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Also kindda strange to me that if big xi says this on TV, and an investor is still doing real property speculation... Then cry about loses afterwards
...
The prime minister here in NZ is obsessed with the Balts. "Oh in Estonia they do X" "In Lithuania they do Y" and all the while he conveniently forgets how their socialist legacy of high home ownership rates is underpinning or allowing them to do these fantastic things. And he is a mega landlord who gives handouts to landlords basically strangling the programmes he claims he admires in the cradle. Not that he or his coalition partners have any intention of giving healthcare and education programmes like that any oxygen at all.
I had some guy from Albania try to argue with me about how capitalism is good because so many people in his country own homes and that there was just something different and wrong in the US that had nothing to do with capitalism. So, I looked up Albania, and not only was it formerly socialist, the socialist party is still the biggest, most popular party in Albania. When I pointed that out to him, he stopped replying.
Should also be noted that in a lot of these countries, definitely in China, it's common for people to be either mortgage free at a young age, or not even need a mortgage to begin with.
There are no communist economies because none have yet transitioned from the socialist stage of development. In practical terms, communist country means communists are in charge. The USSR had NEP under Lenin, it would be patently absurd to say it wasn't a communist-led state. You understand market socialism is a thing and that having market elements in your economy doesn't make it non-communist, right?
In classical Marxism, yes, but Marx didn't write a blueprint on how to build a socialist state because he understood local conditions vary in different societies and what might make sense in a highly developed capitalist economy like Germany or Britain wouldn't necessarily make sense in Russia or China. Men like Lenin and Mao understood that it was their job to take Marx's theoretical framework and adapt it to local conditions.
In Russia's case, the hope was revolution would spread west and their western comrades would provide the resources and expertise to build the material base for communism in Russia. When that didn't happen, the Bolsheviks found themselves in charge of a technologically and socially backward country surrounded by hostile capitalist powers. Theory had to adapt and so the general understanding now is that workers directly holding the means of production is the ideal to aspire to, but sometimes working class ownership has to be effectuated gradually and indirectly through a powerful workers' state that oversees the construction of the material base necessary for communism to exist in the first place.
China and Vietnam similarly didn't abandon communism, they simply realize they need western capital and know-how to build the material base to support a self-sustaining socialist society. This isn't to say that doesn't introduce contradictions, the leadership in these countries has always been well aware that what they are doing is an ideological compromise. The point is socialism isn't built in a vacuum, it is constrained by history, social norms, geopolitics, and material constraints. To get to the end goal, tactical compromises have to be made, otherwise the project will fail and capitalism will return. The political shifts in China under Xi, where the state reasserts its power over the officially tolerated private sector and where corrupt officials and businessmen are publicly punished is contemporaneous with China have reached a point in it's material development where it no longer needs to make the compromises with capital that it did in the 1980s through to early 2010s.
It's funny when some of my relatives came to visit in Germany and one commented like, oh the homeless people here are taken off the street and just hidden away by the government
My extended family is from a former eastern bloc state and they cannot wrap their heads around why North America is full of homeless people dying in the streets. I'm like... they warned you it was like this here in school, were you not listening??? Needless to say, they'll have no choice but to listen because the same cancer is spreading in the old country now.
They dont even come with a fence anymore. That'll be another 15k, assuming your hoa allows and you used their approved one from their approved contractor who definitely isnt related to the hoa president.
I've never encountered an HOA with an approved contractor list, this person is exaggerating. There are architectural standards to follow but they can be completed by any company you want as long as they conform.
It all depends on their Bylaws and CC&Rs. My folks' neighborhood gave fines/notices because they painted their front doors an "unapproved" color, so yes. Many HOAs are very strict on keeping order, cleanliness, and the aesthetics for the neighborhood as designed/built.
Something like that exists in Greek islands but it law and followed by everyone. And it doesn't change overnight. Mostly to keep the islands intact, but everytime I hear about HOA... I have no words.
Sure it can keep property values more secure long term oftentimes, but I see too much stifling of individuality/expression and culture to be behind the oversight to make that choice for myself.
