> London is now building so-called “co-housing” which sounds like it should be for retirees but is for the working young who have been priced out of even renting (let alone purchase) but IMO that is a shocking non-solution. It is forced barracks living–for people in their 20s and 30s (soon … 40s & 50s)–and seems very redolent of USSR communal apartments with shared kitchens etc. The common thing within the Anglosphere (and places that mimick it, like HK) is the abandonment of public housing for at least the last 35 years (since 1997 for HK), along with tax policies that promote unproductive property speculation.

I live in a former communist country, and as an urbanism-buff one of the projects I was thinking about in my head was to hunt down the remaining barrack-like buildings that are still extant (most of them have been built in the 1950s and the early 1960s as a temporary solution for a fast-growing urban population, very few actually still exist). Interesting to see that the "West" is resorting to the same ideas 50-60 years after we did.