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What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air qual
by audunw 3y ago
What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air quality, longevity, energy effiency etc.
You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison?
I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer.
I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will
make most cities look great.
- ido 3y agoI just came back from San Francisco and plenty of post WW2 buildings there (mostly high rises) look nice.
- __loam 3y agoAnd we're also facing a severe housing shortage.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoDo the two have to be mutually exclusive? Are crappy architecture and plenty of housing or interesting architecture and a housing shortage our only options?
- __loam 3y agoObviously not but we shouldn't slow down development over some boring looking buildings.
- __loam 3y agoOne of the only things the Soviets did right was building a shit load of dense, boring housing at huge scales. They eliminated homelessness, which jumped substantially when they became the Russian federation and privitized everything.
- chupasaurus 3y ago2 problems: - That housing costed more average Ivan wages than the same after the collapse of USSR. - Most of it wasn't actually sold hence the fun for inhabitants [sic] to prove their right to own it.
- __loam 3y agoYeah man you'll note I explicitly mentioned how things went to shit after the collapse.
- chupasaurus 3y ago"Housing became cheaper and affordable = things went to shit" doesn't adds up.
- __loam 3y ago"Homelessness jumped substantially" is not "Housing became cheaper and affordable". It was all state owned lol, what does affordability even mean in that context? I'm just saying they built more housing than they needed and housed everyone and that was good. The Soviet economy itself was fucked (20% of gdp on defense spending!), and after the collapse housing did obviously become more expensive (ie, not free).
- SergeAx 3y agoDo you speak from experience? Because I was born in the USSR and spent the first five years of my life with my parents in a single room in a communal apartment. "Communal" here means that other families occupied other rooms, one room per family. These families shared the same single kitchen, single bathroom, and single toilet. And the icing on the cake was that these habitats were provided by the state and it was almost impossible to rent anything better, at least not with a standard Soviet salary. If you are wondering what happened after these five years, we moved to another state-provided habitat, this time separate, for a change. All we had to do was put half a year of effort into finishing it to the acceptable quality — all by ourselves — because you cannot exploit other Soviet citizens. Only the state can do that. And why exactly five years? Because that was the queue wait time for a new living space once you had a child (me) and exceeded a Soviet norm of square meters per human being. And it was Moscow, the capital, where top money was invested into looking good before the eyes of foreign guests.