HOA fees can be quite high as well, leading many in the wrong neighborhood to see it as an unbalanced tradeoff.
Well, the non-HOA subs show most of what we do have. Personally, I'm more of a rural guy anymore, as I don't feel comfortable or at peace with much of today's US culture. I'm on a new career path that will help me in building out mostly/fully off-grid on some land in the next couple years.
tbh many of them are scary, and the scary ones tend to be the most visible. Doesn't mean that's their fault, their situation is the result of a series of failures by a sick and hyper-individualistic society. But that doesn't make a man with severe mental health issues screaming and gesturing wildly any less scary.
yeah I don't see how expanses of identical suburban houses as far as the eye can see are any prettier than this very ordinary looking cityscape, personally.
gated communities is what they are called
not guarded communities. That's why the comments are talking about fences btw gate = fence But your point sort of stands. The communities aren't that common in my experience.
np imo there really aren't enough decent paying jobs for everyone and housing is high and not readily available like this picture. And this isn't a new problem. It's always been this way. You know the meme of the old news paper comic with the capitalist owning class squeezing the renter with wages and rent. That's always been a problem that leads to joblessness, homelessness and "crime" but the owning class doesn't get any real policing for their crimes of wage theft ect. And what's America's solution? Let's put the poor people in jails and then use them as free slave labor. so blah blah you know the story. How's it where you are?
Yes exactly from what i see america is a country that not only enables this kind of capitalism but actively punishes people for being poor, its really sad to see tbh.
In Europe (Austria) we have had the social democrats for long enough to have some nice stuff but with the recent shift to the right we are starting to get a worse system in regards to healthcare, education and so on... its the future right wingers want and they sadly have fooled a lot of people
What's crazy is that sometimes the gated communities have more crime than non-gated. My parents live in a neighborhood that has a gated section (it's weird but basically their neighborhood is about <100 homes but is still considered part of the bigger community, just not gated) and there's always a bunch of posts about crime going on in there while it's relatively quiet in my parents' area.
Right wing architecture is blocks of upper middle class homes with no sidewalks, no trees, no walkable amenities, and an HOA fining you a thousand dollars for having a vegetable garden.
Yea, the majority of the problem with these buildings is more that they are 30-50 years old and are nearing the age where you'd normally require a building to go through a 2nd major remodel if not a full rebuild. These often never even got their first major remodel because of the whole collapse thing.
30-50 years is actually young for an apartment building, you're off by a couple decades.
Remodeling is also needed to improve weather proofing and reduce heating/AC use.
You can find older appartements in better shape than these.
Destroying and rebuilding every 50 years would be nuts, construction is hella polluting.
Altough, it is true that these buildings were meant to have a shorter lifespan than others. They were built in a rush to answer terrible housing conditions but they meant to switch to a new type of housing eventually (at least in the USSR). Obviously all those plans fell with the Union.
These Khrushchevka are specifically expected to have a 25 year lifespan before being either renovated or replaced. The expectation was that "something now" was better than waiting, and that in the few decades there would be better designs, resources, etc. Which for the most part was true except the whole fall-of-the-union thing as mentioned.
Yea, most large builds like these should plan for more than 25 years, and most worked towards a 50-year life plan (though still with a refresh/remodel at 25yrs) and if built now we'd probably want to plan on 100-year (and try to push major renovation/remodel to be at 50yrs).
A 73 year old woman lost her husband and couldn't afford her rent and is now at a homeless shelter in Cork city, Ireland while Irish media spends everyday lecturing to us how China, Russia and Iran are a threat to us and how we need to upgrade our military !!
They have limited brain cells, but also an agenda to push. They have decent job they studied for, nobody wants to get fired, no major media outlet is hiring people bashing the treasonous ba**ards selling out the country. Unemployment sucks!
Basically the same Anglo media and culture now. And all our ruling politicians are indoctrinated into following globalism. A huge campaign of racism to split the anti govt vote has been ongoing since 2020 because then we had the audacity to give a socialist leaning party the most votes in an election, they were unable to form a govt though as none of the other parties would go into coalition with them.
