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So your example looks like an adequate analogy to Eastern Europe conditions (except for prices), which was my point: those are passable conditions, and not deserving of the attitude like they pose mortal danger; tiling cheap land with communalkas and enabling the underclass (and anyone not rich enough for better things) to live in such conditions is preferable to encouraging homelessness and the eviction cycle. I'd hypothesize that the debuffs of «ghetto» and «project» stack in the statistical sense, and Americans expect them to.
More importantly, my frustration has to do with the American belief that dense housing somehow begets dysfunction – I've seen takes riffing off the Universe 25/Behavioral Sink narrative that purported to explain why projects are fucked up, and it just sounds inane.
You're about correct it seems. I'm aware of the «Bad Old Days» mostly theoretically – witnessing a corpse with leaking brain tissue in the yard in the mid-90s, junkies dismembering a dog, hobo pack occupying the hallway etc. is about the maximum of my exposure. Stories of getting beat for venturing into An Alien Neighborhood, which my siblings and people of that cohort have conveyed to me, were kind of stale by then; in my generation, I've only met (somewhat confused) people who LARPed that culture but weren't born into it.
Regardless, this is a present-time discussion, and not specific to Russia.
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