I bought mine in 2011 for $37k (single room apartment with kitchen and bathroom/shower, interior freshly renovated). Exterior renovated in 2020 (free, mix of utilities and eurofonds). In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. When I search similar apartments now they cost $90k. Tax/trash/utilities are $150/month. Everything is walking distance away.
Oh that's not how commie blocks and heating work. You can't turn the radiators on and off in a classic commieblocks. There is no valve, there is no anything -- your only regulator is a window. The local government picks a day in a calendar once in 5 years when the turning on and off happens. People who talks about efficiency, insulation and all that have no idea.
I have lived in several commie block apartments over the 30 some years I lived in Romania, and in every single one every radiator had a manual valve I could use to regulate temperature.
Yes, but those valves were rusted stuck open all the time and nobody could change them unless they emptied the whole water circuit, which never happend. And the whole installation was so full of rust, any new valve would only last a year at most until it got stuck again.
It's true that the municipal heating services turn the heat on but there are definitely dials you can turn - I lived in four different commie blocks and in every one the radiators had dials. Nowadays they even have wireless sensors to bill you for the heat you actually used and of course enforce the requirement to have them on most of the time so as to not become a heat sink.
They've proven particularly useful when due to a mistake in reading the apartment plan the workers installed the radiator meant for the living room in my room.
This sounds like a difference between ussr proper and the more broader “eastern block”, as I haven’t seen a single dial on those things in a whole country. The fact you even meter those per-apartment makes me believe even more.
The further western you go from the epicenter of this shitshow, the more amenities those things get
That might be it, as the mentioned commie blocks I lived in are all in Poland.
I don't know if the dials were there during communism as well, but I remember noticing that the radiator in my school did not have one (save for a hex key valve) and thinking it was unusual, so they were already common in the mid 90s.
I actually find brutalist architecture charming, and not sure why the BBC opted to use such overloaded language such as "~ apartment blocks that DOMINATE Eastern Europe" lol relax.
I dislike that the conversation around apartment tends to be centred around form instead of function. Does it have better insulation, ventilation and sound proofing? That's all that matters.
Form gets so much attention because the public conversation around housing is dominated by older and more wealthy NIMBYs who don't have to live in apartments, so their only consideration is how they look as they drive past them on their way to work.
I wouldn't say you must agree with a statement like "the purpose of life is to foster beauty" but it is the life philosophy for quite a lot of people. That is to say, beauty, or creating the possibility of beauty, is the greatest value - more important than justice or easing pain, perhaps. Many otherwise inexplicable and often self-destructive behaviours, can only be understood in that light.
This is such a strange mode of thinking, one I don't subscribe to (I'm usually quite painfully utilitarian) that I struggle to understand it. But I suspect that just tells me I'm not quite "grokking it", and it's not that their values are just decadent and bourgeois. Though I will admit, this tendency does seem to show up strongest among the decadent bourgeois.
You are exactly right. And this thinking becomes dangerous if the same people who prefer form over function start ranking which form are "objectively" the best. I will have to go political here, sorry, you shouldn't read it if it makes you unhappy.
Aesthetics over matter, form over function is one of a well-know defining trait of fascism. Not the only one, but one of the main one. It create a hierarchical order, a new one, amongst structure, amongst objects, to enhance the society hierarchical order. Somehow, Fascism, despite sometime using "egalitarian" politics at first (i will note that those policies aren't really egalitarian, but meritocratic at first, even if in most historical cases this meant the same), manage to create the ultimate hierarchical society.
"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life". ("Work of Art", W. Benjamin).
It's why Fascism is called "far-right". And it's why, dear friends from AF and other royalists, fascists _are_ more far-right than you, ultimately (sorry).
(i'm taking the standard definition of left and right here: left is a push toward egalitarianism, right is a push towards hierarchical society, whether it is economic, politic or other reasons that makes that hierarchy. Nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism or any -ism, so USians and the rest of the world can agree).
You can't appreciate beauty if your room has no sunlight, the highway noises wake you up, the trapped VOCs from cooking give you respiratory illness and the lack of insulation inflates your power bill eating into what little of your paycheck you have left for groceries.
It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision.
I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.
Which is, no doubt, is the reason why brutalism was invented in post-WW2 Great Britain. The Soviets kept building in "socialist classicism" style around that time; those apartment blocks from the article were Khrushev's invention, after the guy condemned the "architectural excesses" and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture.
I lived in one for more than 20 years and no, oh god no, they don't. If anything, I actually like the way it looks from the outside (now that I don't have to live there), at least in summer, at least in the memories of the summer in a country I can't even visit now. Maybe not even the building itself, but the surounding area. For me it has some weird charm, it's a unique, one in a kind commie block that I can tell from other commieblocks of the same series.
It's not the form that sucks (they don't have any), it's the build quality, the amount of indoor space -- everything is min-maxed to the limit and then still underdelivered even against soviet-grade cheapness (two bedroom, 55 sqm for a family with five kids on a peak of soviet glory).
And they also look bad on photos and in winter, when the greenery is gone and all you see is gray aged concrete, but hej, everything there looks depressing in winter to me.
These blocks are often huge and you feel like an ant standing next to them. I don't think that the word dominate is misplaced. They have a weight to them that most older residential buildings (pre-1950) simply don't.
Do skyscrapers dominate American cities? Well, yes, regardless of whether you like them or no.
Because it's in their best interests to demonize whatever came out of a non-capitalist system, which people could naturally gravitate towards in a time when homelessness is at an all-time high and a home ownership rate at an all-time low.
You can still have the housing shortage without even the concept of home ownership. If anything, soviet union was constantly in a state of housing shortage. If you take by square meter per person and compare it to the current state of affairs in affluent places that complain about things, you will realize how bad it was.
I broadly agree that the BBC has a vested interest in demonizing non-capitalist systems, but home ownership rates haven't deviated terribly much for the past half-century.
Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin. They are great and pretty cost-efficent. I'm glad there's a movement to renovate them.
The title is misleading as the article primarily focuses on Bulgaria. In contrast, Poland began re-insulating old blocks en masse about 20 years ago, especially in all the larger cities.
Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades.
There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built).
For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process.
Well, the last one (hopefully) I was living in and moved from in 2015, was built in 1971 and it's "district cooperative" was mostly unchanged from that time (starting from technical employees, through administrative ones and ending on "executives") and basically was there to just rubber stamp any inspection. It's not like the building was collapsing of course. It had full 10-floors of tenants. But if going by the actual inspection book - it shouldn't.
Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!)
and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved.
One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city
So the real questions then are -- did you have a nest of hobos in the basement or was it colonized by cats? Did the cats lobby you to put huge metal doors with a chain to tip the balance in the war? Were you scared shitless from the look of the basement door before they did?
Oh yeah, all of those. Plus shitload of trash, of all kind, including old engine oil, that fisherman guy's rotten meat on which he grows he's bait, empty bottles (the ones which are non-refundable at the liquor shop)... at some point even I contributed to pushing trash and fire hazard there.
Mentioned above "district cooperative" flatly refused to remove an old asbestos roof from over the balcony and professional removals don't deal with 1x1m asbestos roofing. I removed it myself, standing on a chair on 10th floor balcony with an old grinder as it was permanently attached to the building through the metal frame, because of course it was.
I pushed it into the same basement as no one was interested in picking it up, no matter petitions, asking nicely, asking not so nicely, making threats or wanting to pay.
All these places with super high housing prices because of supply issues? Maybe we need more, not less. Why wait for high quality housing, when we need something to alleviate pressure now. At least give people the option to be function over form and save a buck.
I mean, plain boiling water with Oats is a meal I eat a lot, but just because it's pretty tasteless, doesn't mean it's not an effective solution to hunger.
