Last week, I found a used book in a store, called "what the Soviet worker receives besides their salary" (or something like that, translated it literally from my language). It's a short, 40-pages pamphlet written in 1959 by the then Soviet Minister of Finance, A. Zveriev.
On a section regarding housing, the pamphlet claims: "The workers and employees of the USSR pay insignificant rent compared to that paid by workers in capitalist countries. If in the latter, the rent expenditure absorbs 25 to 30% of the family budget, in the USSR, the rent including communal services doesn't rise, on average, above 4 to 5% of the family budget".
Leaving aside how much they paid in the USSR for rent, I want to dedicate a moment to examine this 25-30% expenditure of the family budget in rent in developed capitalist countries. I looked up the data for my western-european, developed country, and for the bottom 50% of families by budget, the housing expenditure actually ranges from 45% to 35% of the family budget in 2023 (latest data available).
Let's forget about the fact that family budgets can't be compared from 1959 to now because nowadays there are more workers per household as a consequence of the mass-incorporation of women in the workplace and young adults staying with their parents because of housing prices. Even if we forget about that, after 65 years of technological and scientific progress, in which the population of western capitalist countries has actually stabilized, the prices of housing as a percentage of family budgets have risen by about 50%, compared to the numbers given in an anticapitalist pamphlet written by a literal Soviet finance minister.
There is no reason for this other than the commodification of a HUMAN RIGHT such as housing. If Cuba and the USSR solved housing for everyone 50+ years ago, there's no actual, physical or economical problem preventing us from doing so. It's purely a desired consequence of our current system.
