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Arrogant? I grew up in a Czechoslovak apartment building and although it still stands and now looks a lot better inside and outside, it required a lot of investments in the meantime and it might have been cheaper to pull it down and build a replacement from scratch - but it wouldn't have been bureaucratically easier, plus people are attached to their dwellings. Meanwhile buildings built around 1900 are in better order, because the quality of work was a bit higher back then. You can raise a decent family in a flat, but things like a constantly leaking roof, gaps between windows and windowsills big enough for snow to get through or flimsy electricity installations made in alluminium (one of my friends back in the basic school got half-electrocuted by a faulty socket, result of a shoddy work of a drunken state-employed electrician) are pretty miserable, and that was the building standard for blocks of flats east of the Iron Curtain prior to 1989. I still remember my mom stuffing rags into said gaps around the windows to stave off the draft. This wasn't a Western standard. Now, after a lot of improvements and investments, it is, yes. As for the 800 sqm garden, yeah, not in the city center, but if you consider 30 minutes by public transport far enough, it used to be well possible. Parents of a friend of mine are a cook and an accountant, now both retired. They built such a house in Prague-Ďáblice in the 1970s, in a walking distance from a tram terminal. A well paid Google engineer might probably be able to buy this property now on a mortgage. This is just one anecdote of many in my surroundings. |
It's not just the capital of Czechia anymore. Those days aren't coming back.
Same with Munich. 40 years ago it was just the capital of Bavaria, now it's an international hub.