Boring is cheap. Look at the way houses and apartments are being built now. Soviet Bloc Block Housing. No need for architects if the preexisting plans are pre-approved.
Yay capitalism.
Edit: a lot of people are missing the nuance. Surprise.
I’ve just been reminded that in the wonderful 70s people felt a bit similarly suppressed and the future dim as compared to 60s as we do now as compared to 00s.
Nothing is new.
What is important, though, is that nothing existing has been given to us be benevolent or harsh, kind or cruel gods. It has all been built by people just like us.
To dream and to work are the most important parts.
Been reading Vonnegut again and it’s astonishing how he’s calling out the exact same societal ills we have today. Only thing he missed was global warming and that’s because many in the 70s thought we were headed for an ice age.
Yep, 35 storeys and 400 units of plain beige whatever.
But you’re missing the value of the modern mixed-use building. They just finished one nearby and it’s insane:
ground-floor light commercial - a pizza place, a daycare and I think a pet store in there so far
parking is secure and underground, with a loading bay,
2 floors of professional - physios and notaries and some ad-hoc wework space
30 floors of apartments
an entire floor of guest space - airBnB units, essentially - and common play-space.
All these pictures are accurate as I remember from the tour:
The units will look more familiar if you’ve been to Northern Europe, but a bit bigger. We looked at a 1150sqft 3bd unit with huge triple-pane windows and - 2024 building code - A/C built-in. If you don’t count a garage - underground parking - the bigger ones are like small ranchers stacked on one another – in concrete, so you don’t notice you have neighbours.
They’re not Bloc blocks; they put a few of these together and they have a small city.
Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it’s supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn’t. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.
Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn’t turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).
It’s not really “capitalism”, it’s an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it’s very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It’s the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn’t it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.
At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your “land of the free” is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you’d be leaving could write something so nasty there that you’d never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.
BTW, yeah, I’ve gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn’t been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin’s family lived in a three room apartment in such (it’s also there who his parents were). That’s about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of “first world problems”. Again, my grandmother’s sister’s family also emigrated then.
And in western stereotypical portrayals of “how people live in (ex-)USSR” of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.
Yet the absolute majority didn’t.
So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn’t live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be “liberated” and play “discount USA”, while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.
It’s a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.
So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn’t so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn’t bad at all and still isn’t.
Boring is cheap. Look at the way houses and apartments are being built now. Soviet Bloc Block Housing. No need for architects if the preexisting plans are pre-approved.
Yay capitalism.
Edit: a lot of people are missing the nuance. Surprise.
except at least the commie blocks were affordable lol
“cheap to build” meant “cheap to rent”, not “our housing company is making record-breaking profits! 😃”
There were not “affordable”, they were allocated. One could somehow improve the chance of being “given” that via connections.
And if you changed a workplace, it could be taken back. It wasn’t yours.
the apt i live in isnt mine either. plus i have to pay to live on it.
OK. Suppose so.
I’ve just been reminded that in the wonderful 70s people felt a bit similarly suppressed and the future dim as compared to 60s as we do now as compared to 00s.
Nothing is new.
What is important, though, is that nothing existing has been given to us be benevolent or harsh, kind or cruel gods. It has all been built by people just like us.
To dream and to work are the most important parts.
Been reading Vonnegut again and it’s astonishing how he’s calling out the exact same societal ills we have today. Only thing he missed was global warming and that’s because many in the 70s thought we were headed for an ice age.
Disco Elysium is a more recent look.
It’s funny to think that when everything is made more cheap, the more they cost.
Blame minimum parking requirements. An 800 ft2 2-bedroom apartment is really 1200 ft2, when the zoning code requires one parking space per bedroom.
Yep, 35 storeys and 400 units of plain beige whatever.
But you’re missing the value of the modern mixed-use building. They just finished one nearby and it’s insane:
All these pictures are accurate as I remember from the tour:
The units will look more familiar if you’ve been to Northern Europe, but a bit bigger. We looked at a 1150sqft 3bd unit with huge triple-pane windows and - 2024 building code - A/C built-in. If you don’t count a garage - underground parking - the bigger ones are like small ranchers stacked on one another – in concrete, so you don’t notice you have neighbours.
They’re not Bloc blocks; they put a few of these together and they have a small city.
Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it’s supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn’t. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.
Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn’t turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).
It’s not really “capitalism”, it’s an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it’s very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It’s the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn’t it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.
At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your “land of the free” is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you’d be leaving could write something so nasty there that you’d never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.
BTW, yeah, I’ve gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn’t been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin’s family lived in a three room apartment in such (it’s also there who his parents were). That’s about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of “first world problems”. Again, my grandmother’s sister’s family also emigrated then.
And in western stereotypical portrayals of “how people live in (ex-)USSR” of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.
Yet the absolute majority didn’t.
So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn’t live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be “liberated” and play “discount USA”, while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.
It’s a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.
So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn’t so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn’t bad at all and still isn’t.