9 ms·

The Disappearing Mass Housing of the Soviet Union

116 points by myth_drannon 10y ago

dcgudeman 10y ago
"What we find in Western societies is that even if you’re the owner of your own apartment, there’s still an understanding of community ownership. It wouldn’t be possible just to demolish these buildings and replace them today." Pretty frustrating sentiment. This is why we have a housing crisis in the bay area, NIMBYism.
- surfmike 10y ago
  The article is referring mainly to people who have no choice but to have their own home/apartment demolished. I doubt most people, even YIMBYs, would argue for that. The real issue with NIMBYs is that they want to abridge the property rights of others in their community, by restricting development.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    I read an interesting article about Singapore, that claimed that was their approach. Lots of people live in social housing blocks, and as time moves on entire blocks are demolished and rebuilt to better suit the needs of the city. They appeared to consider the human side very well, by guaranteeing that people would remain in the same area as friends and family as they moved to newer housing stock, but I did wonder how the actual people felt about this. I've heard good and bad stories of similar things in my own country.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > Pretty frustrating sentiment. This is why we have a housing crisis in the bay area, NIMBYism. It's very frustrating indeed when you lived all our life in that apartment, your pension is minimal just enough to scrape by, and some developer (probably corrupt, in bed with the city mayor) comes and kicks you out so they can build a fancy apartment building to sell it to some multi-millionaire. I am sure it' s just like the bay area :-)
  - scythe 10y ago
    In theory, if the owner wants to expand their building, there are schemes where the developer will compensate the tenants by offering them units in the new building at the old prices, or sometimes units elsewhere. San Francisco could potentially implement this by making it possible for the owner of a building to voluntarily convert a non-rent-controlled unit to a rent-controlled unit, allowing old buildings to be replaced by offering the tenants converted units in other buildings (the total # of units on the market still increases). Of course nobody likes to be asked to move, but with guarantees on the price and a reasonable definition of "equivalent unit" it's a whole lot better than the Ellis Act conversions we're used to seeing.
  - nikanj 10y ago
    Say what you want about the soviet model, but with an ample, cheap supply of housing stock you could just buy a new flat from the house next door
    - varjag 10y ago
      No, you couldn't buy anything really. There was tremendous housing shortage throughout all USSR existence, and the apartments were distributed. There were some building "cooperatives", but they were massively subsidized too, with the spots rationed and queued for many years ahead.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      More like you could get on a list that would have you in another apartment eventually (if you lived that long). In practical terms it's no different from "affordable housing" in the US.
- pm90 10y ago
  In Indian cities, they have got around this problem by demolishing existing apt. complexes but building even taller towers in their place, giving existing apt owners an apt in the new tower for free.
futurix 10y ago
I am biased as I lived in one of those for 20+ years, but I think they couldn't be replaced quickly enough. Atrocious housing stock.
- csydas 10y ago
  I haven't lived in one nearly as long, but I find them okay for the most part. I'm a US expat so it took me a bit to get used to the rather compact nature of the apartments in St. Petersburg, but while the outsides of these buildings look like they're begging to be torn down, most people have done some amazing modern renovations with the actual apartments themselves. My partner's mother has a very lovely multi-room apartment, and my only complaint with it is just that the shower room is far smaller than I'm used to. In SPB at least, new construction is going up as fast as they can do it, and while a lot of it is done in more remote areas (end of Metro lines), there is plenty to support people who live in those areas. Dozens of full grocery stores within walking distance at the base of every complex, bus transit is plentiful and relatively frequent (compared to US bus schedules anyways), and the developers/city do seem to try to create good public places for families, such as playgrounds and parks. I have to echo what a lot of others have said, it's nice to be able to walk through the complexes and not have to worry too much about cars. The complexes closer to the city proper have some difficulty though with cleanliness just because a lot of the gardens and embankments aren't well tended to or the infrastructure built to contain the dirt has finally given out after 60 some years, and no one has bothered to fix it. The city tearing up roads and grass embankments to replace ancient plumbing doesn't help much either. It's not perfect, obviously - the newer buildings are mostly small one or two room apartments, but they have modern amenities, are wired up with modern network and electrical, and overall look nice. Don't think they'd ever fly in the US though...just not "personal" enough.
