POVERTY IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG

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I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it's always shot in autumn or winter when it's overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
- always shot in autumn or winter when it’s overcast.
  To me this adds a lot to the charm. I'd love to live there (at least for some time)!
- Kruschev housing outperforms new apartments? That's the opposite of what we see of Russia in North America.
- I am simply not believing that 50 year old apartment blocks are outperforming new ones by any metric.
  I'm glad you're happy and there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in my country that are just fine but they are not outperforming anything.
  
  Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m² (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m² (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
  
  Even communism aside, this is actually not uncommon. One of the advances we've made in construction is knowing how to save even more money, making the right sacrifices and meeting the minimum bars of code compliance, to maximize our margins.
  
  I don't know how you say this unironically as criticism. That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources. It's not a good thing to waste manpower and resources for no real gain.
  
  for no real gain
  What gain? More profits for the ultra rich? A dying planet?
  People living in comfortable apartments is no real gain in capitalism because it means less ROI. But it is a huge gain to everyone's quality of life if they can live comfortably.
  Market mechanisms are very powerful in optimising resource allocation - but they aren't optimising for maximum quality of life, they're optimising for maximum ROI. Which lands in the pockets of the ultra rich, which then allocate the accumulated capital in only those endeavours providing maximum ROI, and the cycle goes on and on until so much wealth is extracted from society that the middle class collapses and the planet dies - and the ultra rich with them, for they depend upon the plebes to work for them in order to have an ultra rich lifestyle in the first place.
  
  I mean if we were trying to house people we should be aiming for inexpensive and non-wasteful building choices, shouldn't we? When we're handling basic human needs we send boats full of rice and beans, not a bunch of badass chefs.
  
  Why not? Why not let people have nice things?
  
  I mean it's kind of a scarcity thing. Resources aren't infinite. I have no problem with letting people have nice things and would certainly want minimums to be pretty decent, but when you're getting people off the street or something then efficiency means lives saved.
  
  I agree!
  Did you know that in the USA more buildings are vacant than there are homeless people? So the amount of housing that needs to be built is exactly zero. It' s not an amount of resources problem, it's an allocation of resources problem.
  
  It is still a resource problem. There's a reason NIMBYs exist. Homeless populations have substance, legal and mental issues. The property is pretty much a write off the moment you hand it over.
  
  This is probably where we'll disagree: I believe that all people living in a humane way is more important than investors' real estate portfolio valuation.
  
  copium
  
  We have all the money in the world. We have more than enough homes to house people, right now. We have an abundance of housing, of resources to build more housing, of everything. What we do not have is a distribution that allows people who need housing to get it. Instead we have a literal Spiders Georg situation where a tiny fraction of the country each own hundreds of homes they don't live in or even have any intention of living in. This situation is deranged.
  
  Alright, then show the numbers. Let's ignore that seizing all that property will go super well. I know, you want people that own more than one house dead, so even include it as double the free housing. Figure out how much it costs to upkeep rental properties. Double it, maybe more, for people that literally don't give a fuck about it. Add costs for policing the shit.
  Seizure won't fix it.
  
  The math has already been done. I'm not your high school teacher. Go look up, ex, housing co-ops for a relatively inoffensive example.
  I'm not of the opinion that people with more than one house should be killed, but people who own a thousand? People who own houses they will never live in and have no intention of ever living in? Those people are parasites.
  And you can talk about upkeep all you like but who's paying for they upkeep now? Not the landlords, that's for sure. Oh don't get me wrong, they're managing the upkeep and it's coming out of their account but all that money? The money is all coming from the tenants. The people living there are already paying the upkeep.
  It's also an absolute joke to try to characterize landlords as being interested in maintaining property any more than is absolutely necessary when they're, as a class of person, categorically infamous for being cheap bastards who refuse to make any improvements or even do basic maintenance because it would cost them money. "Sure the heat may be out and the place may be drafty and the freezer may not freeze and the whole place may be infested with vermin but if we didn't keep paying the landlords for all this decadence the poor people would ruin it!"
  
  They literally sacrificed quality and safety to maximize profits and you call that good? Come on... You're being too biased.
  
  That's literally not what I said.
  
  You called the thing I criticized "one of the biggest advantages".
  
  That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources
  Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
  
  Yeahhhhh...
  
  An apartment complex went up outside my work and it's made of wood. That's against fire safety code but they found some creative work arounds to convince the inspectors it was legal. (And of course the inspections are all toadies who have been put in place to rubber stamp developer plans.) Very efficient until it burns down and kills everyone inside.
  
  So it doesn't actually meet minimum standards?
  
  It meets the law but it sure as hell doesn't meet the safety.
  
  Laws usually follow industry standard safety guidelines.
  
  That’s naïve
  
  That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources.
  No, it's not capitalism, this is definition of economy itself. Which by the way includes communism.
  
  Por que no los dos?
  It's something capitalists claim. Communism claims to distribute things equitably and they have to fight over efficiency. Capitalism is the opposite.
  
  Communism claims to distribute things equitably
  No, communism claims to distribute things fair.
  they have to fight over efficiency.
  Same does any other economic system, but define efficiency differently.
  
  Fair on both counts.
  
  Tons of large buildings are older than you'd think. Hell, a lot of large buildings don't even get serious structural inspections until they're 40+ years old!
  It was one of many contributing factors to the Champlain Towers South building collapsing in the US in Florida. No communism or Soviet corner cutting. Just good ol' fashioned American ineptitude. That building was undergoing some work so they could raise prices. It wasn't a low class building nor did many people think it was too old to invest in.
  What OP said is extremely likely to be true: Those buildings are competative.
  
  It's less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It's not like people didn't know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
  
  We have absolutely made strides in material technologies for construction over the last 50 years. Take asbestos for example.
  
  Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.
  As a building material? What's even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?
  
  Not just that but internal insulation and fireguarding has come a long way.
  
  yes they are, they outperform american's cardboard house

370 comments