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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school.

Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.

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I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.

See Japan also, the mamachari....

Soviet-style micro-districs aren't that great. Its just modernist ideas done cheaply.

Soviet-style certainly is better then US style suberbia but its not actually good compared to real urbanism.

What you actually want is not a bunch of identical blocks spaced far apart. You want proper streets with connected blocks with commercial in the lower floors to frame a real urban feeling. That has many advantages. You can still provide real public parks and open spaces in such a structure (see Oslo for example).

There is a reason tons of tourist go to places that are beautiful urbanism and almost nobody goes even to the best Soviet microdistrics to look at them. And nicer building wouldn't change that.

> Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.

And yet somehow the capitalist west has built amazing cities and towns for 100s of years.

And places like the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark are very much on the forefront of modern example of these things.

> soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option.

Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang.

Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments.

In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects".

To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.

Y'all do understand that people move to the suburbs voluntarily, right? That they aren't forced to move there at gunpoint or something like that?

Have you ever considered that your "collective anthill" housing ideas might actually, you know, suck ass?

And that the basic idea has wound up sucking ass every single time it's been put into practice?

Whether it's called "The Projects" or "Housing Estates" or "Collective Worker Housing Blocks", it just plain sucks,

Essentially no one (very likely not even you, if it came down to it) would, or ever has, moved into one of these human zoos voluntarily.

Dude. A huge percentage of the US is ZONED for single family homes. If those are SOOO attractive, why don't they remove that zoning and let competition win out?

There's SOOO much legislation in the US that freezes everything in place (when zoning doesn't cut it they just add 100 rules like minimum parking and achieve the same thing) and then someone like you points to the result and says: "see, everyone wants it".

The US basically has 2 types of housing, overwhelmingly: single family homes and residential skyscrapers. The stuff in the middle is low digit percentages.

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