  - pm90 10y ago
    > Don't think they'd ever fly in the US though...just not "personal" enough. I wonder if that's really true. Personally I hate paying rent ... absolutely hate it. Most of my day is spent either at office or at coffeeshops/bars for work and again in gym/bars/coffeeshops/traveling after work/on the weekends. A house is just a place to sleep and cook when I have some time. I absolutely hate paying ~10% of my paycheck for rent; so if we had such "impersonal" but functional residences, I would gladly live in them.
surfmike 10y ago
The embedded street view of a five-story "Khrushchyovka" actually looks pretty nice. Very green, narrow streets, and car-free passages between buildings. My mom lived in a similar style building in Poland. The quality wasn't great, but my cousins have renovated some of their units to really nice sleek modern apartments.
- kolinko 10y ago
  Yes! I absolutely love Polish neighborhoods, I wish the style remained and the buildings were upgraded to newer versions.
- Frondo 10y ago
  I lived in a post-Soviet country for a year several years ago. The neighborhood I lived in had this kind of block layout, and I agree, I much preferred it to anything I've ever seen in America. You could walk on footpaths to the open-air market, to the kiosks, even to restaurants, didn't have to worry about traffic or road noise, it felt just like a very natural, easy place to live. Contrast that with living in Seattle, where even where it's walkable, so much of the public space is given up to cars.
- BTurkE 10y ago
  As a westerner that spent time in Poland and lived in one of these buildings (in a renovated unit), I can say there were things to like. The best part is like you say, the green spaces between the buildings, particularly when you had a view on them from one of the upper floors. Very peaceful on the balcony. Plus the stairs were good exercise :)
  - gambiting 10y ago
    Yeah, this is pretty much where I grew up - loved walking between the buildings, lots of places to play and I never felt unsafe: https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Braszczok,+Brzeszcze/@49.9715433,19.130759,3a,75y,85h,88.42t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3lPewmdRaYz_QXq-OZ3W-A!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D3lPewmdRaYz_QXq-OZ3W-A%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D68.61956%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x4716bded8531f8ed:0x3459f10b4264b1c4!8m2!3d49.9846378!4d19.1449642!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Braszczok,+Brzeszcze/@49.97...
rdtsc 10y ago
Grew up in one of those. Then moved "up" from a 5 story to a 9 story building but same idea. Many downsides to those indeed, but that feeling of moving to an new apartment after waiting in line for years and years. I still remember it to this day. I even had my very own tiny room. Interestingly even though those houses were old they were pretty solid, and isolated noise better than a few American apartment building I've lived in, with walls made from drywall and wood.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Some of them were designed with pretty external tile detailing. But it typically got trashed in transport. Overall, interior finishing was better than early Holiday Inns.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tacon 10y ago
In the 90s I had a girlfriend from Moscow and very early on she played the film Irony of Fate[1] for me, to help explain Russian culture. It is a classic comedy based on how identical the housing blocks were at the time. A man gets drunk, gets on a plane, forgets which city he is in (Moscow or Leningrad/St. Petersburg), and goes to an identical street in the wrong city, opening an identical door with the same key. Hilarity ensues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate
- HenryBemis 10y ago
  that's one of the loveliest comedies that you can watch every year around Christmas time in Russian tv... the "Serendipity" of our times if you may!
- cr1895 10y ago
  Tariverdiev's score of this film has recently been released, and it's really nice: https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.com/album/the-irony-of-fate-original-score https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.com/album/the-irony-of-fate-ori... I think my favorite track is "Along My Street for Many Years."
- phillc73 10y ago
  My wife and I usually watch it at Christmas. I always make it through the first part, but somehow never the second.
thriftwy 10y ago
- I don't think they're actually going to demolish those. Where are the money for that? They didn't even begin to explain how whis is going to work economy-wise. - Now is precisely the worst time for projects of that scale. The only mass housing the modern Russia can build is 25-story ugly buildings without parking, trees, roads, schools but with chilling winds between the apartment towers. Urban planning and landscape design are completely nonexistent. - Compared to US or Western Europe, people are cramped into tiny apartments. No suburbia. No gardens. No neigbours. No roads. No backyard, no place to play. Walkable tho, if you are lucky. - The quality of urban layout was actually dwindling all the time. Stalinist 5-storeys were okay (green, near to public transportation, with shops), 5-storey block khruschevki were worse (no more shops, worse apartments), 9- to 17- block brezhnevki were even worse (further from city centers and public transit, snow hurricanes between tall towers, no infrastructure, no trees), and what gets built today is abysmal. - So are they going to replace okay-ish 5-storeys with this: http://varlamov.ru/2210604.html http://varlamov.ru/2210604.html - For some reason, people still buy those apartments. Even given choice. It's a complete mystery to me. If you ask a Russian which car he wants, he'd probably go for a sport BMW. But ask the same about apartments, and he'll promptly point to concrete coffin on the outskirts. Disclaimer: happy resident of an apartment in 1901 built house in SPb.
