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Phew, so glad there is no homelessness in Russia or China…
There were no homeless in the USSR, the country where this housing was built. Homelessness was abolished because housing was a constitutional right and so was employment. Housing rent costed 3% of the monthly income.
But if you want real data, let’s go. As per Wikipedia, home-ownership rate in China is 96% (second highest in the world) and 93% in Russia (7th highest). In the USA, for comparison it’s 66%, and in Germany 48%.
Having lived in Germany, and having visited China, I can tell you I encountered more homeless in Germany in one day than in China in the two weeks I visited.
Both of which are not lefty?
They’re fascist dictatorship wearing a lefty mask
The PRC is fascist now? The same country that endured brutal massacres fighting fascist japanese soldiers? This is how crucial terms lose all meaning and risk getting bannalized by right-wing reactionaries.
A single-party human rights-abusing government is not fascist? Cute.
This tells me quite enough that you don’t know what fascism actually means.
Also these are not painted, where I live we have their walls painted in colours with sometimes shapes and some have big art on them. Also there are usually small parks or grass plots with trees around and playgrounds.
In the USSR, they also often had murals or mosaics and alike; public art for everyone to enjoy and to encourage them with e.g. messages of equality
commercial ads in public spaces should be banned. they are an eye-sore. source: personal experience
📠
The weird thing is that I don’t mind that architecture. Gray buildings? OK. That’s fine.
Of course very old buildings have their own issues. They all do. And so do many new buildings… But looking at this picture, I just wonder what is supposed to be so bad… Shit, I mean, go to modern suberbia or gated communities and tell me you like the look of the cookie cutter homes that will fall apart in twenty years.
Stop promoting left-right brain rot. Is what they want
“Stop promoting the knowledge that homelessness was successfully abolished 50+ years ago with socialist policy in a country with much fewer resources and technological development than what we have in 2025”
Yup. Freedom first.
eli5 how this is specifically left-wing architecture?
Brutalism is associated with Soviet bloc buildings.
This is functionalism. There is none of the architectural expression of brutalism here.
Housing people efficiently so everyone can have a roof over their head, running warm water and central heating; regardless whether they have money or not
Right wing architecture
TIL the hammers in The Wall were based on Nazi architecture.
Bonus: this happened while we’re listening to Pink Floyd and bakimg christmas cookies.
Ultra luxury apartments are usually vacant most of the time, because the owners live elsewhere and only use that property for money laundering.
not money laundering, gambling. secure a loan with the property as collateral, put that $ into the stock market.
Just expropriate the building and turn them into communal living spaces; e.g. the USSR did that after the revolution with all the fancy aristocratic- and capitalist-owned buildings
Still, some colors. And we know now a lot more about livable non-depressing urban planning.
Many of them were colorful in Soviet times, but the capitalist regimes don’t care for maintenance. As they say, “what communism built, capitalism cannot even paint”.
I mean the dark grey houses of capitalism using every square centimeter of ground are way more depressing than blocks with a lot of trees around them
I mean, after we build them we can also let people do gorgeous art on them
You also like… don’t have to use brutalist architecture. You can build them in any shape you want so long as the building won’t fall down.
Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times
I find it interesting that it’s considered a design choice and style so much when it’s kind of about necessity and just using what works.
But then it does become a sort of mode or aesthetic in art and culture for what it represents.
Or if the design is suitable for machines to streamline a lot of building process so you can build them extremely efficiently, then go for it, you can “personalize” it after the building is there to live in.
The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they’re built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It’s how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.
Ah yes so depressing and ugly that they’re featured in an architectural magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/vienna-social-housing/
vienna social housing is beautiful (a lot of the times at least). source: i live there
Yeah it’s a little bit cheating to talk about Vienna, but they have been doing a lot of things right. Seems that’s buckling under pressure a bit though. More private buildings, reducing the top tax rate - hopefully doesn’t turn into the failed neoliberal ideology from the 80s
I mean NGL the leftist architecture is very depressing. I think with current infrastructure if all houses were occupied homelessness wouldnt be a problem in most western countries right?
Then you haven’t seen it in it’s surroundings and what it looks like when it’s cared for.
