You don't even have to do that - a lot of 3/4/5 story style flats (can be owned or rented) that are not concrete soviet blocks would do wonders in most cities. See: western Europe.
The Chinese/Soviet style of a tower in a park builds tall, but it doesn't actually tend to give more density than more US style dense areas with 3-5 stories mostly filling a block. With the Chinese approach you get better views, but with the US approach you get more walkable neighborhoods and I'll take the later.
> with the US approach you get more walkable neighborhoods
Have you actually ever spent time in a post-Soviet country? Their cities are an order of magnitude more walkable than literally anywhere in the US. And that's ignoring their much better mix of uses (ground floor retail, etc) and access to public spaces (by foot).
No I haven't but I'm not trying to draw a distinction between the average post-Soviet neighborhood and the average US neighborhood. I'm trying to draw a distinction between Le Corbusier's vision of urbanism (still better than US suburbs!) and Jane Jacbos's, which in the rare cases where the US builds dense it actually hits decently well.
The UK's social housing scheme was/is a stonking success, right up until about 1980. it completely reset the minimum standard of housing from slums to actually decent. It wasn't all a success, skelmersdale and thamesmede sucked balls.
The problem with the uk's social housing came as follows:
1) the change from needing a job to have a council house to being a dumping ground for troubled families without support
2) removing the ability of councils to fund new housing
3) overly complex centralised funding of repairs and upkeep
4) selling off housing and then taking the money away that was needed to replace them
I don't know the UK situation in much depth but one of the things I read was how they were disconnected from the rest of the community (socially, services, transport, etc).
southwark has the most council estates. the further out boroughs did try and put their estates far out. Places like thamesmede (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thamesmead) failed because there was literally nothing else around (thats improved significantly, 50 years later)
Mixed use. And also mixing all types of social, free-market rental and owner occupied. Quality for later two could be better, but it should still be next to each other using same services.
// To solve the housing crisis you have to build up like the Soviets
My family lived in a communal apartment[0] for about 30 years in the USSR waiting for a place of our own. Whatever definition of "housing crisis" you are operating with, is heaven on earth compared to the Soviet housing reality.
Please be honest, the vast majority Russians and other Soviets didn't live in communal apartments for the past 60 years. Not only did they have access to new construction commie blocks (small and ugly, but warm and well connected), well over 50% of them had summer homes (datchas) and many still do today.
Anyways, you're missing my point. Which was to solve the post-war housing crisis by building up with prefabs. And it worked - rapidly.
It’s really not difficult; just takes some brave people to change the zoning laws and rethink some of the building codes combined with financing it.