- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
You must log in or # to comment.
homelessness
Data centers, that empty parking lot outside the abandoned mall, deportation camps…
Copying and pasting an old comment i made:
Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather. The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore).
Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they’d look nice.
Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they’d be pretty damn great, as far as skyscrapers go.
Dumb question, I know some places where they build quick and ugly and a few decades later they just remodelled the façade to make it pretty an modern. but those are small residential buildings in places where I lived. do you know of places where that happened in large projects like the picture?
Our commie blocks in East Europe tend to get colorful when their owners (either the city or the dwelers) decide to insulate the facade, which often happens across a whole district in a short time. Random image to ilustrate.
Such a lovely place to live, a bit of green, colourful housing, and I will assume it is a walkable place
Looks like the ones in the picture are already surrounded by green spaces - they’re probably already pretty great as far as skyscrapers go.
The blocks usually have a lot of green areas (that’s why most of the pictures are from winter, they look gloomier). They were designed to be lived in.
And that is just the façade, some places renew the façade every few decades to keep the place fresh and desirable.
the benefits of high density urban design are also amazing and I assume I do not need to list them here. this is lemmy and I just need to wait for the appropriate autist to list them all.
And how is it controversial to build housing for everyone, instead of some pretty houses for those who can afford it.
These blocks look very different as a person on the street. They mostly only look bad from above where you can see all of them together
We have some burtalist apartment buildings in Minneapolis. They’re generally desirable apartments
Nah man. I lived in Russia most of my life and commie blocks are as depressing as they look on those pictures. You have a point that some are poorly maintained, but that’s not some, that’s most of the country. Just a mass of featureless grey blocks. Dirty, ugly and inescapable. About them being good quality on the inside is debatable. The flats are small and I could hear my neighbors all the time. Some of them used to be painted, but the paint is peeling off, only hylighting the ugliness. There’s very little upside to them in the modern world.
I live in Russia nearly all my life, and I can tell it really is a matter of proper maintancnce. Many cities do a very poor job keeping these buildings in a good shape, but when they do, it looks fairly good. Look through the comment section for examples, they are real, I’ve seen quite a few.
Not to mention European neighbors where they are still common, but due maintenance makes them look actually good.
The sound issues are fair, but there are ways to limit them.
is a matter of proper maintenance to an extend. You can paint a box, it’ll still be a box, just not as grey. And let’s not pretend Russia maintains anything. In Moscow maybe, but most of the country looks just as depressing as shown on the picture in OP. Our government never has money for fixing old infrastructure, only for war. My point is, panel houses don’t have to look so ugly anymore. But people here are arguing like it’s the only alternative to homelessness. Live in ugly, cramped panel houses or nowhere at all.
Meanwhile in famously communist South Korea…
South korea is speedrunning into a scify dystopia
Ah, the beauties of capitalism.
Stayed in an probably illegal Airbnb in a Samsung apartment in Jeju 10 years ago. It was nice. Apartment complexes are not bad. We have to them in beautiful Switzerland too. If the building is well maintained and the surrounding is full of greenery, and local shops, and entertainment, then they are a valid option and I’d prefer them over sprawl and cul-de-sacs.
Sure, in the end a building line this is going to be what it is. I personally live on the inside of my apartment, so that’s what I care most about. If I owned a house and spent a bunch of time looking at it from the garden, I would care more.
Funny enough, despite the ugly aesthetics, there is a great sense of community in social housing.
If you visit the communism museum in Prague, you’ll learn all about the horrors of being under the thumb of the USSR. And then at the end you’ll see a photograph of the cottage in the countryside where Vaclav Havel and others plotted the revolution with a text explaining that, like many Czech people, Havel owned a second home in the countryside where they would often spend weekends and holidays. For all the bad, the communists did a much better job on housing than the capitalists.
The only thing more depressing than left wing architecture is right wing architecture
Looks like concept art from Anno 2070… And I don’t mean that in a good way.
As someone who loves watching megaprojects, it is so sad that it is mostly a right wing vanity thing.
Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It’s kind of the China Town of Paris.
It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
If you’re curious, here it is on Google Maps
I’d live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.
No comrade, nice looking things are bourgeoisie decadence.
Well, those have been built in a highly industrialized and rich country, not in a developing economy. Social housing in China nowadays looks more like your pictures than the one in the post, let’s keep in mind that that kind of housing is at this point over 50 years old.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
Well, the Soviets and China never stopped building socially affordable housing. Turns out it’s a quirk of capitalist regimes leaving people to spend half their income in housing!
Right wing architecture
I fucking hate stroads.
More right wing architecture
That’s terrible. Use the nide grabber and put that right. Wobbling all over the place right now.
Just one more lane!