- diimdeep 10y ago
  Exactly. Myself spend 25+ years in 12-storey brezhnevka. Done massive renovation inside. Outside of building even after 25 years, don't change much in better way, only previously empty place is now occupied by somewhat same ~12 brezhnevka. It's like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill but without planning, just randomly. People buy those apartments because there is no much chose. Myself I don't really know any alternatives.
df3 10y ago
There are a lot of housing blocks just like this across the USSR. I've visited a number of them in former East Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau). They aren't pretty on the outside, but some have been modernized into higher-end apartments on the inside. As for the units that haven't been modernized, they're still better quality housing than what you find in lower income neighborhoods in the United States. I wouldn't be thrilled to live in one, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
kbart 10y ago
Having grown up in one of these myself in ex-Soviet country, I hate them with passion. The quality of utilities is awful: sewage pipes get clogged all the time and whole buildings smell like piss more often than not, thermal insulation was practically non-existent and tried to be compensated by extensive heating that had poor circulation and no way to be adjusted flat-by-flat basis, so if you live in bottom floors you would have to open windows in the middle of winter, and if you live in the upper floors, you have to sleep with your clothes on and few layers of blankets. Sound isolation was also so poor, you didn't even need to turn on TV or radio, because you could hear neighbor's clearly. The whole blocks of the same, bleak, monotonous houses are also very depressive place to live in. Currently most of the remaining Khrushchyovkas are getting renovated (something like this: http://www.manostatyba.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mazeikiai1-e1391010294723.jpg http://www.manostatyba.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mazei...), but I shudder even to the idea living in any of them again.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Yeah, the worst of those buildings wasn't the appearance.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  I told this above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13837463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13837463 maybe you will find this kind of renovation interesting.
  - kbart 10y ago
    Yes, there has been a long discussion on what to do with these buildings. Some experts wanted to raze them to the ground and build new ones, but the easier (temporary) solution of renovation was chosen, because it would require too much of government funds and there are also law issues as there isn't many legal means to move stubborn flat owners from their property if they don't do want to and as mostly elders live in these places now (many of them even since it was built), this is a big issue.
    - 10y ago
timthelion 10y ago
I think that there is a lot of "the grass is always greener" type of feeling in Eastern Europe. The panel houses are not fundamentally bad places to live, but there is this default feeling, that it is somehow worse than the west. A lot of people in Prague have this feeling that the entire US looks like the New York that they know from the sitcoms. Those panel houses which have been renovated and their elevators replaced are really nice. All of the buildings are painted different collors and the whole place looks prety idilic. Only real problem for the residents, is that it is hard to rase kids when you have one and a half bedrooms... Now, Czech culture has become generational. For almost the majorty of my friends, the older generation lives in a panel house. Those are the grandmas and grandpas of my peers. The parents of my peers have bought a newer appartment somewhere else. And they have left the appartment in the panel house to their batchelor children, who like having cheep/free housing to live in till they get married. However, there are also some massive developments at the edge of the city, where there are 20-30 panel houses, all huge, and no good public transport. The green areas have been replaced with parking lots and anyone who comes close wants to kill themselves. It is shocking to me, how two buildings built from the same plans, 30 minutes appart, can give such a different impression. One seems like a dream and the other seems like dystopia.
- smcl 10y ago
