> Communist built residential areas had all amenities within walking distance. I was in not a particularly well regarded area yet I was within 500m of the grocery store, my school, soccer field, cinema, library, church, computer club, three bus stops and one tram stop.

That's fairly standard in much of Europe, former communist or not.

EDIT: Though the tram thing is interesting. The general pattern in the west was to replace them with buses and rip up the tracks, then start laying new tracks in the 90s. Whereas Eastern Europe largely kept them. I'm not sure how much of this was the communist system being better at long-term planning, and how much was the communist system being stubborn and happening to choose the right path as a result of this.

At least in Dublin, where I live, the replacement of tram lines with buses in the 20s actually made sense from a short-term perspective. Buses had lower fixed costs, and there weren't many private cars, so traffic wasn't the issue for them that it is now. Trams had higher capacity per line, but that was less of an issue with lower populations and a lower requirement for mobility. We had about 20 tram lines at peak; for most of the 20th century we had zero. We now have two, with more planned. If we'd kept the old lines, we'd be saving a lot of money around now...