Straw Man : Annihilated
You picked one of the best parts about the USSR that 90% of liberals would agree was a good thing.
These apartments had working plumbing, something most of the people moving into them at the time had never had before. It was a huge step up to most people, regardless of how ugly the buildings look.
The hardest part about getting anything done in America is that every decision has to be approved by people who aren’t going to use the solution anyway.
School funding is decided by people who either don’t have school-aged children or who send their kids to private schools. Social Security laws – which only change to affect future generations of retirees, not current and soon-to retirees – are decided by retirees.
And so, the ability to put up large apartment complexes (and let’s make them nicer and include proper green space and all that) is decided by people who won’t live there and who aren’t going to walk, bike, or drive to the place where we would build the goddamn housing in the first place.
That’s the part that riles me up the most: the number of people who will vote to stop someone else from getting something they need, because the voter doesn’t agree with the choice or the outcome. Like, if we could affordably build houses for everyone, Karen P Asshat would vote yes. But ugly apartments? With all the apartment people living there? She votes no.
I’ve been in politics 35 years now and i have no answer for how to fix that. America is a nation of cockblockers, fundamentally.
Unless it’s a data center, those seem to he pretty streamlined at getting approved and built.
The government of the PRC is planning to build 200,000 new public housing appartments in hongkong, tyranny i tells ya
Time for the CIA to activate the student riots one more time
But at what cost???
why won’t something think of the
childreninvestors!!!???
Honestly, the “commie blocks” are really good idea and should be built more often in areas with high homelessness and housing issues. Why should US taxes go to blowing up elementary schools/other people’s homes when it can go towards building homes and helping others in need?
why
The capitalist military industrial complex
We have those, they’re called projects.
You mean those criminally underfunded, means-tested and over-policed apartment blocks in red-lined cities?
Crazy that those weren’t as effective as rhe communist housing initiatives
The ones built on polluted land no one else wants, that have zero amenities nearby, leading to food deserts and lack of healthcare, and that have zero green spaces nearby? Yeah those resemble Soviet block housing in the same way a fart smells like a rose.
Yeah the ones chosen for their similarity to the Moscow cityscape to be sprayed with radioactive cadmium to test the effects of nuclear fallout!
https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/
identical apartments
Under Communism, we were forced by the government to live in Poor People Houses. It was illegal to tip your landlords. If you updated your wallpaper, the local Commissar would murder your first-born child and eat your dog.
Incredible.
Careful, If the communists are asian, white liberals will fully believe they’re open dog/cat eaters because they already believe that. Joe himself prob believes that asian people eat babies until they come on down to Californ-i-a and get nice big ol fake titties
They don’t even have to be communists, per say. Just being Asian and unaligned is enough. Or Haitian, for that matter.
Ever heard of those folks they found in the wild parts of Russia in the late 70s who never even realized the Second World War happened?
Fucking life goals there
IDK
They wore clothes woven from homegrown hemp, used birch bark for shoes, and routinely faced near-starvation (the mother, Akulina, starved to death during a crop failure in 1961).
I’ll take my chances. Plus those clothes and shoes sound durable and cheap.
Nobody’s stopping you, or Darwin
Flip side to the dudes in the Pacific who were still hunkered down
I’m just here for the comments…
Remember when Jane Byrne tried to vacation at Cabrini? Good times.
Famously Communist Vancouver, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_special
Yeah, I figuredy sarcasm was obvious here given what this thread is about, but I forgot about the terminally online Lemmy users who always choose the interpretation they can get the most mad about.
I think you forgot lemmy is full of people who would write what you write in full seriousness.
It’s so incredibly clear when someone talks about soviet housing without setting a foor in one. You can say a lot about those, but saying the word quality about them will be actually a crime. For example, mine had a hole between the panels big enough, you could put your hand out and grab loose concrete from the wall. It was 4th floor. My mom had to work 15 years without changing jobs to be able to get one.
OP is a russian citizen
I think they’re Canadian, or live there at least.
I remember yougthos sending a reply with an image russian passport (I think russian but not sure as I dont read any language tgat uses the cyrrillic script, it could have some other place that also uses the cyrillic script) at one point
The exact context in which the word “quality” was used, since you seem to have glossed over it was:
they were made with enough quality that they are still used today
No one said that these are high quality homes. They said that the caliber of build was strong enough to still be inhabitable 80ish years later.
Believe you me, they are used today not by choice. You need to stretch the definition of inhabitable significantly to include 80 years old mass construction buildings in it. Unless those Theseus shipped over the decades, but even then. Buildings from ancient Rome still standing today, it’s really not that big of a bragging rights to have some of the homes be technically upright after 80 years.
Ironically, the only buildings from post-war era that survived in my hometown are only those that were built by Germans as part of the reparations. Make of that what you will.No one said they were being used by choice. The very reason behind their original purpose was precisely because people didn’t have anywhere else to live, not because they thought people would genuinely choose to live there over a normal home.
