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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.
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.
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
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.
As someone from a post-soviet country, and had to live in one of those.. there's plenty of reasons to shit on them.
Indeed. There is a hierarchy.
Commie blocks are better than tents.
But proper social housing is better than commie blocks.
And proper social housing mixed with middle class owner-occupied housing in the same neighborhoods and even within the same buildings is the best.
Ok im gonna try typing out some of the observations of living in commie blocks from personal experience as well as some stories from my friends. Im also spoilering it for anyone who doesn't want to read the list.. also also.. not a comprehensive list of everything, just what I can think of on my lunch break
here goes
Just to name a few :3.. im gonna go eat now
Hey there, also lived in commie block (ground floor of the 10 level (+ground) one), wanna add few things!
Also, bonus point for specifically my neighbourhood - it was built on cementary. We had a lot of weird phenomena, I learnt where it was built much later after moving out.
Now, miracle happened as they renovated these! Got proper insulation and paint, and they look nice now. They also moved down some green space outside the circle and made more parking, leaving inner greenery intact.
My small addition to the list is that the surrounding green spaces were usually poorly lit and created lots of opportunities for muggers to hide once it got dark. In winters it gets dark early, so winters were a dangerous time.
Oh, yeah. A lot of bushes also, the tall ones in which you could overall easily hide. Where I lived, these green spaces were also different heights. Now it was somewhat safe where I was (in a "nobody shits in their own nest" way) but I've seen a few folk who upset more difficult people and...yeah. Pretty much nowhere to go safely.
Yep. Despite large buildings, overall density ends up pretty small so you often don't meet a lot of people when on a walk, which increases feelings of danger.
The ants one is real x3.. they were all over the place even on the 4th floor. No cockroaches where I lived but a ton of wasps.. I think the wasps were nesting in the walls
And the whistling windows too hah
We used to have those tiny Egyptian ones, but the heating system was replaced from a nearby industrial one to the central one and they all left because it became too cold for them.
Look, the post clearly states "No real reason". You, you gotta learn to read.
(I lived in one of these and it was absolute hell)
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!
Well, this picture is just poor city development. Living in appartement buildings 3-5-7-9 floors high is all very fine, IF
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.
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
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.
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.
The projects were a flawed concept not least because it concentrates inequality leading to the obvious results.
So instead we have a morass of inscrutable regulations on 3-4 levels (federal, state, county, city) with wildly complex funding schemes making the few expert developers wildly wealthy while building tragically few affordable units.
Not just the concentration of inequality. Also there was often no infrastructure, no shops, no pubs, no nothing, super thin walls, so you could hear all your neighbours, terrible heat isolation... not so different from the tents but higher concentration of people, which made it worse. In many post-communist countries those were later remade into livable places, but it took lots of time and money to do so. Totalitarian regimes suck.
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.
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...
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.
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.
all I see are 2 examples of brutalism
Nah. Both are brutal, but only one is brutalist.