Pls bro, just one more 🙏
I swear I can quit any time I want, I just need one more lane and then I’m done
I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and even driving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control
That is a lot of gas stations and signs for them
Free market competition 🇺🇸🦅🙏
I hate our society’s fixation with ugly utilitarianism. We could be making beautiful things for all of us
They’re too hard to regulate. Grey square boxes are good for the poor! You’ll see! Trust us. We’re totally not stupid
I actually wish they’d build more of those than the overpriced “luxury condos” people build now that no one can afford.
Has anyone seen the cat?
Semi relatedly, there’s some new blocks in my city that are both ugly and expensive to live in. It’s this soulless, almost corporate feeling type of architecture. Doesn’t fit into how the city looks at all. They had the opportunity to decide whether to build affordable housing or something pretty that aesthetically fits into the city and picked neither. No doubt the shareholders shed a tear of joy.
People here understand that the Soviet Union had a homeless population too, right? They actually had a higher rate than the US in the 1980s.
The USSR collapsed entirely in the early '90s
Safe to assume everyone is aware they had severe societal issues
I see this meme getting reposted here every week, and it’s the same nonsense every time. The fact that the people in the Soviet Union had both depressing architecture and homelessness renders the point in the meme both false and meaningless.
What was their homelessness rate in the 1980s? I’ve looked for 5 minutes and have not been able to find anything. In the US it was 0.01%.
Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn’t exist, they never officially published figures on it, however most experts both today and back then agreed that the homeless population was in the hundreds of thousands. Most conservative estimates put the figure at around 150k-200k, while some put the figures as high as 2 million.
The Soviet Population was 266 million in 1980 and 286 million in 1989. In both cases, if we go around the absolutely most conservative estimates of 150k, that’s around 0.05% of the population.
https://www.rbth.com/history/332657-homeless-people-ussr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Soviet_census https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/ehome.html
So, I’m not interested in being a Debbie Debater here, and I’m absolutely not claiming that you’re wrong, but I think two of the three sources you give don’t really pass my standard for reliable.
The first one doesn’t quite pass the vibe check for me. When I go to the home page, the top articles are about “the five greatest russian erotic films” and “7 budding russian models”. It just doesn’t scream “impartial scientific article” to me.
The Christian Science Monitor one is from a researcher from radio liberty research. What I read is that this place was founded and funded by the CIA with the explicit purpose of broadcasting propaganda into the east bloc. To me, I’m about as likely to trust an article from this source as I am to trust an article about homelessness in South Korea coming from a think tank funded by North Korea, called the “Proletarian Empowerment Institute” or whatever.
One thing I can find plenty of impartial sources on is that it’s hard to find reliable data on homelessness from the USSR. But to go and trust some less than credible sources for a lack of alternatives is pure lamp post bias.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. All I’m saying is that the sources you cite don’t pass my personal smell test, and I still feel agnostic on whether or not homelessness rates in the USSR were better or worse than in the US in the 80s.
As an aside, it’s really embarrassing, but I don’t know where I got the 0.01% figure from. A second google search seems to suggest a range of 600,000 to 2,000,000 out of 247,000,000 so something closer to 0.0025%–0.08%. These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR. For me personally, it doesn’t really affect whether or not I believe that the homelessness rate in the USSR was higher or lower than in the US because I still feel like I’m pretty much in the dark on the former. But maybe for you these figures help you sharpen your beliefs, so I figured I’d share them.
Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn’t exist
Ugh… Anticommunist propaganda. Vagrancy was considered illegal, and “homeless” people had access to free dorms. Your figures are entirely made up
That’s dumbest argument imaginable. Drugs are considered illegal, drug addicts access to free rehab in most countries… does that mean nobody uses drugs? Because that’s your argument. The Soviet Union had homelessness. Just because they made it illegal, that didn’t make the problem magically go away, and just because they denied it that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
On the picture: hundreds of flats with individual windows and balcony
Oh no, giving hundreds of families a balcony, how terribile! What’s next: non-shared bathrooms and kitchens?
They’re all made of concrete which means I don’t have to hear my upstairs neighbor stomping around at every hour of the day
I wish! As someone who have lived in one of those concrete apartments from the communist era of my country, at least as they were made here, you do hear your neighbours. And if your neighbours have an active kid or a bigger breed dog that likes to jump a lot especially. Also every time they drop something on the fooor. I’m not very familiar with construction and material propeties, but there is something about concrete that carries vibrations easily. When a neighbour starts doing some renovations the power drill can be heard in half of the building (it was a nightmare for me, who worked night shifts at the time).
Don’t get me wrong, I’d still prefer that hell to being homeless.
Why is there always a neighbour that’s drilling? I live in a similar style building, but much smaller. There’s always someone who drills.
