cities increasing demand. Then WW2 hit and huge amounts of existing housing were destroyed in the fighting.
So the USSR was in tight spot and did the best they could with limited time and resources which for most Russians ended up being a huge improvement.
Most of the issues with this era of housing projects stem from the fact that the plans for upkeep were abandoned. Most of the buildings themselves were solid and very modern and with the right maintenance they would've been in much better condition than they are now.
The buildings that have received that care and attention still look great. Not all the areas were well planned but most of the time they're fine.
And that's without constraining that judgement to Russia specifically. Many of the countries that built like this were very ambitious but the ambition faltered with time as the resources allocated to maintenance were used for other things.
Semi relatedly, there's some new blocks in my city that are both ugly and expensive to live in. It's this soulless, almost corporate feeling type of architecture. Doesn't fit into how the city looks at all. They had the opportunity to decide whether to build affordable housing or something pretty that aesthetically fits into the city and picked neither. No doubt the shareholders shed a tear of joy.
I'm not sure what "left wing architecture" means. Because, to me, this looks like the sort of thing you have to do when the population grows like crazy. Those tend to be areas where women have little education and little power.
Hey if you need a lot of housing real quick utilitarian designs like this tend to come about, doesn't really matter who is doing it. Hell the Romans had some prefab designs that had a passing resemblance to this.
High-rises? No. Multi story buildings some going up to six or seven floors? Yes. Plenty of them survived up until around the high medieval period but we're starting to come down by the Renaissance, though there are some examples in Revenna Italy. It's been about 1500 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and about 500 years since the Eastern Roman Empire, regardless of how well built that's a long time for any tall structures, a good example is the Lighthouse of Alexandria which while a bit older was rendered ruined around the same period and subsequently scavenged from to construct something newer, much like it's Roman counterparts.
Most of them did collapse and fail or were otherwise scavenged for materials and lowered a few floors. So it's not like these were all lasting for some massively absurd timescales on average, what we have are the well built ones. We probably do have plenty of structures that will be around in a thousand years with proper maintenance, it's just that most large scale building of comparable sizes are only about 200 years old at most, which is roughly comparable to when the larger Roman building in Gaul and Britain started to get a bit rough according to chroniclers.
One interesting thing I'm noting is that picture appears to have been taken on a rather dreary winter day. I can see a lot of trees between the buildings, and I'd be interested in seeing what this place looks like in other seasons and better weather
Yes, additionally utilitarian architecture like this can easily painted in lively colors to make it look nicer. Imo this also would make a big difference with minimal costs
Those blocks might be not perfect, but they were part of a program to build housing for all those people living in quite bad conditions after the war and after everything that went through in eastern europe in the 20th century. They needed millions of homes and quick. And they might be ugly to some people, but they are better than slums and you shouldn't take their condition today after several decades for what they were when they were new.
Just a reminder that the underlying problems that lead to this kind of architecture aren't explicitly left-wing. When you were born all the land already belonged to someone else. These might be private properties, corporate owned properties or state owned properties. If you weren't lucky enough to inherit something from your parents you are forced to live in these boxes. This problem gets worse over time. Lack of opportunities to earn enough money to buy a plot/house, paired with a lack of space in cities also contributed to the situation. It's shit everywhere because we as humans have continuously failed to implement better solutions.
I'm aware your comment is very likely a joke, but I still got triggered.
Isn't if funny how people born in Capitalism wants socialism, but people born in socialism want (balanced, not late stage) capitalism, yet both consider themselves leftists?
Guaranteed housing
See image above. You can't choose. The house is given to you wherever the government wants you to work till you kick the bucket. You felt more like a slave in socialist state than in capitalistic one.
human-centered urban planning organized around moving on foot and in public transit
Like China, Half of capitalistic EU, and North Korea? This has nothing to do with any political spectrum and was commonly done due to historical factors or resource/car availability.
universal healthcare, free education
Well, just because there is a one country that managed to screw it up, does not mean it cannot be part of capitalism. See: Rest of the world
abolition of unemployment
Depends on how you look at it. I'm sure there is zero unemployment rates in concentration camps too.
False. A majority of people who lived in the Eastern Block (except for a few countries like Baltics or Poland) say that life was better during socialism, every poll that comes out confirms this. The people who are so afraid of socialism are the 90s kids who have been indoctrinated in the "horrors of gommunism" while completely ignoring the very real horrors of capitalism.
Think about what you just said. "Back when we had more money, life was better than now when east is poor after wars and collapse".
It's funny that you excluded the countries that are not considered broken.
Work mobility was very much a thing in the Eastern Block except during exceptional times such as WW2. Housing in the USSR was actually primarily accessed through your work union, not through the government, so it was up to you where you wanted to work and therefore live
You could not choose the housing. Queues were often unrealistically long everywhere around, so "freedom to move" was often only on paper. Some cities around were straight up blocked from "peasants", including one nearby me. It's not as smooth and easy as you describe it, I have way more freedom now in capitalism
I've also lived in a smaller village, and many people are forced out of there by the economic situation of not being able to find any job because capitalism moves all jobs to the big city. Are you purposefully lying, or just misinformed?