That is exactly the approach the Soviets took when they built these in the first place. They might get a bad rep these days, but commieblocks lifted out millions and millions of people from much worse circumstances.
Thanks to the internet it's relatively easy to see what the alternative housing stock was; I too would have chosen cheap & cheerful, especially in a country where heating systems matter (the stove was often the show off piece of a Russian peasant's house).
You sadly miss the larger picture here. Why would soviets suddenly have a housing crisis that required shit-quality housing? Why don't we have commie-blocks district in Amsterdam?
Worse circumstances were -- living in villages in their own houses, but that was against communist things. People had to live in public housing in a city and work in a factory, be mobile and be shuffled around whatever number of timezones and thousands of kilometers -- that was the whole point of ideology and was needed for industrialization too.
Ummm. Because of WW2 and the Nazis waging a war of extermination on the Soviet population?
Many cities were completely reduced to rubble, as were any villages that got in their way. Amsterdam still has their pretty Dutch Golden Age buildings because the war played out very differently there.
That's not it. My hometown, which has slightly more population than Amsterdam, didn't suffer any damage to historical core during WW2 (so we have our pretty theater and low-key fancy 19th century houses), yet grew a massive multi-tier commie-block suburbs and incorporated surrounding villages with their owner-occupied single-story houses. In between those suburbs.
Soviets squeezed people into the cities and then gave them bare minimum housing there, yet people seem to prize them for it, while diverting all the resources from villages.
I started appreciating the design and build quality of commie blocks only after living in "the West" for a while.
The prevalence of poor quality, cramped (and very expensive) housing in many of Europe's wealthiest cities is really disregarded, I think.
Yes, I come from a commie block in Bulgaria and was rather taken aback when I moved to London as a fresh adult and the houses I lived in there had so many more issues, such worse insulation etc.
> But as the blocks age and become inadequate in terms of energy efficiency, there's the question of what to do with them – demolish or retrofit?
Huh? Once you fit in new windows and insulation in the form of a thick layer of styrofoam, commie blocks are already very efficient.
I grew up in one and we would maintain 22-24°C during the winter because the combination of insulation and district heating allowed for that at a low price.
The price of district heating may not reflect the actual efficiency of insulation zo.
Classic commie-block walls are 30-40 cm of bare (reinforced) concrete. The windows as they were put there are double glass in a wooden frame, which you have to glue over with a paper in winter. Sure, replacing windows and slappign styrofoam on a facade helps, but beating that doesn't seem to be hard when building now.
Funny thing is that this style came from Eastern Europe. Early soviet architecture was heavily slanted towards classic themes, as per Stalin personal tastes. Only after Stalin died that brutalism and modernist themes became prevalent in the soviet system.
Just to clarify: Folks buy them in the US as well, much like you are likely to be able to rent an entire house with a yard. You'd miss this if you, say, lived in small-to-medium sized housing in the US simply because there isn't a lack of land in cities surrounded by farmland. But if you go to Indianapolis and especially Chicago, you can own an apartment. Of course, they might not call it an apartment, row house, or whatever - it might be called a condo instead.
I think it's more a question of authoritarianism rather than "Communism". If the state (or a corp) can take away anything you have without reason, then it's really hard to plan for the future. In some places all land is considered state land and you can only lease it, in other places the politics are so fluid your property could be handed out to an oligarch in good with the regime. Both of them have major discontinuities that disrupt decision making.
Anecdotal data from Poland : mostly, yes, they are owned by people living in them, or by people renting them (people having small amount of apartments that they are renting). Mind you - in post-communist countries, in cities houses are not as popular as apartments, as we do not have USA-style suburbs.
There is issue on the housing (apartment?) market, but it has nothing to do with communism, mostly with capitalism - big funds are buying apartments en masse (mostly new ones) and a lot of people started buying previously cheap apartments and renting them, causing prices to skyrocket in the last years.
