this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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I’d like to learn more about the Soviet housing system. From my very limited knowledge it seems to be one of the few sectors of the economy that actually functioned reasonably well. But maybe I’m missing something.
"functioned" is the key word there. No elevators, terrible insulation, no air conditioning, tiny radiators for heating, small living space for entire families, and infested with bugs. Of course some American apartment buildings check all those boxes too, but it's naïve to assume that soviet apartments were great places to live
I add that "cannot be evicted" is a double edge sword here. Since appartments were free and were assigned more or less random (cough, cough, corruption), very often you got one or two ... let's say "interresting" neighbours
Edit: well some interresting facts from my mom who's sitting next to me - there were quite some downsides
- My father asked for an appartment and the answer was: get married. As a single guy you won't get anything.
- Also when you get married and have children, there's no guarantee that you get some big appartment. Her colleague had 3 children, a husband and got 1 room appartment anyway
- There was a list of people waiting for appartments. When you were somewhere down, you wait, for years
- When she asked for an apparartment as a married woman, a "commission" arrived to verify, whether we as a familly really need one. And whether we couldn't stay living with grandma
- When my grandma with my mom moved into a newly built appartment, they opened a window and it fell off. My grandad caught it thankfully so it didn't break. They never openned that window again. There was no one to repair it and a replacement was basically impossible. They were able to open it again in like 2010 when she changed windows
Thanks for sharing firsthand knowledge. Sounds like there were a lot of problems which isn’t surprising but at least compared to the US with our extreme numbers of homeless I’m still not sure which is better.
Of course, an ideal system would provide quality housing to everyone but I don’t know of such a system.
Well the name of the game in the west is "things are better than "elsewhere" as long as you don't fall through the cracks!"
The reality is the cracks are pretty fucking wide now.
Capitalism contatantly strives to be as slightly better than the opposition as possible. This doesn’t go well when it’s the only game in town.
If you are ultra rich or ultra poor, the Soviet system is better. If you are lower, middle, or upper working class, the US system is better.
Source: I was born to a family of highly educated professionals in Russia during the late-USSR period, later moved to the US where we were working poor. The US was heaven on earth in comparison.
What was worse about the USSR housing? Anything beyond what was mentioned above?
Yes, I guess that's up to a debate which one is better (or none of them).
I'd say if we imagine housing as a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 means you're homeless and 100 means you're living in a mansion
- The US way sounds like you're using the whole scale - you've quite a lot of homeless people, but also quite a lot of people living in mansions. Some people are above average, some are bellow awerage and so on.
- The soviet way is like if you'd shrink the scale to 30 to 50. You have no homeless people but also no one is living in a mansion (well ... ). But also notice the best you can achieve in such system is average.
Which approach is better? I guess from "progress" point of view the US system is better. Theoretically if you're skilled and hard working, you can get above average and live better life. That's actually the reason why so many skilled and talented people fled the soviet union - in the west there was no "ceiling" for you. On the other hand, from humanity point of view though, the soviet system sounds much better - country caring about every single one of its citizens to have a place to live.
But I'd argue that maybe the 3rd way is best. Because well both Soviets and US are extremes. Soviets were ... well ... soviets. It's like "left" on steroids. Also it failed - I mean if it was such a paradise on earth, why were so many people fleeing it.
But US is also an extreme - you're like a capitalist lunapark. Even other countries from west are often horrified how you take care of people (or rather not care)
But there is some middle ground between these - you can have a system with focus on social issues but also not go crazy f.e. some scandinaviam countries
Scandi here, sorry to tell you our system also sucks. It has almost exactly all the problems of the soviet system (queues, poor quality, corruption) AND the American system (inequality, horrible if you’re poor, inefficient focus on luxury production), but in moderation. You can call it better (I would, or I’d have moved), but it still sucks. You need a system that’s fair, transparent, efficient, and provides enough.
We have the capacity to do that, but I don’t think it can be combined with capitalism. Capitalism eats everything around it (and inside it). It cannot be negotiated with, except for at most a lifetime in exceptional circumstances, usually less.
By the way, a unique problem with social democracy is that capitalist interests have a huge incentive and ability to commandeer whatever shit implementation of democracy you have to extract profits. If you have centralised social services (housing, healthcare) they’re very very vulnerable to takeover, selling our, deregulation where private entities can cream the market and leave the difficult cases to the publicly funded variants etc etc.
Another issue is the EU, which demands universal market liberalism. The Swedish housing system with universal public housing as opposed to social housing for the poor was explicitly fucked by this after a EU court ruling demanding they operate their rental flats like profit-driven companies, which of course completely destroyed their ability to provide the service they’re designed to provide.