This also happened in the union. Where do you think the masses for popping industry cities came from? So many dead villages lying around. Few years ago I traveled to the place my parents grew up in (but were forced to abandon due to jobs moving to city) and it was hard to find, almost forgotten and overtaken by nature. Weird argument, and on top of that to say I'm purposefully lying? Lmao even.
So, like a socialist country, a bunch of countries imitating socialist urban design, and another socialist country? Nothing to do with political spectrum?
These countries with good urban planning have vastly different ideologies and political systems. What was Ancient Rome, capitalistic or socialistic? Urban planning rarely has anything to do with what party is currently at the government. They're often independant systems even where they just allocate the budget and "ok, go do your best".
The European urban planning mostly played out before words like socialism or democracy existed.
Why are you so hurt by people having a right to retirement pensions, worker rights, extremely high unionization rates, and guaranteed employment?
Because the people who lived thru socialism have this "I deserve everything, give me all basic needs without me having to put anything back into the society" mindset while their retirement pensions are non-existent because socialist states don't survive long.
I barely became an adult by the time it collapsed, but it's still noticeable how full of themselves "boomers" are.
The uncomfortable truth for you is that capitalism works more like competition. That was not a problem back then, but if now you know/feel like you can't compete with people around you, then yes, you will get stuck, left behind and will live miserably, but is that a problem with the system, or you? Get your ass up, start studying robotics, get a degree, and you'll do just fine, if your brain works.
Here's something to think about: Are most people incapable of living in capitalism and would fare better in socialism, or would most people feel like their growth has stagnated in socialism and are basically surviving with their basic needs being met, but not really thriving? Do you think humans by nature are lazy, or competitive? Do you think humans by nature want to constantly grow, experience new things, etc. or stay in a village?
You say I have superiority complex. I say I choose something a majority would choose too (which by logic invalidates superiority argument). This is democracy, isn't it?
"Dumb commies, they think this is better than owning your own houses and renting them out so they don't have to work? Savages, let them live in cardboard boxes." / the bourgeoisie
I wish! As someone who have lived in one of those concrete apartments from the communist era of my country, at least as they were made here, you do hear your neighbours. And if your neighbours have an active kid or a bigger breed dog that likes to jump a lot especially. Also every time they drop something on the fooor. I'm not very familiar with construction and material propeties, but there is something about concrete that carries vibrations easily. When a neighbour starts doing some renovations the power drill can be heard in half of the building (it was a nightmare for me, who worked night shifts at the time).
Don't get me wrong, I'd still prefer that hell to being homeless.
I guess you can maybe make an argument that this is centralized planning, trying to make the best use of the land available and that right-wing would be pure chaos where the market decides what's going on. On so you'd have sprawl next to Mansions next to slums, next to McDonald's, and no parks, and every single tiny piece of land has a building on it, and it all must be fully utilized trying make money in some capitalism way?
Honestly, it doesn't seem the worst way to do it from a housing density standpoint. Yes, we all want the standalone suburb house or some spot in the countryside, but that's not the world we live in. For high density housing, this doesn't seem that bad. Each building has a balcony and overlooks a park and has fresh air and sunshine.... How do you do this better?
or is it about equality? Every unit here is equal and therefore bad? That seems a positive in my eyes. Is that really the difference here? There aren't the ultra poor and the mega rich all mixed in together... Where the poor are in slums and the Richer mansions, is that right wing architecture?
What's the best way to build high density housing? Tall buildings surrounded by Parks seems to be the most optimal way, right? What am I missing here? The buildings aren't pretty enough?
Edit: I’d rather see little communities of tiny houses with central services like a little bodega, laundry-mats, parks, greenways, etc. within walking/biking distances.
I see this meme getting reposted here every week, and it's the same nonsense every time. The fact that the people in the Soviet Union had both depressing architecture and homelessness renders the point in the meme both false and meaningless.
Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn't exist, they never officially published figures on it, however most experts both today and back then agreed that the homeless population was in the hundreds of thousands. Most conservative estimates put the figure at around 150k-200k, while some put the figures as high as 2 million.
The Soviet Population was 266 million in 1980 and 286 million in 1989. In both cases, if we go around the absolutely most conservative estimates of 150k, that's around 0.05% of the population.
So, I'm not interested in being a Debbie Debater here, and I'm absolutely not claiming that you're wrong, but I think two of the three sources you give don't really pass my standard for reliable.
The first one doesn't quite pass the vibe check for me. When I go to the home page, the top articles are about "the five greatest russian erotic films" and "7 budding russian models". It just doesn't scream "impartial scientific article" to me.
The Christian Science Monitor one is from a researcher from radio liberty research. What I read is that this place was founded and funded by the CIA with the explicit purpose of broadcasting propaganda into the east bloc. To me, I'm about as likely to trust an article from this source as I am to trust an article about homelessness in South Korea coming from a think tank funded by North Korea, called the "Proletarian Empowerment Institute" or whatever.
One thing I can find plenty of impartial sources on is that it's hard to find reliable data on homelessness from the USSR. But to go and trust some less than credible sources for a lack of alternatives is pure lamp post bias.
I don't have a dog in this fight, and I'm not saying you're wrong. All I'm saying is that the sources you cite don't pass my personal smell test, and I still feel agnostic on whether or not homelessness rates in the USSR were better or worse than in the US in the 80s.
