this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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On the one hand, I guess it's a more efficient packing of people into urban areas than having large green spaces. On the other hand, it's fucking depressing, and I think kids miss something in childhood without psuedo wild spaces to go explore alone.
Actually maintained soviet apartment blocs aren't nearly as depressing as the ones taken in winter, that haven't been maintained properly since the dissolution of socialism:
These apartments provided housing for people that lived largely in shacks, where smoke from heating caused early deaths:
Soviet city planning made things walkable, with schools, playgrounds, and greenery within walking distance from nearly every apartment.
To be clear, I think the homes being made fun of in the original picture were supposed to be Western homes. They certainly look like many subdivisions in the US.
I haven't actually seen propaganda about Soviet housing. The pictures you posted just look like the poorer areas of any western city. We stayed in La Mina (on accident) when we visited Barcelona. Your pictures look better than La Mina!
I've seen you post the last one before, what's the source for it?
I believe I originally found it while looking for similar images. A good bit of info on housing I know came from Hakim's video on soviet housing. I'd love to have a primary source document to reference, such as a newspaper or book, but for images I usually grab them from internet searches.
It seems it might be "The People's dining room in the Nizhny Novgorod region" by Mikhail Dmitriev
Interesting! I'll have to check that out later, thanks comrade!
It's hard to find anything about it on the english internet, there's a bit more on the russian it seems, but it's harder to navigate it when you don't speak the language.
Yea that's entirely fair. One day for me, maybe, haha.
I grew up in a Soviet apartment bloc, and I did way more exploring outside than kids living in suburbia could ever hope to. For one, it was completely safe to let kids go out and play on their own. There were always green spaces and playgrounds between a few apartment buildings, and you'd go and play there.
Can confirm. We used to play till 10PM (cause we had to wake up early for school) around the apartment bloc and around the neighbourhood. In the pre-cellpone era parents would call their kids from their balconies to come home. At the height of organized crime that arose post-1989, people felt that safe about their kids playing unsupervised.
Yeah, it's kind of unthinkable today honestly. I don't know anybody who'd just let their kids out on their own, and you'd probably get charged with neglect if you did.
A friend got in trouble for letting her kids play IN HER SUBURBAN BACKYARD without her watching them. A neighbour called the authorities.
Kids are basically treated like pets nowadays.
If you're talking about the OP image, it's actually inefficient as fuck. The houses depicted there house the same number of people as one or maybe two apartment blocks. And those apartment blocks can then have a bunch of greenery between them.
And the space can be more walkable, with grocery stores, schools, clinics, and more nearby.
I think you just need well-placed parks in the urban areas. I think it's worth asking ourselves why we don't really hear people bemoan the upbringing and experiences of kids from really urban cities like NYC or Tokyo. But when it comes to Soviet apartment blocs, this becomes a real concern. I think it's a double-standard that's been propagandized onto us.
Notice the multiple "I thinks" -- it's not like I'm out here doing surveys on the topic. This is just how it seems to me.
I don't know about Tokyo or what the options really are for raising kids in Japan. But I think (I'll join you here with spewing opinion/ conjecture everywhere) in the US a lot of people intentionally leave cities once they decide to have kids. When you are a young professional in your 20s, it's still very popular to live in dense urban centers, but then as you get married and start having kids, the vast majority of people move out to the suburbs or more rural areas. Now, obviously this is a privileged class of people, and maybe there are different trends in socioeconomic classes above and below them. And perhaps they move out of the city for other reasons (the price of housing, the quality of schools, etc), but I think access to nature also plays a part. But I say this as a girl scout troop leader, so I'm definitely biased.