  I agree - the panelaky seem to get a unfairly bad rep and I hope the guys here appreciate how good they are in the grand scheme of things. The Czech and Slovak panelaky seem to be better planned, designed and built than equivalent units in Scotland as far as I've seen, for example. Adam Curtis did a documentary on the UK mass-housing and how badly they were delivered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4XgysYujXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4XgysYujXo) - as far as I know the CZ/SK units didn't have these sort of problems and as a bonus avoided the sort of planning problems we had in Scotland (where we built housing for 10,000s of people too far and too disconnected from retail/business/industry)
- VeejayRampay 10y ago
  Quick question: Is the New York of sitcoms supposed to present "good housing"? The two most famous New York sitcoms that come to mind (namely Seinfeld and Friends) present rather small and basic apartments, people using in-building shared washers and driers, doesn't look any better than the ridiculously small apartments we have in Paris.
koliber 10y ago
My wife and I had an interesting observation about these apartment blocks. They were built really quickly, often on the outskirts of cities, where there was plenty of undeveloped land. They were often placed in large groups. The landscape was bleak at the beginning. Huge gray apartment blocks spaced in a random fashion. There was a lot of space between them. Large empty spaces. Sure, footpaths were set down, grass was sown, and small trees were planted. But in the beginning, they looked bleak. Fast forward thirty or forty years. The trees have grown huge. The playgrounds are no longer depressing. On the outside, they are actually very nice. They were insulated and painted and are no longer drab. These developments have a park vibe to the, with the large trees, asymmetric building placement, and large open spaces. This is not taking into account the conditions inside, as those varied from country to country, city to city, and development to development. Many have been modernized, but some still have the fundamental problems mentioned by others. The moral of the story is that large trees and open spaces make for pleasant living.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  In France the melody played backwards. Housing blocks, which I've read were also praised by communists there, started as little paradises. Not too disconnected, out of the box parks, daily shops (groceries, hair, ..), some tiny lakes, sport fields even some times. Fast forward decades, many of them became ruins and barely liveable places (for tons of different factors). Now they've been a thorn in France's shoe, some neighborhood have been recently deeply remodeled. A good 50% of blocks, towers and bars have been destroyed and replaced by smaller blocks. The difference in scale makes the place liveable. I couldn't believe the impact on the city.. Having smaller heights and tinier blocks instead of prison like huge and dense structures brings back life and peace. Previously there were renovation plans but they just fixed breakage and applied a new layer of paint. These would quickly become dirty, with graffitis back soon too. But the new blocks are still clean after 2 years. My feeling is now that housing projects were a necessary error of the post war era; but they're far from optimal for a sense of good life.
  - varjag 10y ago
    Could it be that as the capacity of the neighbourhoods decreased, prices soared?
rodionos 10y ago
These buildings were built with many intentional shortcuts (by design). The real tragedy however was to allow their construction in seismic zones. One of the reasons why so many people died in the Spitak earthquake is that many of these Khrushevkas collapsed like a house of cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Armenian_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Armenian_earthquake
jlebrech 10y ago
i think this should be the default welfare housing you get for nothing and a canteen that gives free slop.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Because?
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    I just think there should be a minimal housing arrangement that everyone is entitled to, it might not be great but it would help motivate people to move out, and also people won't be jealous of other people that got a better house on welfare.
    - pm90 10y ago
      I don't understand why this is being downvoted. Is it really unreasonable for the State to provide basic food, shelter and amenities to those in society that need it the most? Especially as our productivity keeps increasing because of automation, we could reasonably provide it inexpensively?
    - gozur88 10y ago
      I agree with this. People should have a place to live and food to eat, but at minimal cost to the taxpayer.
      - jlebrech 10y ago
        and as you start paying tax yourself you could be upgraded to something nicer.
- mcculley 10y ago
  You think children on welfare should be fed slop?
  - 10y ago
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Most of the Russian economy is based on exploiting (Gas, Oil, Steel etc.) and/or reliance (Metro, Railways, Housing, Water Treatment, Powerplants) on Soviet era infrastructure. The high levels of corruption in government and instability of investments has made the primary goal of owners and investors to gain as much profit as possible and get it out of the country - I don't expect any really positive developments for decades.