As an aside, it's really embarrassing, but I don't know where I got the 0.01% figure from. A second google search seems to suggest a range of 600,000 to 2,000,000 out of 247,000,000 so something closer to 0.0025%--0.08%. These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR. For me personally, it doesn't really affect whether or not I believe that the homelessness rate in the USSR was higher or lower than in the US because I still feel like I'm pretty much in the dark on the former. But maybe for you these figures help you sharpen your beliefs, so I figured I'd share them.
I think two of the three sources you give don’t really pass my standard for reliable
You know what? That is fair criticism, and I acknowledge it. My sources are not as good as they should have been and that's my fault.
I did some actual digging this time, and I did find a real academic source. The source is a 2006 academic book called Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia that written Svetlana Stephenson, who's a Sociologist professor at the London Metropolitan University who specializes in studying Russian society.
Although it's a good read, I'm not going to ask you to read a 170 page book for an online argument. Instead, I'll give the relevant excerpt from page 95:
The true extent of homelessness in Soviet times remains unknown, but it has
been claimed that there were about six million vagrants in the Soviet Union in 1989
(Starikov, 1991), while studies conducted in the late 1980s place the number of
homeless people west of the Urals at two to two and a half million (Alexeeva, 1993).
This estimate is based on the number of people detained by the militia for vagrancy
and ‘parasitic way of life’. As the militia registered the person each time he or she
was brought into the militia station, this statistic is very unreliable.1
If we use these figures as a rough estimate, we get an idea of the extent of homeless in the Soviet Union. The Soviet population in 1989, as per the1989 Soviet Census, was 286 million. If we use the 6 million figure for the whole country then that means that the homeless were 2.1% of the population. If we use the most conservative number here, which is the 2 million west of the Urals, that would obviously be a severe undercount as that excludes the Russian heartland, however that figure does seem to be more reliable so let's pretend that it's the figure for the whole country. If that's the case then the homeless would still be around 0.7% of the population.
Now, I did my own digging for the US figures as well. According to the Alliance Housing Council, the homeless population in 1988 was somewhere between 1.3 and 2 million. The US population as per the 1990 census was 248.7 million. That means that the homeless make up 0.5%-0.8% of the population at the time. Keep in mind this figures come from an extrapolation of official figures that came out in 1984, and they made the assumption that the homeless population would grow 20% every year. So this is likely an over count, but I still think it's more accurate than the official figures.
So going by these figures, I think we can safely assume that the Soviet Union not only had a homelessness problem, but it had both a higher rate and a higher number than the US at the time.
These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR.
A bit is really understating it. There was an absolute canyon in the levels of freedom found in the US vs the Soviet Union. At the time the US was arguably the freest country in the world while the USSR was the least free. The USSR had no freedom of the press, speech, expression, assembly, information, nothing. The one and only source of data was the government, and they refused to report the actual numbers because they feared them. The fact that we're in the dark about it now should be proof that such a gap was substantial.
That's dumbest argument imaginable. Drugs are considered illegal, drug addicts access to free rehab in most countries... does that mean nobody uses drugs? Because that's your argument. The Soviet Union had homelessness. Just because they made it illegal, that didn't make the problem magically go away, and just because they denied it that doesn't mean it's not real.
If you visit the communism museum in Prague, you'll learn all about the horrors of being under the thumb of the USSR. And then at the end you'll see a photograph of the cottage in the countryside where Vaclav Havel and others plotted the revolution with a text explaining that, like many Czech people, Havel owned a second home in the countryside where they would often spend weekends and holidays. For all the bad, the communists did a much better job on housing than the capitalists.
To be fair, the USSR had the worse economy in the Warsaw pact. (and to be fair to the USSR, the massive distances and relative emptiness of their country added alot to transportation expenses)
Right wing architecture
More right wing architecture
Just one more lane!
Pls bro, just one more 🙏
That's terrible. Use the nide grabber and put that right. Wobbling all over the place right now.
I fucking hate stroads.
I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and even driving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control
That is a lot of gas stations and signs for them
Free market competition 🇺🇸🦅🙏
Social housing typically doesn't look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn't have to look terrible. Here's some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It's kind of the China Town of Paris.
It's right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
If you're curious, here it is on Google Maps
I'd live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.
No comrade, nice looking things are bourgeoisie decadence.
Yeah, that's why I'd like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
They're called commieblocks if they're affordable to the average person. If not, they're "highrise apartments"
I live in a city with neighbourhoods built during Socialism, they're spacious, full of greenery and with important services within walkable/bikeable distance. Meanwhile we have new "urban villas", which are drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
I am so happy I'm not alone seeing it. Modern "development" is such a massive scam, in every country it seems like. It's the new equivalent of logging or mining barons- they buy up land, build shit on it, sell it overpriced, wash their hands and move on to the next project with little regard for long term urban city planning. They are creating forced gentrification.
Soviet development that was driven purely by economic considerations tends to have all the issues of modern development. Well, except car centric planning, but we know why that wasn’t a consideration ever.
Apartment complexes that didn’t focus just on economy, tended to be way better. And that is missing from modern considerations almost always.
Still, there’s a reason pre-Soviet areas to this day remain some of the most sought out ones.
Also part of why it looks depressing is because it's old and poorly maintained.
Just a touch of renovation and the houses start looking way better:
Ugh. Disgusting.
