If you ever roamed around Russia on Google earth, you probably saw that in almost every city there are 2 distinct types of neighborhoods:
The “commie blocks” where a majority of people live, usually nothing too fancy, just buildings, wide streets with roads that are in good shape, most shops are here and so on.
and…
Rundown neighborhoods with houses, with streets that in many cases don’t even have asphalt, but instead just gravel roads. Tall grass and bushes everywhere and just a total mess. Somewhat mind boggling, but you can often see modern (year 2005+) cars, sometimes even 2 of them, parked in front of a house that looks like it’s about to collapse.
So why is this? You can go to a city as big as Izhevsk or a random small village and you’ll always see these 2 specific categories in almost every city, town or village, a good medium/high residential zone and totally rundown low residential zone.
I think it has something to do with poor people for some reason not being able to get apartments during the USSR times, so they were basically let on their own in their neighborhoods with houses, while the state developed the more urban zones with buildings and that’s why mostly only poor people live in houses in Russia.
At the same time, if you go to any place in Poland, Romania, Hungary, ex Yugoslavia, countries that all had communism as well, you’ll see normal neighborhoods with houses that are well kept, you’ll very rarely stumble upon a street that has no asphalt, houses are in a good condition and it’s a totally different picture, most people don’t even live in buildings like they do in ex-ussr.
I just looked at Russia a little bit in Google Earth and I agree, the suburbs seem very run-down. Also, I was absolutely astonished at how much of Russia appears to be nearly-undeveloped wilderness. The “Komi Republic”, “Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug”, and “Tomsk” regions look almost totally desolate.
Some wild guesses.
Russia is in the interesting position of transiting from a full socialist country to a more capitalist one. It’s finances are actually very good. But it is still in the early stages of the transition.
There is a lot of unemployment due to subsidized business shutting down. Housing was subsidized as well. Pensions and such were guaranteed. They seem to be trying to uphold the older socialist social contracts made to the older population. So a lot of the homes in the suburbs may be held by elders. They are probably also housing younger relatives. Russian millenials are having a much harder time than ones in other western countries.
Those neighborhoods were likely always minimally maintained by the state. The citizens doing a lot more to upkeep. But now they are elderly. Their younger relatives not so inclined to do it.
It is an interesting transition to watch. There was a terrible bout of looting of wealth and economic activity in the early stages. But it seems to be turning around quite well.
Compare Russian national debt to others. I believe it is currently zero or close to it. Economic growth is doing well.
I imagine that as the elders die off, and economic growth continues to increase. The state and the new generation will work out a tax system that will bring suburban ares up a fair amount. Or. They may become more urban. As the state would not lose much from the loss of suburban evacuation. And millenials would be less inclined to keep living there. In a way, Russia has the opportunity to more dynamically move to a newer urban based population. Without as much loss as western countries might feel.
Russia still also has a strong system to support their rural population. So farming and other resource based economics will thrive.
I think that the West is most fearful of the fact that Russia is ready to thrive, with no debt. While most Western countries are fearful of how they will have to retrench their own economies.
Western Russian cities were destroyed during the Great Patriotic War. Post war they built lots of high rises, to be able to House lots of people cheaply and quickly. Once the population is there, goods and services start concentrating there. After a while populations don’t move away from the city center, since well goods and services are concentrate there.
The nations that were formerly under the Soviets that subsequently joined the EU have had the benefit of grants to bring the infrastructure up to date. Roads, railways, electricity, water, gas, housing - all the essentials to bring them up to a common standard.
The Russian economy after Soviet times became dominated by Oil and Gas. This distorts the economy, ruining other sectors and concentrates the wealth in the hands of an elite. The curse of Oil is neglect.
I am sure there are some nice suburbs where the rich folk live with shiny new cars and bling. :dubious:
Very little about this is true. Russia made the transition from full socialism in the early 90s. Since then their economy is very tied to the price of oil. From 2015-2016 there was a horrible recession and the 2017 recovery has been anemic. They have very little government debt, but that does them very little good. By western standards Russia is very poor and the nature of an extraction economy is that the owners of the mines and oil fields get most of the money. The corrupt nature of the government means that much of the economic value flows to the capital and rural and suburban regions are neglected.
Status symbols such as cars are more valuable to poor people so you find more of them in poor areas then would be suggested by pure economic reasons.
This sounds like sarcasm or a joke but I swear (from personal experience) that’s it’s simply because it’s cheaper and easier to get a nice car than a nice house.
If you make enough for a nice car, but not enough for a nice house, what are you going to end up with? Not much of a mystery.
It’s one thing to have a decent house and a expensive car, but it’s a whole different thing to have a barely standing house and a expensive car, like what is often a case with these rundown neighborhoods.
Since I live in a not so rich country, Serbia, in a neighborhood, I can say from personal experience that people with limited money take a lot more care for their houses than cars, just do a street view through Serbia and other “non-ussr” east european countries and you’ll see that most cars on the street are made in period of 1995-2010 and most cost from 2k to 8k euros (about the same in dollars) , however the houses are usually in a good shape, you can often see a lot of trees in backyards, the grass is cut, there’s good thermal insulation, digital tv channels, fast internet, some people have swimming pools and so on, but cars…they’re usually meh, even though people can afford +10k usd cars, they just spend the money on houses first.
Thank you for sharing, though slightly off-topic. My ancestors came from somewhere in that area in 1917. You can tell from brown eyes. (somewhere along the present day border, although I am still researching it).
Actually the modern (affluent) suburb, is linked with the development of rail travel which allowed more affluent people to live on the quieter, less polluted outskirts of major cities and therefore unsurprisingly originates in the UK where powered rail transport originates. Similar developments in urban layout happened in parallel, but starting later in the USA.
I don’t know enough about Russia, but my WAG would be that it is linked to the historically to the mass transit system (or lack of it) in Russia.
Why would it be sarcasm? The brand new BMW which burned in the parking lot of the last apartment I had in Miami wasn’t insured… the owner “couldn’t afford the insurance”. My own car was brand new: slightly-old ones had actually been more expensive, thanks to going for last-year’s model in December. We lived in 400sq ft apartments.
I’m honestly surprised that you would not know that Russia has vast expanses of uninhabited land, much of which is pretty much UN-inhabitable. Think of Alaska (density 1.3/sq mi), only 10 times larger.
I don’t know if it applies to Russia or not, but in general, a country with a relatively high poverty rate and migration from rural to urban, the suburbs are always very poor compared to the central city. The concept of the suburbs being a more affluent part of a metro is pretty much an American phenomenon, as well as countries that can economically emulate the USA…
One additional aspect here is that rural to urban migration (and migration to the big metropolises in particular) was kept artificially low during the communist era. Sometimes through explicitly coercive measures like internal passports and sometimes through non coercive ones like subsidizing jobs in remote areas. I don’t know for sure but I’d guess a lot of these suburbs sprang up in the 1990s after the communist system was gone. Russia in the 1990s was in a state of severe contraction so I’d expect any suburbs which grew up at that time to look terrible.
Russia hasn’t ‘turned around well’ at all. If you want an example of a country that did the transition from communism to capitalism right, Poland or the former Czechoslovakia (in different ways) would be a much better choice. Russia has recovered from the economic collapse of the 1990s but that’s about the best you can possibly say for it.
