4 ms·

Do 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.

Do 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.

__loam 3y ago
Yeah I'm not trying to say it was all peachy or wax poetic about the Soviet Union. It was clearly a deeply flawed country with myriad economic issues. I'm just saying that even if some of the housing was shit, everyone was housed which is commendable. In the United States, housing is by far the biggest expense for most people, there's a severe shortage of housing, and there's a homelessness problem in most cities. Solving that problem might require a more radical departure from the market based solutions we've been relying on up to this point (and I acknowledge local zoning makes the market less than perfect). Working on the supply side with publicly built housing is something I'd like to see, but the hazard, as you point out, is that it ends up being poorly maintained, overly crowded, and bad. The failure case in the United States, eg dying of exposure is worse than the failure case was in the Soviet Union, eg being stuck in a really shitty apartment. Another issue is there were probably way more people in that failure case in Russia than there were in the United States. All I'm saying is there's a balance to strike here and public building shouldn't be a tool we ignore.
- SergeAx 3y ago
  In Soviet Union everyone worked for the state and the state decided on the wages. Wages, consequently, were shitty, just enough to make ends, and the rest were put where state wanted it to be, mostly into arms race and military budget, then into Party means, and the rest into social projects, including housing. Think of it as a universal welfare, when there are no market-driven actors to produce better quality goods and services, and everything is just shitty enough to not do harm to consumers. US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. There's tons of cheap housing in US, but people just don't want to live where housing is cheap. California's problems are mostly caused by commie-like government and money they put into non-working social programs. Actually, if they keep doing that for several more decades they may end up in a next level USSR.
  - __loam 3y ago
    > US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. Pointless to discuss this if you can't even agree on basic facts.

__loam 3y ago

Yeah I'm not trying to say it was all peachy or wax poetic about the Soviet Union. It was clearly a deeply flawed country with myriad economic issues. I'm just saying that even if some of the housing was shit, everyone was housed which is commendable. In the United States, housing is by far the biggest expense for most people, there's a severe shortage of housing, and there's a homelessness problem in most cities. Solving that problem might require a more radical departure from the market based solutions we've been relying on up to this point (and I acknowledge local zoning makes the market less than perfect). Working on the supply side with publicly built housing is something I'd like to see, but the hazard, as you point out, is that it ends up being poorly maintained, overly crowded, and bad. The failure case in the United States, eg dying of exposure is worse than the failure case was in the Soviet Union, eg being stuck in a really shitty apartment. Another issue is there were probably way more people in that failure case in Russia than there were in the United States. All I'm saying is there's a balance to strike here and public building shouldn't be a tool we ignore.

SergeAx 3y ago
In Soviet Union everyone worked for the state and the state decided on the wages. Wages, consequently, were shitty, just enough to make ends, and the rest were put where state wanted it to be, mostly into arms race and military budget, then into Party means, and the rest into social projects, including housing. Think of it as a universal welfare, when there are no market-driven actors to produce better quality goods and services, and everything is just shitty enough to not do harm to consumers. US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. There's tons of cheap housing in US, but people just don't want to live where housing is cheap. California's problems are mostly caused by commie-like government and money they put into non-working social programs. Actually, if they keep doing that for several more decades they may end up in a next level USSR.
- __loam 3y ago
  > US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. Pointless to discuss this if you can't even agree on basic facts.