Give me a single structure on a plot of land, 10ft from my neighbours walls, and a lawn to maintain, any day I live for the additional costs on the place I never spend the best hours of my day in. Worth every gallon of commute fuel. My brain is so aerodynamic.
This, but unironically. People suck, give me distance. I'll let the lawn die.
So, don't live in a city.
This. It's call a Ranch style house for a reason. Because the kind of place they were initially common had tons of land available in the form of pasture.
Moving to a countryside can give you both decent enough isolation and teach you to reconnect with others in a more healthy way
I like how living in the countryside lets me disconnect from others in a more healthy way. I live in the suburbs now due to supporting family, but would love to be back in a residence clearly disconnected from anyone outside my household. It doesn't even have to be that far as long as there is separation due to natural barriers like dense foliage or elevation changes.
If you live out in the country you can just mow a meadow
Please don't, critters live in them thar meadows
Yep, my building hasn't had a good amount of care in a while but the one right next to it has recently and it looks just fine.
Meanwhile in famously communist South Korea...
Ah, the beauties of capitalism.
Stayed in an probably illegal Airbnb in a Samsung apartment in Jeju 10 years ago. It was nice. Apartment complexes are not bad. We have to them in beautiful Switzerland too. If the building is well maintained and the surrounding is full of greenery, and local shops, and entertainment, then they are a valid option and I'd prefer them over sprawl and cul-de-sacs.
Sure, in the end a building like this is going to be what it is. I personally live on the inside of my apartment, so that's what I care most about. If I owned a house and spent a bunch of time looking at it from the garden, I would care more.
edit spelling
South korea is speedrunning into a scify dystopia
take notice of your capitalist car park next time you go to big box centre. more depressing than housing
Copying and pasting an old comment i made:
Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather. The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore).
Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they'd look nice.
Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they'd be pretty damn great, as far as skyscrapers go.
The blocks usually have a lot of green areas (that's why most of the pictures are from winter, they look gloomier). They were designed to be lived in.
Looks like the ones in the picture are already surrounded by green spaces - they're probably already pretty great as far as skyscrapers go.
Dumb question, I know some places where they build quick and ugly and a few decades later they just remodelled the façade to make it pretty an modern. but those are small residential buildings in places where I lived. do you know of places where that happened in large projects like the picture?
Our commie blocks in East Europe tend to get colorful when their owners (either the city or the dwelers) decide to insulate the facade, which often happens across a whole district in a short time. Random image to ilustrate.
Such a lovely place to live, a bit of green, colourful housing, and I will assume it is a walkable place
And that is just the façade, some places renew the façade every few decades to keep the place fresh and desirable.
the benefits of high density urban design are also amazing and I assume I do not need to list them here. this is lemmy and I just need to wait for the appropriate autist to list them all.
And how is it controversial to build housing for everyone, instead of some pretty houses for those who can afford it.
These blocks look very different as a person on the street. They mostly only look bad from above where you can see all of them together
We have some burtalist apartment buildings in Minneapolis. They're generally desirable apartments
Nah man. I lived in Russia most of my life and commie blocks are as depressing as they look on those pictures. You have a point that some are poorly maintained, but that's not some, that's most of the country. Just a mass of featureless grey blocks. Dirty, ugly and inescapable. About them being good quality on the inside is debatable. The flats are small and I could hear my neighbors all the time. Some of them used to be painted, but the paint is peeling off, only hylighting the ugliness. There's very little upside to them in the modern world.
I live in Russia nearly all my life, and I can tell it really is a matter of proper maintancnce. Many cities do a very poor job keeping these buildings in a good shape, but when they do, it looks fairly good. Look through the comment section for examples, they are real, I've seen quite a few.
Not to mention European neighbors where they are still common, but due maintenance makes them look actually good.
The sound issues are fair, but there are ways to limit them.
is a matter of proper maintenance to an extend. You can paint a box, it'll still be a box, just not as grey. And let's not pretend Russia maintains anything. In Moscow maybe, but most of the country looks just as depressing as shown on the picture in OP. Our government never has money for fixing old infrastructure, only for war. My point is, panel houses don't have to look so ugly anymore. But people here are arguing like it's the only alternative to homelessness. Live in ugly, cramped panel houses or nowhere at all.
I don't think the point is about present.
More like, "back when these things were built, government had to build the most resource-efficient and mass-constructed housing, responding to a surge in demand for urban living due to industrialization"
It was either this or leaving people without any place to live.
Sure, modern situation is different, and we can have nicer homes.
When the coops that own and manage these houses hire creative architects for renovation, you can these buildings to be much less bleak looking. They mostly miss coloured paint. The gray plaster they used is what makes them look shit.
Otherwise these buildings often have quite clever design in regards to natural light for all flats as well as relative quietness even when next to busy roads.
Photographing them in summer also helps
this is more to do with it being in moscow and built some 50 years ago, not with it being "left-wing" (whatever that means). Social housing around the world can look much better than this
Also seriously who gives a shit about how it looks, it's a place to live. I'll take one of those apartments please, I can't afford to buy a fucking condo for $500K, and that's all they build now because that's what makes them most money. So tired of this bullshit.
Looks matter because it's a place to live. Many commieblocks deal with that just fine by having the green space around them though. I kind of like the look of some of them though - solid, practical, maintainable. Some of the modern builds in my local city look more like temporary emergency shelters - like the people staying there don't belong.
