Only $200/mo for utilities?!
I live in Poland. We have both of them.
- Soviet-era apartment buildings
PROs:
- everything within a walking distance (shops, schools, a clinic, etc)
- a lot of parks nearby
- fucking wind corridors
- you can't piss from your window to your neighbors coffe cup
- you will see some greenery from your window
CONs:
- tiny
- very low ceilings - you most likely won't be stretch your arm upwards.
- very bad acoustic - you can hear downstairs cutting green onions
- a lot of apartments on a floor (and very tiny lifts)
- Modern buildings:
PROs:
- high ceilings
- you can piss from your window on your neighbor's bed if you're into it.
CONs:
- ... we have a whole wikipedia page about it: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patodeweloperka
- I honestly don't want to talk about it, it's so sad. Generally speaking, bad quality (but deceptively good looking) places that cost too much, in a shitty neighborhood.
- no wind corridors so say hello to air pollution
Now, I know this sub tends to romanticize USSR, but during occupation (so until 1990) it wasn't that you had an apartment for yourself for every single person. If we just want to consider recent history (like 1980) then:
- your apartment wasn't yours - it was tied to your job. Like US healthcare. If you lost the job, you would lose the apartment. They were also limited to at most 1 per family.
- If you wanted to move to a different city to get a job there, then it could be impossible if the company didn't have free apartments there. Often it didn't. There was an semi-official apartment swapping market that often involved a chain of swaps in multiple cities.
- In practice you wouldn't get a bigger apartment if you had children. You could try to swap for it. Most apartments were overcrowded and multigenerational AND small. It was common for a 3 generational family to live in a 3 room apartment (not "bedroom", room).
Other than the ceilings part your cons describe most American apartments.
And people would kill here to have nearby parks and stuff within walking distance
You realize that millions of people living in US and Canada would kill for that right now? It's actually very common at this point for multiple people to share apartments komunalka style because their jobs don't pay a living wage.
Also, you create a false dichotomy here suggesting that if free housing was built the way USSR did it today then it would have to be built to the 1950s standard. Obviously there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't be building modern style apartments.
komunalka
also, I'm not talking about them. They were a thing in the 50's (after the war) when people were sharing bathrooms or kitchens, they were no longer really a thing in the 80's. In the 80's apartments had their own bathrooms and kitchens.
edit: isn't that basically "Friends" for USA people? :D
Freedom and human rights are shit down the drain and heads straight to soviet kitchen.
It boggles my mind how people today can support such an evil ideology, just because current times are difficult.
Might I suggest moving tf to North Korea, or perhaps don't move to a Liberal cesspool of a city and update the folk online with your personal dilemmas?
Src: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union
Imagine talking about human rights while ignoring the very basic necessities of life. 🤡
Also didn't your elementary school teacher tell you not to cite Wikipedia?
I was born long before the information super-highway dude
They didn’t get to choose the apartment they lived in, they couldn’t own them, they were often basic with communal kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a good thing they were free because the wages were low, and people were assigned jobs so there was little they could do to improve their careers, not that skilled people got paid much more.
🥱