The whole premise of the meme is that we should be in awe how amazing commyblocks are, and how greatly they survive even to this days.
The reality, that nobody disagrees with, is that post-war USSR very quickly built a bunch of cheap housing that was planned to be gradually replaced by a more nicely built ones, and a lot of them weren’t. This isn’t controversial, and not worth the meme. So the meme stretches this to mean something else.The premise of the meme is that the problem of affordable housing could be very easily solved if the western world was willing to acknowledge that sometimes socialists have good ideas.
This would not necessarily solve the problem of affordable quality housing, but it would be a very effective step in the right direction.
First of all, no, it isn’t. Like, textually isn’t.
Second, situation in post-war USSR is vastly different from the modern western countries. The problem isn’t lack of housing, it’s using housing as commodities. If you can create a system that can build millions of shitty crumbling concrete gravestones, you’d better use fraction of this system’s power to make laws that prevent commodification of housing, so it becomes affordable, and this will be the better outcome. And that’s also one of those good socialist ideas actually.
But again, we’re not talking about the original point anymore.First of all, no, it isn’t. Like, textually isn’t.
Then explain the “Liberals” part of the meme.
The problem isn’t lack of housing, it’s using housing as commodities. If you can create a system that can build millions of shitty crumbling concrete gravestones, you’d better use fraction of this system’s power to make laws that prevent commodification of housing, so it becomes affordable, and this will be the better outcome.
I agree
To be fair, being good enough isn’t the only reason for something to be in current use.
Thats not really the ussrs fault tho, thats current capitalists government fault that they dont give a shit about making new public housing or taking care of the old ones
For real. It’s like living in a very old NYC apartment building and being like “It’s still standing, truly a testament to the politics of the robber barrons who built it!”
What do you actually know about soviet housing? I’ve done significant academic research on the topic. It’s not just a simple “they built a certain type of building”. The reason they all look so similar is that their construction method was pre-fab concrete panels. It was a revolutionary technology at the time, and allowed them to solve their housing crisis. They were called “Khrushchyovka” after whom you can guess. He made it his mission to solve the Soviet Housing crisis when he took over and was largely successful.
You have to keep in mind the historical context. The people moving into these buildings were coming from a pre-industrial society where they commonly had so electricity, dirt floors, and no insulation. These were a significant upgrade from the pre-USSR constructions. They started construction in the 1940s, and really took off in the 50s.
I think the main takeaways from them shouldn’t be “We should build these exact things”. and I don’t think that’s what people who support them are advocating for. I think what they are trying to point out is that if you standardize production, and use economies of scale, it is entirely possible to build tons of housing quickly and cheaply. And considering the way housing prices look these days I’d expect that to be an idea anyone can get behind.
If you are interested here is an article about how modern China is using similar practices: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10695
wouldn’t liberals approve of this?
No, homelessness is for them a low, low price for having capitalism.
homelessness is not a price to pay. It is a tool because it incentivises people to subject themselves to wage labour
Yes it is, but liberals don’t think of it like that. For them the homelessness is the outcome of personal choices meaning that even those that genuinly pity the homeless people will still consider them as victims of their own vices instead of the system that engineered the entire problem as part of the class war they probably hear about but refuse to consider.
They also probably heard and maybe even believe that the socialist states got rid of the problem, but again, never think it’s because under socialism homelessness is not a class domination enforcement tool but a logistic problem. For them it’s because the homeless were forced (again, libs think a lot of the homelessness is voluntary) to live in barrack, psychiatric hospital, prison, gulag etc. etc. A price for having freedoms especially that a lib will never think they will have to pay that price someday, right? They are not gamblers/drunks/junkies etc, right?
Housing people is also a taboo topic because of how libs approach to concept of welfare in general, if the lib struggle to pay the rent and has no hope of ever buying their own home, how in the hell can anyone from “undeserving self-inflicted” pariah group just recive one?
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The whole >90% of territory never saw a foot of German soldier was not where most of the destroyed urban housing stock stood. The war destroyed over 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages, which was roughly half the urban housing stock in the most populated and industrial regions, and left about 25 million people homeless.
Many houses were built by workers in their spare time after work, on a land granted by the state and using construction materials provided by the factory or plant they worked at, but that was a supplement to state reconstruction, not proof that war ruin was secondary.
The barracks aging is precisely what created the need for khrushchevkas in late 50s and early 60s onwards. Then brezhnevki with some improvements over bare minimal comfort of previous gen, and eventually from 70s onwards to the end of soviets the massive prefab took hold. There were countless experimental projects at different times and in different configurations, from 3 storey alpha builds of Khrushchevkas to Kyiv’s Podil 4 blocks project of late 80s, but all of it was a response to the war-created housing deficit, not a response to industrialization alone as you falsely claim.
