They might have fixed the cost issues to an extent during the Soviet Union, but that is about it.
Everything they list applies and more. They are generally small, 90m^2 is generally the biggest sizes, with some exceptions, they have nearly no parking space because when they were built, parking was not a huge consideration. There is very little yard space usually, not really anywhere decent for kids to play unless the building or community have forked up for it (spoiler, they favor parking spaces). The walls are in fact fairly thin, the floors are often creaky as hell.
Plumbing is old, metallic and corroded / clogged. Water pressures up top are abysmal. Don’t even get me started on electrical, the people who built them did not give a hoot unless the building was meant for more than common workers. You can literally hit a live wire in the middle of the wall while hanging a painting, because, again, the people building it didn’t give a hoot and often layed wires using the shortest path not rational right angles.
Many of these houses are in a subpar state. Like okay, they wont probably crumble, but heat insulation is near non-existant, leading to high heating costs. The elevators are tiny, many of them smell like piss, accessibility for disabled people was never considered, nor was access in general - moving in large furniture, or bringing down people on stretchers (EMS) is often a PITA.
And all of this leads to a huge issue they didn’t explicitly outline - getting shit done for your building, is often impossible. One such building I lived it had a resident who was pushing for a full renovation, he had surveyed other houses that have done this across the city, did the math and presented how doing this would lead us to pay less overall, even with the loan considered, than before, with higher property value and a nicer property to boot. Some 60% refused to even take it as far as getting an actualy consultant involved.
![[meme] How would you rather see this land developed?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f6ec67a5-2636-4875-8dd4-fa5241a3083c.jpeg){kind=link}
£900 a month to rent actually - definitely not as bad as $2000 a month!
About £300,000 if I wanted to buy sadly.
FWIW a lot of your problems with apartments were fixed in the Soviet Union lol
This made me stop and do a double take.
Have you lived in one?
They might have fixed the cost issues to an extent during the Soviet Union, but that is about it.
Everything they list applies and more. They are generally small, 90m^2 is generally the biggest sizes, with some exceptions, they have nearly no parking space because when they were built, parking was not a huge consideration. There is very little yard space usually, not really anywhere decent for kids to play unless the building or community have forked up for it (spoiler, they favor parking spaces). The walls are in fact fairly thin, the floors are often creaky as hell.
Plumbing is old, metallic and corroded / clogged. Water pressures up top are abysmal. Don’t even get me started on electrical, the people who built them did not give a hoot unless the building was meant for more than common workers. You can literally hit a live wire in the middle of the wall while hanging a painting, because, again, the people building it didn’t give a hoot and often layed wires using the shortest path not rational right angles.
Many of these houses are in a subpar state. Like okay, they wont probably crumble, but heat insulation is near non-existant, leading to high heating costs. The elevators are tiny, many of them smell like piss, accessibility for disabled people was never considered, nor was access in general - moving in large furniture, or bringing down people on stretchers (EMS) is often a PITA.
And all of this leads to a huge issue they didn’t explicitly outline - getting shit done for your building, is often impossible. One such building I lived it had a resident who was pushing for a full renovation, he had surveyed other houses that have done this across the city, did the math and presented how doing this would lead us to pay less overall, even with the loan considered, than before, with higher property value and a nicer property to boot. Some 60% refused to even take it as far as getting an actualy consultant involved.