@@KaleidoscopicVideos420 Also a lot of native speakers use dead as hyperbole for how depressing the "dormant" season is. At least me and my family does in the American Midwest.
There are many innovative projects/utilities globally but the US refuses to adopt anything developed elsewhere. Bundle this with a bought and paid for Congress, it spells problems for the country, stifling progress.
I haven't heard of a single building from the last century that didn't come with at least a bunch of mistakes People mess up EVERYTHING. But at least giant piles of concrete are indeed less prone to falling apart within years... it can happen, especially if greedy a-holes skimmed on materials, but the same can happen in everything-housing. The city i live in in germany had two of those giant concrete eyesores, both run down to the max. One got renovated pretty good (the apartments all got sold), the other was blown up and replaced by a big electronics/entertainment shop (
concrete is hard to mess up compared to other materials, a bunch of roman legionaries could craft still functioning roads with the archaic form of concrete: 'crete'
Coming from Canada, I spent a few months in a renovated "Commie block" apartment in Hungary. It had small rooms, but was quite nice. And the pedestrian accessibility was amazing. Everything we needed was nearby. Plus there were indeed multiple nearby schools, day cares, and doctor's offices. Our balcony had a nice view of green spaces below. It was lovely. 10/10 would take that style of urban planning over either over-dense downtowns with no light at ground level, or under-dense suburbs with terrible walkability.
That is exactly what "commie blocks" were designed to do - you want dense cities but need somewhere for people to live that won't require long commutes? Commie block.
"the pedestrian accessibility was amazing. Everything we needed was nearby." Wtf would you need a disgusting commie block for that? I have that for both of my apartments in Hungary, one in historic rural town's downtown, one in Budapest downtown, and they are both in districts with old classical buildings with no commie blocks in sight. I need to walk less than 50 meters for a major grocery store from both places fe.
@@moonstriker7350 You know, my aunt lives in a castle and it has as much to do with the topic as your classical buildings. The problem is that almost nothing *after* commie blocks has taken urban planning seriously.
@@moonstriker7350 Fair enough, but that was my experience living in one of those blocks. I think the architecture on the classical buildings was definitely more interesting though.
We had similar hosing projects here in Japan after the war. But in typical Japanese style, the quality was very good albeit the exterior designs were very simple for cost saving reasons. Local Japanese also felt they had won the lottery-literally since lotteries are used to this day for some of the more popular structures in convenient locations. We call them “danchi “ complexes and are still standing today offering affordable housing to the working class of Japan. They are getting older and need regular upkeep and improvements, which are dutifully performed. Only drawback is that most do not allow pets at least in central Tokyo and Yokohama. They even offer discounts on the rent for young families, families who want to live closer to their aging parents, and discounts for single moms trying to raise a family by herself. And even though they are public housing, they welcome foreigners with open arms.
@@constantinethecataphract5949 It's not like Japan is at risk of suffering an immigration crisis, so what's the problem? I'm sure the amount of foreigners is very small.
"Decaying gray blocks under the dark sky" I don't know about the dark sky, but the decaying gray block can be changed for not a lot of costs, renovation and paint and you'll get functionnable appartments with bright colors :p
Khrushchev's lego was, I feel, one of the most important developments in housing. it worked, really, really well. Some of the Soviet town planning concepts as well (clustering developments around public spaces and services, pedestrian friendly layouts) were absolutely brilliant. Singapore copied almost all the same basic principles for their HDB new towns, and they're also fantastic.
A lot of the stock in the UR Housing program in Japan also follows similar design patterns. Not to mention more than one private development firm. Apparently the apartments inside are pretty good and relatively cheap for their value to rent/buy, but you can really tell what design of the apartments they're copying from. :/
"You can't mess up a slab of concrete" oh you would be surprised. I've seen walls warped in all kind of ways, and only maybe a half of those could be attributed to installation mistakes.
i can confirm that, I often have to slightly alter new furniture to make it fit the walls that aren't at 90° from the floor, or there is a visible gap.
@@gabotron94 That's exactly what American developers want you to think lol. Paint them with all the worst construction companies they can find in China and call them all the same so that you would think American developers are different in a good way. Fact is, bad companies make bad stuff, and bad companies are everywhere in the world no matter where they are. Just because you're shown construction failures/demolition projects that make their buildings look very vulnerable doesn't mean every single construction company in the same country work the same, because if that's the case then nobody would risk building the Empire State building either because of all the bad construction companies in America.
@@hommhommhomm As a carpenter working in Germany i can say with confidence: i haven't seen a SINGLE house without messy walls and/or floors. You ALWAYS have to adjust furniture and even windows/doors according to the real measurements you find. The key part being: NOT A SINGLE HOUSE, regardless of it's building style. No real world house ends up with perfectly straight walls and floors, those only exist on paper. This gets even crazier in regions with a long history of mining, a history found under a crazy amount of cities in germany.
I live in a commie block area in Poland. The apartment itself is a bit "meh", our block looks kinda decrepit, and the one other thing that bothers me is the relative lack of meeting places (coffee shops, bars) in the commercial sectors (a few ice-cream joints, but mostly takeout), but other than that... man, I love it here. The amount of greenery is off the charts, with every service and store imaginable within walking distance. Great tram and bus connections with the rest of the city, 15 minutes by bus to the regional train station, and 30 minutes to the big one, 30 minutes to the airport. It's a heaven for children (we have three) - every grass section between blocks has a playground or two, there's also a huge exercise area adjacent to the local school, a line park, a bunch of beautifully designed, kid-friendly parks. BTW, when I say "grass sections", I don't mean lawns, but cool, natural looking green areas with trees, pretty bushes and stuff. So, yeah. A fantastic place to live in, and also compared to some of the places you showed, we have less concrete. The whole setup is also a boon for health - I walk about 2800-3000 km a year (often with significant added weight, like a kid on my back, or groceries for 5 people) just living my normal life. Two thumbs up!
I saw that too, pretty cool! I have some model trains myself, kinda got a little bit of everything (HO, N, and G), though I mainly do LEGO Trains, so have a lot of L-Gauge stuff.
After living in London for last 10 years + I'm dreaming about having a flat like the one I remember form my childhood in post soviet blocks. Seriously, when I was a kid my family didn't like it because "the wall wre thin and we could hear our neighbours flushing their toilet". Which was true. Oh little did we knew. I've lived in places that had walls made out of cardboard I imagine, because I could hear my neighbours walk, no not run or jump, just walk around their flat. I lived in places where mould was irremovable from the wall. I lived in a places that were build without windows in every room. Places where you wouldn't find a 90 degrees corner, all were this weird either too wide or too narrow so lots of space was wasted because you couldn't fit any furniture in. And so on and on. Really, I'd move into commie block flat this instant if I had an opportunity.
So true! The layout of the flats and the planning around them is pretty smart. And you can keep the good parts while improving on the aesthetics and the sound-proofing (the last one is a must, though, but it's even worse in many Western European countries, I can confirm that).
@@trut52 Asbestos was a building material used across the whole world at the time. I lived in houses that still have asbestos in the walls here in London and yet the insulation and sound proof was shite. So nope, use of asbestos or lack of it has nothing to do with poor soundproofing.
Worth to mention that "complete planning" in Soviet cities also included green areas for relaxation an aesthetics, which nowadays in free and liberal Eastern Europe are gradually taken away from the local residents(by new commercial or residential buildings), without any planning at all
@@111splinter111 When a system fails because of corruption it doesn't really say anything about the quality economic system. So if you want to shit on any economic sectors you should isolate the corruption out and then make a comparison. Otherwise you only give an example of "corruption bad"
I grew up in a Polish commie block and to this day, I remember it as one the best living situations I have ever experienced. Unbeatable social aspects, walkability, excellent public transportation and proximity to everything I needed. Today, I live in deep suburbia, where no one walks outside and I need to drive miles just to buy food. It's awful and depressing.
I like how "sad and depressing" pictures of commieblocks are always taken in the middle of the winter. As if it's the building's fault that winters in Russia are like that: gray, snowy and without any leaves on the trees. Take the same pictures in the middle of a sunny summer and it's nowhere near as depressing. Can confidently say so because I live in one.
I was growing up in such a "commie block" neighborhood untill I moved to Germany into a very rural area. And I totally agree with you. The areas between houses were populated with playgrounds where all kids from the blocks met. Since on one block typically roughly 80 families were living and there were four or five blocks in a row, this meant that there was a tons of kids there. Everything was (and still is) in walking distance -- daycare, schools, shops, doctors, etc. I still miss the feeling I have when I am there.
I grew in a place like that too. Also, my "block gathering" (we have a word for that in Polish, neighborhood does not really fit I feel) was at the edge of town, facing a small river. So not only we had all those advantages of schools, stores, doctors in a walking distance, but I could also walk on a river bank and go to actual wild woods nearby. And we had a giant soccer field not only playgrounds. I honestly don't understand why people oppose those neighborhoods, for all the kids it was great. And the concrete at least stops the sounds of neighbors, not like any US apartment I lived in, where you can hear a regular conversation across the wall. My family still leaves in that neighborhood, and I got to tell you the prices of the condos are skyrocketing, everyone is finally realizing that it's not a bad idea at all. I moved out of Poland to US due to cultural reasons, the places like those block neighborhoods work like any small village, everyone knows everyone, which can be great, but if you're slightly different it gets annoying. But still, the community feeling was there and I miss it here in the rural US.
@@Apost0345 osiedle. Neighborhood to bardziej okolica, nie ma kontekstu administracyjnego. Poza tym osiedle, przynajmniej u nas, mialo bardzo konkretny wydzwiek, moze troche jak slangowy "hood".
When I first played Fallout 4, I got the quest "build beds to your settlers" I said ok I decided to build a communist block building for them. It was extremely difficult to just design those things to make sure not to have unused areas in any floors but I did it. It's harder than you might think. Once I had the plans it took me 3 days and I built it. I was amazed how efficient this thing was. I was suppose to house 12 settlers at that point, but my commie block was capable of housing 36 settlers easily on a 4×6 square area in the game! Not counting the ground floor, which was a pub. It had an elevator in it plus a stairway, each apartments had 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 kitchen, and 2 balconies! The limit of the settlement is 22 settlers and this thing overkilled it with ease!
How to make a nuclear apocalypse worse? Finally everyone has a bit of privacy becuase the world has ended and you shove 12 people into a commie block. My God. I'd rather side with the raiders. 😉😉😂🤣🤣🤣
@@theMerovingianMan The torture didn't end here XD Later I built a 19 story commie block on Abernathy farm. It had 38 apartments which was enough to house every single NPC in the entire game, plus all the raiders of Nuka World. I only had around 18 settlers there, so I put their beds to the top floors so every day they had to go all the way up to the 19th floor to sleep XD I put junk mortars and those tennis ball shooter things on the top of the building. Every day when the settlers were working on the crops to make food, I bombardiered them with junk just for fun XD Once a settler was complaining about the water situation, but the water supply was good. So I put his bed on the top of the commie block exposed to rain, radstorms, and everything, I put a flower bed next to it with a single piece of tayto. So all he could do is work and sleep XD That settler lived like that for my entire gameplay XD
Oftentimes though it's choice. Advanced West European countries already have everything to solve homelessness, but there are still homeless people, because you can provide a room for them to live, but not all will want to settle somewhere. Same as there were homeless and jobless people in USSR too, although militsiya (police) were catching them and forcing them to work, sending to factories (which went badly as they were just drinking vodka, and demotivating other workers). Some people are fine with hunter-gatherer lifestyle, some are so deep in alcoholism/drug abuse that they do not want any help and should we help or correct them against their will? I'm all for better social safety nets and social policies but people are people, sometimes it's not ''capitalism'' that makes them a certain way, it's who people are
@@lkrnpk Often it's a choice what?? And no, most Western European countries don't care about solving homelessness, very few homeless people are homeless by choice, and it's often a death sentence
And suburban hellscapes. At leas a well kept commie block gives you an outdoor space that is not a lawn you have too keep trimmed to within a mm of it's life to satisfy the local home owners association.
@@Hey1234Hey a commie block is far from a shipping container. People who lived in small houses (which, itself is a massive improvement from a shipping container) described it as a massive leap forward in terms of housing.
I’m from Poland. We’ve got lots of building like this. They are ugly - too big, too blocky, too grey. But the city planning aspect of them is great! Every part of the city that is dominated by them is planned completely - grass, trees, places for kids, cyclist etc. The newer part of the city look better, but are chaotic and worse in the holistic planning aspect. Shortly - the are not pretty, but make for a great space to live in.
Can't they just slap some colourful panels onto the concrete walls? There's no rules saying that they can't make it look good other than it technically not being profitable.
@@DragoonBoom There was an ugly concrete office block in my town, until it was bought up and given a bit of a makeover. It's now referred to as 'The Blue Building' and it looks much better, and is a useful landmark, being right next to the railway station.
@@DragoonBoom In Poland they are beeing plastered and painted. Especially if the building is insulated. Looks much better. But the problem is that the size of the building itself makes it a bit overwhelming structure. Especially if there is many of them on the block. Still - the terrain around theme is awesome! Lots of trees, little businesses, kindergartners etc. Much better than on the newer estates.
I grew up in a commie block area and couldn't agree more. The part where I grow up was called Lesná. Which could be translated as "Foresty". There was green everywhere! Groups of trees between the blocks. Kindergartens planed into the area! I had kindergarten 10 meters away. Playgrounds on NEARLY EVERY STREET. 2 big primary schools. 2 mid sized supermarkets and at least 5 small corner shops. Many pubs. Football field, tennis courts, swimming pool, one big foresty area in the middle of the area where we used to play all the time. Well done side walks. There were large gaps of community space and beautiful foresty areas in the area and around the area. Very well connected with public transportation. All on 2.6 square kilometers of area. Everything was in walking distance. The urban planning was just pristine! When I look at the residential areas being built now, it's always "modern" houses, each the same, no kindergartens, no sporting areas, no playgrounds or shops no community spaces. Just parcels of the same family houses right next to each other, because space is extremely expensive. We call it "concrete jungle". I'd take a smaller commie block apartment over this any day! Also the commie blocks were not grey. Just a little bit of money and every street was painted in some nice colors.
In Kiev there is a neigbourhood with the same name. And while the houses are your typical commieblocks with occasional newer "architectural masterpieces" squeezed in between, everything else is exactly as you described - forests and great air!
... I had the opportunity to live in Beverly Hills as well as Jizni Mesto (considered to be one of the more shitty commie-block areas in Prague). Jizni Mesto wins by a long shot - in Beverly Hills, there was no way to survive without a car, no shops or services what so ever, and no shared recreational areas at all.
I remember when I was a kid growing up in commie Bucharest, Romania, my kindergarden was within 5 minute walking distance, then my school (grades 1-8) was at the end of the street I was living on, so about 1 minute of walking, playground areas were everywhere in the back plus we kids could ride our bikes all around the neighborhood, the general store where my parents bought stuff from was about 10 minutes walking distance, and the furthest away was the farmers market, for which we took a tram for 2 stops. Lots of things were bad in communism, starting with the lack of civil rights, lack of accountability for government, the thought police they practiced, and basically every manifestation of the totalitarian control of the state, but a few things weren't that bad, among them education and healthcare for all, and urban planning (when the dictator and his wife didn't try to play urban planners themselves, because it did go terribly wrong when they did). Already now they started rehabilitating the old commieblocks, and they don't even look that bad anymore. The one where my uncle lives in in Drumul Taberei neighborhood is actually quite decent.
I don't know. I grew up in a farm and although i'm not demanding, moving to a commie block was weird as the building quality was absolute horse shit and neighbor's tobacco smoke seeps into my apartment. The neighborhood is fine now that 90s anarchy is over and greenery has grown for 4 decades. Good for affordable housing, yes. Its insane how in some areas you get a late soviet apartment with a sea view and balcony in a relatively nice neighborhood for 10k eur. But for it to be good you have to strip your apartment down to bones and rebuild everything.
@@TheFatMob it's called "Лісовий масив" or Forest neighborhood and whist I agree that it's a nice enough place I don't think that the 'urban planners' are to be praised here. Because, as the name would suggest, the neighborhood is literally next to a forest and it's one of the furthest removed areas of Kyiv. It would take you a 30-40 min drive nowadays to get to the city centre. Also, the metro station there only opened in 1979, whist the neighborhood began filling up in 1965, meaning that for about a decade your only means of transportation was a bus (because trust me you won't be getting a car any time soon if you have to live there). Maybe the buses were frequent and transportation isn't that big a problem, but compared to the rest of Europe not being able to walk to, let's say the theatre, an opera house, a museum or a church, is a major problem.
The disconnect between eastern Europeans that see commie blocks and Americans can be boiled down to poverty. When an American sees a commie block they tend to think that it was a place to house only poor people, that were than forgotten. Hence, they tend to view commie blocks as being synonymous with America projects, and associate with them the same sort of problems. But one really good thing the commies did was get people from across a wide swath of society to live in these things. Your neighbor could just as easily be a university professor as a janitor.
The swedish million homes programme seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from this. While the urban planning aspect of it is usually not great (except for walkability and parks), the apartments themselves were planned down to the millimeter. Big rooms, natural light, built in storage (including built in spice racks!) and ktichens scientifically planned for comforts and efficiency. Meanwhile, some new apartments require you to climb up a fucking ladder to reach your bed.
It was a Soviet leader named Nikita Khrushchev who invested money to agriculture and housing, in Sweden we had urbanisation due to our industrial revolution in the 60s and borrowed the Soviet design due to it was low cost due it was designed to rebuild Europe after the war. The million homes programme used the pensionsystem for investment which was a good idea because real estate is low risk.
True! Unfortunately some of these 'commie blocks' areas have a tendency to develope into unsafe/risk zones here in Sweden. Basically low social safety in the area.
@@mimimurlough In Finland we also have these and quality of area really depends are they mostly public or private. Public being cheapest rents thus most of the people that need to be housed by municipality... Clearly leading issues, while the people with better income don't even get chance to get such apartment...
I'm Polish and I live in a modernized commie block, and I have ever since I was a child. I have to say that I agree with everything in this video - especially the part about how it's great even externally. I wouldn't have ever needed a car if not for studies/work. Here's a list of locations near my home, just to show you how crazily available everything here is: - A large grocery shop (almost comparable to a supermarket, in terms of space and goods available,) with fairly cheap prices built INTO the block; all I have to do to get there is put on my shoes, jacket, and go downstairs. - Another grocery/liquor store, 2-3 minutes (on foot) further away down the block, but this one is open 24/7. - And if that doesn't cut it, 4-6 minutes (on foot) away is a supermarket, around two blocks away. - A bar on the other side of the street, almost always open. - A sort of mini-shopping mall with several clothing stores in the same block, 3-4 minutes away on foot. - A barber attached to the mini-mall mentioned above. - Another barber literally next door to the one above, in case the first one is ever fully booked. - A pawnshop next to the first large grocery store mentioned on this list. - A home improvement store right next to the pawnshop. - An ice cream store next to the home improvement store mentioned above. - Another grocery store, next to the ice cream store, which sells notably different goods than any of the ones mentioned here, is open on most days, and has a barber on the other side of the street from it. All of this is still within 2-3 minutes of walking distance. - A photographer in the same block, 3-4 minutes away. - A bank (and ATM) right down the street, 5-6 minutes away. - Five different pharmacies, plus a medicine store, all within a radius of ten minutes of walking. - A professional clinic right next to the medicine store, where you can get free healthcare/check-ups if you get sick, sometimes even with appointments on the same day/instantly if they don't have too many patients booked in. - A pizzeria next to the supermarket. - And if you're religious (I'm not, but maybe you are,) there's a Catholic church next to the pizzeria, still within a ten minute radius. - Another bank a bit further away. - An elementary school within fifteen minutes of walking (I attended here). - A middle school, within ten minutes of walking (I attended here). - A high school, within fifteen minutes of walking (I attended here). - And that's not mentioning the post offices, other minor stores, services, parks, etc. In summary, I have basically anything I need for daily, weekly, or monthly living (and more), all within ten minutes of my home. And it's been like this, without change, since I was a little boy. It's really great to live here. I had to move out briefly when I was going to university, and I absolutely hated how far away everything was in the 'modern city.' Being forced to walk for more than ten minutes to buy some basic groceries seemed to me like a sin against my basic human rights at the time, lol.
I lived in a same one in Budapest. It was a very long house, like a snake. Actually there were more houses built next to each other. But there were connection between them. At the 6th floor there was a connection in case of fire. But it meant that you could walk nearly a kilometer inside the house. In the groundfloor there were different shops, like you listed them. When the weather was bad you didnt even need to leave the house, just walk throug at the 6th floor.
