Opinions vary for those who were exposed to privileged side only. In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an apartment.
On top of that, many people were stuck in Kolchoz without any prospect of moving to a city. Thus were was no pressure to the system. If a city can't take in people - they're not sent in..
> Opinions vary for those who were exposed to privileged side only.
That's completely opposite to my experience in the GDR. Neither my aunt nor my grandparents had to wait "decades" to move into their Plattenbau apartments and I can assure you neither of them had been on the "privileged side", their Stasi files make that pretty clear.
For my grandparents it was a giant step up in terms of living conditions, previously they lived in an old house that didn't even have running water in the toilets.
In contrast to that, the Plattenbau apartments had very modern design and interiors, they are still living there happily to this day.
The starting comment in the thread explicitly mentions "Soviet". I cannot say much about GDR, but as for USSR, Mantas is right. Soviets controlled 100% of employment options, and restricted movements of citizens - and that was their approach to urban planning. Which in the end didn't work well anyway, as my parents waited for an apartment for more then 20 years, and finally USSR collapsed before it happened :-) By the way, I guess GDR was not that different in the idea, it's just that lesser territory, and population made the approach less catastrophic.
Imho the GDR was just another extension of the Soviet Union, sovereign in theory only. Otherwise the "Iron Curtain" wouldn't have gone up where it did, splitting Germany in half.
Of course, the GDR also saw its fair share of cronyism with all of its injustices, like they exist everywhere, but the Plattenbauten are still held in high regard by many East-Germans.
Maybe the Soviet approach wasn't actually that catastrophic it just didn't scale that well when applied to the more populated and bigger eastern bloc states compared to the GDR? GDR wasn't that big, so not that much need to force people to move around.
To give you some idea, GDR was seen as almost totally west from USSR. Anything "made in GDR" was immediately seen as super high quality. Getting visa to visit GDR was next-to-west hard.
USSR had much worse conditions as a starting point. On top of that, it was an empire that had assimilation as one of it's goals as well as military targets to meet. Thus playing field for citizens was far from level. For example, even whole "strategic" cities were much nicer to live in that a regular cities. Better food, more exotic food options, better housing, more entertainment... You name it.
The whole approach of state-owned housing is not catastrophic. If you can build reasonably fast. USSR couldn't. After all, catastrophic productivity is what brought the red empire to it's knees. Why it was so bad is another topic though.
> In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an apartment.
I don't see how that's meaningfully different from current day USA.
In America, you have to save for decades to afford a down payment on the chance to potentially land an apartment. But, if you enlist in the military or move to bumfuck nowhere, you can bypass that problem. And if you are willing to start climbing the ladder at a well-connected company, they will pay you enough to afford an apartment right away.
Sure, we swapped "government" for "corporation". But to a regular person, it's a pretty similar situation.
> If a city can't take in people - they're not sent in.. On top of that, many people were stuck in Kolchoz without any prospect of moving to a city. Thus were was no pressure to the system
As opposed to today in the US, where if a city can't take in people, they get people anyway, and they huddle under an overpass or setup a tent camp in a park somewhere. Pressure in the system is only useful if people react to it, and in America no one reacts to that pressure in any useful way. (to the extreme that it became national headline news when Utah decided to actually try to build housing for people who needed it - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04...).
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I'm not arguing that the Soviet system was good. But American housing has become so bad that it's understandable that for some, Soviet housing is starting to look appealing in comparison.
> Pressure in the system is only useful if people react to it
Indeed. And in Soviet system, nobody reacted for decades.
The main difference is fairness of playing field. In USSR, you could try to bribe your way into good living. In capitalist system, you can work your way through. In USSR, there was much less regard for quality work. On top of that, even the well-connected&bribed 1% of USSR would barely live like US middle class. If not lower-middle. Meanwhile working yourself up to middle class is quite doable in capitalist system.
There were lots of things that were very bad about the eastern bloc. Freedom and rights, for a big example. As you say, people could not decide where they would live. I'm not comparing democracy to totalitarianism's merits on the moral front.
I was just comparing the average GDR house, to a modern one. It's not that different, and most people lived in an apartment then as they do now. Both are similar in quality & abundance to housing in West Germany, UK, etc.
Contrast this to manufactured goods. Eastern bloc residents couldn't get a car, and if they did it sucked. They couldn't get enough razors, toilet paper, car tyres. All the things that were abundant and cheap in the west, and are abundant and cheap in those countries now.
We can argue about the small/marginal differences in quality or abundance of housing under different systems. We can't argue about the massive quality & abundance differences for industrial goods.
This is why I'm quite leery of ideological "theory." From Marx to Rand, it all seems too grand to me. At the end of the day, these were economic policies and their successes and failures varied.
I'm not sure about GDR, but in Lithuania Soviet housing is piss-poor. Apartments are tiny and dark, planning is crappy, heat insulation is shitty (at least renovation can somewhat fix it).. And nobody did anything for decades - just kept building same standard apartments. And even if they were shitty, they weren't building nowhere near enough of them.
On top of that, a lot of people, even families with young kids, got "dorm" apartments with shared kitchens/bathrooms/etc.
So yes, housing quality between USSR and modern housing is quite big.
Opinions vary for those who were exposed to privileged side only. In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an apartment.
On top of that, many people were stuck in Kolchoz without any prospect of moving to a city. Thus were was no pressure to the system. If a city can't take in people - they're not sent in..