It is worth considering the circumstances in which they were built, though - much of the worst of the classic eastern European "commie blocks" were basically just a desperate attempt to build something that would house people after WW2 flattened half of the continent. Throw in decades of under-maintenance for good measure.
So the upkeep part of this meme is bullshit?
I think, based on context, they mean the upkeep charges to residents, which are not necessarily the same as the cost to maintain the whole building
yeah they may have been the same or worse under a different housing model. or much better, but it seems plausible that this wasnt the worst outcome. a modern implementation in a wealthy society not post war would do a lot better, and probably in this specific sector be better than the market alternative.
I mean shitty housing is better than no housing. Their setup comes out looking pretty good compared to a lot of places nowadays. But far from perfect as you point out.
i don't think the soviets are a great example of how to do things but homeless people lack those things too. well i guess you don't need elevators to live on the street anyway so that's one thing you won't have to worry about.
of course they should have amenities. there's no dichotomy here. you can make housing comfortable and free.
There were no homeless because they were rounded up and put into prisons.
ah the supreme court's dream!
I know little about Russia, but a quote from earlier this year from a Russian:
Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, responded to Beglov's remarks, saying in a Telegram post that "a quarter of Russians do not have centralized sewerage," citing data from Rosstat, Russia's state statistics service.
"And basically, it is hard to imagine something more gender-neutral than a backyard 'latrine'-style toilet," he added.
For context: In response to criticizing gender neutral toilets in Ukraine (I don't know if they mean individual/private unisex bathrooms, or actual group restrooms they think are trans bathrooms, it's not the point of this discussion anyways).
- Low rent means no money for maintenance
- the elevators where frequently out of order or vandalized
- instead of a private washing machine you would have a number of them in the basement (maybe 1 for every 5 flats?), and a week plan with timeslots when you can use them. This is nice as long as all machines are working, but the same problem as with elevators applies here.
- it's not a quiet place, you could always hear people going up and down the stairs. The light switch Relais in the cabinet on each level always made a very loud "clunk" when someone turned on the lights...
Well, when you keep reducing the demand, it's a bit easier to do.
Funny but despite famines, purges, wars, etc. their population generally grew quite a bit during the Soviet era. So I don’t think that was a major factor.
I wasn't being funny. I was mostly talking about their current war too, not their past. They've lost quite a bit of troops. Surely that's had a noticeable effect on their housing market.
Well, if you were serious, then you are greatly overestimating the effects of these events on their population. WWII was really the only one that had a big impact. Otherwise, growth was mostly pretty consistent, despite violence that would be rightly considered extreme in other societies.
The situation today is somewhat different because population growth has collapsed due to oligarchy and neoliberalism. We’ll see what effects the war has but so far the deaths are not really enough to change the overall trajectory. But either way, today’s society is very different since they don’t have the same housing production and distribution scheme, which is instead much more like typical capitalist economies.
What parts of the (former) communist world have fruit trees? Around Odessa, you can probably live off of fruit taken from people's yards. In St. Petersburg, there are also abundant fruit trees, in the sense that acorns are the fruit of an oak tree.
Near my house in central Europe there's a bunch of walnut trees.
People go pick then up in fall.
Walnuts smell really nice when they're fresh off the tree :)
How about swimming pools?
I'd love to see anyone arguing that American apartments are good.
Another fabricated argument to get mad at. Stay classy 😎
You criticizing anyone for fabricated arguments to get mad at is pretty fucking funny.
for everyone going "oooh but this wasn't true in communist countries!!"
this is basically how it works in sweden, you get an effectively free apartment if you can't afford one on your own (you get welfare to afford the rent), you basically cannot be evicted unless you run a siren 24/7 and shit off the balcony onto people's heads, commie block-style areas tend to have at least some green space with at least a fruit tree or two, and rent in this kind of older housing is generally so cheap that when americans learn about it they just weep.
Spoken like someone who's never lived in a Soviet apartment. f'ing lol.
There's just nothing quite as bleak as that same falling apart brutalist concrete block after block after block after block.
From first hand experience I can tell you all the romance of communal living goes right out the window when they shut down the centrally heated water for the summer for "maintenance" because if you shut it down in the winter, you're f'ed.
All that "to every man as he needs" fantasy isn't real life. All my fire escapes had rusted off from the 3rd floor up to the 10th. So good luck with that in an emergency lol (major Russian City center on the Volga in 2009). Two things can be bad at the same time. Just because the US has a massive social safety net dysfunction, doesn't mean the CCCP was kind to its citizens.
People can suck everywhere.