I have been to every major European capital and as someone who lives in North America, we have all these things. You don't need a "commie" block to have access to supermarkets, transportation or parks. My father grew up in one in St-Petersburg and a) there was still a massive lack of housing and homelessness in the city b) it's not normal for a family where both parents are doctors to live in a tiny apartment where both the neighbors to each side are raging alcoholics. While these apartment units remain practical for certain situations, let's not make them out to be something people reminisce over.
I have lived in 3 areas like this in social democratic Sweden, and loved them all. We call them "miljonprogrammet" (literally the million program) where the goal was to build a million apartments moving a lot of people out of shit housing. The houses are butt-ugly, but the inside is a lot more functional than anything newer I have lived in, and you walk out of the house directly into areas with lots of grass and trees and almost without cars. These days most of the areas are not considered nice to live in due to their socio-economic status, but those I have lived in have been a lot more human friendly than the later built million program of the upper middle class.
I lived in something similar in Denmark and it was actually quite nice. Very little space but it was well designed to get the most out of such a small place. I'm currently living in one in the UK and I can't say the same. It's very loud and the noise can be stressful essentially with young neighbours who have friends over frequently. I can hear every footstep and sneeze next door, and the layout seems haphazard and cluttered. The place I am living now is owned by a company, which I have never seen my landlord in person. When I was accepted I just paid and received the pin codes by email. There is a significant difference in a well planned building and a property lazily renovated to fit as many people as possible to maximise profits. I'm hoping to move soon as the sound is ruining my mental health. I have sensory processing disorder and it's starting to make me overstimulated and sleep deprived. There is nowhere nearby I can easily get to that is quiet, like a park or library. There are parks and such but they are still noisy and busy and the library has noise from the shopping centre. Sorry for going off on a tangent the sleep deprivation is making me agitated 😂
I don´t know how old you are, but most of the worst "miljonprogramet" was torn down in the 00s and late 90s. All the rest was renovated between 00 and 10. The windows was switched out in all of them, a huge improvement. Kitchen and bathroom was either partly fixed up or totally renovated. Sometimes the floor was refloated. In reality there was never 1 million flats made, the number was closed to 850k, still that was way to much for a country with 5-6 million population. Leading to a huge surplus apartments. There was also modular concrete buildings made as early as 1930 in Sweden, as well as in 1950s. People often confuse them for "milionprogramet" because they look kind of similar, but they was built way before the program. I was in my early 20s around the time those flats was renovated and move around a lot. I lived in plenty of them both before and after being fixed up. And most of the was pretty awful prior to being fixed up. (but its also a huge geographical diffrance, most of the very late flats are also much better quality.). Its also worth saying that most modules in Sweden was during this period made with a 160mm standard, and during the very latest year increased to 180mm. While the eastern block counter part was built to 120 - 140mm standard. That is a huge diffrance in sound insulation. When they was built in Sweden they was all built with linked to glass. When they was upgraded in the 90s and 00s they was all replaced with monolithic 3 glass argon, that is the same that is used in new build to this day. Standard today for new-build is 200mm walls having a huge increase of sound insulation relative to the 160mm (its like the cube of the width is the sound dampening) The reason mostly expensive flats have been built the last years is due to how municipality (komun in Swedish) handling planing making it very expensive to buy a plot to build a new house, forcing the builders to build expensive flats to recoup there cost. Its also the effect of the municipality in most places want to make the city more compact building in what use to be open places. Making the central flats more and more expensive. Back in the 90s there was hardly a price diffrance between a central flat and a flat in the suburbs. Now the diffrance is huge. Ironically, the reason why modern city is so humen unfrendly, is that planers wanted to make them more walkable, by compacting them more together,.
Everytime someone shows me how "depressing" everything there is, the picture is taken in winter. Yeah of course the sky is dark and the trees arent green! ITS WINTER!
My father lived in a "commie block" throughout his whole childhood and teenage years. At one point, his family moved out the industrial "commie block" city to live in a village but couldn't even live their for a half a year because there was no basic commodities included and it was very cold during the winter. They moved back in the commie block.
I went to a "commie block" in MOLDOVA - electricity worked, water pressure was great, elevator was wide enough for a wheelchair user and 3 others. Senior citizens were happy, children were playing in the corridors (the surrounding area had been encroached by much newer developments) etc. As a foreigner, people were happy to see me and invited me to drink all the time. In the USA the MDUs were of 2 kinds - rich people places or gang-controlled towers where no one was happy in either one. Maybe the gang leaders were, i don't know.
The big plate blocks are worse than living in village. (My personal comparesen with my grandmas "apartament" and lovely cold Full of snow in winter polish countryside) P.s sorry for bad English
My entire family in Poland on both sides lives in blocks / bloki. My grandpa has been in his unit since the 1960's. Its a fun colored 4 story building in the city of Opole. The entire neighborhood has these same Blocks. 2 big bedrooms, sizable living room with enclosed balcony, decently sized kitchen. Walls still have wood panneling and the furniture and electronics are all from the soviet 60s but the unit itself is very nice. The part that sucks is that there is no elevator and my 89 year old grandpa lives alone on the 4th floor. His unit is nice, but I really hate the high rise blocks. These are extremely depressing and run down. I also have a family member in one of these. No balcony, one delapitated elevator in the whole building that is broken 80% of the time, narrow ugly hallways usually filled with drunks and vomit, or both. Going off the beginning of the video, we literally still have one of those "pre war" properties in the family. My grandpa's childhood home has no running water at all, with only enough electric wiring to power an ancient mini fridge and tube radio. So I guess coming from that, blocks were an upgrade.
A good book on British housing at the same time is "Municipal Dreams" , if anyone's interested. There's one account in there of an ex-solider being shown around a public motor home-looking bungalow, and his wife was crying because she couldn't believe they could have such a perfect house given to them with everything included. She apparently said to him (paraphrasing), "measure for the lino, love. We're taking it!". Especially after living in the slums with an outdoor toilet. People did love these homes, even with their faults, despite the propaganda built up over recent decades. I know I'll never own a house, but fuck I'll take a public apartment block if that means I get to have somewhere to live.
as a romanian who has lived their entire life in communist apartment buildings, I would like to highlight the joys of having to also listen to the news every time any of your neighbours decides to, as well as be kept up to date with every single argument they have! very exicitng!
Housing and entertainment all in one, these commies sure knew about value for money. But seriously I've experienced the same in western capitalist blocks, funnily enough some western social housing blocks had better sound insulation than the private sector ones.
@@blacxthornE Not to the same extent, not by a long shot. Some commie blocks are alright, some are even great and those are the ones Adam's talking about. Most of them lack most any kind of insulation and would make even the cheaply built of modern apartments seem pretty alright. You can't compare the best of one thing to the worst of another...just look around for videos of people showing you around Romanian commie blocks if you want to know where this man is coming from.
You also get to know your neighbours' taste in music. I'm going through this right now, the neighbours below me host a damn party or something all day every day😒
Used to live in one until I moved to Germany in 2014. It really wasn't that bad or depressing. On the inside, it's an apartment like any other. There was also a sense of a community between the neighbours, since the commie block wasn't that big. Every evening, the adults would gather outside and just talk, drink, eat together. The kids would play in the meantime. I have so many fond memories, I get a very cozy feeling every time I start thinking about those times.
Bro, that feels incredible, i live in a block myself in Egypt but its a small 4 floor block and all the people living in it are my family so not as cool, god i wanna go to eastern Europe so much lol
Hijacking your relatively top comment I'd like to give some context to the western viewers. Surely, pics of commieblocks in the middle of the winter are depressing, but Adam also shows the top notch examples of good commieblocks. The actual reality is that yes, there is indeed usually quite a lot of greenery between the buildings, but in the case of old construction it all is covered in overgrown trees, which result in no grass. When it rains, the entire area inbetween the houses turns into mud. Combined with the lack of parking, your entire yard turns into an unsafe parking lot and the mud is carried into the asphalt by cars and water. Commieblocks don't often have stores and amenities nearby. In some cases you can have a store right in your own building. In other cases you'll have to take a 10-15 minute trip to the nearby supermarket. I lived near one microdistrict which consisted of nothing but 9-story living buildings. It had two schools in the vicinity, 1 or 2 kindergartens, but the entire area was supported by a supermarket nearby and a small market (yay, capitalism) in the middle of it. Indeed, you need to spend a lot of funds to renovate the buildings, because the walls are thin and oftentimes the outside walls are just cold. This is why many people don't want to rent corner flats. When Adam mentions Ukraine, that particular project was realized by ОСББ, which can be loosely translated into "Homeowner association". The entire purpose of this organization is to unite the dwellers of a particular building to funnel their funds into modernizing their building because the local government sure as hell doesn't have a capability to do it. The answer is, of course, "make well designed living buildings with the living conditions in mind". In my opinion, the only thing good about the commieblocks is a lot of green space. I'd very well like some modern buildings but with a neatly designed yards and inner spaces.
I live in a commie block in the former GDR and I can literally hear my upstairs neighbours talking, coughing, sneezing. I know when they're showering, I know when they're making love. The noise issue would be my only negative aspect although this aspect should be taken seriously, especially because of TVs and listening to music. It get can get very annoying very very quickly...
This is also an issue in many western apartments, though probably not as bad. It shouldn't be an issue though, we have the technology to create apartments that are practically sound vacuums, why don't we implement it in every apartment? There is no good reason. We should be building the highest quality housing blocks that will last for a thousand years without complaints from residents.
Yeah but they are free, here in Colombia I used to live in something near to that but really expensive. Probably a bit smaller. Bogotá is one expensive city. I had to sound proof it DIY with used egg cartons foam old papers and some drywall. I don't know if it was psychological or if there are better method but that one work for me.
I heard someone say that they were designed to have thin walls on purpose so that you could hear other people are saying. So if somebody was talking bad about the government you could report them. It was to encourage eavesdropping on your neighbor.
@No One But there are easy solutions to this. Have archritecture and vibrant colours on the buildings and more importantly have good public parks or forests near-by.
@No One Lol did you watch the video? They used concrete blocks because it was cheaper ,rezistent and easy to manufacture, the fact that it resulted in a brutalist look doesn't mean that it was intended that way, what other solution would you have proposed to achieve that performance?
its honestly one of the most hilarious things that people cite as a downside of the Soviet system. The exact same style of buildings were built basically everywhere in Europe and Asia after WW2, its only the US that went into Suburban stupidity. The builds also ended up facing the exact same issues the "commie blocks" fell into. ie government not putting effort into continual maintainance but its only seen as a slight against the Soviet system? There is a reason why the UK and the like have torn down massive swathes of the blocks/ towers built in this style while Eastern and Central Europe havent.
It's worth mentioning that these buildings were meant as a temporary solution with a life expectancy of about forty years. That kinda explains the building quality.
@@GreenLarsen And it wasn't so different in western Europe either. Western Europe, West Germany in particular also suffered from a housing shortage and planners came up with similar ideas, albeit mostly excluding the amenities in walking-distance part. That's where the car-centrism comes back in. Difference is: In Western Europe many of these 50s and 60s constructions were already decomissioned and demolished by the 80s.
@@Exodon2020 I know, some of them are still up. And as you mention, the big difference was the lack of supporting facilities. This in itself made them of far lower quality and I can understand why they needed to go (many places). It sadly show that if something good is only done ½ way then it do not become ½ good, it becomes ½ bad. Hopefully however we learn and do better in future (let me dream haha)
And it’s crazy considering in my town in America we’re actively building apartments and condos all the time but the issue is …. Expensive rent. Like at this point we just dont wanna solve nor come up with a few solutions for homelessness. In my city, They’re bulldozing section 8 housing and building more “luxurious” section 8 apartment buildings or just moving those people to another town, however they are STILL building new commercial and expensive realty over top of that…. My city wants to be baby nyc without having initiative about why people wanna move there but also why nyc still has a huge homeless problem. Lmao
You know why there were almost no homeless people in the USSR ? ... because people got deported into gulags if they didn't work voluntarily. And what's "anti-homeless architecture"? Housing you have to pay for with money ?
@@satanicdude one by the time of the second big housing process post stalin gulags were havily being phased out. also anti homeless achtecture, is things like holes in benches or straight up concrete spikes on overpaths, spikes on heating exhaust for the city etc. Anti homelessness archtecture affects everyone including the non homeless as it takes away space for recreation due to being uncomforatble, it also has started becoming more expensive than actully housing the homeless.
@@Yingyanglord1 Same thing happening here in Brazil. In São Paulo, the governor years ago instaled spikes and put concrete stones under bridges, and other places where homeless people sleep so they wouldn´t do it anymore. They also doused some with strong water jets to get them out of the area. More recently, police have been keeping pastors, who have been doing good deeds and helping poor and homeless people (many affected by drugs) with food and clothes, away from such areas. They basically have to stealth missions to get in and help them. Or in Rio, where for the olympic games they literally just put up loads of walls and grids to block the view of and hide the poor parts of the area, so strangers couldn´t even see them. And also basically the police keeps on arriving in your community (favela) and many times controles the region through brute force and military influence with guns and kills or hurts your loved ones and scare the overall population with their guns... Hatred for the poor is real.
@@DHPanthony Y'know it's 'amazing' (in a horrifying way) to think the amount of time, energy, resources, and man power they (Brazil's governments, local and federal) will put towards harrassment of the homeless and persecution of the poor could've been spent addressing and solving these problems, truly saddening.
I grew up in the 90s in a block neighbourhood build in the 80s and it was amazing. My kindergarten was in the basement of my block and my school was 2 minutes away in the middle of the complex. There was SO MUCH space between building, lots of area for children to play and hand around, greenery everywhere, almost car free as access road went around it like ring. It was cool in the summer and hot in the winter, can't complain really.
I'm from 70th commie-block in Moscow. I was lefting my appartments in 20 minutes before start of first lesson in school. This 20 minutes included time to put down winter clothes and change the shoes.
TLDW: Commie blocks aren't just functional housing, they're cohesive neighbourhoods that take into account the needs of the residents and don't treat them like a resource to be mined for the most rent possible
You don't know what you are talking about. The commieblock my wife grew up now has dozens of small shops/barber shops/dentist practices/pharmacies/beauty salons, etc instead of the ground floor appartments. And all of them are full. Commies had no idea what people need.
@@timbehrens9678 I'm not making this argument at all, I'm just summarising my understanding of Adam Something's argument, since that's what the video seems to boil down to.
@@timbehrens9678 I'm honestly confused about your comment; you're talking as if incorporating workplaces into the buildings is a bad thing, or at least I'm getting that.
Me seeing Adam for the first time: I don't know what I was expecting him to look like but it wasn't that Adam: (brushes dust off one carriage in his wall of model trains) Me: Oh okay I see it now
The only problems I have with the older ones are: - bad heat insulation (solve-able through exterior insulation cladding and new windows) - very bad acoustic insulation between units (not solve-able) - often very narrow door frames (making getting modern appliances or bigger pieces of furniture a pain in the ass)
Maybe in your part of the world, but in Hungary they had excellent heat and sound insulation. I never heard anything from my neighbor. Now in Spain even in a 240000€ apartment I can hear neighbors even just walking around.
@@trut52 Well, I don‘t have empirical data, but in all blocks I have been in eastern or western Germany, it is or was like that. Thankfully, they have to be retrofitted with insulation by law and most have already. No solution for sound proofing. For that, you have to physically uncouple walls and floors with layers of rubber or other elastic material. Sound travels inside concrete (and every solid material), so thickness is not a defining quality. That cannot be retrofitted. For the doors: most doors until 80s were usually 655mm wide. Not enough for wheelchairs. Modern accessibility standards here demand at least 955mm - extremely expensive to retrofit because of the steel reinforcement in the concrete.
@@harrybryan9633 In theory, yes. In practice, you would have to cut a physical gap around the whole floor of about 1cm wide, _including_ the support _inside_ the walls, then fill it (although flex seal can’t carry the whole floor, there are other technical solutions to do so). You would need hydraulic support jacks carrying each floor, starting at the basement throughout the top floor. Technically maybe doable. But, yeah, you won’t do that.
Panel houses require to maintain junctions between panels with period ~12-20 years. In Russia (where I live), old buildings are usually unserved. Meanwhile one should remember, that commiblocks were designed as a temporary measure for 3-5 decades.Just to solve urgent problems.
I was born in a Soviet apartment building and lived there for most of my childhood and after that, I've lived mostly in NYC and mostly in NYC apartment buildings. So, I can compare the two experiences. One big win for Soviets were the superblocks. They were the size of about 10-12 NYC blocks and had lots of trees, grass, playgrounds, soccer fields inside of them. Many had either schools or kindergartens, some had medical clinics. All had bakeries, markets, convivence stores, etc. So, it was a lot better, in my view. Kids could walk themselves to school, without crossing busy roads, you can ran out to buy fresh bread of vegetables and it will take only a few minutes. Most apartments looked out at trees and only some looked out at major roads. I think it's better than looking at another set of windows across a narrow street, the way Manhattan is set up. And while everything is also pretty convenient here, it's still longer walks over busy streets which adds to stress, in my view. Now apartments themselves were small, had only one bathroom, tiny kitchens where you had to pick what you wanted to fit in there - a fridge or a kitchen table (one fits but not both, usually). However, when I compare it Manhattan typical 1960-1980s apartments, it's not much better. Obviously, you get very spacious apartments with 2,3,4 bedrooms and multiple bathrooms and large kitchens but basic 1 bedrooms and 2 bedrooms also have tiny kitchens (almost never sit-in ones). You do get multiple bathrooms, which is a plus. In terms of sound isolation and quality of construction, I think NYC Is actually WORSE. Walls are thinner, ceilings are lower and window frames are worse but only a bit worse. Obviously, luxury buildings and new construction is of much higher quality in NYC.
I live in a block in Slovakia, these are absolutely not depressing, they're all renovated, rapainted, they are colorful(bit too clorful), there are trees and parks between them. These are built in the 80's, but still more affordable than a new appartment or a house, even in small towns like mine
They are NOT affordable AT ALL. A 1 bedroom soviet apartment costs about 80 000€ in an average sized town. The average wage (meaning half of the population earns less) is about 1 000€ after taxes. That means you have to work for almost 7 years to buy one (but you can't eat in the process). It was much much more affordable during socialism.
@@stevedownie1378 that's why you take a loan. So you can pay it off piecemeal over a longer stretch of time so you don't have to compromise on quality of life.
I've lived in a commie block my whole life in Slovenia (used to be a part of the Yugoslav Republic) and I agree with most of your points, but would also like to point out that noise isn't always an issue. At least in Slovenia, all the walls are quite decenctly insulated.
My great uncle liven in a commie block in Zagreb. There are no sound issues. Walls are pretty thick, it is relatively hot in there becouse they have a lot of windows. There are sometimes issues with pipes but that's the same in all old buildings.
@@williamthebonquerer9181 I think the reason is that Yugoslavia used to be quite a rich country back then so maybe they didn't skimp on the materials...
As a Croat from Zagreb, another city with many commie blocks who used to live in them, I concur. The only real noise I heard was the occasional bumps here and there, but I hear this in the modern apartment building I (very) recently moved in as well.
I am an american, was born in the 80's. So I was alive and simi-aware of the implications of the sovet union when it fell. I'm sooorta familiar with section-8 housing in America and... Honestly? I would like to know if the micro-district has been tried here in any real capacity. Being disabled sucks when you're in a car centric hellscape, and this sort of planning would greatly alleviate that.
Funny how you mention it. In America you would probably add elevators to the 5 storey plans because here any house that is in the 5 storey and below range wouldn't have them. You either had 5 storeys, no elevator, or 9 - 13 storeys and a small elevator.
Yeah we had similar housing blocks in the US. They didnt work out. I'm not knowledgeable enough about to say for certainly why they failed, but I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that they were built exclusively as section 8 housing and not just for the general public like in the soviet union. Today, Americans would be very very against any sort of similar project. Just look up Pruitt Igoe. Of course, if you just want to take the idea of modular housing to save costs, thats fine. As another person mentioned, thats trendy today as some "innovation". But as we learned from the 60s and 70s, there has to be continued maintenance and it dramatically helps when the housing is mixed income.
The only kind of similar building was done in Section 8 housing - done by the cheapest contractors, every corner possible was cut, and absolutely no maintenance. Oh and ofc green space or being able to walk/take public transit anywhere was considered important enough to bother with. Green space is wasted space, you know. You could build things there! Like parking lots for cars! Everyone should get a car, you know. What kind of person doesn't have a car? There's a reason Section 8 housing is awful and no one wants to live there if they can avoid it. It's all slumlord-type properties.