Aggressive industrialization wasn’t the fundamental explanation for the scale and duration of the postwar housing construction program. Wartime destruction was the main driver.
It really helps to actually learn about the subjects before you start braying about them.
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This is completely incorrect.
Even if it’s a meme, and it rips the piss out of liberals or whatever, such mistakes make them easy target and work only in echo chambers
That would require liberals to read so they know what you just said. Quite rare.
If those kids could read.jpg?
They can, they just dont. certainly not something that might make them understand the conditions inside the Soviet Union.
Oh and on the other hand, British mass social housing for working class emerged because of King George’s WW1 realization that better fed and kept humans give more durable cannon fodder, after comparing British and German soldiers. At crown’s command, no socialism required.
It just looks like ugliness is the point. Grow some fruit trees or community gardens or something so we don’t need to be surrounded by concrete and empty patches of grass.
Have you lived in one or seen one? Ive been raised in one and it was great, we had a park and it still is a peaceful neighborhood. Besides this, commie blocs where supposed to be temporary housing, but theyre still standing today after countless earthquakes and after so many years. It would be amazing if they gave it some maintenance, but thats not ussrs fault that the current government of any post soviet country isnt taking care of peoples houses. Besides this, theres an obvios point fhat people who dont like commie blocs just straight up ignore, these hoese where a massive upgrade to the majority of people at that time, the reason any post soviet country’s house ownership is so high is because of these houses, that is a huge deal and idk why people ignore it so much and just say “theyre ugly”, you might not like how they look on the outside but its just a regular apartment man, i live in the newer apartment now but let me tell ya, the old one is still good, i have more faith that the old one will last longer than this new one, because they skimp out on everything on the new ones, they dont care about safety, they just care about profit
Yeah the soviet block housing is architecturally DEPRESSING. Not that they are the only ones who built joyless prison boxes.
You just compared people’s houses to prisons. I hope you didn’t mean it that way.
When it’s designed for pure efficiency, housing often starts to take on a more prison-like architectural style. After all that’s how they design prisons as well, just on a much more brutal level. It’s good that post-war civilians were saved from homelessness, but it’s not really an architectural style to emulate, and the fact that they’re still around isn’t a virtue in its own right.
I’m not saying the people who live there are in prison, but rather that it’s a bleak and inhumane way to design things. You see the same mindset in the design of many overpriced condo blocks in the US, they just dress it up with bigger windows, as well as kitchen islands, Murphy beds and other glitsy bullshit.
How is it bleak and inhumane to build free, strong, effective houses? HAVE YOU SEEN MODERN APARTMENT BUILDINGS IN USA?! I feel like I’m going crazy. The only people that like those new fuck ugly “mixed use” developments is rich old smarmy people who’s family left their home town 20 years ago. And they have the worst fucking interior taste I’ve ever seen it’s all white and sanitized and they got nothing on the shelves or walls. I don’t wanna hear shit from Americas about “inhumane design.” My house is sided with fucking asbestos.
How is it bleak and inhumane to build free, strong, effective houses?
That is obviously not what is being complained about. The chief complaints are:
- Large areas consisting of one or two buildings copied-and-pasted dozens of times.
- The area between buildings being more-or-less featureless.
The only people that like those new fuck ugly “mixed use” developments is rich old smarmy people who’s family left their home town 20 years ago.
I’m not sure what you mean by mixed use developments but if you mean this, then you are flat out wrong. Mixed use developments are the cornerstone of the kinds of urbanism that encompass walkable neighbourhoods and the 15 minute city, which is overwhelmingly preferred by the non-car-brained.
And they have the worst fucking interior taste I’ve ever seen…
Not really relevant since interiors can be ugly or not independent of the ugliness of the buildings.
That is the exact type of building I am talking about. I work in one. It was built by a company that is worth over 50 billion dollars. It has not made our city more walkable. It has made our city less affordable, less walkable, and they are building an identical “mixed use” building right across the street from it with competing businesses.
This building I work in used to have a clinic, it failed and is no longer there, a realtor office that failed and is closed, and my own boss tried to expand the restaurant I work in and failed spectacularly and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own personal money that he is now indebted to (it was probably the dumbest thing my boss could have done but you know business owners)
The Montessori school in this building complex is a private school that costs over 13 thousand dollars for one child K-12.
There is a section of “green space”, in the middle of the parking lot inside that is about 20-30 square feet of grass and about 4 cherry blossom trees. They are quite pretty to look at out the window while I’m working, but I would hardly classify it as an adequate green space.
What you are describing as an effective communal living area for all people (not just the rich) would be a commie bloc. These 5 over 1 buildings are cheap money grabs that do not function correctly, raise rent prices wherever they are placed effectively gentrifying entire neighborhoods, and are meant to serve a rich subset of capitalists thru “rent controlled” apartments that have a minimum wage requirement for you to even apply. That wage requirement is way higher than I make working in the same exact fucking building.