116 points by myth_drannon 10y ago

"What we find in Western societies is that even if you’re the owner of your own apartment, there’s still an understanding of community ownership. It wouldn’t be possible just to demolish these buildings and replace them today." Pretty frustrating sentiment. This is why we have a housing crisis in the bay area, NIMBYism.

surfmike 10y ago
The article is referring mainly to people who have no choice but to have their own home/apartment demolished. I doubt most people, even YIMBYs, would argue for that. The real issue with NIMBYs is that they want to abridge the property rights of others in their community, by restricting development.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  I read an interesting article about Singapore, that claimed that was their approach. Lots of people live in social housing blocks, and as time moves on entire blocks are demolished and rebuilt to better suit the needs of the city. They appeared to consider the human side very well, by guaranteeing that people would remain in the same area as friends and family as they moved to newer housing stock, but I did wonder how the actual people felt about this. I've heard good and bad stories of similar things in my own country.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Pretty frustrating sentiment. This is why we have a housing crisis in the bay area, NIMBYism. It's very frustrating indeed when you lived all our life in that apartment, your pension is minimal just enough to scrape by, and some developer (probably corrupt, in bed with the city mayor) comes and kicks you out so they can build a fancy apartment building to sell it to some multi-millionaire. I am sure it' s just like the bay area :-)
- scythe 10y ago
  In theory, if the owner wants to expand their building, there are schemes where the developer will compensate the tenants by offering them units in the new building at the old prices, or sometimes units elsewhere. San Francisco could potentially implement this by making it possible for the owner of a building to voluntarily convert a non-rent-controlled unit to a rent-controlled unit, allowing old buildings to be replaced by offering the tenants converted units in other buildings (the total # of units on the market still increases). Of course nobody likes to be asked to move, but with guarantees on the price and a reasonable definition of "equivalent unit" it's a whole lot better than the Ellis Act conversions we're used to seeing.
- nikanj 10y ago
  Say what you want about the soviet model, but with an ample, cheap supply of housing stock you could just buy a new flat from the house next door
  - varjag 10y ago
    No, you couldn't buy anything really. There was tremendous housing shortage throughout all USSR existence, and the apartments were distributed. There were some building "cooperatives", but they were massively subsidized too, with the spots rationed and queued for many years ahead.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    More like you could get on a list that would have you in another apartment eventually (if you lived that long). In practical terms it's no different from "affordable housing" in the US.
pm90 10y ago
In Indian cities, they have got around this problem by demolishing existing apt. complexes but building even taller towers in their place, giving existing apt owners an apt in the new tower for free.

futurix 10y ago

I am biased as I lived in one of those for 20+ years, but I think they couldn't be replaced quickly enough. Atrocious housing stock.

csydas 10y ago
I haven't lived in one nearly as long, but I find them okay for the most part. I'm a US expat so it took me a bit to get used to the rather compact nature of the apartments in St. Petersburg, but while the outsides of these buildings look like they're begging to be torn down, most people have done some amazing modern renovations with the actual apartments themselves. My partner's mother has a very lovely multi-room apartment, and my only complaint with it is just that the shower room is far smaller than I'm used to. In SPB at least, new construction is going up as fast as they can do it, and while a lot of it is done in more remote areas (end of Metro lines), there is plenty to support people who live in those areas. Dozens of full grocery stores within walking distance at the base of every complex, bus transit is plentiful and relatively frequent (compared to US bus schedules anyways), and the developers/city do seem to try to create good public places for families, such as playgrounds and parks. I have to echo what a lot of others have said, it's nice to be able to walk through the complexes and not have to worry too much about cars. The complexes closer to the city proper have some difficulty though with cleanliness just because a lot of the gardens and embankments aren't well tended to or the infrastructure built to contain the dirt has finally given out after 60 some years, and no one has bothered to fix it. The city tearing up roads and grass embankments to replace ancient plumbing doesn't help much either. It's not perfect, obviously - the newer buildings are mostly small one or two room apartments, but they have modern amenities, are wired up with modern network and electrical, and overall look nice. Don't think they'd ever fly in the US though...just not "personal" enough.
- pm90 10y ago
  > Don't think they'd ever fly in the US though...just not "personal" enough. I wonder if that's really true. Personally I hate paying rent ... absolutely hate it. Most of my day is spent either at office or at coffeeshops/bars for work and again in gym/bars/coffeeshops/traveling after work/on the weekends. A house is just a place to sleep and cook when I have some time. I absolutely hate paying ~10% of my paycheck for rent; so if we had such "impersonal" but functional residences, I would gladly live in them.