@@adamt195 These appartment blocks were in fact not being built because they were cheap (they were quite expensive, in fact), but because they could be built very fast. The idea was that perfection of this technology would allow to rebuid quickly after the possible war.
@@adamt195 They didn't work out because there was no effort put into making the community itself work. Developers just threw together cheap housing blocks and left it at that. Most section 8 housing developments are in unwalkable nightmares, with no amenities or community spaces, and then the resulting crime and continued poverty is used as an excuse to continue not trying.
Russian here. Lived in four of these, all were pretty good. City planning is superb, i was able to get to my school, hospital, uni and now work in about half an hour on foot. Lots and lots of green spaces that look nice at summer and snowy winter. Flats were descent, a little noise here and there, some walls were curved, but overall it's good. We have a lot of new houses in my town, and they are. ..well, worse. Much,much bigger buildings, to the point it makes it uncomfortable to be next to, apartments are either smaller or way too expensive, noisy, and close to no infrastructure in the area. State was building with a plan, so they could decide where to make a road, a school, where to plant trees for it to be convenient for people. Capitalists are building to make profit with as little losses as possible, so they don't usually care about such things. The only advantage the new houses have is they are painted bright. However it's more of a maintainence problem and some of the older ones that are kept in a good shape also look good, especially at summer
Above all. In the USSR, these houses were built en masse, solving housing problems for tens of millions of people (after industrialization, most of the population of the USSR began to live in cities). And these apartments were given to people from the employer for free. My parents and all the parents of my friends in 1970-80 received apartments with 2 or 3 bedrooms. And utilities cost literally pennies. In each microdistrict there were 2-3 kindergartens and schools (also free, of course). This is one of the advantages of socialism that young Russians do not understand (not to mention people from Western countries).
I lived in some Chinese commie blocks during my primary school years. They were 6 story Khrushchyovka copies (but build higher quality). It was a nice enough place, bike garage/storage rooms in the basement, nice central plaza for the community to rest, exercise, and hang out. Our block was pretty well maintained so it was a completely fine place to live in even in the 2000s.
As someone living in one of the commie blockhouses (albeit slightly renovated) in Eastern Europe, I can only say that while at the time they were a great solution to the problem they are notoriously outdated and barely stand to any type of modern-day architectural, engineering or safety standards. Because many of them were built by prisoners or soldiers with zero experience there are a lot of foundational flaws that require an almost complete redesign. It's very common to find very major discrepancies when comparing with architectural plans, such as walls being built unevenly and with several centimeters offset to their correct location, cement blocks not being properly connected, floors being installed aslope, and so on. Most of them wouldn't pass a basic construction inspection and be deemed as "unsafe" and "inappropriate for living", yet because many people still live in them there is not much municipal government is ready to do. Additionally, cement blocks were good, but the rest of the materials used in construction (especially interior materials like plaster or drywall) were of poor quality and quickly deteriorated. Utilities are a whole another tragedy. They used poor quality aluminum wires that have completely deteriorated so it's pretty much necessary to re-wire the electricity for the whole apartment, water, and sewage mains were usually inadequate, terrible, would clog up, and posed health hazards. Air ventilation and quality are non-existent and pose fire hazards. Proper insulation is also non-existent so a lot of heating energy is wasted in wintertime, albeit one of the most common upgrades for such houses is to add it. Sound isolation is practically non-existent so pretty often you could hear your neighbor's voices through the walls or floors. In summary - they are pretty terrible and need to be quickly replaced. But as you mention in the video for the time it was truly a great solution. It's just sad that most of them cannot stand up to modern standards and are actually a money sink maintenance wise for people trying to stay.
I think the overall point of this video is less to claim that the construction specifically is top notch and amazing and _that's_ what should be kept, but the idea of the blocks as a community with amenities nearby. Obviously in 2022 we can build significantly better actual buildings even at low cost than anything we had in the 50's, but it's the way we utilize and plan said buildings that is worse than the originals. Replace the actual physical construction and most of the complaints directed at the concept disappear.
in Sofia,Bulgaria some maybe 10 years ago a whole exterior concrete panel wall detached and came crashing down, and its not the only example, thankfully no one was hurt . However , the connection of these panels will continue to deteriorate , as people won't do structural renovation . They will start crumbling down pretty soon , it's a matter of time now. There is also another alarming trend - interior renovation. People would very often make illegal and dangerous changes to the interior walls as they make openings in them , a lot of times without reinforcement , a lot of times balconies are assimilated by the kitchen in order to extend it , because a lot of these blocks have notoriously tiny kitchens. The weight put on these balconies when you build a wall around them to close them , added to the fact that you;ve probably demolished half the exterior panel wall to extend the kitchen , and all done without engineer is an absolute disaster waiting to happen.
Not to mention just stupid or lazy planning/implementation of plans. I've seen in Estonia sewer pipes from upper floors running through the middle of rooms in the floors beneath.
About the construction failures you're correct, that tends to always happen when the builders aren't going to live in the buildings themselves and there's an inadequate supervision. The only thing saving todays' capitalist developer construction from those same mistakes is the good publicly enforced supervision. Other than that, I believe you're being far too uncharitable. You're describing issues that are caused by a serious lack of maintenance, not the inferiority of the construction. Many of the "commie-blocks" were designed to last 30-40 years, whereas today many buildings are designed to last approximately 20-30 years. And the profit motive of the capitalist building development is doing nothing but trying to push that number lower and lower, whereas the legislative branches and the public are trying to plant regulation in order to force it higher.
@@KingBobXVI In sweden we built similar community styled "commie" blocks they were and still in ways are awesome for their ease of access and nearby amenities (shops, etc.) but the community-building way they were built has lead to segregation since these blocks were cheaper for low income and newly arrived peoples. Having lived in a "no go zone" (they arent as bad as people say but it suffers, like any low income area, from higher crime rates) i can say the sense of community is greater but it can be from a long term viewpoint destructive unless actively handled. Many peoples dont have a want (or necesarilly need) to learn the native language and in total people from these areas feel "left out" from the rest of the nation.
Americans: Those commie blocks all look the same Me: Looks at cookie-cutter suburbs IN America... (EDIT: Thanks for the 2k+ upvotes on my comment everyone... You all are the best!)
I like the suburban house look, but commie blocks are good for high population areas. They can also be designed to look good and not like dry cement blocks.
As someone who grew up in a post-SU country, I find it funny when left-leaning people berate their own medium and dream of one they never actually experienced. Ask anyone here, they would prefer living in a shitty copypasted American suburb than in an anthill that is a commie block.
@@hulahula6182 why wouldn't public housing solve homelessness? People need a house, you give them a house; that allows them to live, work, produce, be happy, etc. I don't get your opinion.
This is exactly the kind of system in Singapore. The HDB system in Singapore is amazing, the amount of greenery, lots of common space for kids to play and elders to walk. Every block also has common chairs and tables to have conversations and some food. Most importantly amazing public transportation system and the hawker food culture. Singapore has the best possible aspects of everything mentioned in this video
Singapore is definitely not communist, but the government is involved and that makes people scream communism. The biggest property owner and developer in SG is the SG government, after all, and all their programs that pundits like to talk up as "free market" are the product of the government realizing that they should be the ones holding the whip, not the corporations, and that would horrify the free market adherents.
@@fuschiaknight1991 Many of Singapore's large companies e.g. DBS & POSB Bank, Singtel are government-linked as it's investment company ( _Temasek_ Holdings, which is similar in purpose to, say, Qatar's QIA I think) has a stake in them, but they all practice market discipline I think
East german here, i've lived in both an unrenovated and a "renovated" commieblock and i can confirm that living there is quite comfortable, especially if you're lucky and have good neighbours
@@Xiphactinus of course, with the way our government is acting lol In all seriousness though, in germany many people still see themselves as west or east german
One interesting thing to mention: they didn't just put up the the appartment blocks in lego style, but also schools, at least here in Germany (former GDR territory). It was called "Typenschulbau" (roughly translates to "type-based school building"). And honestly, besides a one or two minor problems (like the entrance had to be fitted with a ramp for better accessibility): they were fine. I know what I'm talking about because I went to primary school (from 2000) in a building of type "Erfurt II", then the school moved to a different building of type "Erfurt II" and finally my first years at high school it was located in building of type "Erfurt II". They were all exactly the same.
My experience with East German commie blocks: the ones built in the sixties and early seventies are of good quality and very popular with old and young people. The ones built in the eighties are a mixed bag, ranging from "decent quality in good repair" to "there is a two centimeter gap between the wall and the floor". Generally, though, many of these commie block areas are really nice to live in with parks and playgrounds in between them.
@White replacement is real. If you can afford it, it is great, but that housing isn't efficient or realistic in an urban setting as described in the video which is talking about commie blocks vs modern high rise apartments/flats. Also, shouldn't you be scared about interracial marriage or something.
@@vittocrazi So in communist society, who do we decide who gets to live in a single house somewhere and who gets to live in a shitty public housing block? What happens if someone decides i have to live in commie housing block, but I don't want to?
I was born and raised in one of those. Very cold during winter and very warm during summer because of poor insulation. Other than that I can't remember any issues. The staircases were actually very clean and well maintained before the comunism went down. Afterwards there was not inerest in maintaining the common areas so they started to decay.
Here in Berlin most commie blocks did get extra insolation installed outside, bringing them on par with many modern energy efficient houses, the insolation also usually has individual colour pattern unique to the block, making them look less uniform and boring.
Cool history lesson. When I was a kid, most of my friends and family in Poland lived in flats like these. Some were super small with only one room, but most were a comfortable size and looked good inside.
I'm always amused by articles describing the revolutionary advantages of prefabrication as a solution to the housing crisis. Like, yeah, we were doing that in the '60s, what's the big deal?
@@sidexrulz2006 Propaganda. If the plebs think everything is new and innovative, they wont question if the system actually innovates, or just claims to do so. Pretty sure humans could innovate and solve problems if they had everything they needed to survive as opposed to living life like struggle via employment is somehow required for human sanity, it's not.
@@lzrrrrr3370 Nah, if the right is gonna give us Socialists shit for what the Soviets did, I say we should take credit for the good and smart things that came out of them.
In my hometown, after the fall of the USSR, the parts of the neighborhoods that were left green and allowed spaces between buildings, were bought out and more blocks, now capitalist ones, were put up. This ended up with my parents moving into an apartment that's has a view of blocks on one side and a school on the other. My mother decided to blame this on communism, of course, because the building we lived in was "pretty" while the others were ugly. And also because she could buy our apartment thanks to capitalism! By which she meant my father's union loan and family support funds from the government.
Yep, hearing the neighbors is a big downside of modern blocks. Today I live in a block that was build in the 50es, so the problem is not that bad (they build thicker walls back then). But in the 70es-block I used to live the last years, you could hear the people 3 stories below drink and the family directly below argue and the wife above clean the room. And that means, they could hear me watching TV, going to bed (oh, yes- you could hear the neighbor next door turn around in his bed at night), showering etc. Psychologically it is not the feeling you should have, when you are at home.
2 good arguments for commie blocks being solid choices: 1. Germany rebuilds theirs if they show signs of age. If they were bad, they'd replace them. 2. Have you seen the american alternative? Let everybody live in the same house in the same road that's reproduced all over the country. Well that or homelessness which in america is always an option ;)
1. As each flat is private property and Germany is not communism, the government can not come in and just rebuild any apartment building. In todays Germany counter to Soviet block, private property rights exists. If you would live such building would you rather renovate or rebuild (consider to pay for either of options from your own wallet)? What option you would consider, renovation or rebuilding if you have to pay for it? 2. Not an argument. If something is shit, it does not make other shit better. And in soviet union there was no homeless because they all were either in concentration camps, jail or living in dorms - flats that was taken away from locals that was "EXPORTED" to Siberia and split between several "IMPORTED" families. So several families was forced to live in one flat.
@@AivarsLauzis I said germany, not the german government. If Commie blocks were bad, neither the government nor private citizens would choose them over available alternatives. Also many commie blocks are NOT owned flat by flat by individual owners so the argument of "me having to pay for renovations myself" is not valid for most of the blocks we're talking about. Rents would increase if they rebuilt as something fancier but since they do that anyways ... And yes, comparing something to something else to find out which is worse IS in fact an argument here. We call it a comparison and it's quite commonly used to make an argument for or against something. If all alternatives are worse, that makes it the best available option. That's not nothing
I live in a commie block. Actually, a full-on commie district. And to my own surprise, I have to agree with this video. Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they contribute to people not knowing each other, as any high-density residentials do. But everything else about them is pretty awesome, just as the video describes. My daycare center was ...not even a minute's walk, it's right in the yard of the commie block. Elementary school is in the neighbouring block, 3 minute walk. Supermarket is in another neighbouring block, 3 minute walk. Any kind of shop for anything i need, except actual furniture or cars and similar stuff, is within 10 minutes walking distance.
I live in Dublin, visit Moscow regularly (here rn) & I used to find the towers & Kruschevka blocks grim & depressing (like some tenements back home). Now, having been inside several apartments & studios that are modern & comfortable, (& very warm in winter) I actually like alot of the Soviet block estates. There are lots of playgrounds, grassed areas & kids would all get to know eachother, as would parents. Like the video said the external planning is good & it's up to residents & local authorities to look after the housing stock. Cladding & some external lighting really transforms tired looking Soviet blocks.
In France, we have what are officially known as "HLM" meaning "Habitation à Loyer Modéré". You could translate this as Regulated Rent Housing. But between us, we usually call them "Cages à poules" meaning Chicken Cages, because of how small and how dense the early building were (in the late 50s and 60s). The main problems with them today are that these buildings are still around and need to be better insulated. Also, the name doesn't mean much anymore because it's not the rent that's regulated but living in one means you have the right to ask for a social assistance that helps you pay your rent. But that rent can still be pretty expensive. The reason for that is instead of having the state manage these buildings, there are specialized private companies that profit from them.
@@mausklick1635 just took thirty minutes to check out a bunch of wikipedia pages, and he's just plain wrong. whether the HLMs are managed by a public or private organism doesn't change much, in either case the state has some amount of control over the prices and quality of the housing. allowing some companies to do it for a profit is just a way to test many things at once, to see what sticks. but you're right on the fact that despite the rents being cheap, it is sometimes still too expensive for the very poor, who end up in private dirt-cheap shitty housing. that is a known issue. Keep in mind that france was not nearly as devastated during ww2 as central europe (actually sparring the country the destructions of war was one of the reasons for surrendering, they didn't know about the nazi's crimes at the time). we mainly had to build those HLMs to house the french people that were rapatriated from algeria after the independance. once the job was done there was no longer so much need for building fucktons of housing, so it makes sense for the state to sort of privatise while locking the prices.
@@gamermapper well i'm pretty sure it wouldn't be "free" housing anyway, but that is an other known issue. because the system allows people to keep their social housing despite significant improvement to their financial situation, many people choose to stay in rather than go rent a regular apartments, causing a significant slowdown in the tenant turnover. but there is some sense to it too, asking someone to move out just because he earned more one year doesn't mean the income gain will be permanent, so you may end up kicking out people that will come back in a couple of years. also it serves the purpose of conserving some "social mixity". and lastly forcing people out causes threshold effect where people will try to conceal some income just to stay in the brackets of their housing. Anyway, the cost of rents is getting out of control in many cities and that's a problem the government should take it more seriously. no wonder the economy is going to shit when people have to spend 2/3 of their income on rent.
@@gamermapper yeah right, and who would bother building stuff and taking care of it if it all was free ? Or it should all be state owned ? And everything else too while you're at it ?
@@tomaszzalewski4541 I live in Slovenia and all neighbourhoods are designed that way with services nearby. That said Yugoslavia did have a higher standard than most Eastern block
@@tomaszzalewski4541 It's more because of corruption, mismanagment and buerocracy (don't get me wrong, ideologies are still terrible materialist wastes of time and resources).
This channel makes me better at Cities Skylines. I've implemented lots of commie blocks with plenty of well-connected free public transport and made sure to have good coverage of all public services. My massive export-only industry is located far from the residential areas, but that works well considering the metric ton of trains and metro subways, with some bus services in there too. My overground train system is getting clogged so I'm probably going to add more buses and connect the various zones by underground metro. But overall it's going very well, even with traffic despawning turned off. Millions in the bank, 110,000 residents, all-round happiness, and almost no road traffic. The anti-car, free public transport, commie block system works really well.
Having lived in a commie block AND a modern apartment, the modern apartment wins. Hands down no contest. The fact you can't hear your neighbor scratch their balls through the thin solid "concrete TM" walls is already a massive step forward. The fact there is a bedroom and not a sleeping couch basically sealed the deal.
That's more an issue of having had to build them fast and with little labor though. Obviously we shouldn't build 1:1 copies, but the underlying concepts of city planning work.
@@keiyakins You cant really seperate them. Private builders cut corners to save cost for profit, government contractors cut cost to cut cost. Both versions can turn out poor results but when you have a MASSIVE contract like you do with city planning of that sort the cut costs get way worse. Hence why both commie blocks and modern apartments have all sorts of problems but the worst of the commie blocks are downright dystopic. Look for some video walkthroughs if the stories people are telling in the comments arent convincing enough.
While the Blocks were definitely an improvement when compared to what existed previously, they absolutely cannot compare to modern development. I live in a country that used to be communist, and the Commie Blocks are generally regarded as one of the worst living spaces you can be in. For instance, there is almost no noise isolation between the apartments, so you hear everything from your neighbors, which often isn't exactly pleasant. And there is nothing you can reasonably do to fix that, it's just inherent to the construction of the building.
It really depends what you are comparing them to. It was a "workers' housing" and for all intents and purposes it still is. There is no viable alternative for millions of people to get better housing. For example in my country Ukraine (war aside) you can't rehouse 20 mil people or so, living in those buildings. There is neither enough land nor reason for everyone to have a suburb single family house. And most commercial highrises have the exact problem this video pointed out, super bad planning and also not much better in that noise problem you are talking about. So for a lower income families those are still the best options.
@Some Kind Of Master no. Noise isolation is bad even with thick walls, it may help a bit since physics and stuff, but you can still hear people moan during sex sometimes. That's why all the people in those houses are grumpy, they can't properly sleep at night if their neighbour is doing some low to mid noise level activities.
@@assetaden6662 I live in a condo built in 2009, usually cannot hear a thing from my neighbours but I do occasionally hear moaning (and the consequences of it in a form of crying kids;)). Some noises are loud af and there's not much you can do about it within reasonable cost and effort. I don't mind people having THAT good of a time expressing that once in a while, it might be my turn some day (same applies to kids).
@@assetaden6662 I lived all my life in a commie block, but built in Italy in the 70's and I never had such problems, yes you can hear something sometimes but I mean It Ain't life ruining. PS: It had a beautiful park which helped me make firends nearly instantly
That's because you live in a country that used to be communist. If you lived in America you'd have no choice but rent something fancy you can't afford because it costs enough less for developers to throw in some snazzy tile and jack up the rent they charge compared to the extra rent they get that they can let a lot of their units sit empty.
OMG you look a lot younger than you sound! I grew up in one of the pre commie block brick buildings. But there was a commie block area right across the street and I always admired the big area between them, full of (by then) big trees. A lot of that space has been made into parking lots by now, but some are still in original condition and it is just great how nature like it feels in those green areas. I certainly prefer 4-6 storey high buildings with lot of green between them to singel family cubes with barely enough green space that everyone needs some machine to cut the grass and so someone in noise reach is always doing it.
I believe that you missed a very important thing - that the apartments in such blocks were given to people entirely for free without having to pay anything. You just had to wait a few years for your house to be built. My entire family got their apartments from plants they were working at.
that may be true where you grew up - in hungary they were handed out with state-controlled loans with micropayments to be made on minimal interest for the duration of 20 years but sometimes even more. not a bad deal, but not free. there was also an immense waiting list and corruption and nepotism played a huge factor in when, where and which flat you got.
