That is exactly the approach the Soviets took when they built these in the first place. They might get a bad rep these days, but commieblocks lifted out millions and millions of people from much worse circumstances.
Worse circumstances were -- living in villages in their own houses, but that was against communist things. People had to live in public housing in a city and work in a factory, be mobile and be shuffled around whatever number of timezones and thousands of kilometers -- that was the whole point of ideology and was needed for industrialization too.
Life in a village sucked by design too.
Many cities were completely reduced to rubble, as were any villages that got in their way. Amsterdam still has their pretty Dutch Golden Age buildings because the war played out very differently there.
Soviets squeezed people into the cities and then gave them bare minimum housing there, yet people seem to prize them for it, while diverting all the resources from villages.