surfmike 10y ago

The embedded street view of a five-story "Khrushchyovka" actually looks pretty nice. Very green, narrow streets, and car-free passages between buildings. My mom lived in a similar style building in Poland. The quality wasn't great, but my cousins have renovated some of their units to really nice sleek modern apartments.

kolinko 10y ago
Yes! I absolutely love Polish neighborhoods, I wish the style remained and the buildings were upgraded to newer versions.
Frondo 10y ago
I lived in a post-Soviet country for a year several years ago. The neighborhood I lived in had this kind of block layout, and I agree, I much preferred it to anything I've ever seen in America. You could walk on footpaths to the open-air market, to the kiosks, even to restaurants, didn't have to worry about traffic or road noise, it felt just like a very natural, easy place to live. Contrast that with living in Seattle, where even where it's walkable, so much of the public space is given up to cars.
BTurkE 10y ago
As a westerner that spent time in Poland and lived in one of these buildings (in a renovated unit), I can say there were things to like. The best part is like you say, the green spaces between the buildings, particularly when you had a view on them from one of the upper floors. Very peaceful on the balcony. Plus the stairs were good exercise :)
- gambiting 10y ago
  Yeah, this is pretty much where I grew up - loved walking between the buildings, lots of places to play and I never felt unsafe: https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Braszczok,+Brzeszcze/@49.9715433,19.130759,3a,75y,85h,88.42t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3lPewmdRaYz_QXq-OZ3W-A!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D3lPewmdRaYz_QXq-OZ3W-A%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D68.61956%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x4716bded8531f8ed:0x3459f10b4264b1c4!8m2!3d49.9846378!4d19.1449642!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Braszczok,+Brzeszcze/@49.97...

rdtsc 10y ago

Grew up in one of those. Then moved "up" from a 5 story to a 9 story building but same idea. Many downsides to those indeed, but that feeling of moving to an new apartment after waiting in line for years and years. I still remember it to this day. I even had my very own tiny room. Interestingly even though those houses were old they were pretty solid, and isolated noise better than a few American apartment building I've lived in, with walls made from drywall and wood.

mirimir 10y ago
Some of them were designed with pretty external tile detailing. But it typically got trashed in transport. Overall, interior finishing was better than early Holiday Inns.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tacon 10y ago

In the 90s I had a girlfriend from Moscow and very early on she played the film Irony of Fate[1] for me, to help explain Russian culture. It is a classic comedy based on how identical the housing blocks were at the time. A man gets drunk, gets on a plane, forgets which city he is in (Moscow or Leningrad/St. Petersburg), and goes to an identical street in the wrong city, opening an identical door with the same key. Hilarity ensues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate

HenryBemis 10y ago
that's one of the loveliest comedies that you can watch every year around Christmas time in Russian tv... the "Serendipity" of our times if you may!
cr1895 10y ago
Tariverdiev's score of this film has recently been released, and it's really nice: https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.com/album/the-irony-of-fate-original-score https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.com/album/the-irony-of-fate-ori... I think my favorite track is "Along My Street for Many Years."
phillc73 10y ago
My wife and I usually watch it at Christmas. I always make it through the first part, but somehow never the second.