As someone who grew and lived most of his life in a typical commie block, in an ex commie country, I can say that the truth is not so black and white. While there were truly upsides all of them came with at least one downside. First of all - yes, these apartments were free. That was because they were built mainly by soldiers and prisoners initially. You had no way of choosing where or in what apartment you will be living, that was for the state to decided. Due to the cheap and usually inexperienced labor used in the construction of these buildings the quality was and still is trash. And I am 100% certain and sure on that, because as I said I've been living in such buildings for more than 20 years. One of the upsides of panel-based buildings is how easy they are to isolate. However isolation, if it existed, was terrible. As a result energy loses and molding are enormous. Due to how fast they were usually built together with the bad quality of the construction work I can't count how many times I've seen walls that don't have a single right angle, believe it or not. Thankfully it's hard to see. Sadly it makes most attempts at renovation or maintenance a nightmare. There are massive EU campaigns at the moment to subsidize the renovation of these commie buildings (some of them finished after the fall of the Soviet regime, so not that old), which proves how hard it is to do. Thankfully after intelligent renovation they do become far better in terms of living conditions. A significant upside is that they are bigger than almost any newly build apartment. They are not massive, but still quite comfortably big. Another upside is that the planning around these blocks was indeed good, with plenty of playgrounds and green areas (often times badly maintained, but at least they existed). Another thing is that in the case of my country they were not supposed to solve a housing crisis, because my country was thankfully spared the destruction of WW2. However this became the doctrine for all further housing in the Eastern Block and we had to go with the flow. It allowed for faster urbanization though. There are reasons why no one wants to live in commie-built blocks and the main one, I assure you, is the terrible quality of these buildings. The common opinion that "commie blocks are sad and depressing" is completely false. While they are indeed ugly and depressing, the reason for that is the economical collapse after the soviet era which didn't allow for these buildings to be maintained for a long time. It is fixable. Panel buildings became the norm throughout entire Europe during the cold war, but everyone pays attention only to the ones built in the Eastern Block. Truth is they are everywhere. The main differences are build quality and size, for the ones in Eastern Europe were usually MASSIVE and crowded. They did not making the living conditions of easterners better than those of westerners... at all.
The apartments were not free. The apartment were allocated by the state according to the size of the family and the jobs. It was a monthly fee as a rent to the national construction company and the family could bought the apartment with a credit with low interest loan. A family could have only one real estate.
Finland has an interesting take on commie blocks, as we never were a socialist country but had to become efficient and industrial due to war reparations to USSR. We moved in 1950s from agrarian to industrial economy, built a ton of commie blocks because they are cheap and easy BUT with skilled labour, these buildings are still up and well maintained. They are less tall because its cheaper and safer that way (plus less people to house) but otherwise they are in theory carbon copies in blueprint to eastern-bloc ones. Not sure if it was done in other countries but we built Storage units, laundry rooms, bike storages, bomb shelters and Saunas into the buildings as well
@@george90210 That is correct. Thanks for correcting me. Indeed a family had to ask/sign for these allocations and then they were distributed. In my country, I believe for the first ~20 years of communism they were actually free in an attempt to keep up with the rapid urbanization demands and industrialization of the country that required a lot of people to get relocated into the bigger cities. Eventually as you said it is correct that they had a price payed with state loan with low interest rate. It is correct they were not entirely free.
I'm from Czechia. I live in this kind of building and while I agree with your points, there is a significant drawback. These flats are really small. There is almost no chance of finding something bigger than 3+1 in our city. This is an issue, because you can either live in a small (and noisy) flat, or you can... move to a "suburban" home. This inherently leads to the classical "rich people move away" scheme.
I'd say that Soviet blocks can work well but they can't just all be uniform throughout, otherwise it just copies some of the negative properties of suburbs. However, diversified city blocks with low and high income housing mixed together can work pretty nicely
Sounds almost like Germany. You either stay in a small apartment, most of them are 3 rooms max, which costs too much money, or in a way too big newly build apartment or house that you cant afford at all
Not an inherent problem of the building style though. It's just that the buildings were made with certain expactations. You could easily build 6 room blocks.
Except those "rich people" take out mortgage, have to drive for hour to each direction everyday and pay a lot more for car maintenance and fuel. And despite having a separate house, they live in urban desert with nearly no services and conveniences of city and sometimes sketchy situation with sewerage or internet. They are not very bright.
2:00 Funny you stop your flaws at "elevators (if they were installed, 4th floor gang) broke sometimes, and roofs leaked a bit". The more significant issue with prefab blocks are insulation and heating problems, which left blocks cold in winter and unbearably hot in the summer. I live in a commie block myself, and I agree, the urban planning of socialist neighbourhoods is admireable. I even like them for their aesthetic reasons (yes I am that mad). But I think you shouldn't undermine the blocks' flaws as part of your video. Especially if those flaws could be easily amended with current technology.
There were cheapest choice by far and his point was that people that inhabitated them originaly were living in middle ages one room shacks with dirt floors or their house was bombed to gravel in ww2. Commie blocks were cheap and mass produced they werent meant to be permanent solution we can only blame the commies who continued the practice well over things didnt require more commie blocks. Its like complaning that Lada the commie car isnt a race car ...
The blocks all had radiator heating, and summers weren't as harsh 50 years ago, so just opening the windows usually did the job. So really it wasn't that bad, and 90% of the blocks have now been insulated for years, even the ones with a geriatric population
In some of the commie block hellholes surrounding Leningrad the elavator shafts were filled with garbage to the top well into the mid 90s. This video is like something found in one of them.
The concept is good, the execution an eyesore and noise inefficient. I live in Slovakia and there is a pretty big difference in my city in the way these blocks look, in some parts of the city they make it a "insert ugly eastern european tik tok here" and in others they fit without you even noticing them. It all depends on how they're maintained and of course, renovated. It depends on what your standard of living is. As you stated, when you give them to farmers they will be greatful, if you give them to rich suburban folk they won't and thats the core of the issue. They were good when they were introduced but failed to be upgraded and so most people just look at them with "wow I wonder how this city looked without these ugly unpainted blocks before such a shame".
@@kopkaljdsao One issue is that the architecture, the brutalist brutalism, isn't good-looking at all. Yes, that is my opinion but it also resembles the majority of the people who live in or near these and have experienced them in the cityscape they live and work in. Some people do appreciate brutalism and do think that there is some beauty to these apartment blocks, but I personally disagree with that. Why is that an issue? Well, a beautiful city/town/village/suburb in terms of architecture and the quality of infrastructure really can make the inhabitants more or less happy. It does affect my mood walking through a, what we in Sweden have, "million programme" which was a program in the 60s and 70s where affordable housing for everyone was to be built. Today we see it as a big mistake. Not that people got homes obviously, but just the execution and how it affects our society today.
I live in a commie block myself. A part of the advantages you’ve mentioned I’ll add a good sound isolation as these buildings are built as bunkers. The downside is that I have to waste three drill bits to hang a picture
I always found arguments based on "communism bad because depressing concrete building" to be exceedingly bizarre, because we literally have those in Western Bloc countries.
@@rulingmoss5599 leaving the ordinary American arrogance and racism aside (these brown villagers haven't seen a tree in their life am I right?). in these parts of the world, only poor people make wooden houses nowadays. we make houses out of steel and concrete that last in natural disasters better or don't just get rotten by the bugs. but I guess Americans are just poor to afford these kinda things and have to resort to deforestation. a single fire burns down half your city blocks every year
Interesting to see the apartment blocks with insulated cladding, however Grenfell tower serves as a reminder that this kind of renovation has to be done well. Too many short cuts were taken on the Grenfell project which cost 72 lives almost as soon as the work was completed.
For smaller buildings it doesn't matter. For taller ones only non flammable materials are used. There's also no outside cladding covering the insulation so it can't act like a chimney.
Well Grenfell was gross negligence. They used flammable insulation, which was not supposed to be used in fire hazard critical applications like tall residential buildings. Manufacturer said so in the materials information. One can use stuff like mineral wool, which instead of fire hazard is in fact fire protection. Since it is non flammable... rock. Spun into wool like consistency to trap air spaces into it, hence insulation.
The only shortcut taken with the Grenfell tower block was that whoever made the decision to refurbish a single stair high-rise building without adequate smoke extract and unprotected lobbies at each level. All that followed is a direct consequence of that shameful and (thus far) blameless person or group.
Honestly, it is both hilarious and depressing learning of all the successful city/urban planning and housing solutions that we could replicate but even better nowadays, yet they get shit on as “old useless trash, shitty designed, terrible, etc” while people are literally homeless or if not quite, struggling to rent rotting shitty rooms and barely able to keep up with life…
Well it started in Europe with public housing where we pretty much did the same but due to increased crime in the areas they were built in no one wanted to build more of them as the city council wouldn’t be able to afford the construction and police department prices, along with some homeless people just being afraid to live in them
@@Flipflopflopper I think that's because those blocks in the West are crammed with poor people, instead of actually mixing with different classes. You wouldn't see the same problems if the same block was a luxury apartment on NYC's 5th Ave, or was full of workers and their families like in the former Soviet blocs.
I agree, commie blocks can be great. In mine, between the buldings, there is a huge space full of trees, bushes, playgrounds. It is very green like living in a park.
Toronto's condos aren't the same as commie blocks. Toronto has its own version of the commie block ("apartments"), constructed in practically the same way in the 1960s and 1970s with very similar architecture and layout. Those were built on a huge scale mainly to serve the post-World War population boom fairly quickly and cheaply. You can find a lot of them in the inner suburbs and some pockets of Downtown (a famous example being St James Town). A lot of condos being built today (which generally aren't called apartments), on the other hand, have a larger emphasis on individual ownership rather than affordability.
@@natenae8635 Nah mate. Us commie lovers get wins everyday watching y'all obediently pretend everything's fine and reading your illiterate comments on the internet. Well, I suppose you'll have the last laugh when the purge gets rolling and you unleash your death squads on us.
@@sunalwaysshinesonTVs Death squads. Because I don’t believe in whimsical economics I’m an extremist. Do you think I’m fascist???🤔 I think it is good that the state should provide housing but I’m not a Communist.???
It was such a novel thing to see the exact same style apartment building I've been living around my whole life in Hungary smack dab in the center of the Cuban jungle.
I live in the capital of Serbia - Belgrade, and there are many apartment buildings that are obviously built in the communist era. I encountered a building that had, in its ground level: a supermarket, a small grocery store, a dance club, a karate club, a post office, two exchange offices, a clothing store, and many more stores, all in arranged around covered hallways. I was really pleasantly surprised by how walkable it all was (being in the same building), but I was little saddened that this is something that is probably going away, and won't be replicated by new construction, as Belgrade is going in a car-centric direction, by removing pedestrian crossings in the city center, planning for suburbs, disregarding bike lane importance etc.
“Commie blocks” are in a lot of western countries too, made in about the same time too (1950’s-1960’s) to get people closer to the city. While they don’t look the nicest, it’s still very liveable and close to the city you’re next to, and the public transports are also helping to get to said city better, in some cases. Moreover, in Switzerland, many of those industrial buildings are set apart with small parks and bigger parks, not giving it a stale feel of monotony. A lot of them are still for people in need and multiple ethnic groups, sometimes half the rent is paid by the state.
One of the issues is because these blocks are used for people in need they become ghettoised poor places that are seen as undesirable. Communist blocks are not ghettoised really in most of Eastern Europe that I have lived in. They are boring but not poor places. Not all communist blocks were made equal though.
@@martinperring5286 I fully agree, in a lot of western places, it has become a place (maybe mostly because they already are poor, and poor people tend to get into illegal stuff) of ghetto.
Norwegian version of the commie blocks took all the worst parts about them (shoddy construction, ugly, no insulation) and ignored all the good bits (cheap, planned liveable neighbourhoods)
Yes, whilst the indigenous Swiss work hard, their tax money is used to provide cheap housing and subsidised rent to multiple ethnic groups. Gotta love this socialist thinking. We are all equal but some are more equal than others 🙈
I live in Warsaw, Poland and I've resided in 3 different apartaments throughout my life - all being commie blocks. Honestly, I can't imagine a more efficient, intuitive and comfortable design for cheap-mid price flats, I love them
Yeah, apart from them being poorly constructed (bad water pipes, poor heating etc), they were really comfortable and affordable. Even though I don't think we ever gave up on idea of blocks in Poland, I actually start seeing them being built in higher ammount
Before the war, in Ukraine there were so called “novostroika”. Same thing as Soviet flats, but built from better materials, good electronics and with bigger rooms. They even look nice, not gray or straight up white, they are colorful (some floors are one color, some another).
We have the same in Belarus. But the difference is that our government gives us many flats for free (just to make life conditions of people with too little area per person better) and as in soviet times government plans many aspects. Building hospitals, schools, supermarkets nearby. It's amazing!!!
@@Neversa yes. We still have Soviet panel buildings, but they are built out of very cheap and bad materials, while new ones use better materials, have bathrooms in every flat and can keep warmth.
At least from the outside, some of these blocks look very much the same than public housing ('Sozialer Wohnbau') built during the same period in Austria (e.g., at 2:00 mins). Including the 'complete planning' concept, which just makes a lot of sense :)
"Commie blocks next to dead trees"
They are not dead, adam. This is called "winter"
Sleepy trees 😀👍🏻
The trees actually lose leaves when it's called winter.
English isn't his first language, relax
@@KaleidoscopicVideos420 Also a lot of native speakers use dead as hyperbole for how depressing the "dormant" season is. At least me and my family does in the American Midwest.
Well it could be winter. But you can't prove they are not just dead trees in winter.
Soviet Union: Duplicated apartment blocks
America: Duplicated suburban houses
@UCHKJXxVVDg9MHcRj_PfBe4g suburban houses all look the same, require cars, and are inneficient and fall apart.
Dont forget the duplicated mandatory double-garages too!
There are many innovative projects/utilities globally but the US refuses to adopt anything developed elsewhere. Bundle this with a bought and paid for Congress, it spells problems for the country, stifling progress.
America: Duplicated tent cities
But only for some people as wages drop like dead leaves.
I wasn't expecting Adam to look like mild-mannered Clark Kent lol
I'm disappointed he's so young. I was imagining someone in his 50s & was getting a crush.
@@MaddieMaddocks same
@@MaddieMaddocks He's still just adorable though, isn't he?
He kinda looks like Adam Ragusea’s younger cousin.
@@NerfMaster000 I was thinking Nicholas Hoult, the actor who played Beast in the X-Men reboots.
I notice that the aesthetic of "commie blocks" is actually pretty similar to a lot of post-war council housing in Britain.
yeah and council housing fucking sucks having lived in it. idk why adam is saying anything remotely similar is good lol
@@chair6703 Probably because bad housing you can actually live in is infinitely superior to good housing you cannot afford.
@@Bustermachine if its socialized housing, at least make it liveable. instead of "eh just do thr least effort, theyll settle for it"
The Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
@@jaisbrennan7696 Your point being?
"Its pretty hard to mess up" as an engineer, you would be surprised
Friend we are engineer not architect. We will find the mistakes and they will ignore them and we get the blame, cheers.
yo nice profile pic
I haven't heard of a single building from the last century that didn't come with at least a bunch of mistakes
People mess up EVERYTHING.
But at least giant piles of concrete are indeed less prone to falling apart within years... it can happen, especially if greedy a-holes skimmed on materials, but the same can happen in everything-housing.
The city i live in in germany had two of those giant concrete eyesores, both run down to the max.
One got renovated pretty good (the apartments all got sold), the other was blown up and replaced by a big electronics/entertainment shop (
I have seen people mess up a 'fold flaps in order of the numbers labeled in big green text on the flaps' box it would not surprise me
concrete is hard to mess up compared to other materials, a bunch of roman legionaries could craft still functioning roads with the archaic form of concrete: 'crete'
Coming from Canada, I spent a few months in a renovated "Commie block" apartment in Hungary. It had small rooms, but was quite nice. And the pedestrian accessibility was amazing. Everything we needed was nearby. Plus there were indeed multiple nearby schools, day cares, and doctor's offices. Our balcony had a nice view of green spaces below. It was lovely. 10/10 would take that style of urban planning over either over-dense downtowns with no light at ground level, or under-dense suburbs with terrible walkability.
That is exactly what "commie blocks" were designed to do - you want dense cities but need somewhere for people to live that won't require long commutes? Commie block.
Exactly the content they wanted you to feel with their government
"the pedestrian accessibility was amazing. Everything we needed was nearby." Wtf would you need a disgusting commie block for that? I have that for both of my apartments in Hungary, one in historic rural town's downtown, one in Budapest downtown, and they are both in districts with old classical buildings with no commie blocks in sight. I need to walk less than 50 meters for a major grocery store from both places fe.
@@moonstriker7350 You know, my aunt lives in a castle and it has as much to do with the topic as your classical buildings. The problem is that almost nothing *after* commie blocks has taken urban planning seriously.
@@moonstriker7350 Fair enough, but that was my experience living in one of those blocks. I think the architecture on the classical buildings was definitely more interesting though.
A: "Argh those commie blocks are so grey and depressing"
B: *slaps a coat of paint onto them*
A: "Wait! That's illegal!"
This is actually pretty relatable, because when our house got some paint on it, it looked even better than those new houses that were built nearby
"wow it's so beautiful now!" -anyone who hasn't seen them in real life
@@trunestor It does look way better tho and often includes new insulation
@@trunestor I had that reaction when I first saw painted & insulated commie blocks. It's MUCH more beatiful compared to old commie-blocks.
They are still disgusting
We had similar hosing projects here in Japan after the war. But in typical Japanese style, the quality was very good albeit the exterior designs were very simple for cost saving reasons. Local Japanese also felt they had won the lottery-literally since lotteries are used to this day for some of the more popular structures in convenient locations. We call them “danchi “ complexes and are still standing today offering affordable housing to the working class of Japan. They are getting older and need regular upkeep and improvements, which are dutifully performed. Only drawback is that most do not allow pets at least in central Tokyo and Yokohama. They even offer discounts on the rent for young families, families who want to live closer to their aging parents, and discounts for single moms trying to raise a family by herself. And even though they are public housing, they welcome foreigners with open arms.
Went and googled danchi. Was not disappointed.
Everything about them was good until the last part
That all sounds great! I knew I liked Japan for a reason.
@@constantinethecataphract5949 It's not like Japan is at risk of suffering an immigration crisis, so what's the problem? I'm sure the amount of foreigners is very small.
@@leandrog2785 its a slippery slope
"Decaying gray blocks under the dark sky"
I don't know about the dark sky, but the decaying gray block can be changed for not a lot of costs, renovation and paint and you'll get functionnable appartments with bright colors :p
The DPRK paints theirs all sorts of colors
@@Zhicano You're right, we should ban colors. That'll teach the commies.
When you comment before you reach 6:09 in the video
Or just not looking at photos taken from from a drone, nearly exclusively in late autumn - early spring period.
And that's exactly what most of the former Soviet bloc did.
Khrushchev's lego was, I feel, one of the most important developments in housing. it worked, really, really well. Some of the Soviet town planning concepts as well (clustering developments around public spaces and services, pedestrian friendly layouts) were absolutely brilliant. Singapore copied almost all the same basic principles for their HDB new towns, and they're also fantastic.
A lot of the stock in the UR Housing program in Japan also follows similar design patterns. Not to mention more than one private development firm. Apparently the apartments inside are pretty good and relatively cheap for their value to rent/buy, but you can really tell what design of the apartments they're copying from. :/
You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
It really was
@@DyslexicMitochondria your username made me click on your profile. Your channel is a hidden gem bro
@@imShlievenhien Compare home ownership rates in Vietnam/Cuba vs the US
"You can't mess up a slab of concrete" oh you would be surprised. I've seen walls warped in all kind of ways, and only maybe a half of those could be attributed to installation mistakes.
i can confirm that, I often have to slightly alter new furniture to make it fit the walls that aren't at 90° from the floor, or there is a visible gap.
* China swating nervously *
@@gabotron94 That's exactly what American developers want you to think lol. Paint them with all the worst construction companies they can find in China and call them all the same so that you would think American developers are different in a good way. Fact is, bad companies make bad stuff, and bad companies are everywhere in the world no matter where they are. Just because you're shown construction failures/demolition projects that make their buildings look very vulnerable doesn't mean every single construction company in the same country work the same, because if that's the case then nobody would risk building the Empire State building either because of all the bad construction companies in America.
If someone finds a straight wall in a commie block, lmk. They're all slightly curved.
@@hommhommhomm As a carpenter working in Germany i can say with confidence: i haven't seen a SINGLE house without messy walls and/or floors. You ALWAYS have to adjust furniture and even windows/doors according to the real measurements you find.
The key part being: NOT A SINGLE HOUSE, regardless of it's building style.
No real world house ends up with perfectly straight walls and floors, those only exist on paper.
This gets even crazier in regions with a long history of mining, a history found under a crazy amount of cities in germany.
I live in a commie block area in Poland. The apartment itself is a bit "meh", our block looks kinda decrepit, and the one other thing that bothers me is the relative lack of meeting places (coffee shops, bars) in the commercial sectors (a few ice-cream joints, but mostly takeout), but other than that... man, I love it here. The amount of greenery is off the charts, with every service and store imaginable within walking distance. Great tram and bus connections with the rest of the city, 15 minutes by bus to the regional train station, and 30 minutes to the big one, 30 minutes to the airport. It's a heaven for children (we have three) - every grass section between blocks has a playground or two, there's also a huge exercise area adjacent to the local school, a line park, a bunch of beautifully designed, kid-friendly parks. BTW, when I say "grass sections", I don't mean lawns, but cool, natural looking green areas with trees, pretty bushes and stuff.
