I also harbor no illusions how hard life was back then. I remember queues that lasted for hours just to get a decent piece of meat for dinner or some candy for the kids for Christmas. But with the passage of time and the experience of having lived in four different countries I can notice what the vision was and what they got right and what they got wrong.
Industrial pollution was pretty horrible too - watching snow going gray nearby any factory or coal plant (back then we used to have proper winters with tons of snow). Or when wind blew in bad direction from huge smelters in Katowitz in Poland, that created quite a few ecological catastrophes and highly acidic rains in our national parks.
Today, courses like that are very popular in Finnish schools. Every Finnish school has a serious workshop. Not only that, but when the school is over, plain citizens can come and use the workshop as they need.
Well, it is not a Warsaw perspective but most probably any city perspective (versus rural areas).
E.g. I grew up in a 50 thousand people city and lived on a new neighborhood with blocks of flats and the edge of the city.
I had: - small grocery store (10m away, it was next to my block of flats) - supermarket (150m away) - bus stop (150m away) - it was next to supermarket - pharmacy (130m away) - hairdresser (50m away) - nursery (600m away) - kindergarten (350m away) - primary school (650m away) - high school (1.5km away) - church (600m away) - they didn't plan that for sure :), not sure if westerners are aware but communist were against any religion - and a lot of green space between block of flats that was used as a playground or soccer fields by kids
And now the negatives: - nursery was overcrowded, my younger sister couldn't get in - supermarket/grocery didn't have a lot of stuff, e.g. coffee was sold 1 bag per person, when they got it finally. Meet was sold for cards ("na kartki") - each person was given a certain amount of cards per month to buy certain things that were in high demand (like meat, I don't remember what else, maybe sugar, butter).
Basically you had two currencies: ordinary money and the cards.
Source: grew up in the 80ties there
When I moved to Warsaw's Ursynów to study, the numbers are the same as well. Seriously :D
All of that was of course for greenfield neighbourhoods, though some work went into maintaining such standards in brownfield locations as well.
They were trying to fight it for a while, but catholicism in Poland was too strong so they formed a kind of cease fire. That's why they even let people build churches, do mass celebrations, pilgrimages etc.
And a lot of priests were secret informators of the security (communists searched for any material for blackmail and if they found something they forced them to become informators - common blackmail material was pedophilia and homosexualism (treated so because of social stigma) ).
I doubt any Pole who remembers communism and is on HN now would want it back. But the public transit, even in communism, was better than it is in modern day USA. So was urban planning.
Why not compare it to Western Europe? North America had a different evolutionary path. The prosperity that emerged post-WW2 enabled vast swaths of the population to own a car (leading to a cultural obsession with the car). That same population also wanted homeownership which lead to the creation of suburbs and their vast stretches of single-family homes (I don't think people realize how attractive this lifestyle was when compared to what came before it, or compared to what you had back home if you immigrated). Those kinds of things coupled with relatively young cities, lead to investment in roadways over public transit.
Those were not options under communism, and for much of Western Europe (though for somewhat different reasons). Eastern European populations had limited access to the car, road infrastructure was decrepit and the government was spending minimally on maintenance, and housing development was largely limited to ugly concrete, uninsulted high-rises with tiny apartments (which you had to wait for years to be allocated).
To me this kind of thinking sounds like saying the trains and Autobahn were better in the Third Reich, which is true, but completely ignoring the cost of that one benefit (built for war, paid by war and human right violations) as if it were isolated from the remaining clusterfuck of decisions of that time.
So that's why I call it "glorification". It's naive beyond belief and quite frankly it pisses Poles (who were victims of both Nazism AND communism) off when Westerners go "Oh, but it wasn't all bad..", and in the extreme form commonly heard as "That wasn't real socialism, real socialism gets other parts right, too.." (which is really hip and cool in western academia). The communists, Nazis, dictatorships, monarchies, etc. couldn't have had the "good" things without the "absolutely horrible" things.
One can't observe these things in isolation. And we have remainders of that still in the present. Many successful German companies like BMW are only so big and successful now because of e.g. Jewish slaves and theft. Westerners should be more proud of their countries and political form, and less jealous of quickly built airports in North Korea by dying workers and eco-friendliness of starving people.
All the untold misery that Western Europe went through over a couple of centuries happened in a couple of decades instead. They tried to force the process and progress.
In the end, political pressure from outside and corruption from inside brought it down.
But I think you overstate how good it was because you look from the perspective of Warsaw (even if it's not the best part of Warsaw).
It wasn't the norm to even have a computer club in your city during communism, never mind within 500m from where you live :)
Also communism in Poland wasn't concerned with ecology at all, when it was cheaper people did no waste (my grand-grandmother asked us to give her all the metalized wrapping from chocolate and sweets because she made christmass tree decorations from them for one example).
But for example energy consumption was wild and unchecked - there was no thermal insulation to speak of. Public buildings and private homes were all burning coal with abandon. In 1989 coal consumption dropped by like 30% year to year, half of it from heavy industry becomming unprofitable, but half of it from people all over Poland investing into thermal insulation as coal wasn't subsidized anymore. And now Poland produces much more stuff than in 80s (export grew like 20 times) and uses less power to do it :)
My parents used half the coal yearly in 90s compared to 80s. Air quality was much worse during communism, too, because of that.
Also it was common to have trash thrown on the streets in 80s. In 90s it became passe.
Also - on the subject of DIY - it was immensely important and everybody realized it - simply because there was nothing in shops. You wanted to have something cool you had to do it yourself. My uncle made a small tractor by himself in his workshop, and he haven't even finished high school and was a regular farmer in countryside near Lublin. He bought used engine from some crashed car and did everything else by himself. And it wasn't unusual - if you were a farmer you had to have a well-supplied workshop because buying anything was hard and unpredictable.
There were "technology and workshop" lessons in primary school for 3 years, and everybody learnt how to do simple electric stuff, how to work with metal and wood, etc.