A country that went from serfdom to industrial economy in 30 years then got absolutely wrecked in ww2 losing millions of its population might not be able to pull it off as well as we could today
It also helps to not have a brutal dictatorship in charge.
Thankfully we only have a plutocracy!
I fascinated by that phrase.
Yeah I friends that are communist survivors. Luckily they were decent ranking in the party. They only had their share their house with another family of party members. They also didn’t have heat, air conditioning or running water.
I remember when they bought their first house. It was like 1600 square feet and they couldn’t imagine one family having so much space
I’d like to learn more about the Soviet housing system. From my very limited knowledge it seems to be one of the few sectors of the economy that actually functioned reasonably well. But maybe I’m missing something.
“functioned” is the key word there. No elevators, terrible insulation, no air conditioning, tiny radiators for heating, small living space for entire families, and infested with bugs. Of course some American apartment buildings check all those boxes too, but it’s naïve to assume that soviet apartments were great places to live
I add that “cannot be evicted” is a double edge sword here. Since appartments were free and were assigned more or less random (cough, cough, corruption), very often you got one or two … let’s say “interresting” neighbours
Edit: well some interresting facts from my mom who’s sitting next to me - there were quite some downsides
- My father asked for an appartment and the answer was: get married. As a single guy you won’t get anything.
- Also when you get married and have children, there’s no guarantee that you get some big appartment. Her colleague had 3 children, a husband and got 1 room appartment anyway
- There was a list of people waiting for appartments. When you were somewhere down, you wait, for years
- When she asked for an apparartment as a married woman, a “commission” arrived to verify, whether we as a familly really need one. And whether we couldn’t stay living with grandma
- When my grandma with my mom moved into a newly built appartment, they opened a window and it fell off. My grandad caught it thankfully so it didn’t break. They never openned that window again. There was no one to repair it and a replacement was basically impossible. They were able to open it again in like 2010 when she changed windows
Thanks for sharing firsthand knowledge. Sounds like there were a lot of problems which isn’t surprising but at least compared to the US with our extreme numbers of homeless I’m still not sure which is better.
Of course, an ideal system would provide quality housing to everyone but I don’t know of such a system.
It is worth considering the circumstances in which they were built, though - much of the worst of the classic eastern European “commie blocks” were basically just a desperate attempt to build something that would house people after WW2 flattened half of the continent. Throw in decades of under-maintenance for good measure.
yeah they may have been the same or worse under a different housing model. or much better, but it seems plausible that this wasnt the worst outcome. a modern implementation in a wealthy society not post war would do a lot better, and probably in this specific sector be better than the market alternative.
i don’t think the soviets are a great example of how to do things but homeless people lack those things too. well i guess you don’t need elevators to live on the street anyway so that’s one thing you won’t have to worry about.
of course they should have amenities. there’s no dichotomy here. you can make housing comfortable and free.
There were no homeless because they were rounded up and put into prisons.
I know little about Russia, but a quote from earlier this year from a Russian:
Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, responded to Beglov’s remarks, saying in a Telegram post that “a quarter of Russians do not have centralized sewerage,” citing data from Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics service.
“And basically, it is hard to imagine something more gender-neutral than a backyard ‘latrine’-style toilet,” he added.
For context: In response to criticizing gender neutral toilets in Ukraine (I don’t know if they mean individual/private unisex bathrooms, or actual group restrooms they think are trans bathrooms, it’s not the point of this discussion anyways).
- Low rent means no money for maintenance
- the elevators where frequently out of order or vandalized
- instead of a private washing machine you would have a number of them in the basement (maybe 1 for every 5 flats?), and a week plan with timeslots when you can use them. This is nice as long as all machines are working, but the same problem as with elevators applies here.
- it’s not a quiet place, you could always hear people going up and down the stairs. The light switch Relais in the cabinet on each level always made a very loud “clunk” when someone turned on the lights…
Funny but despite famines, purges, wars, etc. their population generally grew quite a bit during the Soviet era. So I don’t think that was a major factor.
I wasn’t being funny. I was mostly talking about their current war too, not their past. They’ve lost quite a bit of troops. Surely that’s had a noticeable effect on their housing market.
What parts of the (former) communist world have fruit trees? Around Odessa, you can probably live off of fruit taken from people’s yards. In St. Petersburg, there are also abundant fruit trees, in the sense that acorns are the fruit of an oak tree.
I’d love to see anyone arguing that American apartments are good.
Another fabricated argument to get mad at. Stay classy 😎
for everyone going “oooh but this wasn’t true in communist countries!!”
this is basically how it works in sweden, you get an effectively free apartment if you can’t afford one on your own (you get welfare to afford the rent), you basically cannot be evicted unless you run a siren 24/7 and shit off the balcony onto people’s heads, commie block-style areas tend to have at least some green space with at least a fruit tree or two, and rent in this kind of older housing is generally so cheap that when americans learn about it they just weep.