So, yeah. A fantastic place to live in, and also compared to some of the places you showed, we have less concrete. The whole setup is also a boon for health - I walk about 2800-3000 km a year (often with significant added weight, like a kid on my back, or groceries for 5 people) just living my normal life. Two thumbs up!
2:47 Adam having a model train collection is somehow both the funniest and most expected thing ever
Yes I love the model trains, a highlight of this video!
I have some too, wish nine was as nice as his
So on brand I didn't bat an eye. Pretty though!
ČESKÉ DRÁHY REPRESENT
I saw that too, pretty cool!
I have some model trains myself, kinda got a little bit of everything (HO, N, and G), though I mainly do LEGO Trains, so have a lot of L-Gauge stuff.
After living in London for last 10 years + I'm dreaming about having a flat like the one I remember form my childhood in post soviet blocks. Seriously, when I was a kid my family didn't like it because "the wall wre thin and we could hear our neighbours flushing their toilet". Which was true. Oh little did we knew. I've lived in places that had walls made out of cardboard I imagine, because I could hear my neighbours walk, no not run or jump, just walk around their flat. I lived in places where mould was irremovable from the wall. I lived in a places that were build without windows in every room. Places where you wouldn't find a 90 degrees corner, all were this weird either too wide or too narrow so lots of space was wasted because you couldn't fit any furniture in. And so on and on.
Really, I'd move into commie block flat this instant if I had an opportunity.
So true! The layout of the flats and the planning around them is pretty smart. And you can keep the good parts while improving on the aesthetics and the sound-proofing (the last one is a must, though, but it's even worse in many Western European countries, I can confirm that).
The soundproofing in those soviet houses is so much better than modern houses. I guess it's because of asbesthos
Sorry but whenever I read or hear "And so on and so on" I have to sniff and tuck my shirt. You triggered me D:
@@trut52 Asbestos was a building material used across the whole world at the time. I lived in houses that still have asbestos in the walls here in London and yet the insulation and sound proof was shite. So nope, use of asbestos or lack of it has nothing to do with poor soundproofing.
@@50733Blabla1337 Zizek looks at you with disappointment.
Worth to mention that "complete planning" in Soviet cities also included green areas for relaxation an aesthetics, which nowadays in free and liberal Eastern Europe are gradually taken away from the local residents(by new commercial or residential buildings), without any planning at all
depends on how ''free and liberal'' a certain country is
Sounds like a whole lot of words to say : the problem is corruption
@@Impossibleshadow yeah that doesn't mean that planned economy has no corruption right? :) It just means that it plans better than free market
@@111splinter111 When a system fails because of corruption it doesn't really say anything about the quality economic system. So if you want to shit on any economic sectors you should isolate the corruption out and then make a comparison. Otherwise you only give an example of "corruption bad"
Did they get any green areas for private relaxation etc (like a garden)?
I grew up in a Polish commie block and to this day, I remember it as one the best living situations I have ever experienced. Unbeatable social aspects, walkability, excellent public transportation and proximity to everything I needed. Today, I live in deep suburbia, where no one walks outside and I need to drive miles just to buy food. It's awful and depressing.
I like how "sad and depressing" pictures of commieblocks are always taken in the middle of the winter. As if it's the building's fault that winters in Russia are like that: gray, snowy and without any leaves on the trees. Take the same pictures in the middle of a sunny summer and it's nowhere near as depressing. Can confidently say so because I live in one.
It really is, I have no idea where you're from but they look awful.
@@LaVaZ000 you didn't get the point of my comment, did you.
Pretty sure grey and depressing is less a property of Russian winters and more Russia generally. 🤔
@@klobiforpresident2254 visit us in the summer 😃
@@2D_SVD
I do plan to visit but have to brush up on my Russian first.
Not remotely surprised that Adam has a big collection of model trains. That tracks 100%. (Pun intended.)
Yup! When I saw that, I realised his love of trains likely predates his interest in urban planning and good commuting options.
Dude just likes trains!
@@gromm93 wholesome man adam
He and Francis Bourgeois should collab.
Genuinely would love to see the collection in full, having amassed way too much of it myself
I was growing up in such a "commie block" neighborhood untill I moved to Germany into a very rural area. And I totally agree with you. The areas between houses were populated with playgrounds where all kids from the blocks met. Since on one block typically roughly 80 families were living and there were four or five blocks in a row, this meant that there was a tons of kids there. Everything was (and still is) in walking distance -- daycare, schools, shops, doctors, etc. I still miss the feeling I have when I am there.
I grew in a place like that too. Also, my "block gathering" (we have a word for that in Polish, neighborhood does not really fit I feel) was at the edge of town, facing a small river. So not only we had all those advantages of schools, stores, doctors in a walking distance, but I could also walk on a river bank and go to actual wild woods nearby. And we had a giant soccer field not only playgrounds. I honestly don't understand why people oppose those neighborhoods, for all the kids it was great. And the concrete at least stops the sounds of neighbors, not like any US apartment I lived in, where you can hear a regular conversation across the wall. My family still leaves in that neighborhood, and I got to tell you the prices of the condos are skyrocketing, everyone is finally realizing that it's not a bad idea at all.
I moved out of Poland to US due to cultural reasons, the places like those block neighborhoods work like any small village, everyone knows everyone, which can be great, but if you're slightly different it gets annoying. But still, the community feeling was there and I miss it here in the rural US.
@@horace6851 O którym słowie mówisz, wyleciało mi z łba jakimś cudem ale świta
@@Apost0345 osiedle. Neighborhood to bardziej okolica, nie ma kontekstu administracyjnego. Poza tym osiedle, przynajmniej u nas, mialo bardzo konkretny wydzwiek, moze troche jak slangowy "hood".
@@horace6851 Osiedle w sumie ma dwa znaczenia, jedno jako residential area a drugie właśnie w slangu jako hood
@@Apost0345 dlatego neighborhood mi nie pasuje, nie oddaje kontekstu.
When I first played Fallout 4, I got the quest "build beds to your settlers" I said ok I decided to build a communist block building for them. It was extremely difficult to just design those things to make sure not to have unused areas in any floors but I did it. It's harder than you might think. Once I had the plans it took me 3 days and I built it. I was amazed how efficient this thing was. I was suppose to house 12 settlers at that point, but my commie block was capable of housing 36 settlers easily on a 4×6 square area in the game! Not counting the ground floor, which was a pub. It had an elevator in it plus a stairway, each apartments had 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 kitchen, and 2 balconies! The limit of the settlement is 22 settlers and this thing overkilled it with ease!
How to make a nuclear apocalypse worse? Finally everyone has a bit of privacy becuase the world has ended and you shove 12 people into a commie block. My God. I'd rather side with the raiders. 😉😉😂🤣🤣🤣
@@theMerovingianMan The torture didn't end here XD Later I built a 19 story commie block on Abernathy farm. It had 38 apartments which was enough to house every single NPC in the entire game, plus all the raiders of Nuka World. I only had around 18 settlers there, so I put their beds to the top floors so every day they had to go all the way up to the 19th floor to sleep XD I put junk mortars and those tennis ball shooter things on the top of the building. Every day when the settlers were working on the crops to make food, I bombardiered them with junk just for fun XD Once a settler was complaining about the water situation, but the water supply was good. So I put his bed on the top of the commie block exposed to rain, radstorms, and everything, I put a flower bed next to it with a single piece of tayto. So all he could do is work and sleep XD That settler lived like that for my entire gameplay XD
Jesse
What the fuck are you talking about
I love that game any screen caps of the building?
I did the same. Only difference: my ground floor is several small hallways, lined with turrets, to kill off any raiders.
From Reddit: "You know what's more depressing than commieblocks? Homelessness"
Oftentimes though it's choice. Advanced West European countries already have everything to solve homelessness, but there are still homeless people, because you can provide a room for them to live, but not all will want to settle somewhere. Same as there were homeless and jobless people in USSR too, although militsiya (police) were catching them and forcing them to work, sending to factories (which went badly as they were just drinking vodka, and demotivating other workers). Some people are fine with hunter-gatherer lifestyle, some are so deep in alcoholism/drug abuse that they do not want any help and should we help or correct them against their will? I'm all for better social safety nets and social policies but people are people, sometimes it's not ''capitalism'' that makes them a certain way, it's who people are
but we have commieblocks, and also homelessness
@@lkrnpk Often it's a choice what?? And no, most Western European countries don't care about solving homelessness, very few homeless people are homeless by choice, and it's often a death sentence
And suburban hellscapes. At leas a well kept commie block gives you an outdoor space that is not a lawn you have too keep trimmed to within a mm of it's life to satisfy the local home owners association.
@@Hey1234Hey a commie block is far from a shipping container. People who lived in small houses (which, itself is a massive improvement from a shipping container) described it as a massive leap forward in terms of housing.
I’m from Poland. We’ve got lots of building like this. They are ugly - too big, too blocky, too grey. But the city planning aspect of them is great! Every part of the city that is dominated by them is planned completely - grass, trees, places for kids, cyclist etc. The newer part of the city look better, but are chaotic and worse in the holistic planning aspect.
Shortly - the are not pretty, but make for a great space to live in.
Can't they just slap some colourful panels onto the concrete walls? There's no rules saying that they can't make it look good other than it technically not being profitable.
if we made a new version that isn't as brutalist we might be able to combine beauty and good city planning
@@DragoonBoom There was an ugly concrete office block in my town, until it was bought up and given a bit of a makeover. It's now referred to as 'The Blue Building' and it looks much better, and is a useful landmark, being right next to the railway station.
@@DragoonBoom In Poland they are beeing plastered and painted. Especially if the building is insulated. Looks much better.
But the problem is that the size of the building itself makes it a bit overwhelming structure. Especially if there is many of them on the block.
Still - the terrain around theme is awesome! Lots of trees, little businesses, kindergartners etc. Much better than on the newer estates.
@@superrinusblick4222 The newer ones are much prettier but still enormous.
I grew up in a commie block area and couldn't agree more. The part where I grow up was called Lesná. Which could be translated as "Foresty". There was green everywhere! Groups of trees between the blocks. Kindergartens planed into the area! I had kindergarten 10 meters away. Playgrounds on NEARLY EVERY STREET. 2 big primary schools. 2 mid sized supermarkets and at least 5 small corner shops. Many pubs. Football field, tennis courts, swimming pool, one big foresty area in the middle of the area where we used to play all the time. Well done side walks. There were large gaps of community space and beautiful foresty areas in the area and around the area. Very well connected with public transportation. All on 2.6 square kilometers of area. Everything was in walking distance. The urban planning was just pristine! When I look at the residential areas being built now, it's always "modern" houses, each the same, no kindergartens, no sporting areas, no playgrounds or shops no community spaces. Just parcels of the same family houses right next to each other, because space is extremely expensive. We call it "concrete jungle". I'd take a smaller commie block apartment over this any day! Also the commie blocks were not grey. Just a little bit of money and every street was painted in some nice colors.
In Kiev there is a neigbourhood with the same name. And while the houses are your typical commieblocks with occasional newer "architectural masterpieces" squeezed in between, everything else is exactly as you described - forests and great air!
... I had the opportunity to live in Beverly Hills as well as Jizni Mesto (considered to be one of the more shitty commie-block areas in Prague). Jizni Mesto wins by a long shot - in Beverly Hills, there was no way to survive without a car, no shops or services what so ever, and no shared recreational areas at all.
I remember when I was a kid growing up in commie Bucharest, Romania, my kindergarden was within 5 minute walking distance, then my school (grades 1-8) was at the end of the street I was living on, so about 1 minute of walking, playground areas were everywhere in the back plus we kids could ride our bikes all around the neighborhood, the general store where my parents bought stuff from was about 10 minutes walking distance, and the furthest away was the farmers market, for which we took a tram for 2 stops.
Lots of things were bad in communism, starting with the lack of civil rights, lack of accountability for government, the thought police they practiced, and basically every manifestation of the totalitarian control of the state, but a few things weren't that bad, among them education and healthcare for all, and urban planning (when the dictator and his wife didn't try to play urban planners themselves, because it did go terribly wrong when they did).
Already now they started rehabilitating the old commieblocks, and they don't even look that bad anymore. The one where my uncle lives in in Drumul Taberei neighborhood is actually quite decent.
I don't know. I grew up in a farm and although i'm not demanding, moving to a commie block was weird as the building quality was absolute horse shit and neighbor's tobacco smoke seeps into my apartment. The neighborhood is fine now that 90s anarchy is over and greenery has grown for 4 decades.
Good for affordable housing, yes. Its insane how in some areas you get a late soviet apartment with a sea view and balcony in a relatively nice neighborhood for 10k eur. But for it to be good you have to strip your apartment down to bones and rebuild everything.
@@TheFatMob it's called "Лісовий масив" or Forest neighborhood and whist I agree that it's a nice enough place I don't think that the 'urban planners' are to be praised here. Because, as the name would suggest, the neighborhood is literally next to a forest and it's one of the furthest removed areas of Kyiv. It would take you a 30-40 min drive nowadays to get to the city centre. Also, the metro station there only opened in 1979, whist the neighborhood began filling up in 1965, meaning that for about a decade your only means of transportation was a bus (because trust me you won't be getting a car any time soon if you have to live there). Maybe the buses were frequent and transportation isn't that big a problem, but compared to the rest of Europe not being able to walk to, let's say the theatre, an opera house, a museum or a church, is a major problem.
The disconnect between eastern Europeans that see commie blocks and Americans can be boiled down to poverty. When an American sees a commie block they tend to think that it was a place to house only poor people, that were than forgotten. Hence, they tend to view commie blocks as being synonymous with America projects, and associate with them the same sort of problems. But one really good thing the commies did was get people from across a wide swath of society to live in these things. Your neighbor could just as easily be a university professor as a janitor.
My university dorm is basically a renovated concrete block, pretty astonishing how many people can fit in there
The swedish million homes programme seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from this. While the urban planning aspect of it is usually not great (except for walkability and parks), the apartments themselves were planned down to the millimeter. Big rooms, natural light, built in storage (including built in spice racks!) and ktichens scientifically planned for comforts and efficiency.
Meanwhile, some new apartments require you to climb up a fucking ladder to reach your bed.
It was a Soviet leader named Nikita Khrushchev who invested money to agriculture and housing, in Sweden we had urbanisation due to our industrial revolution in the 60s and borrowed the Soviet design due to it was low cost due it was designed to rebuild Europe after the war. The million homes programme used the pensionsystem for investment which was a good idea because real estate is low risk.
True! Unfortunately some of these 'commie blocks' areas have a tendency to develope into unsafe/risk zones here in Sweden. Basically low social safety in the area.
@@Calleohr2 because they're cheap for now. I'm just waiting for a gentrification wave to hit.
@@mimimurlough In Finland we also have these and quality of area really depends are they mostly public or private. Public being cheapest rents thus most of the people that need to be housed by municipality... Clearly leading issues, while the people with better income don't even get chance to get such apartment...
I'm Polish and I live in a modernized commie block, and I have ever since I was a child. I have to say that I agree with everything in this video - especially the part about how it's great even externally. I wouldn't have ever needed a car if not for studies/work. Here's a list of locations near my home, just to show you how crazily available everything here is:
- A large grocery shop (almost comparable to a supermarket, in terms of space and goods available,) with fairly cheap prices built INTO the block; all I have to do to get there is put on my shoes, jacket, and go downstairs.
- Another grocery/liquor store, 2-3 minutes (on foot) further away down the block, but this one is open 24/7.
- And if that doesn't cut it, 4-6 minutes (on foot) away is a supermarket, around two blocks away.
- A bar on the other side of the street, almost always open.
- A sort of mini-shopping mall with several clothing stores in the same block, 3-4 minutes away on foot.
- A barber attached to the mini-mall mentioned above.
- Another barber literally next door to the one above, in case the first one is ever fully booked.
- A pawnshop next to the first large grocery store mentioned on this list.
- A home improvement store right next to the pawnshop.
- An ice cream store next to the home improvement store mentioned above.
- Another grocery store, next to the ice cream store, which sells notably different goods than any of the ones mentioned here, is open on most days, and has a barber on the other side of the street from it. All of this is still within 2-3 minutes of walking distance.
- A photographer in the same block, 3-4 minutes away.
- A bank (and ATM) right down the street, 5-6 minutes away.
- Five different pharmacies, plus a medicine store, all within a radius of ten minutes of walking.
- A professional clinic right next to the medicine store, where you can get free healthcare/check-ups if you get sick, sometimes even with appointments on the same day/instantly if they don't have too many patients booked in.
- A pizzeria next to the supermarket.
- And if you're religious (I'm not, but maybe you are,) there's a Catholic church next to the pizzeria, still within a ten minute radius.
- Another bank a bit further away.
- An elementary school within fifteen minutes of walking (I attended here).
- A middle school, within ten minutes of walking (I attended here).
- A high school, within fifteen minutes of walking (I attended here).
- And that's not mentioning the post offices, other minor stores, services, parks, etc.
In summary, I have basically anything I need for daily, weekly, or monthly living (and more), all within ten minutes of my home.
And it's been like this, without change, since I was a little boy. It's really great to live here. I had to move out briefly when I was going to university, and I absolutely hated how far away everything was in the 'modern city.' Being forced to walk for more than ten minutes to buy some basic groceries seemed to me like a sin against my basic human rights at the time, lol.
I lived in a same one in Budapest. It was a very long house, like a snake. Actually there were more houses built next to each other. But there were connection between them. At the 6th floor there was a connection in case of fire. But it meant that you could walk nearly a kilometer inside the house. In the groundfloor there were different shops, like you listed them. When the weather was bad you didnt even need to leave the house, just walk throug at the 6th floor.
jakie miasto masz na mysli?
@@hatushka.mikovna Płońsk.
I can't even get to a gas station without walking 30 mins yay suburbs >.>
I have been to every major European capital and as someone who lives in North America, we have all these things. You don't need a "commie" block to have access to supermarkets, transportation or parks.
My father grew up in one in St-Petersburg and a) there was still a massive lack of housing and homelessness in the city b) it's not normal for a family where both parents are doctors to live in a tiny apartment where both the neighbors to each side are raging alcoholics. While these apartment units remain practical for certain situations, let's not make them out to be something people reminisce over.
I have lived in 3 areas like this in social democratic Sweden, and loved them all. We call them "miljonprogrammet" (literally the million program) where the goal was to build a million apartments moving a lot of people out of shit housing.
The houses are butt-ugly, but the inside is a lot more functional than anything newer I have lived in, and you walk out of the house directly into areas with lots of grass and trees and almost without cars.
These days most of the areas are not considered nice to live in due to their socio-economic status, but those I have lived in have been a lot more human friendly than the later built million program of the upper middle class.
The Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
I lived in something similar in Denmark and it was actually quite nice. Very little space but it was well designed to get the most out of such a small place.
I'm currently living in one in the UK and I can't say the same. It's very loud and the noise can be stressful essentially with young neighbours who have friends over frequently. I can hear every footstep and sneeze next door, and the layout seems haphazard and cluttered.
The place I am living now is owned by a company, which I have never seen my landlord in person. When I was accepted I just paid and received the pin codes by email.
There is a significant difference in a well planned building and a property lazily renovated to fit as many people as possible to maximise profits.
I'm hoping to move soon as the sound is ruining my mental health. I have sensory processing disorder and it's starting to make me overstimulated and sleep deprived. There is nowhere nearby I can easily get to that is quiet, like a park or library. There are parks and such but they are still noisy and busy and the library has noise from the shopping centre.
Sorry for going off on a tangent the sleep deprivation is making me agitated 😂
Well to be fair, there's no culture in the world that does a better job at getting smart people to actually do work than Sweden.
I have a similar experience in Sweden.
I don´t know how old you are, but most of the worst "miljonprogramet" was torn down in the 00s and late 90s. All the rest was renovated between 00 and 10. The windows was switched out in all of them, a huge improvement. Kitchen and bathroom was either partly fixed up or totally renovated. Sometimes the floor was refloated.
In reality there was never 1 million flats made, the number was closed to 850k, still that was way to much for a country with 5-6 million population. Leading to a huge surplus apartments.
There was also modular concrete buildings made as early as 1930 in Sweden, as well as in 1950s. People often confuse them for "milionprogramet" because they look kind of similar, but they was built way before the program.
