Even if we had commie blocks in the US, believing they would ever be affordable is pure fantasy. The corpofascists would just collude with each other and price fix things so that they’d cost the $3k/month that current lowest-tier shithole apartments cost and then everything else would get a major price hike.
This is not an equivalent argument. We can build spaces for humans that don’t suck the soul out of you. I’ve lived in crummy apartments horded by neighbors, and as long as I have the choice I never will again.
I mean the US has much less soulless housing, and we have enough housing for everyone. The issue is we have a society that doesn’t care to house the homeless.
The issues with the brutalist blocs built in Eastern Europe is usually more about the soulessness and drearineess of the architecture.
What’s a house go for now in Sanfrancisco?
Given 2/3 of it is zoned for single family homes I’d assume its still not cheap.
People on the streets is far more soulless than gray concrete housing. Especially because concrete can at least be painted over to make it look better.
I think you misunderstood my point. That concrete block design came about due to a push for efficency and quickly rebuilding post WWII. So it was either house more people quickly or nice looking houses.
The US hasn’t really ever had to make that decision. We have enough houses as is for the homeless. The design of our homes/apartment buildings is not our limiting factor, it’s our policies and approach to housing and the homeless.
But look how colorful the tents are!
I mean, the people shitting on “commie blocks” usually don’t mind that homeless people are barely considered human by the law… so they’d probably be on board with the idea of sending the police to slash all these tents
no pedos in my memes pls
Kinda works for representing evil, repulsive people though.
The commie blocks also had smart city planning, like you had a supermarket and everything else in walking range, and no through traffic. I do think they could be designed and build a bit nicer with modern technology. Especially higher ceilings and thicker walls. And then put those blocks out into nature or agricultural land and connect them via high speed rail or a self driving shuttle bus.
No city folks want to live in agri land due to smell and sounds from agri works. I do agree with more green areas. Stockholm gets a lot of flak for its miljonprojekt but there are quite a lot of trees and green areas within walking distance from most places
I suspect most city folk live in the city to find work. So if more people could work online, or wouldn’t have to work at all (less consumerism, wealth redistribution, basic income) then I suspect most would want to live close to nature but still luxuriously. So the ideal I can imagine would be a luxury apartment block surrounded by fields and forest (now pig manure though since we need to stop industrial meat production anyway)
Affordable housing doesnt need to be expensive. You can have pretty nice midrises for very cheap. Design like 20 different models, all of em in 5 different colours, thats 100 different styles of apartment buildings and you just dont put two of the same next to eachother and problem solved. Mass produced, colourful, nice, cheap, housing.
Are the people shitting on these in the room with us, now?
There’s one two comments down from you.
Yeah but not unprompted. The only people who regularly bring these up seem to be middle age assistant professors lecturing on civic planning, Tankies, and direct opposition to Tankies.
People shitting on commie blocks, but there’s millions who would love to have a roof and plumbing.
The more densely we live, the more land that can be left wild/rewilded. We’re not entitled to a tick tacky vinyl wrapped house surrounded by lawns and pavement. Our earth is fucked and getting more so by the day. It’s a problem that can only be solved by us all living smaller lives.
I always tell people to look to Hong Kong for housing practices. They don’t do everything right, but they’re definitely on the right track.
I demand my own little box on a hillside!
Support state owned apartments!
Oh there is a reason
These commies blocks don’t just look ugly, they tend to become a crime riddled dump
Then again, you can also build affordable housing that doesn’t look like a prison system?
All the Projects in major cities are an example. But it isn’t the buildings’ fault. It just putting a lot of poor people with lots of problems all in one place tends to concentrate all the ills that go along with poverty.
The alternative, tent cities like skid row, are pretty crime-heavy. I’ve never heard about commie blocks being especially crime ridden, but I guess you have good reason to say what you did and aren’t just pulling it straight out your ass.
These commies blocks don’t just look ugly, they tend to become a crime riddled dump
It will surprise you, but this is other way around. Hruschevkas have less crime than modern humant colonies.
They are very common in Germany and are in general really safe, the only crime going on there was smoking pot (which is not a crime anymore). I myself did not grow up in one, but many friends have and I still frequently visit people there. Floors, stairs and elevators are clean, neighbours greet you, when someone new moves in its common to help them as a neighbour.
Recently one of these houses was in the news “weißer Riese” in Duisburg because of crime. Now Duisburg is basically Germanys Detroit, used to be a coal mining city and has nothing else going on for it (still the homicide rate for Duisburg is 20x lower than for Detroit lol). And this house is 55years old and has been neglected by the developers, so rent for an apartment there is basically the lowest of any German city and in Germanys most undesirable city and somehow people wonder why there is some crime and this becomes the stereotype for all “commie blocks”.
But for every commie block like that you get 1000 others that are really safe and clean, offer cheap rent, are energy efficient as fuck, some even have their own bus or train stations, big playground in the middle and usually more on the edge of the city so closer to nature.