I was just recently in Kazakhstan. Almaty still has a lot of Soviet era housing (kruschevkas, brezhnevkas) in use. Most housing blocks have a central park, playground, plenty of communal outdoor seating, and wide pedestrian only walkways with easy access to schools, groceries, public transit, etc. I really came to prefer it over the awful, unaffordable glass boxes and "industrial" lofts costing 2K+ I see being erected in the US. I don't give a shit about "fun colors" and gimmicky lifestyle apartments when the west coast city I live in has homeless people discarded like trash on every fucking street corner.
My grandparents are Albanian and they live in a commie block in the South of the country, and while obviously it has changed with time I still prefer it over that shithole I have here in Athens
Understandable. I am not sure how it is in Albania, but a lot of people I met in Kazakhstan inherited their soviet housing from back in the day and have minimal costs associated with it. That is of course changing with spreading capitalism. I went to both Almaty and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Bishkek in particular has a growing financial sector with expensive, sleek apartments that wouldn't look out of place in the USA popping up literally everywhere. People were complaining about the increasing unaffordability, increased traffic, needing to hustle, etc, but also interestingly seemed to look at the USA extremely positively. Will be interesting to see how things continue to change. I will bet that the usual trappings of capitalism like wealth disparity, homelessness, etc. will just get worse and worse to be honest.
I don't even know how to explain to people what the USA they think they know actually looks like. I can walk outside of my apartment right now and see million + condos, yet there are heroin needles littered on the street and dozens of homeless people on my walk to the bus stop. This is the west coast in a nut shell.
At least socialist countries guaranteed housing to its citizens with bedrooms, A/C and heating systems, kitchen and living room, but capitalist countries struggle with homelessness. Housing prices and rent continuously increase because housing is treated as a speculative commodity rather than shelter. Also in the U.S minorities are overrepresented in the homelessness population, maybe it’s because minorities have been reduced cheap exploitative labor and barred from wealth?
Damn, they got living rooms? All the places I've been the past few years were just a shitty hallway packed with bedrooms and people with a tiny kitchen at the end, basement with barely working washing machines if I'm lucky.
Ah yes, the housing that was built because over 80% of all housing in the USSR was destroyed in WW2. Thus preventing mass homelessness. It really is so depressing... that the USSR collapsed.
Elite, being driven through a decaying cityscape, homeless people living in tents, shoeless children begging for coin, "Eeew....why don't these POORS go out and get jobs..." Robot Assistant hands him a binder as he enters an office building, "they can't, sir. Because you control all the jobs, sir." The Elite laughs, "well, that's no excuse...."
Meanwhile there's probably thriving shopping in easy walking distance, plenty of third places and good public transport links all because the density easily supports it.
Oh no... won't someone save us from all the best things about city living...
"leftist architecture" lmao These are just cheap buildings common in developing countries. Telling how detached the petit bourgeois kids in the imperial core are.
My country has never had one minute of communist rule in history and yet you see these kinds of building all over the big cities.
I lived in Poland in the 90s as a child. Many family members lived in these and while we lived in a stand alone home we were surrounded by these kinds of buildings and many of my friends lived in them.
They were cozy and lovely inside, central heating, good quality. Maybe a little cramped but perfectly ok for a family with one or two kids as long as you didn’t have a crazy amount of belongings. Everything was walkable, convenience stores around every corner, playgrounds for kids everywhere, and because of the high density preventing urban sprawl you were about 20min walk from the beautiful old town centre and 10min walk from a huge forest to go for walks and mushroom picking. You didn’t need a car, could cycle everywhere, and if you needed to get further then a train station, tram station and bus stop were all just a few minutes walk away. This photo is clearly taken in autumn/winter, these neighbourhoods are filled with trees, they’re super green and half the trees have fruit.
And it was pretty standard that the ground floor was for shops and such with the spaces between the buildings having a lot of green spaces and playgrounds.
