>You should see some Soviet community centers before thinking they can replace anything

The concept was good and they did work. In many towns, it's usually the only place where you could run cultural evens,some more important community gatherings and so on. What did happen once the Soviet occupation ended, was the lack of funding of these places. The town I grew up in, 15k population and the culture center large enough to be suitable for a pretty large city,so the maintenance costs are substantial. That's where people go for theatre,concerts,and so on.

As for the churces, they do a lot of charitable work, however my own experience with churchgoers in many countries is that it's too often ' It's our way or no way at all'.

Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well. If you need to ask for some community center funded from some abstract government, you don't have the local community, at the first place.

> from some abstract government

The.. local municipality funded by the same local community as your churches?

> Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well.

Where do you think other churches get their funding? Where do you think municipalities get their funding?

Municipality is too top down for these purposes either and should not tell people how to entertain or take care of themselves. I don't want it to spend even a penny on that, ok? Enough to help emergency services and such - no one will want to opt out of that.

I can't imagine your model working for any town/city except the very smallest ones or those inhabited by rich people only: to have an independent building,where the community could do whatever they think is right for them requires capital and some sort of management. So if it's a small village in the middle of nowhere, building something is probably realistic,but what about a few thousand people town? You'd need a piece of land, substantial amount to build it or even to rent it. And how a larger community would finance it? Joe may want to contribute but Mary won't and so on. Once you have the place,who runs it. Self elected local activist or elected person? How would they decide that events they plan to do fit well within the community, especially if it's more diverse? Whether it's national or local, the main problems around its use would remain the same.

Churches already do that organically, no?

In the city I grew up in in Canada, the nearby community centre was a relatively nice building on a big piece of land surrounded by a park and playgrounds. Not every one, but many had large halls and gymnasiums, some were collocated with schools, some with art galleries, etc. In the winter many distributed sand and salt, and they just generally acted as hub for anything the community required and anything the government needed to provide to the community. They also served a purpose as a shelter and support site in the event of a natural disaster.

As a child of a relatively poor family, I spent a fair bit of time there because the local government sent us a catalogue a couple times a year detailing all the programs they were running which due to our income level were more or less free (being a whopping $30 or something otherwise).

Based off this and your other comments, it seems a more visceral reaction to the phrasing “community centre” than that you have any real argument against them.

Indeed, I have seen community centers in the US that do all that (perhaps with the exception of Hospitals).

I don't recommend going to your church when you need to go to a hospital. Go to a hospital. Doctors spend 12 years in school for a reason. The best outcome is that someone may do some first aid and call you an ambulance. The worst is you may die because you wasted time.

You should see some American churches before thinking they are substitute for schools and hospitals.

Nowhere was communism ever mentioned, only the potential for a "community center" which is a rather generic term that can exist independent of communism.

What are you talking about? Sounds either made up or completely twisted Russian history.

If you compare to official textbooks from "both sides", yes, it sounds made up. It takes some time to find the history in witnesses' words. And.. things are largely unchanged until today in that region, easy to check.

> some Soviet community centers before

Could you elaborate?

I was born in the exUSSR and there, if you want to find the most apocalyptic, neglected, boring and useless building which lives by renting out itself to some strange businesses (if at all), you can ask for the local community center.

Have you considered that you might just be jaded? Why should a 1980 USSR concrete building be your idea of the best that a "community center" can be, in the USA in 2020?

Doesn't your complaint have more to do with the USSR than it has to do with community centers?

Yeah this veered off into personal opinion real fast, I'm like we have thousands of Community hubs in Australia and they're great and only getting better.

For example: https://southperth.wa.gov.au/our-future/projects-and-places/...

I didn't even realise there was a connection to Russia until he brought it up.

I thought that would be the reply, but a community centre isn't a building but a function (that happens to need a building), but they're not the same.

Exactly that. Community centers there are useless and only work as a cheap building for rent