thriftwy 10y ago

- I don't think they're actually going to demolish those. Where are the money for that? They didn't even begin to explain how whis is going to work economy-wise. - Now is precisely the worst time for projects of that scale. The only mass housing the modern Russia can build is 25-story ugly buildings without parking, trees, roads, schools but with chilling winds between the apartment towers. Urban planning and landscape design are completely nonexistent. - Compared to US or Western Europe, people are cramped into tiny apartments. No suburbia. No gardens. No neigbours. No roads. No backyard, no place to play. Walkable tho, if you are lucky. - The quality of urban layout was actually dwindling all the time. Stalinist 5-storeys were okay (green, near to public transportation, with shops), 5-storey block khruschevki were worse (no more shops, worse apartments), 9- to 17- block brezhnevki were even worse (further from city centers and public transit, snow hurricanes between tall towers, no infrastructure, no trees), and what gets built today is abysmal. - So are they going to replace okay-ish 5-storeys with this: http://varlamov.ru/2210604.html http://varlamov.ru/2210604.html - For some reason, people still buy those apartments. Even given choice. It's a complete mystery to me. If you ask a Russian which car he wants, he'd probably go for a sport BMW. But ask the same about apartments, and he'll promptly point to concrete coffin on the outskirts. Disclaimer: happy resident of an apartment in 1901 built house in SPb.

diimdeep 10y ago
Exactly. Myself spend 25+ years in 12-storey brezhnevka. Done massive renovation inside. Outside of building even after 25 years, don't change much in better way, only previously empty place is now occupied by somewhat same ~12 brezhnevka. It's like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill but without planning, just randomly. People buy those apartments because there is no much chose. Myself I don't really know any alternatives.

df3 10y ago

There are a lot of housing blocks just like this across the USSR. I've visited a number of them in former East Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau). They aren't pretty on the outside, but some have been modernized into higher-end apartments on the inside. As for the units that haven't been modernized, they're still better quality housing than what you find in lower income neighborhoods in the United States. I wouldn't be thrilled to live in one, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

kbart 10y ago

Having grown up in one of these myself in ex-Soviet country, I hate them with passion. The quality of utilities is awful: sewage pipes get clogged all the time and whole buildings smell like piss more often than not, thermal insulation was practically non-existent and tried to be compensated by extensive heating that had poor circulation and no way to be adjusted flat-by-flat basis, so if you live in bottom floors you would have to open windows in the middle of winter, and if you live in the upper floors, you have to sleep with your clothes on and few layers of blankets. Sound isolation was also so poor, you didn't even need to turn on TV or radio, because you could hear neighbor's clearly. The whole blocks of the same, bleak, monotonous houses are also very depressive place to live in. Currently most of the remaining Khrushchyovkas are getting renovated (something like this: http://www.manostatyba.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mazeikiai1-e1391010294723.jpg http://www.manostatyba.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mazei...), but I shudder even to the idea living in any of them again.

ktRolster 10y ago
Yeah, the worst of those buildings wasn't the appearance.
agumonkey 10y ago
I told this above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13837463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13837463 maybe you will find this kind of renovation interesting.
- kbart 10y ago
  Yes, there has been a long discussion on what to do with these buildings. Some experts wanted to raze them to the ground and build new ones, but the easier (temporary) solution of renovation was chosen, because it would require too much of government funds and there are also law issues as there isn't many legal means to move stubborn flat owners from their property if they don't do want to and as mostly elders live in these places now (many of them even since it was built), this is a big issue.
  - 10y ago

timthelion 10y ago

I think that there is a lot of "the grass is always greener" type of feeling in Eastern Europe. The panel houses are not fundamentally bad places to live, but there is this default feeling, that it is somehow worse than the west. A lot of people in Prague have this feeling that the entire US looks like the New York that they know from the sitcoms. Those panel houses which have been renovated and their elevators replaced are really nice. All of the buildings are painted different collors and the whole place looks prety idilic. Only real problem for the residents, is that it is hard to rase kids when you have one and a half bedrooms... Now, Czech culture has become generational. For almost the majorty of my friends, the older generation lives in a panel house. Those are the grandmas and grandpas of my peers. The parents of my peers have bought a newer appartment somewhere else. And they have left the appartment in the panel house to their batchelor children, who like having cheep/free housing to live in till they get married. However, there are also some massive developments at the edge of the city, where there are 20-30 panel houses, all huge, and no good public transport. The green areas have been replaced with parking lots and anyone who comes close wants to kill themselves. It is shocking to me, how two buildings built from the same plans, 30 minutes appart, can give such a different impression. One seems like a dream and the other seems like dystopia.