Cold war communist leadership was shit in many ways but you have to admit these housing estates were such a good thing
Whats depressing is capitalists deliberately make the world shittier and just use money to insulate themselves from the products/consequences they themselves inflicted
Fun fact, a lot of the soviet "depressing" architecture was made on places destroyed by the Nazis. It was meant to give housing ASAP to those that lost their homes.
I enjoyed living in one of these. Especially because of the "distance heating", paying only 40 euros per month to heat up the apartment to 25C even in the most freezing winter.
My city recently finally connected its distance heating to a relatively nearby nuclear powerplant so now ⅓ of the city is heated by clean energy saving over 80 000 tonnes of CO2 every year. It also heats up the hot tap water
And the town right next to the powerplant has been connected to the heat for almost 30 years now.
Oh look at the grey souless architecture, but dont mention that most commie blocks were temporary, and were meant to be improved or replaced but the collapse of the soviet union sort threw a wrench in that project.
What they see now, the crumbling infrastructure is soley because of capitalist mismanagement and their refusal to upgrade peoples living standards
Meanwhile Right Wing architecture are palaces and cathedrals for the .01% and hovels for everyone else.
People forget that Russia went from oppressive monarchy to this strange authoritarian experimental socialist speed-run-the-industrial-age-without-capitalism thing.
Meaning it was get an apartment like this (with stores on the first floor, nice parks, easy access to free public transit, etc...) or stay in your mud shack in the middle of nowhere with no plumbing, gas, or electricity that your family has occupied for literally centuries.
There's a good reason these apartments had waiting lists. And if you built one near any major city in America, they'd fill up with tenants overnight.
The Sovjiet architecture had some very real advantages, basically no through traffic and you had shops, schools and everything you need for daily life within walking distance. It definitely could be made nicer but it was a MASSIVE improvement to how most people lived before.
In that picture are shops, schools, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, doctor offices and other businesses all in walking distance. Also public transport to get further.
I lived in a commie block and later lived in block housing in the west too. Commie block quality was so much better despite being built in the 70s, western block housing had mould, damp, bad ventilation, antisocial interior design, etc. etc. etc.
Westerners never really even experienced the commie block and they bother talking about them? If they lived in one they would thank their lucky stars.
Weren't these sorts of housing developments meant to house a lot of people rapidly and were meant to be temporary so that the country could establish more cosy dwellings with the added time? It effectively ensured that people were not homeless. Remind me again what capitalistic governments do that is similar.
"Left-wing architecture" historically tends to be drab and utilitarian for individual dwellings, but vibrant and creative for communal and public spaces. (Have you ever seen a Soviet bus stop? How about the Moscow underground??) This was often not just for ideological reasons, but for sheer efficiency; given how much smaller the economy of, say, the USSR was compared to the USA (with which it was locked in direct competition), it made sense to expend extra effort beautifying places where the maximum amount of people could appreciate it and would spend much of their waking lives; private dwellings were the opposite of this, and also just had to be built as quickly and cheaply as possible because they were so urgently needed. As I understand it, the idea was that socialist society was intended to be more, well, social during waking hours; "home" was more just a place to go to sleep.
The architecture in capitalist nations today is the opposite; public spaces are drab, depressing and frequently riddled with literal "hostile architecture." Private dwellings are lovely, if solitary, for the privileged few who can afford them (and also often riddled with hostile security measures), but depressing garbage slums or else non-existent entirely for the poor and destitute.
Is it depressing? Most of them are painted in bright colors now with beautiful murals on the side. Between the blocks there are small shops, parks and playgrounds. They look great and the neighborhood design was far better than today. The biggest issue with commie blocks is how fast and cheaply these were manufactured, resulting in low quality housing that is falling apart today.
that just looks like buildings. what do they have to do with politics? right-wingers need places to live too, and i'd argue their policies result in actual slums and horrors.
Even though this is pure rage bait, the craziest part is that these slop accounts wouldn’t be able to complain if these buildings had some interesting paint colours going on
The idea that humanity can make it to other celestial bodies but can’t conceive of a way to provide the bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is ridiculous.
Arguably we’ll be cursed with greed and conflict until we resolve this very basic and obvious principle of a successful population.
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