I recently moved to a German city that, whenever I mention it, is described as “ooh it’s such a beautiful city!” because it wasn’t bombed to shreds in the war and a lot of buildings are from 1900ish and older.

Honestly I would rather prefer to live in a building like the post. The apartments often are cut more efficiently and fit better for a family. Yeah, the outside isn’t as appealing as around here but I don’t live on the outside of my house, I live inside of it, so I barely care about its outsides. The other side effect of eastern blocks is that the density per square km is amazingly high. This also leads to supermarkets etc being everywhere. (I am, of course, making generalizations here.)

Of course I need to say that the energy efficiency in old eastern block houses is also awful.

But I don’t want to bash the 1900s houses too much. At least they have 4-5 levels. That’s still better than single family homes in the middle of a city (talking about you, pipe smoking guy in the middle of Sendling).