Indeed. There is a hierarchy.

Commit blocks are better than tents.

But proper social housing is better than commie blocks.

And proper social housing mixed with middle class owner-occupied housing in the same neighborhoods and even within the same buildings is the best.

Ok im gonna try typing out some of the observations of living in commie blocks from personal experience as well as some stories from my friends. Im also spoilering it for anyone who doesn't want to read the list.. also also.. not a comprehensive list of everything, just what I can think of on my lunch break

Just to name a few :3.. im gonna go eat now

Although it does appear that living in them was better than living in a tent and perhaps led to living in a better housing situation? Unless the place was demolished after you moved out, it would be better than a tent for someone else.

Bad housing is better than no housing, largely in part that it helps people get out of the inertia and deathspiral of homelessness.

There's a minimum a society should provide, and public housing at least can satisfy that.

It's not rocket science. Vienna did this once. Also you don't need car parks if a city is well designed. Public Transport and Carsharing is enough

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa

The original commieblocks were fairly walkable, with parks, schools, grocery stores, and so on nearby. I'm personally a fan of making all the buildings concrete blocks and then getting a bunch of local mural artists to paint them for visual distinction.

May I introduce you to the concept of microdistrict. That's how the original soviet developments were planned out - every house is guaranteed to have necessities like stores, a polyclinic, a school, a kindergarden, or a fire department within reasonable distance. Usually, walking distance. Everything is pedestrian permeable, there's public transport connecting the "sleeping districts" where there were mostly apartments to the industrial areas where the jobs were. And yeah, playgrounds in or near every building.

Jobs in the same area as apartments isn't really happening though, office buildings and industry tends to be away.

Don't forget access to businesses - I don't know the stats for 3 floor developments but 5 is already plenty to support nearly all your needs within at most a 15 minute walk.

Not just the concentration of inequality. Also there was often no infrastructure, no shops, no pubs, no nothing, super thin walls, so you could hear all your neighbours, terrible heat isolation... not so different from the tents but higher concentration of people, which made it worse. In many post-communist countries those were later remade into livable places, but it took lots of time and money to do so. Totalitarian regimes suck.

Nah. Both are brutal, but only one is brutalist.

I demand my own little box on a hillside!

People on the streets is far more soulless than gray concrete housing. Especially because concrete can at least be painted over to make it look better.

They are very common in Germany and are in general really safe, the only crime going on there was smoking pot (which is not a crime anymore). I myself did not grow up in one, but many friends have and I still frequently visit people there. Floors, stairs and elevators are clean, neighbours greet you, when someone new moves in its common to help them as a neighbour.

Recently one of these houses was in the news "weißer Riese" in Duisburg because of crime. Now Duisburg is basically Germanys Detroit, used to be a coal mining city and has nothing else going on for it (still the homicide rate for Duisburg is 20x lower than for Detroit lol). And this house is 55years old and has been neglected by the developers, so rent for an apartment there is basically the lowest of any German city and in Germanys most undesirable city and somehow people wonder why there is some crime and this becomes the stereotype for all "commie blocks".

But for every commie block like that you get 1000 others that are really safe and clean, offer cheap rent, are energy efficient as fuck, some even have their own bus or train stations, big playground in the middle and usually more on the edge of the city so closer to nature.

This stereotype thing about commie blocks always reminds me of the american homeless people sleeping in tents in front of the "victims of communism" museum...

All the Projects in major cities are an example. But it isn’t the buildings’ fault. It just putting a lot of poor people with lots of problems all in one place tends to concentrate all the ills that go along with poverty.

These commies blocks don't just look ugly, they tend to become a crime riddled dump

It will surprise you, but this is other way around. Hruschevkas have less crime than modern humant colonies.

The alternative, tent cities like skid row, are pretty crime-heavy. I've never heard about commie blocks being especially crime ridden, but I guess you have good reason to say what you did and aren't just pulling it straight out your ass.

Cabrini Green immediately comes to mind. The police used to get sniped in the parking lot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes