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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

Um, most Soviet-era apartment buildings in Russia are setup like this. Many isolated bedrooms sharing a shower-room/bathroom and a kitchen.

I have to give it to VC's in the Bay Area. If anybody can take Soviet-style housing arrangements and sell them as "the next big thing", it's these guys.

I mean, it's terrible. But it is impressive.

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So the soviets were short on industrial building/transportation resources and had plenty of space versus the san franciscoans who are 'short' on space and have plenty of industrial resources. the soviet constraint was about as or maybe less centrally imposed as the san francisco constraint...

I think Soviet functioneers understood that when everybody earns more or less the same tiny salary, they needed to create some other stimulus to control masses.

Although USSR had a lot of free space to build, I think new apartments made artificially scarce, especially with the start of the industrialization, when many people migrated from a villages to a cities.

People had to work many years at the same workplace in order to advance in a queue for a new private apartment.

I live in Poland, was born in 91 (pretty much right after the soviets fucked off), but my family grew up in those times. I think you don't realise just how ineffective and broken the system was. Housing shortage came from shortage of everything else, the workfoce didn't give two shits what they made (horror stories about freshly built budings needing an overhaul, etc

> I mean, it's terrible. But it is impressive.

... Terribly {im|op}pressive?

Only because it's Soviet-style doesn't mean it's bad.

It's not seen as a boon or benefit there. It's how you live when you have no money.

Having lived in one, I don't recommend it.

The dorms are a partial solution, not the problem.

Urban living means sense living. The best bet is to go for comfortable dense living.

You can have dense apartments with your own bathroom.

I guess this is all a bit of a broken record but Tokyo has all the same potential problems as SF (Namely earthquakes), yet somehow has no housing shortage despite being denser. It's all a manmade issue.

Accepting this is acting as if there's no reasonable solution of just building normal apartments on more land. But of course that runs into social barriers.

Not even Soviet-era - this is Stalin-era stuff. Khrushchyovkas had private bathrooms and kitchens.

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