500k? Dang that’s a bargain!
How the hell is this "left wing architecture"?? Apartment buildings have looked like this all around the world for at least 50 years.
Any housing that isn't exclusively for billionaires is 'left wing'.
It's left-wing in that it provides cheap housing for many. It also looks very brutalist and is reminiscent of USSR housing blocks.
It's "left wing" because the buildings are identical, because they were built through central planning.
I don't see this as left or right wing
This is architecture that could be done better.
Yes, we need to stop homelessness, but you also want to avoid creating spaces where nobody wants to live because it's ugly and depressing and guaranteed, the poor end up having to live there, and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas where even police is uneasy
Take a little bit more space, put a little bit more thought into the designs, add spaces for children to play, add parks, make it look nice. Wr don't need luxury villas either, but there has to be something better than this
In my country this type of building came about in a society where many still lived in wood sheds without electricity or running water. Where people shared outhouses with their neighbors in the yard of actual residential buildings. Where every residence on average was overpopulated.
The architecture of the time homed huge amounts of people with running water, indoor toilets and electricity. Indoor heat without needing a fire.
The areas where they were erected weren't much to look at before. The buildings today may be unappreciated but I find them lovely in a way. They're a shadow of a society that cared for it's citizens.
You're forgetting the public transport availability, walkability, and facilities being part of the planning, i.e. the design was to include kindergartens, schools, hospitals, shops, etc., all not too far away to access on foot or a short commute that is regular and predictable and also easy to get to. Admittedly, it didn't always happen, but still resulted in more liveable cities and areas than many of the new neighborhoods being built today in the same cities.
It was built cheap and efficiently, not to please the eye. It could certainly be better, and we know that our environ plays a bigger role in our outlooks than we did before. If they built it today, it would have a few more trees and green spaces but would maintain it's very essence, which is a large domicile to house people for cheap.
Also correct me if I'm wrong but didn't a lot of these have murals and shit painted on them back in the day. Could've sworn I've heard about these building having their outer paint stripped only to reveal a mural or mosaic.
you should not give lectures about something you know from bad tv show at best.
what a suprise, these communities look according to how you maintain them and people who live there are happy to have a place to live. and when it undergoes revitalization, it looks quite nice.
the photo in the post is typical manipulation, everything looks grayish if you capture it in the middle of the winter with bad sky and trees without leaves.
But they aren’t wrong either. Some places with these type of buildings have been build wrong. Like in the Netherlands in the 60’s they build an entire new neighborhood that had only these mega modernists apartment buildings that followed Le Corbusier futuristic vision. And nobody wanted to live there, because other neighborhoods with history were much more pleasant to live in. So eventually only the poor and desperate moved into the neighborhood. And the neighborhood turned into a rundown ghetto. Today almost every one of those 1960’s apartment buildings in that neighborhood has been torn down. Was much cheaper to rebuild from the ground up than to renovate. Same is true in many suburbs of Paris.
thay may very well be true, but that is not problem of the houses. architecture is not responsible for solving issues in the society. if you devastate your neighborhood, it is your fault, not the architect's.
same country, same houses, different residents:
The only thing more depressing than left wing architecture is right wing architecture
Looks like concept art from Anno 2070... And I don't mean that in a good way.
As someone who loves watching megaprojects, it is so sad that it is mostly a right wing vanity thing.
A spot in one of those for a family in Berlin costs 650.000€ because of how great the non-communist economy is doing at creating affordable housing. That is 14 times for median salary before taxes, or 21 times after taxes. https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165160850
in prague, it is 2 monthly median salaries per squared meter. there was a lot wrong with the fucking "communism", but accessible housing was not it.
this post is a work of some ignorant teenage edgelord, the title does not even have anything to do with the screenshot.
Wtf is a left wing architecture.
The shit far right comes up with sometimes melts my brain.
Lots of trees there. That place still looks pretty nice in the summer.
A quick web search had someone say it's Yaroslavsky District, Moscow and while I'm not entirely convinced (having trouble matching the photo to a map), in the summer it will probably look similar to the photo of Yaroslavsky District on Wikipedia.
We lived in similar housing back in the 80's, and the surrounding area was nothing but lovely greenery and forests, by design. Then the 00's came around and they privatized everything, sold the apartments, and cut down all the greenery. I don't know why, it's just something they do, like, they had to create low income jobs somehow and decided the best way is to equip parks&rec with chainsaws and just go around and cut shit down to validate their own existence, so they could show their amazing statistics.
Now everything is barren concrete, and it looks way more like actual grey communist dystopia than it did before. Go figure.
Capitalism will do that. It sucks.
That's so fucked up. I hate when asshole cut down trees.
I've seen this posted before. Important points to consider: Imperial Russia had a housing shortage in the cities due to industrialization occurring and the existing housing was often of poor quality. According to one source: "In major cities, a significant portion of housing consisted of barracks, basements, semi-basements, dormitory-style rooms, dugouts, and semi-dugouts."
Then WW1 hit followed by the civil war and housing construction essentially stopped with some housing destroyed in the war. Then in the interwar period, priority was given to industrial construction in the USSR, resulting in low housing construction volumes, with a significant share consisting of temporary housing. Rapid industrialization and increasing population shifts to cities increasing demand. Then WW2 hit and huge amounts of existing housing were destroyed in the fighting.