smcl 10y ago
I agree - the panelaky seem to get a unfairly bad rep and I hope the guys here appreciate how good they are in the grand scheme of things. The Czech and Slovak panelaky seem to be better planned, designed and built than equivalent units in Scotland as far as I've seen, for example. Adam Curtis did a documentary on the UK mass-housing and how badly they were delivered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4XgysYujXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4XgysYujXo) - as far as I know the CZ/SK units didn't have these sort of problems and as a bonus avoided the sort of planning problems we had in Scotland (where we built housing for 10,000s of people too far and too disconnected from retail/business/industry)
VeejayRampay 10y ago
Quick question: Is the New York of sitcoms supposed to present "good housing"? The two most famous New York sitcoms that come to mind (namely Seinfeld and Friends) present rather small and basic apartments, people using in-building shared washers and driers, doesn't look any better than the ridiculously small apartments we have in Paris.

koliber 10y ago

My wife and I had an interesting observation about these apartment blocks. They were built really quickly, often on the outskirts of cities, where there was plenty of undeveloped land. They were often placed in large groups. The landscape was bleak at the beginning. Huge gray apartment blocks spaced in a random fashion. There was a lot of space between them. Large empty spaces. Sure, footpaths were set down, grass was sown, and small trees were planted. But in the beginning, they looked bleak. Fast forward thirty or forty years. The trees have grown huge. The playgrounds are no longer depressing. On the outside, they are actually very nice. They were insulated and painted and are no longer drab. These developments have a park vibe to the, with the large trees, asymmetric building placement, and large open spaces. This is not taking into account the conditions inside, as those varied from country to country, city to city, and development to development. Many have been modernized, but some still have the fundamental problems mentioned by others. The moral of the story is that large trees and open spaces make for pleasant living.

agumonkey 10y ago
In France the melody played backwards. Housing blocks, which I've read were also praised by communists there, started as little paradises. Not too disconnected, out of the box parks, daily shops (groceries, hair, ..), some tiny lakes, sport fields even some times. Fast forward decades, many of them became ruins and barely liveable places (for tons of different factors). Now they've been a thorn in France's shoe, some neighborhood have been recently deeply remodeled. A good 50% of blocks, towers and bars have been destroyed and replaced by smaller blocks. The difference in scale makes the place liveable. I couldn't believe the impact on the city.. Having smaller heights and tinier blocks instead of prison like huge and dense structures brings back life and peace. Previously there were renovation plans but they just fixed breakage and applied a new layer of paint. These would quickly become dirty, with graffitis back soon too. But the new blocks are still clean after 2 years. My feeling is now that housing projects were a necessary error of the post war era; but they're far from optimal for a sense of good life.
- varjag 10y ago
  Could it be that as the capacity of the neighbourhoods decreased, prices soared?

rodionos 10y ago

These buildings were built with many intentional shortcuts (by design). The real tragedy however was to allow their construction in seismic zones. One of the reasons why so many people died in the Spitak earthquake is that many of these Khrushevkas collapsed like a house of cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Armenian_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Armenian_earthquake

jlebrech 10y ago

i think this should be the default welfare housing you get for nothing and a canteen that gives free slop.

lostlogin 10y ago
Because?
- jlebrech 10y ago
  I just think there should be a minimal housing arrangement that everyone is entitled to, it might not be great but it would help motivate people to move out, and also people won't be jealous of other people that got a better house on welfare.
  - pm90 10y ago
    I don't understand why this is being downvoted. Is it really unreasonable for the State to provide basic food, shelter and amenities to those in society that need it the most? Especially as our productivity keeps increasing because of automation, we could reasonably provide it inexpensively?
  - gozur88 10y ago
    I agree with this. People should have a place to live and food to eat, but at minimal cost to the taxpayer.
    - jlebrech 10y ago
      and as you start paying tax yourself you could be upgraded to something nicer.
mcculley 10y ago
You think children on welfare should be fed slop?
- 10y ago

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Most of the Russian economy is based on exploiting (Gas, Oil, Steel etc.) and/or reliance (Metro, Railways, Housing, Water Treatment, Powerplants) on Soviet era infrastructure. The high levels of corruption in government and instability of investments has made the primary goal of owners and investors to gain as much profit as possible and get it out of the country - I don't expect any really positive developments for decades.