A fun story, but ehhhhhhhhh a few things:
Whether measured in terms of access to an independent unit, floor space, or quality of services, housing shortage is a very serious problem in the USSR... the current [1989] average level is 15.8 square meters of usable space per capita, but due to the unequal distribution of housing the median is about 12 square meters. This is less than half of the average of Western Europe, and there are major differences in housing quality and efficiency. According to the 1989 census, about 13 percent of reporting households indicated that they did not have a separate housing unit and instead lived in such accommodations as communal apartments (5 percent) and workers’ hostels (6 percent) or renting space (2 percent)....
Communal apartments, where several families share the same kitchen, bathrooms, toilets and corridors, are still prevalent, especially in cities with an old housing stock such as Leningrad, where 36 percent of the population was still living in such apartments in 1986...The USSR has one of the most severe shortages among socialist countries, which as a group performed consistently worse than market economies. Indeed, the ratio of households to dwellings in the USSR increased again during the 1980s...The current ratio implies that a large proportion of new social needs is unmet each year and that the backlog is expanding. The basic target of one housing unit per household set for year 2000 is unlikely to be reached.
Another ratio with particular political visibility in the USSR is the number of persons per room; Lenin had defined housing adequacy as having one person per room. This criterion was originally used to reallocate existing units among workers. In Western countries, there are more rooms (usually one or two) than persons. In the USSR the usual situation for new units is still that the number of rooms is one or two below the number of persons. On average there were 1.4 persons per room in 1989. In state housing the ratio is 1.5, in private housing 1.2, and in communal apartments 1.8 person per room.
The Soviet Union sucked at constructing housing in comparison to Western countries. I have discussed this before so just quote dumping this one, but the USSR had many, many people living in shoddily constructed slum-like structures, and the majority lived in ludicrously cramped conditions - having your own room was a luxury. The way the Soviet Union "solved" homelessness (it didn't) was extremely simple - it was illegal to be homeless. Begging, 'wandering the streets', or other activities were classified as "disrupting the social order", and based on severity of the crime & context one would be sent back to one's registered family unit, placed in non-voluntary 'disability institutions' (the internat), or thrown in jail/sent to forced labor camps. Those who kept to the social order but lived in slums would wait in queue for new housing to go online that, by the late 1970's, was growing longer over time, not shorter, as the pace of household formation was outrunning housing construction.
See, the US could fix its homelessness problem this way. Homeless people...have families? Being human beings and all. You could A: make being homeless criminally illegal and actually enforce that, by B: mandating that those people go live in their state-recognized family domicile, regardless of the reasons they no longer do that, and C: throwing in institutions or jail those who can't or won't comply. If you think this is the right idea, you are in luck - vote for Donald Trump! He and his party would probably support your idea, I think you have a political home! Just...not the one you think you do.
I grant the USSR was not as bad at housing in comparison to other sectors of its economy, it was a 'relative strength' as one might say. The USSR was a poor country, particularly once you factor in that it was devoting ludicrous sums of money to its military, so its housing was bad, but not awful, for how poor it was, and it even had a few good ideas. However, given that so many countries today aren't poor, those places have little to learn from the USSR, having already eclipsed it fully. There is virtually no problem liberal developed countries have today that "Soviet housing" can help solve.
ALSO BRUTALISM ISN'T SOVIET don't worry this part is wildly uncharitable I am just doing my thing here but it wasn't like a Soviet identity. They definitely have their share of it and built a bunch, don't get me wrong, but they didn't invent it (Sweden/France), they didn't formalize it (France+UK), they didn't push it to its limits (Yugoslavia), and they didn't even particularly love it. Many Kruschevkas, the "brutalist peak" of Soviet architecture, were brick, many were painted, Soviet office buildings moved toward glass-heavy modernist constructions, etc. They used *concrete* a lot, yes, but so did everyone, and using concrete in a building doesn't make it brutalist. Literally a "5-and-1", that modern US new construction thing, is a concrete podium with wood-framed upper floors, it has an entire base floor of concrete. Doesn't make it brutalist.
The Soviet Union had its time in the 60's with brutalism, and did enjoy it, but actually had large issues with it - in the end the USSR was supposed to be prettier, in an everyman sort of way, than the west. That was The Point of the system after all. Stalinist architecture was intensely neoclassical - like the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, and then both during and after the 60's wave modernist styles were the ideal, a sort of "futurist" soviet building. While meanwhile everyman housing would use brick/concrete combos and often look like this, not really brutalist.
Now Eastern Europe did go more heavily into this style, Yugoslavia most notably and also places like Poland & East Germany. But West Germany built as many "brutalist" (I'm just setting aside the "is a random concrete apartment building brutalist by default" debate right now) mass-scale concrete apartment complexes as East Germany did. The reason you think of them as "Soviet" - actually more Warsaw Pact but again w/e - is that West Germany turned out to not like them too much and demolished a lot of them! As did France, and the UK, and so on. Now that Eastern Europe is getting richer they are demolishing a ton of them too - I highly recommend visiting New Belgrade now, because it only has a few years left as the palace of Third Way Brutalism. Hell, its been a while for me - it might already be lost.
When mass photography and the internet made a post-soviet Russia & Eastern Europe available to the world, what you were seeing was not, with a few exceptions, a love affair with Brutalism that the West never had. What you are seeing is the poverty of the Soviet system unable to build fast enough to replace the ex everyone else already moved on from 30 years ago.