So the USSR was in tight spot and did the best they could with limited time and resources which for most Russians ended up being a huge improvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_construction_in_the_Soviet_Union
Most of the issues with this era of housing projects stem from the fact that the plans for upkeep were abandoned. Most of the buildings themselves were solid and very modern and with the right maintenance they would've been in much better condition than they are now.
The buildings that have received that care and attention still look great. Not all the areas were well planned but most of the time they're fine.
And that's without constraining that judgement to Russia specifically. Many of the countries that built like this were very ambitious but the ambition faltered with time as the resources allocated to maintenance were used for other things.
C'est la vie
Funny how the same people who do that blame the ideology that built the apartments and made those plans huh
I hate our society's fixation with ugly utilitarianism. We could be making beautiful things for all of us
They're too hard to regulate. Grey square boxes are good for the poor! You'll see! Trust us. We're totally not stupid
Semi relatedly, there's some new blocks in my city that are both ugly and expensive to live in. It's this soulless, almost corporate feeling type of architecture. Doesn't fit into how the city looks at all. They had the opportunity to decide whether to build affordable housing or something pretty that aesthetically fits into the city and picked neither. No doubt the shareholders shed a tear of joy.
I'm not sure what "left wing architecture" means. Because, to me, this looks like the sort of thing you have to do when the population grows like crazy. Those tend to be areas where women have little education and little power.
Are you saying the USSR did not educate their women? (As a means to further population growth?)
This is historically because urbanization. It may look to you because sexism or whatever, but that's because you see sexism everywhere.
This litterally looks like any neighbourhood build in Spain in the 60s.
Hey if you need a lot of housing real quick utilitarian designs like this tend to come about, doesn't really matter who is doing it. Hell the Romans had some prefab designs that had a passing resemblance to this.
Except that if the Romans actually built high-rises, the damned things would probably still be standing.
High-rises? No. Multi story buildings some going up to six or seven floors? Yes. Plenty of them survived up until around the high medieval period but we're starting to come down by the Renaissance, though there are some examples in Revenna Italy. It's been about 1500 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and about 500 years since the Eastern Roman Empire, regardless of how well built that's a long time for any tall structures, a good example is the Lighthouse of Alexandria which while a bit older was rendered ruined around the same period and subsequently scavenged from to construct something newer, much like it's Roman counterparts.
And meanwhile, name structures of similar scale built with modern engineering would probably be gone long in a fraction of the time.
Once you find the exact material and labor required to meet specifications, spending more to exceed them is simply wasteful.
If you want modern engineering to build something that will last 2000 years with minimal maintaince, it'll be expensive and kinda shitty to live in.
Most of them did collapse and fail or were otherwise scavenged for materials and lowered a few floors. So it's not like these were all lasting for some massively absurd timescales on average, what we have are the well built ones. We probably do have plenty of structures that will be around in a thousand years with proper maintenance, it's just that most large scale building of comparable sizes are only about 200 years old at most, which is roughly comparable to when the larger Roman building in Gaul and Britain started to get a bit rough according to chroniclers.
Just paint them some color bruh. It would do wonder.
The homeless? Or the buildings?
Make homeless colorful again
homeless modern art piece
Building duh
Data centers, that empty parking lot outside the abandoned mall, deportation camps…
One interesting thing I'm noting is that picture appears to have been taken on a rather dreary winter day. I can see a lot of trees between the buildings, and I'd be interested in seeing what this place looks like in other seasons and better weather
Yes, additionally utilitarian architecture like this can easily painted in lively colors to make it look nicer. Imo this also would make a big difference with minimal costs
I actually wish they’d build more of those than the overpriced “luxury condos” people build now that no one can afford.
On the picture: hundreds of flats with individual windows and balcony
Oh no, giving hundreds of families a balcony, how terribile! What's next: non-shared bathrooms and kitchens?
Who could've guessed, low-cost housing doesn't look fancy!
Funny enough, despite the ugly aesthetics, there is a great sense of community in social housing.
Those blocks might be not perfect, but they were part of a program to build housing for all those people living in quite bad conditions after the war and after everything that went through in eastern europe in the 20th century. They needed millions of homes and quick. And they might be ugly to some people, but they are better than slums and you shouldn't take their condition today after several decades for what they were when they were new.
It also just looks this way from a drone shot. It's very different when you walk around there.
Just a reminder that the underlying problems that lead to this kind of architecture aren't explicitly left-wing. When you were born all the land already belonged to someone else. These might be private properties, corporate owned properties or state owned properties. If you weren't lucky enough to inherit something from your parents you are forced to live in these boxes. This problem gets worse over time. Lack of opportunities to earn enough money to buy a plot/house, paired with a lack of space in cities also contributed to the situation. It's shit everywhere because we as humans have continuously failed to implement better solutions.
lists one way of doing a thing "This is the only way of doing that thing!!"
Ahh yes, the famous left wing authoritarian centric planning government Soviet Russia
I'm aware your comment is very likely a joke, but I still got triggered.
Isn't if funny how people born in Capitalism wants socialism, but people born in socialism want (balanced, not late stage) capitalism, yet both consider themselves leftists?