I was in my early 20s around the time those flats was renovated and move around a lot. I lived in plenty of them both before and after being fixed up. And most of the was pretty awful prior to being fixed up. (but its also a huge geographical diffrance, most of the very late flats are also much better quality.).
Its also worth saying that most modules in Sweden was during this period made with a 160mm standard, and during the very latest year increased to 180mm. While the eastern block counter part was built to 120 - 140mm standard. That is a huge diffrance in sound insulation.
When they was built in Sweden they was all built with linked to glass. When they was upgraded in the 90s and 00s they was all replaced with monolithic 3 glass argon, that is the same that is used in new build to this day. Standard today for new-build is 200mm walls having a huge increase of sound insulation relative to the 160mm (its like the cube of the width is the sound dampening)
The reason mostly expensive flats have been built the last years is due to how municipality (komun in Swedish) handling planing making it very expensive to buy a plot to build a new house, forcing the builders to build expensive flats to recoup there cost. Its also the effect of the municipality in most places want to make the city more compact building in what use to be open places. Making the central flats more and more expensive. Back in the 90s there was hardly a price diffrance between a central flat and a flat in the suburbs. Now the diffrance is huge.
Ironically, the reason why modern city is so humen unfrendly, is that planers wanted to make them more walkable, by compacting them more together,.
Everytime someone shows me how "depressing" everything there is, the picture is taken in winter.
Yeah of course the sky is dark and the trees arent green!
ITS WINTER!
Also, there should be the muddy winter for the photo, if it's Yakutia winter then the commieblocks start looking cool even in winter)
Evergreens!!!
Having lived in the old eastern bloc, I can tell you they're also fucking gross in summer
I love Winter.
eastern europe looks depressing regardless of the season
"That's to ugly, we prefer to be homeless." Said nobody ever
Plenty of American "veterans" (aka invaders) chose to be homeless.
Nah, I'd rather be shot in the head
"Homeless people should be thankful for whatever we give them"
@@suspiciousbird487 I mean you could if you are black
But what if I tell you to become homeless to own the libs?
My father lived in a "commie block" throughout his whole childhood and teenage years. At one point, his family moved out the industrial "commie block" city to live in a village but couldn't even live their for a half a year because there was no basic commodities included and it was very cold during the winter. They moved back in the commie block.
Indeed.
I went to a "commie block" in MOLDOVA - electricity worked, water pressure was great, elevator was wide enough for a wheelchair user and 3 others. Senior citizens were happy, children were playing in the corridors (the surrounding area had been encroached by much newer developments) etc. As a foreigner, people were happy to see me and invited me to drink all the time. In the USA the MDUs were of 2 kinds - rich people places or gang-controlled towers where no one was happy in either one. Maybe the gang leaders were, i don't know.
@@rahulmenon4357 moldova? is that a plane model?
@@krio1267 I don't think moldova's a plane model
The big plate blocks are worse than living in village. (My personal comparesen with my grandmas "apartament" and lovely cold Full of snow in winter polish countryside)
P.s sorry for bad English
My entire family in Poland on both sides lives in blocks / bloki. My grandpa has been in his unit since the 1960's. Its a fun colored 4 story building in the city of Opole. The entire neighborhood has these same Blocks. 2 big bedrooms, sizable living room with enclosed balcony, decently sized kitchen. Walls still have wood panneling and the furniture and electronics are all from the soviet 60s but the unit itself is very nice. The part that sucks is that there is no elevator and my 89 year old grandpa lives alone on the 4th floor. His unit is nice, but I really hate the high rise blocks. These are extremely depressing and run down. I also have a family member in one of these. No balcony, one delapitated elevator in the whole building that is broken 80% of the time, narrow ugly hallways usually filled with drunks and vomit, or both.
Going off the beginning of the video, we literally still have one of those "pre war" properties in the family. My grandpa's childhood home has no running water at all, with only enough electric wiring to power an ancient mini fridge and tube radio. So I guess coming from that, blocks were an upgrade.
A good book on British housing at the same time is "Municipal Dreams" , if anyone's interested. There's one account in there of an ex-solider being shown around a public motor home-looking bungalow, and his wife was crying because she couldn't believe they could have such a perfect house given to them with everything included. She apparently said to him (paraphrasing), "measure for the lino, love. We're taking it!". Especially after living in the slums with an outdoor toilet. People did love these homes, even with their faults, despite the propaganda built up over recent decades. I know I'll never own a house, but fuck I'll take a public apartment block if that means I get to have somewhere to live.
You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
@@imShlievenhien You eat bugs every day. Trace amounts are in all food.
@@headerahelix You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
@@imShlievenhien this is literally the situation we're already in
Bangladesh vs Dubai, UAE neighbourhood ua-cam.com/video/_TEaabHHx7Q/v-deo.html you decide.\
as a romanian who has lived their entire life in communist apartment buildings, I would like to highlight the joys of having to also listen to the news every time any of your neighbours decides to, as well as be kept up to date with every single argument they have! very exicitng!
@Kotori no shogai indeed all fun and games until you get a shouting match at 3 am on exam night
Housing and entertainment all in one, these commies sure knew about value for money. But seriously I've experienced the same in western capitalist blocks, funnily enough some western social housing blocks had better sound insulation than the private sector ones.
you think regular apartments don't have that huh
@@blacxthornE Not to the same extent, not by a long shot. Some commie blocks are alright, some are even great and those are the ones Adam's talking about. Most of them lack most any kind of insulation and would make even the cheaply built of modern apartments seem pretty alright. You can't compare the best of one thing to the worst of another...just look around for videos of people showing you around Romanian commie blocks if you want to know where this man is coming from.
You also get to know your neighbours' taste in music. I'm going through this right now, the neighbours below me host a damn party or something all day every day😒
Used to live in one until I moved to Germany in 2014. It really wasn't that bad or depressing. On the inside, it's an apartment like any other. There was also a sense of a community between the neighbours, since the commie block wasn't that big. Every evening, the adults would gather outside and just talk, drink, eat together. The kids would play in the meantime. I have so many fond memories, I get a very cozy feeling every time I start thinking about those times.
Yes! Exactly the same for me, it feels like something is missing when nobody cares about one another
Bro, that feels incredible, i live in a block myself in Egypt but its a small 4 floor block and all the people living in it are my family so not as cool, god i wanna go to eastern Europe so much lol
Hijacking your relatively top comment I'd like to give some context to the western viewers. Surely, pics of commieblocks in the middle of the winter are depressing, but Adam also shows the top notch examples of good commieblocks. The actual reality is that yes, there is indeed usually quite a lot of greenery between the buildings, but in the case of old construction it all is covered in overgrown trees, which result in no grass. When it rains, the entire area inbetween the houses turns into mud. Combined with the lack of parking, your entire yard turns into an unsafe parking lot and the mud is carried into the asphalt by cars and water.
Commieblocks don't often have stores and amenities nearby. In some cases you can have a store right in your own building. In other cases you'll have to take a 10-15 minute trip to the nearby supermarket. I lived near one microdistrict which consisted of nothing but 9-story living buildings. It had two schools in the vicinity, 1 or 2 kindergartens, but the entire area was supported by a supermarket nearby and a small market (yay, capitalism) in the middle of it.
Indeed, you need to spend a lot of funds to renovate the buildings, because the walls are thin and oftentimes the outside walls are just cold. This is why many people don't want to rent corner flats. When Adam mentions Ukraine, that particular project was realized by ОСББ, which can be loosely translated into "Homeowner association". The entire purpose of this organization is to unite the dwellers of a particular building to funnel their funds into modernizing their building because the local government sure as hell doesn't have a capability to do it.
The answer is, of course, "make well designed living buildings with the living conditions in mind". In my opinion, the only thing good about the commieblocks is a lot of green space. I'd very well like some modern buildings but with a neatly designed yards and inner spaces.
@@MrDarthImperius a lot of green space? dude, have you ever travel in one of the eastern block countries?
@@McGigi666 I live in Ukraine.
As a kid I lived in a commie block and my grandparents still live in one. I love both houses.
I live in a commie block and I love it. It's close to the train station and theres a nearby busstop
@@SizaMeSehi Which country? (Mine's Hungary.)
I live in a commie block in the former GDR and I can literally hear my upstairs neighbours talking, coughing, sneezing. I know when they're showering, I know when they're making love. The noise issue would be my only negative aspect although this aspect should be taken seriously, especially because of TVs and listening to music. It get can get very annoying very very quickly...
This is also an issue in many western apartments, though probably not as bad. It shouldn't be an issue though, we have the technology to create apartments that are practically sound vacuums, why don't we implement it in every apartment? There is no good reason.
We should be building the highest quality housing blocks that will last for a thousand years without complaints from residents.
Yeah but they are free, here in Colombia I used to live in something near to that but really expensive. Probably a bit smaller. Bogotá is one expensive city. I had to sound proof it DIY with used egg cartons foam old papers and some drywall. I don't know if it was psychological or if there are better method but that one work for me.
I heard someone say that they were designed to have thin walls on purpose so that you could hear other people are saying. So if somebody was talking bad about the government you could report them. It was to encourage eavesdropping on your neighbor.
@@ReddoFreddo the reason is *cost*
It's cheaper and faster to *not* make the buildings of sufficient substance, so they don't.
@@SeanKula that sounds like nonsense. Folks weren’t paranoid of each other like that
Turns out your commie blocks don’t fall apart when you actually pay for their upkeep. Wild stuff, thanks for another banger Adam.
Lol, those conservatives use this shitty arguments all the times
@No One I think it can look nice, but there are still other styles to build in too
You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
@No One But there are easy solutions to this. Have archritecture and vibrant colours on the buildings and more importantly have good public parks or forests near-by.
@No One
Lol did you watch the video? They used concrete blocks because it was cheaper ,rezistent and easy to manufacture, the fact that it resulted in a brutalist look doesn't mean that it was intended that way, what other solution would you have proposed to achieve that performance?
its honestly one of the most hilarious things that people cite as a downside of the Soviet system. The exact same style of buildings were built basically everywhere in Europe and Asia after WW2, its only the US that went into Suburban stupidity. The builds also ended up facing the exact same issues the "commie blocks" fell into. ie government not putting effort into continual maintainance but its only seen as a slight against the Soviet system? There is a reason why the UK and the like have torn down massive swathes of the blocks/ towers built in this style while Eastern and Central Europe havent.
The reason is that people in UK and others had money to move to better apartments, but in Eastern/Central Europe they do not
You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
@@imShlievenhien One of those guys
@@Terranallias18 You will own nothing and be "happy" - Live in the pod, eat the bugs
@@imShlievenhien You already said that. What does that have to do with anything? By all means these apartments sound decently sized
I always thought of Commie blocks as retro futuristic . In most of the sci fi Hollywood movies , you would find homes like these.
It's worth mentioning that these buildings were meant as a temporary solution with a life expectancy of about forty years. That kinda explains the building quality.
THIS! so many people today complain about the quality, and forget this part
Haha, not how it turned out though
Yeah, and they are quite good even after 60 years of usage, especially when given proper care and repairs
@@GreenLarsen And it wasn't so different in western Europe either. Western Europe, West Germany in particular also suffered from a housing shortage and planners came up with similar ideas, albeit mostly excluding the amenities in walking-distance part. That's where the car-centrism comes back in.
Difference is: In Western Europe many of these 50s and 60s constructions were already decomissioned and demolished by the 80s.
@@Exodon2020 I know, some of them are still up. And as you mention, the big difference was the lack of supporting facilities. This in itself made them of far lower quality and I can understand why they needed to go (many places). It sadly show that if something good is only done ½ way then it do not become ½ good, it becomes ½ bad. Hopefully however we learn and do better in future (let me dream haha)
Holy shit, Adam's face, what a reveal.
@@cicolas_nage Really, I didn't know that.
Oh but the model train reveal! Sweet!
@@cicolas_nage
I’ve watched, I think, all his videos and I don’t remember seeing a face reveal. Lol I’ll have to check again.
@@PittsburghSonido he shown his face in one of the Q&A episodes
He only started showing his face recently.
The irony of people laughing at 'commie blocks' in a country with anti-homeless architecture is not lost on me.
And it’s crazy considering in my town in America we’re actively building apartments and condos all the time but the issue is …. Expensive rent. Like at this point we just dont wanna solve nor come up with a few solutions for homelessness. In my city, They’re bulldozing section 8 housing and building more “luxurious” section 8 apartment buildings or just moving those people to another town, however they are STILL building new commercial and expensive realty over top of that…. My city wants to be baby nyc without having initiative about why people wanna move there but also why nyc still has a huge homeless problem. Lmao
You know why there were almost no homeless people in the USSR ?
... because people got deported into gulags if they didn't work voluntarily.
And what's "anti-homeless architecture"?
Housing you have to pay for with money ?
@@satanicdude one by the time of the second big housing process post stalin gulags were havily being phased out. also anti homeless achtecture, is things like holes in benches or straight up concrete spikes on overpaths, spikes on heating exhaust for the city etc. Anti homelessness archtecture affects everyone including the non homeless as it takes away space for recreation due to being uncomforatble, it also has started becoming more expensive than actully housing the homeless.
@@Yingyanglord1 Same thing happening here in Brazil. In São Paulo, the governor years ago instaled spikes and put concrete stones under bridges, and other places where homeless people sleep so they wouldn´t do it anymore. They also doused some with strong water jets to get them out of the area. More recently, police have been keeping pastors, who have been doing good deeds and helping poor and homeless people (many affected by drugs) with food and clothes, away from such areas. They basically have to stealth missions to get in and help them. Or in Rio, where for the olympic games they literally just put up loads of walls and grids to block the view of and hide the poor parts of the area, so strangers couldn´t even see them. And also basically the police keeps on arriving in your community (favela) and many times controles the region through brute force and military influence with guns and kills or hurts your loved ones and scare the overall population with their guns... Hatred for the poor is real.
@@DHPanthony
Y'know it's 'amazing' (in a horrifying way) to think the amount of time, energy, resources, and man power they (Brazil's governments, local and federal) will put towards harrassment of the homeless and persecution of the poor could've been spent addressing and solving these problems, truly saddening.
I grew up in the 90s in a block neighbourhood build in the 80s and it was amazing. My kindergarten was in the basement of my block and my school was 2 minutes away in the middle of the complex. There was SO MUCH space between building, lots of area for children to play and hand around, greenery everywhere, almost car free as access road went around it like ring. It was cool in the summer and hot in the winter, can't complain really.
I'm from 70th commie-block in Moscow. I was lefting my appartments in 20 minutes before start of first lesson in school. This 20 minutes included time to put down winter clothes and change the shoes.
TLDW: Commie blocks aren't just functional housing, they're cohesive neighbourhoods that take into account the needs of the residents and don't treat them like a resource to be mined for the most rent possible
That's... A very good positive!
Yeah, 12 story buildings really help building cohesion between neighbors.
You don't know what you are talking about. The commieblock my wife grew up now has dozens of small shops/barber shops/dentist practices/pharmacies/beauty salons, etc instead of the ground floor appartments. And all of them are full. Commies had no idea what people need.
@@timbehrens9678 I'm not making this argument at all, I'm just summarising my understanding of Adam Something's argument, since that's what the video seems to boil down to.
@@timbehrens9678 I'm honestly confused about your comment; you're talking as if incorporating workplaces into the buildings is a bad thing, or at least I'm getting that.
Me seeing Adam for the first time: I don't know what I was expecting him to look like but it wasn't that
Adam: (brushes dust off one carriage in his wall of model trains)
Me: Oh okay I see it now
The only problems I have with the older ones are:
- bad heat insulation (solve-able through exterior insulation cladding and new windows)
- very bad acoustic insulation between units (not solve-able)
- often very narrow door frames (making getting modern appliances or bigger pieces of furniture a pain in the ass)
Maybe in your part of the world, but in Hungary they had excellent heat and sound insulation. I never heard anything from my neighbor. Now in Spain even in a 240000€ apartment I can hear neighbors even just walking around.
@@trut52 Well, I don‘t have empirical data, but in all blocks I have been in eastern or western Germany, it is or was like that. Thankfully, they have to be retrofitted with insulation by law and most have already. No solution for sound proofing.
For that, you have to physically uncouple walls and floors with layers of rubber or other elastic material. Sound travels inside concrete (and every solid material), so thickness is not a defining quality. That cannot be retrofitted.
For the doors: most doors until 80s were usually 655mm wide. Not enough for wheelchairs. Modern accessibility standards here demand at least 955mm - extremely expensive to retrofit because of the steel reinforcement in the concrete.
@@RicardoCristofRemmertFontes Flex-seal. Problem solved.
@@harrybryan9633 In theory, yes. In practice, you would have to cut a physical gap around the whole floor of about 1cm wide, _including_ the support _inside_ the walls, then fill it (although flex seal can’t carry the whole floor, there are other technical solutions to do so).
You would need hydraulic support jacks carrying each floor, starting at the basement throughout the top floor.
Technically maybe doable. But, yeah, you won’t do that.
Panel houses require to maintain junctions between panels with period ~12-20 years. In Russia (where I live), old buildings are usually unserved.
Meanwhile one should remember, that commiblocks were designed as a temporary measure for 3-5 decades.Just to solve urgent problems.
I was born in a Soviet apartment building and lived there for most of my childhood and after that, I've lived mostly in NYC and mostly in NYC apartment buildings. So, I can compare the two experiences. One big win for Soviets were the superblocks. They were the size of about 10-12 NYC blocks and had lots of trees, grass, playgrounds, soccer fields inside of them. Many had either schools or kindergartens, some had medical clinics. All had bakeries, markets, convivence stores, etc. So, it was a lot better, in my view. Kids could walk themselves to school, without crossing busy roads, you can ran out to buy fresh bread of vegetables and it will take only a few minutes. Most apartments looked out at trees and only some looked out at major roads. I think it's better than looking at another set of windows across a narrow street, the way Manhattan is set up. And while everything is also pretty convenient here, it's still longer walks over busy streets which adds to stress, in my view.
Now apartments themselves were small, had only one bathroom, tiny kitchens where you had to pick what you wanted to fit in there - a fridge or a kitchen table (one fits but not both, usually). However, when I compare it Manhattan typical 1960-1980s apartments, it's not much better. Obviously, you get very spacious apartments with 2,3,4 bedrooms and multiple bathrooms and large kitchens but basic 1 bedrooms and 2 bedrooms also have tiny kitchens (almost never sit-in ones). You do get multiple bathrooms, which is a plus. In terms of sound isolation and quality of construction, I think NYC Is actually WORSE. Walls are thinner, ceilings are lower and window frames are worse but only a bit worse. Obviously, luxury buildings and new construction is of much higher quality in NYC.
I live in a block in Slovakia, these are absolutely not depressing, they're all renovated, rapainted, they are colorful(bit too clorful), there are trees and parks between them. These are built in the 80's, but still more affordable than a new appartment or a house, even in small towns like mine
Luník IX disagrees :D
They are NOT affordable AT ALL. A 1 bedroom soviet apartment costs about 80 000€ in an average sized town. The average wage (meaning half of the population earns less) is about 1 000€ after taxes. That means you have to work for almost 7 years to buy one (but you can't eat in the process). It was much much more affordable during socialism.
@@stevedownie1378 that's why you take a loan. So you can pay it off piecemeal over a longer stretch of time so you don't have to compromise on quality of life.
Too colourful? Do they blend in with the mountains or something?
But you live in slovakia that's the thing
I've lived in a commie block my whole life in Slovenia (used to be a part of the Yugoslav Republic) and I agree with most of your points, but would also like to point out that noise isn't always an issue. At least in Slovenia, all the walls are quite decenctly insulated.
I often see people in the former Yugoslavia say that the walls were thick in the commie blocks. Perhaps they were expecting a war
@@williamthebonquerer9181 Perhaps we were just good at building them
My great uncle liven in a commie block in Zagreb. There are no sound issues. Walls are pretty thick, it is relatively hot in there becouse they have a lot of windows. There are sometimes issues with pipes but that's the same in all old buildings.
@@williamthebonquerer9181 I think the reason is that Yugoslavia used to be quite a rich country back then so maybe they didn't skimp on the materials...
As a Croat from Zagreb, another city with many commie blocks who used to live in them, I concur.
The only real noise I heard was the occasional bumps here and there, but I hear this in the modern apartment building I (very) recently moved in as well.
I am an american, was born in the 80's. So I was alive and simi-aware of the implications of the sovet union when it fell.
I'm sooorta familiar with section-8 housing in America and... Honestly? I would like to know if the micro-district has been tried here in any real capacity.
