Political Memes

Look, as a someone who floats somewhere between anarchist and social democrat (the closest tags that fits my ideals) I've got nothing against social housing and I'm massively in favour of projects built when balancing good design with modularity/prefab to keep construction costs and time low. Owning a single home is an aspirational luxury that needs to be achievable for individuals BUT it should not be necessary for a good life and providing a warm roof over people's heads gives a solid foundation to fix literally every other problem they have. IMO those solutions need to be community based and the systems at work as small as possible to get the outcome required.

But no, these weren't built to solve homelessness, they were built on mass to shift workers from rural to cities for rapid industrialisation and/or rebuild previously lost housing as a result of mass civilian bombing during WW2.

They didn't fix homelessness in soviet states they stopped recording the homeless statistics and arrested people who were to be shipped off somewhere to be a worker there.

In capitalistic societies most of the time what you need to rent a place is some money for a deposit, the 1st month's rent, and either proof of future income like a job acceptance letter OR enough money to cover the rent whilst you find a job. It's incredibly cutthroat, especially when you don't have regulations or have weakly enforcement of them, but it's usually a fairly quick process that takes a couple of months.

Also under the soviet system you had different problems with being able to move. All the buildings and apartments are government owned and with large government organisations you'll have, by necessity for the large system to work, a lot bureaucracy to navigate. This means a long waiting list, many years or even more than a decade. On top of this you had to have proof of having a job where you're looking to move to because those government apartments are for workers and you haven't been accepted to work there yet so back of the queue you go, but you can't get taken on as a worker there because you don't live there: a sort-of catch 22.

So what's the solution? You'll have to find a private landlord to rent from in the meantime OR wait for a long while for the bureaucracy to finally get around to you.

Are these buildings better than literally being homeless? Yes.

Were they built to specifically solve the issue of homelessness? No.

And as ever no matter what system you run your society under there's going to be issues that will require hard work to resolve and even then it's a trade-off for the inherent flaws in the systems that aren't fixable because they form key parts of the system.