This stereotype thing about commie blocks always reminds me of the american homeless people sleeping in tents in front of the “victims of communism” museum…
I lived in one for a year. It was rather depressing, but one could see the potential if they were better managed.
Cabrini Green immediately comes to mind. The police used to get sniped in the parking lot.
The Bijlmer in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, exactly the same
I’m not sure about the point you’re trying to make but the bijlmer, while having had a tricky past, is now a perfectly safe neighborhood. You really can’t point at the Dutch to make this point (if I understood this thread correctly, it’s early). They work hard at making these areas mixed use, promote cultural mixing etc. Paris on the other hand not so much.
A lot of formerly bad neighborhoods are turning, and I think that’s mostly due to gentrification, not because the idea behind the neighborhood (in this case Bijlmer) was somehow belatedly good…
The idea of the Bijlmer and how it was presented sounded great on paper, but neighborhoods that are exclusively these cheap stacked blocks still mostly attract people on the bottom of the economic ladder and thusly also a relatively large amount of people that will misbehave in various ways. I don´t think culture is relevant here.
This status quo changes now because apartments evidently go for 300 to 400k “because Amsterdam” and the people they originally built those blocks for can´t afford that in a million years.
Right yeah the whole project was a total disaster, there’s lots of info about all the ways it was badly done. Similar bad ideas as the French basically just putting all the “undesirables” in a bucket on the side. My point is they corrected course about it same as they did in Osdorp, like sure these days gentrification and housing prices in the whole Randstad are just insane so the dynamics are different but I do think it also starts with an actual will to do good urban planning corrections originally. I’m just saying, the Dutch are a bad example because they’re some of the best in the world at this stuff.
You’re pretending that the blocks were built to house the homeless, when it was well to do families being forced into them. They lacked just about everything one can desire. So ya I don’t think the inhabitants of these places remember them fondly.
I am happy my grandparents can’t read your comment. And neither can my great grandfather.
I would be happy to learn about your family’s experience in a commie block. Which country were you guys from? What did your grandparents do for a living? Were they living in the country before Soviet occupation or after? High ranking party officials didn’t stay in commie blocks that’s all I meant.
Russia. Great grandfather was woodworker(lost finger on job), grandma was language teacher(and worked in kidergarden for some time), other was computer operator back when it was specialized job(and I think programmer too? Not sure.), grandpa served in military until retirement, other died before I was born, so I don’t know much. And great grandfather’s family was basically serfs in the middle of nowhere without sewers, running water, central heating, roads, electricity
and soviet goverment.High ranking party officials didn’t stay in commie blocks that’s all I meant.
Yeah… Every time someone says how much better stalinkas were than hurchevkas and brezhnevkas, they tend to ignore that mostly party elite lived there. Unless city had no stalinkas, then party elite had nowhere else to live other than commie blocks.
Thank you for sharing. A computer operator back then could have been working with the space program, either way thats a pretty cool and important job. So to understand correctly, your family was swept out of a tough rural life and lived a better life with more opportunities within the block? They did not resent the living conditions? Was there ever a time where they wanted more, and did any of them live to see the wall collapse?
My statement more aimed at satalite nations of the USSR and not russia itself, but I love history, and personal lived history is my favorite, so really appreciate you sharing yours!
I try to understand just because I’d have no problem living in a shoe doesn’t mean everyone should.
Giving people housing doesn’t solve the problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place.
Now you have a concentrated block of people with not just issues, but subscriptions. Mental health, drug, and alcohol abuse.
You have to address those issues FIRST, THEN get them housed.
Otherwise you get this:
or this:
or this:
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/16/argyle-gardens-north-portland-housing/
Giving people housing doesn’t solve the problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place.
Yes
Now you have a concentrated block of people with not just issues, but subscriptions. Mental health, drug, and alcohol abuse.
Yes
You have to address those issues FIRST, THEN get them housed.
No.
You house them and then help then with those issues while in their new homes.
Now the hard and really really important part, you address what caused the issues they were facing.
You create jobs (big incentives for businesses to set up near by), you directly employ people in meaningful government funded projects.
You provide first rate education opertunities (both for adults and children).
You provide good high quality social areas (both indoor and outdoor).
You provide first rate socially funded healthcare both for physical and mental issues.
You legalise drugs so their access can be safe and better controlled. You use the tax money from that to go hard on any non legal drugs.
Or, now follow me on this… OR you hospitalize them while they are being treated.
Not as a default. People should only be hospitalised if they medically need it.
It also doesn’t address the societal issues which lead to their addiction in the first place.
Again, that’s what I’m talking about. If someone is mentally ill or has addiction issues so severe they are homeless then hospitalization is medically necessary.
Get them fit first, get them the tools they need to survive, then get them housed.
Otherwise all you’re doing is sealing them in a room with untreated issues, making it all 1000x worse.
I find the commie block for homeless idea deplorable for this reason. Shuffle all societies undesirables into a ghetto and just expect it to work out. Gee has this been tried before?
