Also, are commie blocks really that much uglier or built worse than comparable social housing constructed in the west during the same period? Isn’t that just how you built cheap housing at the time?
But they’re commie (it’s right in the name!) and that means they’re evil. They can only be shown as dilapidated, dark, and gloomy in every western flick since all of the USSR really was dark and dilapidated and gloomy everywhere except where the Animal Farm leaders lived which was gaudy, extravagant, and over the top opulent. It was always cloudy, never sunny and reality had a dark blue and grainy filter on at all times. Don’t you know anything?
Their dark, gloomy and oppressive housing for everyone 😨
Our bright, opportunistic, profitable homelessness for the unworthy 😊
also, so many of them look “depressing” just because their pictures are taken during winter (where the skies tend to be gray) or are edited to lower the saturation lol
apologies for the reddit link but i just have to share one of the best posts on that website
Libs “I’d rather have my own personal and unique home and thousands of others go homeless than everyone have a home but it’s the same!” Or something I dunno I’m not a lib
Libs: I’d rather live in my own personal and unique home!
Also libs, a 30 minute drive away from the nearest grocery store:
The ones with zero fauna are the scariest to me. These are all over the US southwest.
I think you mean flora but your point is still valid. Wildlife is nice too.
Even cars look similar! This is giving Truman Show vibes!
This left vs liberal bullshit really needs to stop. The only people I have ever heard complain about architecture of housing projects are rich people.
Liberalism is objectively a right wing ideology. Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which directly contradicts its promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
I’ve had that discussion with commoners in East Germany quite a few times. To be fair, I also think the blocks could’ve benefited from some color, but that just wasn’t the priority post WW2.
Liberals keep the machine fed, and when threatened always hand the keys over to fascists. Every single fascist dictatorship in world history was created by liberals. It’s actually incredible the track record liberals have.
Liberalism should have been dead the second they gave Hitler power in order to fight the communists (aka actual working class people that found solidarity).
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism… These organisations (i.e. Fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins.
— Stalin
I’d rather live in a well maintained commie block with access to basic services and public transport than in the middle of nowhere suburbia where the nearest store is a dollar tree and if you try to walk there you get arrested for vagrancy
I’d rather live in a poorly maintained commie block with intentional 15 minute city design than step foot in literally any single family home.
Thanks to the strides made by the developed socialist economy, it recently became possible to launch the construction of houses by industrial methods. Let us see now how available housing has increased in the Soviet Union. The young Soviet state inherited from the tsarist regime altogether 180 million sq m of useful floor space in towns. This figure has by now been exceeded ten times, mounting to 1,860 million sq m. In the last decade alone, 34 million flats were constructed, which means that more than half the population and nearly three-quarters of the urban population live in new flats or houses. Since some people move into new flats and houses, those who remain in the old dwellings are less crowded, so the majority of working people have had their living conditions improved.
Houses are built in the Soviet Union at an increasing rate. Whereas in forty-odd years, 1917-1959, only about 500 million sq m of floor space in state-owned houses could be built, 545-550 million sq m of floor space will be put into operation during the current five-year period alone (1976-1980). Such is one side of the problem, which is that at the current stage the Soviet state really can provide its citizens with comfortable dwellings.
The other side of the problem is no less important. Rent in the Soviet Union is the lowest in the world, although it is paid for the use of modern dwellings with all conveniences. Soviet citizens are astonished to hear foreign visitors complain that rent consumes more than a third of their earnings. In the Soviet Union, rent comes on average to 5-6 per cent of earnings. Since there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union, and labour is in great demand, usually several members of a family have jobs and on this basis rent accounts at most for 2-3 per cent of the aggregate income of an average Soviet family. In many countries, as is known, apartment houses or tenements constitute a profitable industry.
The Soviet state, however, has never regarded rent as an item of revenue. Both in the past and at the present time rent in the Soviet Union is expended on the maintenance and preservation of houses. The great material possibilities for the construction of new houses and the social measures taken to ensure fair distribution of floor space at low rent thus make a real guarantee of the right of Soviet citizens to housing.
- ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism- https://ia801800.us.archive.org/8/items/ABCDialecticalHistoricalMaterialism_cleaned/ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.pdf
Rent being 5-6% of your income and going to building maintenance is what I use to shut down this line of anticommunism. The commie blocs in Bucharest were so nice that they made me an urbanist.
For reference for ppl living in the US, this would means rents of ~200 USD .
“Is there anything worse than socialist architecture?”
“Homelessness”
Not just that, commie blocks were literally an upgrade compared to many old homes. Imagine having a single, shared toilet in the backyard, and then those fancy new apartments with personal bathrooms and working radiators show up.
Why didn’t they just build everyone a nice semi-detached house with hedges and lots of colourful paint? 🤓
Ugly home>>>>Homeless
And they aren’t even ugly, it’s just that te pics you get in the west are during winter and desaturated.
even though they can be made prettier with façade updates. (and I’m won’t get into how practical and walkable they were), they weren’t really aesthetic when they are just endless gray boxes. Still prettier than homelessness.
also are a few decades old, removing mold and a coat of paint and they look much better, this happens with a lot of houses too
this is the discourse the cia has spread through academia. the left on the west is so occupied doing mental gymnastics trying to come up with bullshit analysis on design and aesthetics rather that observing it from the actual material reality. this is no mistake, this is planned, to transform the left into an idle project that complains about minutiae and pop culture.