The areas between communist blocks are not “featureless”, and that is a hilarious accusation when trying to defend these money holes of a building. They are literally cheap imitations of commie blocks that are uglier, not made as well, and don’t work as well. These 5 over 1 buildings being “Cornerstone of urbanism” is the best joke I’ve ever heard about American infrastructure. Those pictures in the Wikipedia article you linked are perfect examples, those don’t have ANY green space. I bet for private residents in the back parking lot there’s a few square feet of grass. Is that what you want over this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sídlisko ?
Go and walk down the street in one of these gentrified neighborhoods and see how fun it is, buy a 16$ sandwich and 4$ coffee, have to walk a quarter mile to where you parked and by then your 2 hour limit is up so you got a ticket and now you gotta park where all the homeless people are. (that got pushed out by the development of this multi-million dollar building).
Not really relevant since interiors can be ugly or not independent of the ugliness of the buildings.
I don’t know about you but I actually like hanging out in the cafe to drink my coffee, these are “public spaces” and to you they are cornerstones of urban development, wouldn’t you want people to oh, I don’t know, spend time (and therefor more money) in the business and schools that this company paid millions of dollars for? No? Oh, so we’re only interested in mass housing/ending homelessness when it’s under a capitalist society and you can walk from your apartment to the cafe without going outside. And it has to LOOK SUPER NICE RIGHT AWAY. And we need THE TINIEST GREEN SPACE SURROUNDED BY A PARKING LOT! THATS THE KINDA GREENERY WE LIKEEEEE
You really think these buildings are better than the blocs because what, they look better to you? Solving homelessness isn’t aesthetically pleasing enough? I know a certain GERMAN political party that agrees with your sentiment…
I’m not American, I’m British. Towns and cities all across Europe are filled with “5 over 1s” and similar, and it’s fine, and works well. Just because the US can’t not fuck it up, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for everyone else.
Solving homelessness isn’t aesthetically pleasing enough? I know a certain GERMAN political party that agrees with your sentiment…
Lemmy.ml user try not to accuse another user of being a Nazi for literally no credible reason challenge: impossible.
We’re a discussion about architecture and urban planning, my dude. Commie blocs solved the homelessness relatively quickly and relatively cheaply. Great. Fantastic. That doesn’t they were best and most ideal solution possible at the time, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re the best and most ideal solution now.
Now, as it stands, I don’t think commie blocks are that bad, I just felt like pointing out that your arguments seemed somewhat unserious, but in case you’re curious, here are the things I think are non-ideal about commie blocks:
- People tend to prefer “human scale” architecture in places that are supposed to be comfortable and large clusters of high rise buildings tend to make people feel small.
- They require steel and concrete to build, which is a concern in terms of carbon footprint, whereas 5 over 1s and similarly sized buildings can get away with using wooden frame construction.
- High rises cost more per occupant to maintain than a similarly constructed mid rise, as a general rule.
- The need for access to lighting, etc. means that the buildings must be spaced a fair distance apart, so the effective footprint still ends up being similar to a wider-based mid rise bulding. And while this does allow for green space, it’s green space that has to be kept low (so as not to interfere with the lower floors) and needs constant maintenance, so it tends to be fairly bland.
- The physical separation between the blocks and the reliance on public transport to reach facilities tends to promote social isolation in a similar way to suburbs.
- High rises mean that the vast majority of the occupants must either rely of lifts (and there are never enough working lifts) or be able-bodied and fit.
If you’re asking me what I’d prefer instead, I’m thinking something like Eixample.
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why is the outside so neglected?
I wonder why the Soviets stopped tending to their infrastructure around 1991 surely nothing happened around that time?!?!
So you think they just came in and bulldozed everything? If they hadn’t done anything since then, it would look nicer
Ok so maybe I wasn’t clear that the housing built in a hurry to house people post war was left to rot and not modernised post 1991 as the soviet union collapsed this was followed by shock therapy and capitalists in power who don’t give a shit thus leaving the modern “commie blocks” in eastern Europe today ugly neglected and rundown.
When OP asked “why is the outside so neglected?” I believe you have interpreted the question as “why has the outside been neglected?” As in, the outside has been allowed to become ugly. What I believe they meant, however, is “why was the outside neglected?” As in, the people who designed it neglected to consider the outside. OP is arguing the blocks were ugly at inception, not just since 1991.
Perhaps but they appear to be talking about the current. Either way, the answer however is largely the same just reframed and rephrased. They were built to be functional and quick to deal with the fact hundreds of thousands if not millions would be homeless if nothing was done due to the destruction of fighting the Nazis. They then were not able to be maintained and modernised post 1991 for the reasons outlined.
