I have written about Khrushchyovkabefore.

Those were the concrete pre-fab apartment complexes built in the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s.  They were poorly constructed with minimal amenities.

That’s me being nice.  They were communist shit holes built by a nation that did not care about its people.

I found another video by a Russian living in a Khrushchyovka, and you can see just how low the quality of life is in one.  (The previous post contains other videos from inside Khrushchyovkas)

So why do I bring this up?

This will be the future of housing if the Progressives get their way.

First, from Virginia:

Virginia latest place to make single family zoning ban a political fight

A proposed plan in Virginia to allow extra housing units on single-family lots has become the latest example of local zoning igniting partisan debate, underscoring how housing laws are becoming a bigger and bigger political issue in the midst of the nation’s affordable housing crisis.

The Virginia proposal would not, as critics claim, make single-family homes illegal or mandate any particular type of construction. It would deregulate housing rules and allow property owners to build duplexes in areas where they currently aren’t allowed, a move Samirah and his supporters believe will increase density in a state suffering from the nation’s affordable housing crisis.

Virginia is not the first location to do it.

Minneapolis, Minnesota did this too, with a very telling headline from Politico:

How Minneapolis Freed Itself From the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes

Oh no, the stranglhold of single-family homes.

Thanks in part to activists like Flisrand and Edwards, Minneapolis just did away with the rules that gave single-family homes a stranglehold on nearly three-quarters of the city. In December, Neighbors for More Neighbors, the group co-founded by Flisrand and Edwards about two years ago to address Minneapolis’ affordable housing crisis, won a victory unseen in any other major American city. The city council approved the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan, which declares the city’s intent to abolish single-family-home zoning and allow duplexes and triplexes to be built anywhere in the city.

Oregon has also jumped on the no-single-family-zoning ban.

Oregon Legislature Votes To Essentially Ban Single-Family Zoning

Oregon is on its way to making a significant change in what housing is allowed to be built in the state.

The state’s House and Senate have now both passed a measure that requires cities with more than 10,000 people to allow duplexes in areas zoned for single-family homes. In the Portland metro area it goes a step further, requiring cities and counties to allow the building of housing such as quadplexes and “cottage clusters” of homes around a common yard.

Now, let’s shift gears over to The Nation:

California’s Fires Prove the American Dream Is Flammable
If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership.

But few are discussing one key aspect of California’s crisis: Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property. Cities and towns have expanded in increasingly disperse fashion, fueled by cheap energy. Infrastructure has been built, deregulated, and privatized, extending services in more and more tenuous and fragile ways. Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it’s hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk.

Cheap energy—both the monetary price of subsidized gasoline and the hidden costs of fossil fuels—and the idealization of individual homeownership have created the scorching landscapes we face today. Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned.

There are other options, in theory: Rental housing serves many cities around the world well, although we should be wary about perpetuating the power of landlords in this country without delinking ownership from wealth creation. There has been resurgent interest in government-planned and -built public housing, including recent legislation proposed by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders that would shore up and invigorate the federal system. The Green New Deal invokes prior eras of government intervention, lending itself to revitalized thinking about the social value of public goods.

Lastly, there is this Tweet from Progressive darling, Ilhan Omar:

The Green #HomesGuarantee ⬇️⬇️

✅ 12 million units of no-carbon social housing in 10 years

✅ Protection from gentrification, displacement & destabilized neighborhoods

✅ Integrated with public transit and vehicle alternatives

✅ Wraparound services pic.twitter.com/lrsXoIvL2W

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) December 12, 2019

As an engineer, I have no idea how to build “no-carbon” housing.

“Social housing” sounds like the Soviet Kommunalki program in which 16 families shared a single apartment.

“Protection from gentrification” sounds like letting neighborhoods turn to slums.  No community has ever stayed stagnant.  Either new money and new investment comes in or it goes out.  If new money and new investment is prohibited from entering a community it will fall to ruin and turn into a slum.  That is guaranteed.

Putting this all together, what do we see.

The Left thinks of housing as a zero-sum game.  They don’t want to expand the suburbs and let people buy homes.  That is bad for the environment and promotes inequity.

They want people packed chock-a-block in high-density urban areas.   That requires doing away with single-family homes and the American dream.  Instead, people have to live in apartments and multiple-family housing units.

They also want to expand public housing.

People do not take care of what they own.  This is the Tragedy of the Commons.

Eventually all of these places will turn to shit.  This is the history of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project.

Eventually, this will result in doing what the Soviets did when they forced people to live in high density living in planned urban areas, the building of Khrushchyovka.

There is just too much evidence that this is the direction the Left is going with housing to ignore it.