Yes, ditto. Having seen the tragedy of "urban renewal" in my city (Hamilton Ontario), where solid buildings with good bones were torn down and replaced with strip malls and bad 80s brutalism and parking lots, I can't help but think that Moscow is following our mistakes.

> In fact, these buildings look nicer than many apartment buildings I have lived in in the northeast US.

Absolutely and strongly concur. USian housing is a complete shitshow, between the government's disinvestment from any sort of public/social housing and the existence of zoning laws (and other land use restrictions) that make any sort of high-density housing extremely difficult to build.

For many people in US (especially those who are poor or elderly or disabled or working-class) a unit in one of those "khruschevka" would alas be an upgrade.

Actually, only Stalin's era buildings are comfortable for living. https://cdn.cian.site/3/194/601/peredelkino-blizhnee-moskva-... This is ordinary new buildings in Moscow. No trees, no sun, everywhere wrong parked cars, and so on. It's like living in hell, but on earth.

Salvageable: Build more buildings in the middle with dense ground floor retail, and replace the cars and parking lots with parks, trams, woonerfs.

Biggest mistake to me looks like that there should have been fewer, shorter buildings, closer together to achieve roughly the same overall density but without all the for-cars space and weird not-parks. And yeah, ground-level retail, which would be more feasible without all that space between them.

Probably built in an area where you have to commute by car, though, so eliminating or reducing the car-owned space to make it more walkable, attractive, and human-friendly is likely not feasible. Which means you'll also have to drive to shop, and, and, and... further driving things apart with more parking, driving surface, and buffers for cars, and removing all other options as they become impossible (walking, biking) or impractically slow/expensive (buses, trains) due to low density. Same disease most of the US has.

Kinda looks like hotel/condo developments along the US East and Gulf coasts, actually.

Agreed. A big problem is the canyoning effect that happens when buildings rise above 5-6 stories. The scale just becomes way off for humans to feel comfortable and to walk.

Have you been to Tokyo? I was walking through it and in one neighborhood thought "These buildings are very short. I'll count the stories". There were 9 stories. The problem with high buildings isn't their height, but the absurd amount of space Western city planners put around them. It's a residential block, not an obelisk - it doesn't need a ginormous lawn around it.

I have; though admittedly it was 3 years ago, and I stayed with a friend in a more residential part of the city (2-3 story buildings).

A large reason why planners leave open spaces around tall buildings are for environmental reasons like shadow impact, and wind tunneling. Without the open space, the canyoning effect would be much worse--look at most financial district areas. So the taller the building, the more open space required.

If you've been to Berlin, I think their altbaus strike a fine balance between housing a lot of people while still maintaining good street life. The flip-side is that Berlin's streets are generally wider than most other cities.

Can you point out one of the buildings pictured in the article that's better than many of the places you lived in the northeast? There are four photos, one of which is demolished, another one which only shows a view out of a balcony, and one which only shows the outside view of many buildings.

I was thinking the same. These look better than the sad buildings across NYC from the same era.