Being disabled sucks when you're in a car centric hellscape, and this sort of planning would greatly alleviate that.
Funny how you mention it. In America you would probably add elevators to the 5 storey plans because here any house that is in the 5 storey and below range wouldn't have them. You either had 5 storeys, no elevator, or 9 - 13 storeys and a small elevator.
Yeah we had similar housing blocks in the US. They didnt work out. I'm not knowledgeable enough about to say for certainly why they failed, but I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that they were built exclusively as section 8 housing and not just for the general public like in the soviet union. Today, Americans would be very very against any sort of similar project. Just look up Pruitt Igoe.
Of course, if you just want to take the idea of modular housing to save costs, thats fine. As another person mentioned, thats trendy today as some "innovation". But as we learned from the 60s and 70s, there has to be continued maintenance and it dramatically helps when the housing is mixed income.
The only kind of similar building was done in Section 8 housing - done by the cheapest contractors, every corner possible was cut, and absolutely no maintenance. Oh and ofc green space or being able to walk/take public transit anywhere was considered important enough to bother with. Green space is wasted space, you know. You could build things there! Like parking lots for cars! Everyone should get a car, you know. What kind of person doesn't have a car?
There's a reason Section 8 housing is awful and no one wants to live there if they can avoid it. It's all slumlord-type properties.
@@adamt195 These appartment blocks were in fact not being built because they were cheap (they were quite expensive, in fact), but because they could be built very fast. The idea was that perfection of this technology would allow to rebuid quickly after the possible war.
@@adamt195 They didn't work out because there was no effort put into making the community itself work. Developers just threw together cheap housing blocks and left it at that. Most section 8 housing developments are in unwalkable nightmares, with no amenities or community spaces, and then the resulting crime and continued poverty is used as an excuse to continue not trying.
Russian here. Lived in four of these, all were pretty good. City planning is superb, i was able to get to my school, hospital, uni and now work in about half an hour on foot. Lots and lots of green spaces that look nice at summer and snowy winter. Flats were descent, a little noise here and there, some walls were curved, but overall it's good. We have a lot of new houses in my town, and they are. ..well, worse. Much,much bigger buildings, to the point it makes it uncomfortable to be next to, apartments are either smaller or way too expensive, noisy, and close to no infrastructure in the area. State was building with a plan, so they could decide where to make a road, a school, where to plant trees for it to be convenient for people. Capitalists are building to make profit with as little losses as possible, so they don't usually care about such things. The only advantage the new houses have is they are painted bright. However it's more of a maintainence problem and some of the older ones that are kept in a good shape also look good, especially at summer
Above all. In the USSR, these houses were built en masse, solving housing problems for tens of millions of people (after industrialization, most of the population of the USSR began to live in cities). And these apartments were given to people from the employer for free. My parents and all the parents of my friends in 1970-80 received apartments with 2 or 3 bedrooms. And utilities cost literally pennies. In each microdistrict there were 2-3 kindergartens and schools (also free, of course). This is one of the advantages of socialism that young Russians do not understand (not to mention people from Western countries).
Totally agree, +1 from romania
I lived in some Chinese commie blocks during my primary school years. They were 6 story Khrushchyovka copies (but build higher quality). It was a nice enough place, bike garage/storage rooms in the basement, nice central plaza for the community to rest, exercise, and hang out. Our block was pretty well maintained so it was a completely fine place to live in even in the 2000s.
That's where I spent my early years too. It's actually very nice. Much nicer than any of the soulless car-centric Canadian suburbs I now live in.
yeah these commie apartments wre not bad at all the issue is just lack of maintenance and corruption .. the designs of them are just fine..
As someone living in one of the commie blockhouses (albeit slightly renovated) in Eastern Europe, I can only say that while at the time they were a great solution to the problem they are notoriously outdated and barely stand to any type of modern-day architectural, engineering or safety standards. Because many of them were built by prisoners or soldiers with zero experience there are a lot of foundational flaws that require an almost complete redesign. It's very common to find very major discrepancies when comparing with architectural plans, such as walls being built unevenly and with several centimeters offset to their correct location, cement blocks not being properly connected, floors being installed aslope, and so on. Most of them wouldn't pass a basic construction inspection and be deemed as "unsafe" and "inappropriate for living", yet because many people still live in them there is not much municipal government is ready to do. Additionally, cement blocks were good, but the rest of the materials used in construction (especially interior materials like plaster or drywall) were of poor quality and quickly deteriorated. Utilities are a whole another tragedy. They used poor quality aluminum wires that have completely deteriorated so it's pretty much necessary to re-wire the electricity for the whole apartment, water, and sewage mains were usually inadequate, terrible, would clog up, and posed health hazards. Air ventilation and quality are non-existent and pose fire hazards. Proper insulation is also non-existent so a lot of heating energy is wasted in wintertime, albeit one of the most common upgrades for such houses is to add it. Sound isolation is practically non-existent so pretty often you could hear your neighbor's voices through the walls or floors. In summary - they are pretty terrible and need to be quickly replaced. But as you mention in the video for the time it was truly a great solution. It's just sad that most of them cannot stand up to modern standards and are actually a money sink maintenance wise for people trying to stay.
I think the overall point of this video is less to claim that the construction specifically is top notch and amazing and _that's_ what should be kept, but the idea of the blocks as a community with amenities nearby. Obviously in 2022 we can build significantly better actual buildings even at low cost than anything we had in the 50's, but it's the way we utilize and plan said buildings that is worse than the originals. Replace the actual physical construction and most of the complaints directed at the concept disappear.
in Sofia,Bulgaria some maybe 10 years ago a whole exterior concrete panel wall detached and came crashing down, and its not the only example, thankfully no one was hurt . However , the connection of these panels will continue to deteriorate , as people won't do structural renovation . They will start crumbling down pretty soon , it's a matter of time now. There is also another alarming trend - interior renovation. People would very often make illegal and dangerous changes to the interior walls as they make openings in them , a lot of times without reinforcement , a lot of times balconies are assimilated by the kitchen in order to extend it , because a lot of these blocks have notoriously tiny kitchens. The weight put on these balconies when you build a wall around them to close them , added to the fact that you;ve probably demolished half the exterior panel wall to extend the kitchen , and all done without engineer is an absolute disaster waiting to happen.
Not to mention just stupid or lazy planning/implementation of plans. I've seen in Estonia sewer pipes from upper floors running through the middle of rooms in the floors beneath.
About the construction failures you're correct, that tends to always happen when the builders aren't going to live in the buildings themselves and there's an inadequate supervision. The only thing saving todays' capitalist developer construction from those same mistakes is the good publicly enforced supervision.
Other than that, I believe you're being far too uncharitable. You're describing issues that are caused by a serious lack of maintenance, not the inferiority of the construction. Many of the "commie-blocks" were designed to last 30-40 years, whereas today many buildings are designed to last approximately 20-30 years. And the profit motive of the capitalist building development is doing nothing but trying to push that number lower and lower, whereas the legislative branches and the public are trying to plant regulation in order to force it higher.
@@KingBobXVI In sweden we built similar community styled "commie" blocks they were and still in ways are awesome for their ease of access and nearby amenities (shops, etc.) but the community-building way they were built has lead to segregation since these blocks were cheaper for low income and newly arrived peoples. Having lived in a "no go zone" (they arent as bad as people say but it suffers, like any low income area, from higher crime rates) i can say the sense of community is greater but it can be from a long term viewpoint destructive unless actively handled. Many peoples dont have a want (or necesarilly need) to learn the native language and in total people from these areas feel "left out" from the rest of the nation.
Americans: Those commie blocks all look the same
Me: Looks at cookie-cutter suburbs IN America...
(EDIT: Thanks for the 2k+ upvotes on my comment everyone... You all are the best!)
But... but... but muh rugged individualism
That and HOAs run by jobless busybodies demanding everyone keep their property to impossible standards.
I like the suburban house look, but commie blocks are good for high population areas. They can also be designed to look good and not like dry cement blocks.
Same with sandstone coloured Barret houses here in the UK, haha
As someone who grew up in a post-SU country, I find it funny when left-leaning people berate their own medium and dream of one they never actually experienced.
Ask anyone here, they would prefer living in a shitty copypasted American suburb than in an anthill that is a commie block.
I lived in a communist block here in Serbia.
Also the buildings had horrendous sound isolation, I could hear my neighbor upstairs fart
You know what is more depressing than Soviet Grey Buildings?
Ans. Homelessness
i mean, you can paint buildings in lively colors...
@@coobk Says North Korea
Commie blocks wont save cali
@@bomba7197 strawman
@@hulahula6182 why wouldn't public housing solve homelessness? People need a house, you give them a house; that allows them to live, work, produce, be happy, etc. I don't get your opinion.
This is exactly the kind of system in Singapore. The HDB system in Singapore is amazing, the amount of greenery, lots of common space for kids to play and elders to walk. Every block also has common chairs and tables to have conversations and some food. Most importantly amazing public transportation system and the hawker food culture. Singapore has the best possible aspects of everything mentioned in this video
A small and thus well managed state
Imagine calling Singapore communist. I know you didn't but...
Singapore is definitely not communist, but the government is involved and that makes people scream communism. The biggest property owner and developer in SG is the SG government, after all, and all their programs that pundits like to talk up as "free market" are the product of the government realizing that they should be the ones holding the whip, not the corporations, and that would horrify the free market adherents.
singapore for past 70 years has essentially been a market socialist one party state. lee kuan yew had an influence on deng xiaoping too
@@fuschiaknight1991 Many of Singapore's large companies e.g. DBS & POSB Bank, Singtel are government-linked as it's investment company ( _Temasek_ Holdings, which is similar in purpose to, say, Qatar's QIA I think) has a stake in them, but they all practice market discipline I think
East german here, i've lived in both an unrenovated and a "renovated" commieblock and i can confirm that living there is quite comfortable, especially if you're lucky and have good neighbours
East German? DDR 2 confirmed?
@@Xiphactinus of course, with the way our government is acting lol
In all seriousness though, in germany many people still see themselves as west or east german
@@lauritoerni2080 yeah I've heard, is Ostalgie still a thing?
@@lauritoerni2080 same but we always had mold problems in unrenovated ones and I feel like they have bad temperature and sound isolation.
Indeed, good neighbours are important, since you'll have to hear everything they are talking about
One interesting thing to mention: they didn't just put up the the appartment blocks in lego style, but also schools, at least here in Germany (former GDR territory). It was called "Typenschulbau" (roughly translates to "type-based school building").
And honestly, besides a one or two minor problems (like the entrance had to be fitted with a ramp for better accessibility): they were fine. I know what I'm talking about because I went to primary school (from 2000) in a building of type "Erfurt II", then the school moved to a different building of type "Erfurt II" and finally my first years at high school it was located in building of type "Erfurt II". They were all exactly the same.
Function is all what matters! I think they did the exact same in the Netherlands.
@@hagelslag9312 Aesthetics matters, but it should be decided after function.
My experience with East German commie blocks: the ones built in the sixties and early seventies are of good quality and very popular with old and young people. The ones built in the eighties are a mixed bag, ranging from "decent quality in good repair" to "there is a two centimeter gap between the wall and the floor". Generally, though, many of these commie block areas are really nice to live in with parks and playgrounds in between them.
@White replacement is real. Not really needed. Just personal prefference. And your idea IS cool, but space IS limited
@White replacement is real. If you can afford it, it is great, but that housing isn't efficient or realistic in an urban setting as described in the video which is talking about commie blocks vs modern high rise apartments/flats.
Also, shouldn't you be scared about interracial marriage or something.
@@vittocrazi So in communist society, who do we decide who gets to live in a single house somewhere and who gets to live in a shitty public housing block? What happens if someone decides i have to live in commie housing block, but I don't want to?
@@zpgJiggleBilly i don knovv. i dont care. im not a communist
@@vittocrazi Are you sure? I can't tell.
I was born and raised in one of those. Very cold during winter and very warm during summer because of poor insulation. Other than that I can't remember any issues. The staircases were actually very clean and well maintained before the comunism went down. Afterwards there was not inerest in maintaining the common areas so they started to decay.
That's interesting, the one I grew up in was very warm and well-insulated. What state was yours in?
Sounds?
Here in Berlin most commie blocks did get extra insolation installed outside, bringing them on par with many modern energy efficient houses, the insolation also usually has individual colour pattern unique to the block, making them look less uniform and boring.
@@jessblues848 russian ones are all very warm. hot even in winter..
In my commie apartment is always hot like communists tried to compensate russias winter everywhere
Cool history lesson. When I was a kid, most of my friends and family in Poland lived in flats like these. Some were super small with only one room, but most were a comfortable size and looked good inside.
I didn't expect you here
And you could even earn extra money from spying on neighbours since walls were designed to do so
Didn't expect you to be here lmao.
Anyone else notice that Adam is living with a malevolent sentient plant?
Capitalist countries are already catching on. But now they call them "modular homes", its a brand new capitalist idea guys, so innovative.
The USSR was state capitalist, so I gues capitalists did develop commie blocks afterall
I'm always amused by articles describing the revolutionary advantages of prefabrication as a solution to the housing crisis. Like, yeah, we were doing that in the '60s, what's the big deal?
@@sidexrulz2006 Propaganda. If the plebs think everything is new and innovative, they wont question if the system actually innovates, or just claims to do so.
Pretty sure humans could innovate and solve problems if they had everything they needed to survive as opposed to living life like struggle via employment is somehow required for human sanity, it's not.
@@lzrrrrr3370 Nah, if the right is gonna give us Socialists shit for what the Soviets did, I say we should take credit for the good and smart things that came out of them.
There's nothing new that hasn't been done under the sun.
The city planning is always the key ='( Would be so nice to have complete/functional communities over here ='(
In my hometown, after the fall of the USSR, the parts of the neighborhoods that were left green and allowed spaces between buildings, were bought out and more blocks, now capitalist ones, were put up. This ended up with my parents moving into an apartment that's has a view of blocks on one side and a school on the other. My mother decided to blame this on communism, of course, because the building we lived in was "pretty" while the others were ugly. And also because she could buy our apartment thanks to capitalism! By which she meant my father's union loan and family support funds from the government.
people hate socialism but don’t realise that the policies they live on are socialist policies
Yep, hearing the neighbors is a big downside of modern blocks. Today I live in a block that was build in the 50es, so the problem is not that bad (they build thicker walls back then). But in the 70es-block I used to live the last years, you could hear the people 3 stories below drink and the family directly below argue and the wife above clean the room. And that means, they could hear me watching TV, going to bed (oh, yes- you could hear the neighbor next door turn around in his bed at night), showering etc. Psychologically it is not the feeling you should have, when you are at home.
As a homeless person, I'd rather live in an "ugly" home than no home at all.
Also, they weren't _as_ ugly back then. Their grey and broken down nature mostly comes from them not being maintaned as it's not profitable.
Good luck this winter, I wish you the best. I hate how close we are to an utopia and at the same time how dystopian everything is.
Dude I hope you are ok do you have any plans of getting out of this situation
Wait, how are you able to type this comment?
@@mcgoldenblade4765 ... are you serious?
2 good arguments for commie blocks being solid choices:
1. Germany rebuilds theirs if they show signs of age. If they were bad, they'd replace them.
2. Have you seen the american alternative? Let everybody live in the same house in the same road that's reproduced all over the country. Well that or homelessness which in america is always an option ;)
"well yeah but something something blind patriotism and something something socialism"
Unfortunately being homeless is basically a crime in many parts of America today.
Hey, the American alternative sells cars! No way they would choose commie blocks over that!
1. As each flat is private property and Germany is not communism, the government can not come in and just rebuild any apartment building. In todays Germany counter to Soviet block, private property rights exists.
If you would live such building would you rather renovate or rebuild (consider to pay for either of options from your own wallet)? What option you would consider, renovation or rebuilding if you have to pay for it?
2. Not an argument. If something is shit, it does not make other shit better. And in soviet union there was no homeless because they all were either in concentration camps, jail or living in dorms - flats that was taken away from locals that was "EXPORTED" to Siberia and split between several "IMPORTED" families. So several families was forced to live in one flat.
@@AivarsLauzis I said germany, not the german government. If Commie blocks were bad, neither the government nor private citizens would choose them over available alternatives.
Also many commie blocks are NOT owned flat by flat by individual owners so the argument of "me having to pay for renovations myself" is not valid for most of the blocks we're talking about. Rents would increase if they rebuilt as something fancier but since they do that anyways ...
And yes, comparing something to something else to find out which is worse IS in fact an argument here. We call it a comparison and it's quite commonly used to make an argument for or against something. If all alternatives are worse, that makes it the best available option. That's not nothing
"It's hard to mess up big hunks of concrete"
*looks at the UK's concrete towers that have 10th floor walls fall out
Fire safety sold separately
Ronan Point anyone?
*looks at Chinese tofu dreg buildings*
That something is hard to do does not mean that nobody can do it.
there is nothing the UK can't fuck up
Commieblocks, from a design and urban planning POV, are actually examples to emulate. It's just also important to maintain them.
I live in a commie block. Actually, a full-on commie district.
And to my own surprise, I have to agree with this video.
Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they contribute to people not knowing each other, as any high-density residentials do. But everything else about them is pretty awesome, just as the video describes. My daycare center was ...not even a minute's walk, it's right in the yard of the commie block.
Elementary school is in the neighbouring block, 3 minute walk. Supermarket is in another neighbouring block, 3 minute walk.
Any kind of shop for anything i need, except actual furniture or cars and similar stuff, is within 10 minutes walking distance.
People know their neighbors even less in US style suburbs in my experience.
Did COVID ever hit the block?
@@Hissanrach True
I live in Dublin, visit Moscow regularly (here rn) & I used to find the towers & Kruschevka blocks grim & depressing (like some tenements back home). Now, having been inside several apartments & studios that are modern & comfortable, (& very warm in winter) I actually like alot of the Soviet block estates. There are lots of playgrounds, grassed areas & kids would all get to know eachother, as would parents.
Like the video said the external planning is good & it's up to residents & local authorities to look after the housing stock. Cladding & some external lighting really transforms tired looking Soviet blocks.
I don't live in a commie block, but everything is within walking distance. It's pretty good.
In France, we have what are officially known as "HLM" meaning "Habitation à Loyer Modéré". You could translate this as Regulated Rent Housing. But between us, we usually call them "Cages à poules" meaning Chicken Cages, because of how small and how dense the early building were (in the late 50s and 60s). The main problems with them today are that these buildings are still around and need to be better insulated. Also, the name doesn't mean much anymore because it's not the rent that's regulated but living in one means you have the right to ask for a social assistance that helps you pay your rent. But that rent can still be pretty expensive. The reason for that is instead of having the state manage these buildings, there are specialized private companies that profit from them.
So the state got rid of its social housing and is now effectively paying a premium to private corporations for the exact same thing it had before?
nice koba profile pic
@@mausklick1635 just took thirty minutes to check out a bunch of wikipedia pages, and he's just plain wrong. whether the HLMs are managed by a public or private organism doesn't change much, in either case the state has some amount of control over the prices and quality of the housing. allowing some companies to do it for a profit is just a way to test many things at once, to see what sticks.
but you're right on the fact that despite the rents being cheap, it is sometimes still too expensive for the very poor, who end up in private dirt-cheap shitty housing. that is a known issue.
Keep in mind that france was not nearly as devastated during ww2 as central europe (actually sparring the country the destructions of war was one of the reasons for surrendering, they didn't know about the nazi's crimes at the time). we mainly had to build those HLMs to house the french people that were rapatriated from algeria after the independance.
once the job was done there was no longer so much need for building fucktons of housing, so it makes sense for the state to sort of privatise while locking the prices.
@@gamermapper well i'm pretty sure it wouldn't be "free" housing anyway, but that is an other known issue.
because the system allows people to keep their social housing despite significant improvement to their financial situation, many people choose to stay in rather than go rent a regular apartments, causing a significant slowdown in the tenant turnover.
but there is some sense to it too, asking someone to move out just because he earned more one year doesn't mean the income gain will be permanent, so you may end up kicking out people that will come back in a couple of years. also it serves the purpose of conserving some "social mixity". and lastly forcing people out causes threshold effect where people will try to conceal some income just to stay in the brackets of their housing.
Anyway, the cost of rents is getting out of control in many cities and that's a problem the government should take it more seriously. no wonder the economy is going to shit when people have to spend 2/3 of their income on rent.
@@gamermapper yeah right, and who would bother building stuff and taking care of it if it all was free ? Or it should all be state owned ? And everything else too while you're at it ?
True, combining housing and services is a great idea.