Again, that’s what I’m talking about. If someone is mentally ill or has addiction issues so severe they are homeless then hospitalization is medically necessary.
How the fuck can notary can notarize selling home by an addict? They are supposed to verify mental wellbeing of both parites, especially seller. Not just home, but the only home! Notaries refuse selling the only home even by mentally stable and not addicted people for tiniest reasons.
Oh, nobody is talking about SELLING homes to addicts, they’re owned by some non-profit and are just supposed to give them to addicts. :)
By addicts, not to addicts. I’m asking how can addicts sell home?
That’s fair. My point is unless you also at least try to fix the issue in society that caused them to get ill in the first place they’re just either going to relapse, or are best someone else will end up in their place.
It’s generally very hard to treat those problems when someone doesn’t have a stable residence. Some of the reasons for self-medicating also go away with a stable residence. It’s a basic need.
But yeah, large concentrations of people with various problems isn’t good either, nor is bad urbanism.
The better solution is generally good urbanism and dispersed municipal housing, so people who start needing it don’t have to move far, don’t need to have their kids switch schools, etc etc.
Simple to treat them without a stable residence… You house them in a clinic while you treat them and don’t release them until they are treated.
Then you give them the tools they need to stay healthy.
“Buh, buh… socialism!!!”
No, “not releasing them until they’re treated” just won’t fly. We have a lot of discussions about the loss of freedom in healthcare, and generally we can’t do something like that unless they’re an immediate danger to others or themselves.
Once they’re very sick there are a variety of treatments one can try, but they’re neither a replacement for social housing for people who are just struggling economically, nor something to deny people who need to get a return to normalcy.
It is also socialism, or at the very least social democracy here in the Nordics, and it works well :)
Well, this picture is just poor city development. Living in appartement buildings 3-5-7-9 floors high is all very fine, IF
- The neighbourhood is (pedestrian) permeable enough. The space around it must be pedestrian/cycle friendly and green. The blocks in this picture are way to wide, forming too big barriers for local slow traffic
- there is a bit of variation in colour, size, shape. A neighbourhood with such blocks can surely have 4 identical buildings, but not 30… It feels uneasy to humans this way. We need a taller or oddly shaped or nicely coloured one once in a while, as a reference point, as things that give the neighbourhood a bit of an identity
- The buildings themselves are high enough quality (well insulated, every appartement has 1 or 2 real balconies, …)
- there are plenty of playgrounds and sports facilities and cars are in general carparks in garages at the edge of the neighbourhood, not on the streets
- neighbourhood is well connected to the rest of the city
- there are plenty of jobs in the area. Probably the hardest part.
May I introduce you to the concept of microdistrict. That’s how the original soviet developments were planned out - every house is guaranteed to have necessities like stores, a polyclinic, a school, a kindergarden, or a fire department within reasonable distance. Usually, walking distance. Everything is pedestrian permeable, there’s public transport connecting the “sleeping districts” where there were mostly apartments to the industrial areas where the jobs were. And yeah, playgrounds in or near every building.
Jobs in the same area as apartments isn’t really happening though, office buildings and industry tends to be away.
Good on paper, terrible when commuting to work 2 hours one way in a packed train.
Yeah, but at least we got WFH nowadays.
The original commieblocks were fairly walkable, with parks, schools, grocery stores, and so on nearby. I’m personally a fan of making all the buildings concrete blocks and then getting a bunch of local mural artists to paint them for visual distinction.
I would add to this list, buildings and units that encourage resident diversity. As in, a diversity of ages, household size, economic class (and ideally also race/ethnicity/country of origin). Organically this means a mix of “luxury” and “budget” housing, unit sizes (studio through three bedroom at minimum), building ages and designs, target demographics for shops (e.g. upscale shopping alongside budget grocers), and community amenities (e.g. schools and senior centers). In a pinch subsidized housing can help with integration, but it’s a limited and costly solution.
“I have never lived in, occupied, or been near anywhere that employs this type of housing. But, here’s a list of stipulations I have decided are absolutely necessary based on nothing other than what I feel former soviet satellite states are like.”
-This Dude
I live in appartement building that is 5 floors high, 4 appartements wide, and almost all of the points I mentioned are satisfied in this location.
It’s a common mistake to confuse “commieblocks suck” (they do, I agree) with “living in appartementbuildings sucks” (it doesn’t, can confirm.)
No, they don’t actually they are HUGE. A lot quite ornate. They’re great places to live, I know. I have.
It’s not rocket science. Vienna did this once. Also you don’t need car parks if a city is well designed. Public Transport and Carsharing is enough
And most of Japan/Korea as well. Most people here prefer living in housing blocks
Don’t forget access to businesses - I don’t know the stats for 3 floor developments but 5 is already plenty to support nearly all your needs within at most a 15 minute walk.
I’ll take “How the government can’t solve your problems with unlimited money” for a preferential bread line or $1000 Alex.