See image above. You can't choose. The house is given to you wherever the government wants you to work till you kick the bucket. You felt more like a slave in socialist state than in capitalistic one.
Like China, Half of capitalistic EU, and North Korea? This has nothing to do with any political spectrum and was commonly done due to historical factors or resource/car availability.
Well, just because there is a one country that managed to screw it up, does not mean it cannot be part of capitalism. See: Rest of the world
Depends on how you look at it. I'm sure there is zero unemployment rates in concentration camps too.
Turns on US news
Think about what you just said. "Back when we had more money, life was better than now when east is poor after wars and collapse".
It's funny that you excluded the countries that are not considered broken.
You could not choose the housing. Queues were often unrealistically long everywhere around, so "freedom to move" was often only on paper. Some cities around were straight up blocked from "peasants", including one nearby me. It's not as smooth and easy as you describe it, I have way more freedom now in capitalism
This also happened in the union. Where do you think the masses for popping industry cities came from? So many dead villages lying around. Few years ago I traveled to the place my parents grew up in (but were forced to abandon due to jobs moving to city) and it was hard to find, almost forgotten and overtaken by nature. Weird argument, and on top of that to say I'm purposefully lying? Lmao even.
These countries with good urban planning have vastly different ideologies and political systems. What was Ancient Rome, capitalistic or socialistic? Urban planning rarely has anything to do with what party is currently at the government. They're often independant systems even where they just allocate the budget and "ok, go do your best".
The European urban planning mostly played out before words like socialism or democracy existed.
Because the people who lived thru socialism have this "I deserve everything, give me all basic needs without me having to put anything back into the society" mindset while their retirement pensions are non-existent because socialist states don't survive long.
I barely became an adult by the time it collapsed, but it's still noticeable how full of themselves "boomers" are.
The uncomfortable truth for you is that capitalism works more like competition. That was not a problem back then, but if now you know/feel like you can't compete with people around you, then yes, you will get stuck, left behind and will live miserably, but is that a problem with the system, or you? Get your ass up, start studying robotics, get a degree, and you'll do just fine, if your brain works.
Here's something to think about: Are most people incapable of living in capitalism and would fare better in socialism, or would most people feel like their growth has stagnated in socialism and are basically surviving with their basic needs being met, but not really thriving? Do you think humans by nature are lazy, or competitive? Do you think humans by nature want to constantly grow, experience new things, etc. or stay in a village?
You say I have superiority complex. I say I choose something a majority would choose too (which by logic invalidates superiority argument). This is democracy, isn't it?
American suburbia.
Especially in the rust belt
in soviet russia, apartments block you
https://i.redd.it/vykv4tij5yie1.jpeg
Thank god the right wing blesses us with their beautiful architecture like:
or
Second one doesn’t look bad imo
"Dumb commies, they think this is better than owning your own houses and renting them out so they don't have to work? Savages, let them live in cardboard boxes." / the bourgeoisie
Left wing? LOL. This is a Soviet Block. They are everywhere in the old USSR.
They're all made of concrete which means I don't have to hear my upstairs neighbor stomping around at every hour of the day
I wish! As someone who have lived in one of those concrete apartments from the communist era of my country, at least as they were made here, you do hear your neighbours. And if your neighbours have an active kid or a bigger breed dog that likes to jump a lot especially. Also every time they drop something on the fooor. I'm not very familiar with construction and material propeties, but there is something about concrete that carries vibrations easily. When a neighbour starts doing some renovations the power drill can be heard in half of the building (it was a nightmare for me, who worked night shifts at the time).
Don't get me wrong, I'd still prefer that hell to being homeless.
Why is there always a neighbour that's drilling? I live in a similar style building, but much smaller. There's always someone who drills.
Why is this right wing or left wing housing?
I guess you can maybe make an argument that this is centralized planning, trying to make the best use of the land available and that right-wing would be pure chaos where the market decides what's going on. On so you'd have sprawl next to Mansions next to slums, next to McDonald's, and no parks, and every single tiny piece of land has a building on it, and it all must be fully utilized trying make money in some capitalism way?
Honestly, it doesn't seem the worst way to do it from a housing density standpoint. Yes, we all want the standalone suburb house or some spot in the countryside, but that's not the world we live in. For high density housing, this doesn't seem that bad. Each building has a balcony and overlooks a park and has fresh air and sunshine.... How do you do this better?
or is it about equality? Every unit here is equal and therefore bad? That seems a positive in my eyes. Is that really the difference here? There aren't the ultra poor and the mega rich all mixed in together... Where the poor are in slums and the Richer mansions, is that right wing architecture?
What's the best way to build high density housing? Tall buildings surrounded by Parks seems to be the most optimal way, right? What am I missing here? The buildings aren't pretty enough?
More like capitalist architecture…
Edit: I’d rather see little communities of tiny houses with central services like a little bodega, laundry-mats, parks, greenways, etc. within walking/biking distances.
People here understand that the Soviet Union had a homeless population too, right? They actually had a higher rate than the US in the 1980s.
The USSR collapsed entirely in the early '90s
Safe to assume everyone is aware they had severe societal issues
I see this meme getting reposted here every week, and it's the same nonsense every time. The fact that the people in the Soviet Union had both depressing architecture and homelessness renders the point in the meme both false and meaningless.