If only it happened more often then it didn't in communism. As always, many great ideas, f$ck up in the process
@@tomaszzalewski4541 I live in Slovenia and all neighbourhoods are designed that way with services nearby. That said Yugoslavia did have a higher standard than most Eastern block
@@tomaszzalewski4541 It's more because of corruption, mismanagment and buerocracy (don't get me wrong, ideologies are still terrible materialist wastes of time and resources).
let's be honest, most placese outside the US and some new developements made to US standard do have that.
@@herlescraft I am happy to hear that
This channel makes me better at Cities Skylines. I've implemented lots of commie blocks with plenty of well-connected free public transport and made sure to have good coverage of all public services.
My massive export-only industry is located far from the residential areas, but that works well considering the metric ton of trains and metro subways, with some bus services in there too. My overground train system is getting clogged so I'm probably going to add more buses and connect the various zones by underground metro.
But overall it's going very well, even with traffic despawning turned off. Millions in the bank, 110,000 residents, all-round happiness, and almost no road traffic. The anti-car, free public transport, commie block system works really well.
Having lived in a commie block AND a modern apartment, the modern apartment wins. Hands down no contest.
The fact you can't hear your neighbor scratch their balls through the thin solid "concrete TM" walls is already a massive step forward.
The fact there is a bedroom and not a sleeping couch basically sealed the deal.
that probably was intentional since papa stalin was unable to clone himself
That's more an issue of having had to build them fast and with little labor though. Obviously we shouldn't build 1:1 copies, but the underlying concepts of city planning work.
@@keiyakins You cant really seperate them. Private builders cut corners to save cost for profit, government contractors cut cost to cut cost. Both versions can turn out poor results but when you have a MASSIVE contract like you do with city planning of that sort the cut costs get way worse.
Hence why both commie blocks and modern apartments have all sorts of problems but the worst of the commie blocks are downright dystopic. Look for some video walkthroughs if the stories people are telling in the comments arent convincing enough.
In Germany they put people who can't afford rent in the commie blocks for free.
they're good as a concept (and worked pretty well when they were first made)
Conservatives: *cut funding for public housing*
Also conservatives: "wow this looks depressing. only the market can solve housing."
May want to take a listen to the NYT before you start ripping conservatives. Democrats aren't much better
ua-cam.com/video/hNDgcjVGHIw/v-deo.html
@@oddatsea9398 conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans, neoliberals.. same thing as far as i'm concerned when it comes to housing policy
@@oddatsea9398 "Before you start"? Why not just rip both? Nobody on either side of the (alleged) divide wants to do what needs doing in this area.
@@oddatsea9398 Unsurprising. Corporate Democrats are economic conservatives.
Of course the market doesn't give a damn about anyone without money
While the Blocks were definitely an improvement when compared to what existed previously, they absolutely cannot compare to modern development. I live in a country that used to be communist, and the Commie Blocks are generally regarded as one of the worst living spaces you can be in. For instance, there is almost no noise isolation between the apartments, so you hear everything from your neighbors, which often isn't exactly pleasant. And there is nothing you can reasonably do to fix that, it's just inherent to the construction of the building.
It really depends what you are comparing them to. It was a "workers' housing" and for all intents and purposes it still is. There is no viable alternative for millions of people to get better housing. For example in my country Ukraine (war aside) you can't rehouse 20 mil people or so, living in those buildings. There is neither enough land nor reason for everyone to have a suburb single family house. And most commercial highrises have the exact problem this video pointed out, super bad planning and also not much better in that noise problem you are talking about. So for a lower income families those are still the best options.
@Some Kind Of Master no. Noise isolation is bad even with thick walls, it may help a bit since physics and stuff, but you can still hear people moan during sex sometimes. That's why all the people in those houses are grumpy, they can't properly sleep at night if their neighbour is doing some low to mid noise level activities.
@@assetaden6662 I live in a condo built in 2009, usually cannot hear a thing from my neighbours but I do occasionally hear moaning (and the consequences of it in a form of crying kids;)). Some noises are loud af and there's not much you can do about it within reasonable cost and effort. I don't mind people having THAT good of a time expressing that once in a while, it might be my turn some day (same applies to kids).
@@assetaden6662 I lived all my life in a commie block, but built in Italy in the 70's and I never had such problems, yes you can hear something sometimes but I mean It Ain't life ruining.
PS: It had a beautiful park which helped me make firends nearly instantly
That's because you live in a country that used to be communist. If you lived in America you'd have no choice but rent something fancy you can't afford because it costs enough less for developers to throw in some snazzy tile and jack up the rent they charge compared to the extra rent they get that they can let a lot of their units sit empty.
The apartment was falling apart, unclean, and there were sounds of gunshots throughout the night. I’m talking about America by the way.
OMG you look a lot younger than you sound!
I grew up in one of the pre commie block brick buildings. But there was a commie block area right across the street and I always admired the big area between them, full of (by then) big trees. A lot of that space has been made into parking lots by now, but some are still in original condition and it is just great how nature like it feels in those green areas.
I certainly prefer 4-6 storey high buildings with lot of green between them to singel family cubes with barely enough green space that everyone needs some machine to cut the grass and so someone in noise reach is always doing it.
I imagined him having a beard and looking disheveled, a lot more hippie-like than the clean cut young lad he turns out to be.
I believe that you missed a very important thing - that the apartments in such blocks were given to people entirely for free without having to pay anything. You just had to wait a few years for your house to be built.
My entire family got their apartments from plants they were working at.
Lol nothing is ever free buddy, even if you were told so
@@grindingpancake read the last sentance again
@@grindingpancake exactly. That's why they were "working" to get the "free" aka super cheap apartments.
that may be true where you grew up - in hungary they were handed out with state-controlled loans with micropayments to be made on minimal interest for the duration of 20 years but sometimes even more. not a bad deal, but not free. there was also an immense waiting list and corruption and nepotism played a huge factor in when, where and which flat you got.
Commie blocks created high dependence on gov't instead of self sustainability.
As someone who grew and lived most of his life in a typical commie block, in an ex commie country, I can say that the truth is not so black and white. While there were truly upsides all of them came with at least one downside. First of all - yes, these apartments were free. That was because they were built mainly by soldiers and prisoners initially. You had no way of choosing where or in what apartment you will be living, that was for the state to decided. Due to the cheap and usually inexperienced labor used in the construction of these buildings the quality was and still is trash. And I am 100% certain and sure on that, because as I said I've been living in such buildings for more than 20 years. One of the upsides of panel-based buildings is how easy they are to isolate. However isolation, if it existed, was terrible. As a result energy loses and molding are enormous. Due to how fast they were usually built together with the bad quality of the construction work I can't count how many times I've seen walls that don't have a single right angle, believe it or not. Thankfully it's hard to see. Sadly it makes most attempts at renovation or maintenance a nightmare. There are massive EU campaigns at the moment to subsidize the renovation of these commie buildings (some of them finished after the fall of the Soviet regime, so not that old), which proves how hard it is to do. Thankfully after intelligent renovation they do become far better in terms of living conditions. A significant upside is that they are bigger than almost any newly build apartment. They are not massive, but still quite comfortably big. Another upside is that the planning around these blocks was indeed good, with plenty of playgrounds and green areas (often times badly maintained, but at least they existed). Another thing is that in the case of my country they were not supposed to solve a housing crisis, because my country was thankfully spared the destruction of WW2. However this became the doctrine for all further housing in the Eastern Block and we had to go with the flow. It allowed for faster urbanization though. There are reasons why no one wants to live in commie-built blocks and the main one, I assure you, is the terrible quality of these buildings. The common opinion that "commie blocks are sad and depressing" is completely false. While they are indeed ugly and depressing, the reason for that is the economical collapse after the soviet era which didn't allow for these buildings to be maintained for a long time. It is fixable. Panel buildings became the norm throughout entire Europe during the cold war, but everyone pays attention only to the ones built in the Eastern Block. Truth is they are everywhere. The main differences are build quality and size, for the ones in Eastern Europe were usually MASSIVE and crowded. They did not making the living conditions of easterners better than those of westerners... at all.
Did your apartment have an elevator?
The apartments were not free. The apartment were allocated by the state according to the size of the family and the jobs. It was a monthly fee as a rent to the national construction company and the family could bought the apartment with a credit with low interest loan. A family could have only one real estate.
Finland has an interesting take on commie blocks, as we never were a socialist country but had to become efficient and industrial due to war reparations to USSR. We moved in 1950s from agrarian to industrial economy, built a ton of commie blocks because they are cheap and easy BUT with skilled labour, these buildings are still up and well maintained.
They are less tall because its cheaper and safer that way (plus less people to house) but otherwise they are in theory carbon copies in blueprint to eastern-bloc ones.
Not sure if it was done in other countries but we built Storage units, laundry rooms, bike storages, bomb shelters and Saunas into the buildings as well
@@george90210 That is correct. Thanks for correcting me. Indeed a family had to ask/sign for these allocations and then they were distributed. In my country, I believe for the first ~20 years of communism they were actually free in an attempt to keep up with the rapid urbanization demands and industrialization of the country that required a lot of people to get relocated into the bigger cities. Eventually as you said it is correct that they had a price payed with state loan with low interest rate. It is correct they were not entirely free.
@daniel halachev in what country do you live?
Adam has such a narorator voice that it feels uncanny when he's on camera
I'm from Czechia. I live in this kind of building and while I agree with your points, there is a significant drawback. These flats are really small. There is almost no chance of finding something bigger than 3+1 in our city. This is an issue, because you can either live in a small (and noisy) flat, or you can... move to a "suburban" home. This inherently leads to the classical "rich people move away" scheme.
I'd say that Soviet blocks can work well but they can't just all be uniform throughout, otherwise it just copies some of the negative properties of suburbs. However, diversified city blocks with low and high income housing mixed together can work pretty nicely
Sounds almost like Germany. You either stay in a small apartment, most of them are 3 rooms max, which costs too much money, or in a way too big newly build apartment or house that you cant afford at all
Not an inherent problem of the building style though. It's just that the buildings were made with certain expactations. You could easily build 6 room blocks.
To be fair to the soviet architects, I don't think rampant economic inequality after the collapse of the USSR was on their radar.
Except those "rich people" take out mortgage, have to drive for hour to each direction everyday and pay a lot more for car maintenance and fuel. And despite having a separate house, they live in urban desert with nearly no services and conveniences of city and sometimes sketchy situation with sewerage or internet. They are not very bright.
2:00 Funny you stop your flaws at "elevators (if they were installed, 4th floor gang) broke sometimes, and roofs leaked a bit". The more significant issue with prefab blocks are insulation and heating problems, which left blocks cold in winter and unbearably hot in the summer. I live in a commie block myself, and I agree, the urban planning of socialist neighbourhoods is admireable. I even like them for their aesthetic reasons (yes I am that mad). But I think you shouldn't undermine the blocks' flaws as part of your video. Especially if those flaws could be easily amended with current technology.
There were cheapest choice by far and his point was that people that inhabitated them originaly were living in middle ages one room shacks with dirt floors or their house was bombed to gravel in ww2. Commie blocks were cheap and mass produced they werent meant to be permanent solution we can only blame the commies who continued the practice well over things didnt require more commie blocks. Its like complaning that Lada the commie car isnt a race car ...
The blocks all had radiator heating, and summers weren't as harsh 50 years ago, so just opening the windows usually did the job. So really it wasn't that bad, and 90% of the blocks have now been insulated for years, even the ones with a geriatric population
Many such buildings had their insulation upgraded recently, and that helped a lot.
i wouldn't call leaking roofs minor flaw.
In some of the commie block hellholes surrounding Leningrad the elavator shafts were filled with garbage to the top well into the mid 90s. This video is like something found in one of them.
The concept is good, the execution an eyesore and noise inefficient. I live in Slovakia and there is a pretty big difference in my city in the way these blocks look, in some parts of the city they make it a "insert ugly eastern european tik tok here" and in others they fit without you even noticing them. It all depends on how they're maintained and of course, renovated. It depends on what your standard of living is. As you stated, when you give them to farmers they will be greatful, if you give them to rich suburban folk they won't and thats the core of the issue. They were good when they were introduced but failed to be upgraded and so most people just look at them with "wow I wonder how this city looked without these ugly unpainted blocks before such a shame".
Yea, only real issues are noise and bad wireless connections. Otherwise it's a sturdy construction that can be updated/renovated with time.
No farmer wants to live there. Get real.
@@fontunetheteller410 I am obviously not talking about modern farmers
@@kopkaljdsao One issue is that the architecture, the brutalist brutalism, isn't good-looking at all. Yes, that is my opinion but it also resembles the majority of the people who live in or near these and have experienced them in the cityscape they live and work in. Some people do appreciate brutalism and do think that there is some beauty to these apartment blocks, but I personally disagree with that.
Why is that an issue? Well, a beautiful city/town/village/suburb in terms of architecture and the quality of infrastructure really can make the inhabitants more or less happy. It does affect my mood walking through a, what we in Sweden have, "million programme" which was a program in the 60s and 70s where affordable housing for everyone was to be built. Today we see it as a big mistake. Not that people got homes obviously, but just the execution and how it affects our society today.
@@KristerL they are definitely beautiful, you just need to learn to appreciate efficiency and functionality over pointless looks.
I live in a commie block myself. A part of the advantages you’ve mentioned I’ll add a good sound isolation as these buildings are built as bunkers. The downside is that I have to waste three drill bits to hang a picture
I always found arguments based on "communism bad because depressing concrete building" to be exceedingly bizarre, because we literally have those in Western Bloc countries.
guess they never learned the meaning of hypocrisy
I live in the middle east
and I don't know why are Americans building homes out of wood!
@@atafakheri8659 We have these cool things called "trees", crazy i know
@@rulingmoss5599
leaving the ordinary American arrogance and racism aside (these brown villagers haven't seen a tree in their life am I right?).
in these parts of the world, only poor people make wooden houses nowadays.
we make houses out of steel and concrete that last in natural disasters better or don't just get rotten by the bugs.
but I guess Americans are just poor to afford these kinda things and have to resort to deforestation.
a single fire burns down half your city blocks every year
@@rulingmoss5599 Arabia has more trees than the west coast lol
Interesting to see the apartment blocks with insulated cladding, however Grenfell tower serves as a reminder that this kind of renovation has to be done well. Too many short cuts were taken on the Grenfell project which cost 72 lives almost as soon as the work was completed.
For smaller buildings it doesn't matter. For taller ones only non flammable materials are used. There's also no outside cladding covering the insulation so it can't act like a chimney.
Well Grenfell was gross negligence. They used flammable insulation, which was not supposed to be used in fire hazard critical applications like tall residential buildings. Manufacturer said so in the materials information.
One can use stuff like mineral wool, which instead of fire hazard is in fact fire protection. Since it is non flammable... rock. Spun into wool like consistency to trap air spaces into it, hence insulation.
The only shortcut taken with the Grenfell tower block was that whoever made the decision to refurbish a single stair high-rise building without adequate smoke extract and unprotected lobbies at each level.
All that followed is a direct consequence of that shameful and (thus far) blameless person or group.
Residents of Grenfell brought up their concerns multiple times. It was a totally avoidable tragedy
Honestly, it is both hilarious and depressing learning of all the successful city/urban planning and housing solutions that we could replicate but even better nowadays, yet they get shit on as “old useless trash, shitty designed, terrible, etc” while people are literally homeless or if not quite, struggling to rent rotting shitty rooms and barely able to keep up with life…
Well it started in Europe with public housing where we pretty much did the same but due to increased crime in the areas they were built in no one wanted to build more of them as the city council wouldn’t be able to afford the construction and police department prices, along with some homeless people just being afraid to live in them
they’d rather make it as much of a point as possible to not look like communists than care for people who have no food or home
You don't need to create giant concrete blocks to have housing plans.
@@Flipflopflopper I think that's because those blocks in the West are crammed with poor people, instead of actually mixing with different classes. You wouldn't see the same problems if the same block was a luxury apartment on NYC's 5th Ave, or was full of workers and their families like in the former Soviet blocs.
@@jesusdontlikethatimgaybuts9493 Based
I agree, commie blocks can be great. In mine, between the buldings, there is a huge space full of trees, bushes, playgrounds. It is very green like living in a park.
In modern day cities, Toronto in particular, "commie blocks" are called, "condos" (minus all the social connection amenities).
Toronto's condos aren't the same as commie blocks. Toronto has its own version of the commie block ("apartments"), constructed in practically the same way in the 1960s and 1970s with very similar architecture and layout. Those were built on a huge scale mainly to serve the post-World War population boom fairly quickly and cheaply. You can find a lot of them in the inner suburbs and some pockets of Downtown (a famous example being St James Town). A lot of condos being built today (which generally aren't called apartments), on the other hand, have a larger emphasis on individual ownership rather than affordability.
I think commie lovers are desperate to have a win so all higher density must be called commie blocks.!!???
@@natenae8635 Nah mate. Us commie lovers get wins everyday watching y'all obediently pretend everything's fine and reading your illiterate comments on the internet. Well, I suppose you'll have the last laugh when the purge gets rolling and you unleash your death squads on us.
Also minus being affordable in anyway which was the whole point of the commie blocks
@@sunalwaysshinesonTVs Death squads. Because I don’t believe in whimsical economics I’m an extremist. Do you think I’m fascist???🤔
I think it is good that the state should provide housing but I’m not a Communist.???
It was such a novel thing to see the exact same style apartment building I've been living around my whole life in Hungary smack dab in the center of the Cuban jungle.
I live in the capital of Serbia - Belgrade, and there are many apartment buildings that are obviously built in the communist era. I encountered a building that had, in its ground level: a supermarket, a small grocery store, a dance club, a karate club, a post office, two exchange offices, a clothing store, and many more stores, all in arranged around covered hallways. I was really pleasantly surprised by how walkable it all was (being in the same building), but I was little saddened that this is something that is probably going away, and won't be replicated by new construction, as Belgrade is going in a car-centric direction, by removing pedestrian crossings in the city center, planning for suburbs, disregarding bike lane importance etc.
"Big hunks of concrete it's pretty hard to mess that up."
China: "h.ha.haa. Y..yeah."
“Commie blocks” are in a lot of western countries too, made in about the same time too (1950’s-1960’s) to get people closer to the city. While they don’t look the nicest, it’s still very liveable and close to the city you’re next to, and the public transports are also helping to get to said city better, in some cases. Moreover, in Switzerland, many of those industrial buildings are set apart with small parks and bigger parks, not giving it a stale feel of monotony.
A lot of them are still for people in need and multiple ethnic groups, sometimes half the rent is paid by the state.
That's neat.
One of the issues is because these blocks are used for people in need they become ghettoised poor places that are seen as undesirable.
Communist blocks are not ghettoised really in most of Eastern Europe that I have lived in. They are boring but not poor places.
Not all communist blocks were made equal though.
@@martinperring5286 I fully agree, in a lot of western places, it has become a place (maybe mostly because they already are poor, and poor people tend to get into illegal stuff) of ghetto.
Norwegian version of the commie blocks took all the worst parts about them (shoddy construction, ugly, no insulation) and ignored all the good bits (cheap, planned liveable neighbourhoods)
Yes, whilst the indigenous Swiss work hard, their tax money is used to provide cheap housing and subsidised rent to multiple ethnic groups. Gotta love this socialist thinking. We are all equal but some are more equal than others 🙈
I live in Warsaw, Poland and I've resided in 3 different apartaments throughout my life - all being commie blocks. Honestly, I can't imagine a more efficient, intuitive and comfortable design for cheap-mid price flats, I love them
Yeah, apart from them being poorly constructed (bad water pipes, poor heating etc), they were really comfortable and affordable. Even though I don't think we ever gave up on idea of blocks in Poland, I actually start seeing them being built in higher ammount
A communist lover in Poland! I've heard that communists aren't really popular in there right?😏
@@amirm3621 how appreciating commie blocks makes us communists?
Before the war, in Ukraine there were so called “novostroika”. Same thing as Soviet flats, but built from better materials, good electronics and with bigger rooms. They even look nice, not gray or straight up white, they are colorful (some floors are one color, some another).
Panel buildings but not soviet?
We have the same in Belarus. But the difference is that our government gives us many flats for free (just to make life conditions of people with too little area per person better) and as in soviet times government plans many aspects. Building hospitals, schools, supermarkets nearby. It's amazing!!!
@@Neversa yes. We still have Soviet panel buildings, but they are built out of very cheap and bad materials, while new ones use better materials, have bathrooms in every flat and can keep warmth.
At least from the outside, some of these blocks look very much the same than public housing ('Sozialer Wohnbau') built during the same period in Austria (e.g., at 2:00 mins). Including the 'complete planning' concept, which just makes a lot of sense :)