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

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.