What was their homelessness rate in the 1980s? I've looked for 5 minutes and have not been able to find anything. In the US it was 0.01%.
Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn't exist, they never officially published figures on it, however most experts both today and back then agreed that the homeless population was in the hundreds of thousands. Most conservative estimates put the figure at around 150k-200k, while some put the figures as high as 2 million.
The Soviet Population was 266 million in 1980 and 286 million in 1989. In both cases, if we go around the absolutely most conservative estimates of 150k, that's around 0.05% of the population.
https://www.rbth.com/history/332657-homeless-people-ussr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Soviet_census https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/ehome.html
So, I'm not interested in being a Debbie Debater here, and I'm absolutely not claiming that you're wrong, but I think two of the three sources you give don't really pass my standard for reliable.
The first one doesn't quite pass the vibe check for me. When I go to the home page, the top articles are about "the five greatest russian erotic films" and "7 budding russian models". It just doesn't scream "impartial scientific article" to me.
The Christian Science Monitor one is from a researcher from radio liberty research. What I read is that this place was founded and funded by the CIA with the explicit purpose of broadcasting propaganda into the east bloc. To me, I'm about as likely to trust an article from this source as I am to trust an article about homelessness in South Korea coming from a think tank funded by North Korea, called the "Proletarian Empowerment Institute" or whatever.
One thing I can find plenty of impartial sources on is that it's hard to find reliable data on homelessness from the USSR. But to go and trust some less than credible sources for a lack of alternatives is pure lamp post bias.
I don't have a dog in this fight, and I'm not saying you're wrong. All I'm saying is that the sources you cite don't pass my personal smell test, and I still feel agnostic on whether or not homelessness rates in the USSR were better or worse than in the US in the 80s.
As an aside, it's really embarrassing, but I don't know where I got the 0.01% figure from. A second google search seems to suggest a range of 600,000 to 2,000,000 out of 247,000,000 so something closer to 0.0025%--0.08%. These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR. For me personally, it doesn't really affect whether or not I believe that the homelessness rate in the USSR was higher or lower than in the US because I still feel like I'm pretty much in the dark on the former. But maybe for you these figures help you sharpen your beliefs, so I figured I'd share them.
You know what? That is fair criticism, and I acknowledge it. My sources are not as good as they should have been and that's my fault.
I did some actual digging this time, and I did find a real academic source. The source is a 2006 academic book called Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia that written Svetlana Stephenson, who's a Sociologist professor at the London Metropolitan University who specializes in studying Russian society.
Although it's a good read, I'm not going to ask you to read a 170 page book for an online argument. Instead, I'll give the relevant excerpt from page 95:
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255728652_Crossing_the_Line_Vagrancy_Homelessness_and_Social_Displacement_in_Russia
If we use these figures as a rough estimate, we get an idea of the extent of homeless in the Soviet Union. The Soviet population in 1989, as per the1989 Soviet Census, was 286 million. If we use the 6 million figure for the whole country then that means that the homeless were 2.1% of the population. If we use the most conservative number here, which is the 2 million west of the Urals, that would obviously be a severe undercount as that excludes the Russian heartland, however that figure does seem to be more reliable so let's pretend that it's the figure for the whole country. If that's the case then the homeless would still be around 0.7% of the population.
Now, I did my own digging for the US figures as well. According to the Alliance Housing Council, the homeless population in 1988 was somewhere between 1.3 and 2 million. The US population as per the 1990 census was 248.7 million. That means that the homeless make up 0.5%-0.8% of the population at the time. Keep in mind this figures come from an extrapolation of official figures that came out in 1984, and they made the assumption that the homeless population would grow 20% every year. So this is likely an over count, but I still think it's more accurate than the official figures.
Source: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/1092/chapter/2#3
So going by these figures, I think we can safely assume that the Soviet Union not only had a homelessness problem, but it had both a higher rate and a higher number than the US at the time.
A bit is really understating it. There was an absolute canyon in the levels of freedom found in the US vs the Soviet Union. At the time the US was arguably the freest country in the world while the USSR was the least free. The USSR had no freedom of the press, speech, expression, assembly, information, nothing. The one and only source of data was the government, and they refused to report the actual numbers because they feared them. The fact that we're in the dark about it now should be proof that such a gap was substantial.
That's dumbest argument imaginable. Drugs are considered illegal, drug addicts access to free rehab in most countries... does that mean nobody uses drugs? Because that's your argument. The Soviet Union had homelessness. Just because they made it illegal, that didn't make the problem magically go away, and just because they denied it that doesn't mean it's not real.
Related:
https://youtu.be/ZtFCpusLvxQ
I think of the landlords all the time actually...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM
If you visit the communism museum in Prague, you'll learn all about the horrors of being under the thumb of the USSR. And then at the end you'll see a photograph of the cottage in the countryside where Vaclav Havel and others plotted the revolution with a text explaining that, like many Czech people, Havel owned a second home in the countryside where they would often spend weekends and holidays. For all the bad, the communists did a much better job on housing than the capitalists.
To be fair, the USSR had the worse economy in the Warsaw pact. (and to be fair to the USSR, the massive distances and relative emptiness of their country added alot to transportation expenses)
rent one and get a free potato
Has anyone seen the cat?