For example, here is a brutalist theatre during winter (with a stylised perspective):
And here is what it looks like during summer with the whole picture:
there are more empty homes/apartments in every city/town in the country than there are homeless people in those areas, yes.
I wonder whether the figure still holds true if we include all of the people still living with parents or in multi-family arrangements because they can’t afford individual homes.
While this is sad and I agree, you cant just go shoving homeless people into empty apartments. There would need to be way more safeguards than that.
Example, you live in an apartment with 2 children and there are empty units near you. A law passes that empty apartments are fair game. A mentally ill or meth addict person moves in next to you, then 5 people move in, people are coming and going to that apartment, right as your children are coming home from school every day. How do you feel about that?
I feel you think every homeless person is a drug addict which makes you an asshole.
Example: rich kid moves in, kid’s into snorting coke, rich daddy just throws money at kid. Way better environment for the next door children i’m sure.I definitely dont think that, but let’s not ignore that its usually the norm. Let me ask you, would you go out in the street and take the first unhoused person you see into your house ? Im being realistic.
That rich kid is a piece of shit and should have the same consequences as if that happened to a homeless person. Im merely outlining what is bad about saying “give all empty apartments and houses to the homeless and it will fix if!” It wont. It would need a massive management team and billions of dollars to run it to make sure your next-door neighbor isnt throwing heroine needles into your yard.
I definitely dont want a homeless person moving in next to me. To be honest I dont want anyone to move in next to me because neighbors usually suck. But thats a different discussion.
To me this says less “Leftist” and more “rich urban planners cutting corners for lower-class housing which will end in a horrific fire or collapse.”
The above is definitely not because of developers.
Look at all that greenspace.
Why is the above considered ugly on the first place?
Rows of uniform monotonous rectangles made of concrete. Even a coat of paint and some color would be more pleasing on the eye but I’m not sure you could reasonably paint concrete and get it to last thru Russian winters.
I recall that picture being a photoshop of a right-wing country. So it’s both fake AND fundamentally right-wing in design.
This one is Moscow.
Imagine what “left wing architecture” looks like after we end manufactured scarcity…
Vast forest arcology-scapes.
Enough to increase the carrying capacity of earth past 300 trillion humans, with vast space enough to live in lush nature…
But no, we have to keep the polluting rents extraction to keep the little people down, to keep the billionaires on top, even if it means even the billionaires have vastly less than they could in egalitarian emancipatarian abundance. At least they have more than others. That’s the most important measure. /s :-/
And pay no attention to the imminence of the bubble popping. ;D
Crazy how detached from reality, compassion, and morality, some are, that they pleep about aesthetics, preferring to keep millions destitute and homeless, to maintain their profiteering gamble.
Vast forest arcology-scapes.
Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape, something with trees and other plants growing all over the building. Not only is that significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won’t last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.
end manufactured scarcity
Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.
significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won’t last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.
This sounds like the kind of argument I hear against spaceships for everybody, that’s basically like “We can’t have spaceships! Screen doors don’t work in space!”. Yeah, well, don’t build them like that.
[Edit: Also sounds like people complaining about indoor plumbing, not understanding what that meant, imagining poop all over the place inside. No. We have tubes to manage where stuff goes. Ample dry clean space.]
Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape,
:3
A house that is a forest arcology-scape… lol… just one house, going from horizon to horizon, with vast layers big enough to fit giant trees in… just a house? Seems more than a little opulent-overkill.
And, by myself? :3 If I had the resources, I would not do it just for myself.
Also, I did draft a small example (and even 1000 variations) of a largely self-sustaining house, using environmentally friendly materials, that would strengthen over time, and as intended to be lived in would increase in capacity to produce food and energy over time, and I was enslaved to do this design work while at my worst health, under promise I’d be put in it, if I’d only design a house fit for my needs, then, after much blackmail, slavery, and torture, they defrauded me, and built a design that inverted every key design element for my health, turning a healing home into a torture box, and what’s worse, it cost them at least twice as much. … I still don’t really know why they did that. Can only presume some kind of sadistic narcissistic Munchhausen-by-proxy. Gets me wondering how much more human potential is being squandered for utterly insane reasons. By this worse-than-Sisyphusian task, I have envied Gregor Samsa. … And I shall recover enough health, and build it properly, and more, yet.
Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.
You’re kidding, right? That’s insanely farcical. Not even funny. If we’ve availed the means to build forest arcologyscapes, you think this makes housing building more scarce and expensive? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that, correct or incorrect. I wonder where your’re presuming screen doors. Like… concrete? LOL. Or perhaps unimaginatively in cognitive dissonance presuming aspects of the current economic paradigm would persist along side the deployed ability to construct vast linked forest arcologies…?
Also, just the same as we don’t have to increase the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions, nor fill that capacity, and that’s just an example to illustrate some of the headroom we have with proper resource management, we don’t have to make everything on earth a forest arcologyscape.
Anyhoo, please don’t be put off by my reflexively scoffing incredulity, and do elaborate on how “Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive”. You might be right. I wouldn’t want to be barking up the wrong tree. (Pun not intended, noticed, and did nothing to avoid.)
Don’t be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.
Wanting to be approximately decent doesn’t overcome physics.
We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.
Don’t be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.
Wanting to be approximately decent doesn’t overcome physics.
We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.
Fun spray of fallacies there.
Starts with Ad-hominem (plausibly/presumably projection), proceeds through a lack of a constructive argument/engagement (ignoring what I said) with false dichotomy, appeal to status quo, appeal to authority, begging the question, circular argument, … and seems like incurious arrogant naive realism, and lack of an educated mind (as in the expression "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting or rejecting it).
You assert “Leftist housing looks” only one way. … So anarchist or agrarian housing are not “leftist” in your meaning of “leftist” (like it’s only the one type) are not “leftist”? Sounds like circular argument, appeal to definition, begging the question, a cherry picking lie of omission, a false dichotomy, appeal to cynicism, reification (new term to me). and whatever else I missed. Gets me wondering if this is a case of “received opinion” that’s not been introspected upon and scrutinised.
Perhaps for a more constructive argument, you could elaborate on what specifics of “physics” you think refute the possibility specific to my thought experiment I invited readers to imagine. Otherwise it looks like handwaving an appeal to authority to close the argument.
“We can build a world” amuses me, for the open positivity opening, and the limitation of just “world”, because much of the suppressed technology that avails such vast construction overlaps with the technology that avails all space to us (not limiting us to just a world). Though the amusement is short lived with the rest of that sentence falling to the false dichotomy, and the dismissive presumptive strawman for the ending portion of that false dichotomy.
I look forward to your elaboration on the physics aspect of your counter-argument. Or better yet, your entertaining the idea in curiosity, engaging in the thought experiment, leaving the incurious cynical presumption behind, getting constructive in a “how can we” rather than a “stupid cant”.
[Edit: PS, just for a fun extension to this, bouncing off a piece of an llm’s dubious analysis, that I looked at after hastily churning out ^,
capitalist/neoliberal housing also relies on specific materials and technologies, yet its limitations are rarely framed as “physics” but as market failures or policy choices. Funny how ‘physics’ only becomes an insurmountable obstacle when discussing leftist or egalitarian housing. When luxury skyscrapers or McMansions are built, we call it ‘innovation’ or ‘market demand’—not an immutable law of nature. Why the double standard?
reminds of a fun idea asserted emphatically as an invitation to entertain in the recentmost episode of derp with kurp that “if communism didn’t exist, capitalism would have to invent it” (paraphrased from memory ~ works better in original context/video/wording). ~ (albeit apparently using the newspeakified definition of “communism”, obviously not as originally coined by anarchists at least 5 years before Marx usurped it and handed it over to the tankies, authoritarians, totalitarians, fascists etc to wield as a means to abuse us by).]
You getting paid by the word count?
just xkcd386’d into brandolini’s law.
& always been more verbose than the average cat.
Enough to increase the carrying capacity of earth past 300 trillion humans, with vast space enough to live in lush nature…
I want what you’re smoking
At the time I was researching the technology and doing the maths, 20 years ago, I was mostly smoking Power Plant. High beta-pinene. Sharp clarity.
But where would all the cars go? /s
“Roads? Where we’re going… we don’t need… … “roads”.” – Doc Emmett Brown, Back To The Future trilogy.
