I bought mine in 2011 for $37k (single room apartment with kitchen and bathroom/shower, interior freshly renovated). Exterior renovated in 2020 (free, mix of utilities and eurofonds). In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. When I search similar apartments now they cost $90k. Tax/trash/utilities are $150/month. Everything is walking distance away.
I actually find brutalist architecture charming, and not sure why the BBC opted to use such overloaded language such as "~ apartment blocks that DOMINATE Eastern Europe" lol relax.
Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin. They are great and pretty cost-efficent. I'm glad there's a movement to renovate them.
The title is misleading as the article primarily focuses on Bulgaria. In contrast, Poland began re-insulating old blocks en masse about 20 years ago, especially in all the larger cities.<p>Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades.<p>There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built).<p>For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8</a>
All these places with super high housing prices because of supply issues? Maybe we need more, not less. Why wait for high quality housing, when we need something to alleviate pressure now. At least give people the option to be function over form and save a buck.<p>I mean, plain boiling water with Oats is a meal I eat a lot, but just because it's pretty tasteless, doesn't mean it's not an effective solution to hunger.
I started appreciating the design and build quality of commie blocks only after living in "the West" for a while.
The prevalence of poor quality, cramped (and very expensive) housing in many of Europe's wealthiest cities is really disregarded, I think.
> But as the blocks age and become inadequate in terms of energy efficiency, there's the question of what to do with them – demolish or retrofit?<p>Huh? Once you fit in new windows and insulation in the form of a thick layer of styrofoam, commie blocks are already very efficient.<p>I grew up in one and we would maintain 22-24°C during the winter because the combination of insulation and district heating allowed for that at a low price.
Funny thing is that this style came from Eastern Europe. Early soviet architecture was heavily slanted towards classic themes, as per Stalin personal tastes. Only after Stalin died that brutalism and modernist themes became prevalent in the soviet system.