Why doesn't it look like rental homes? I think it does. We had a lot of buildings built here in Northern Europe where I'm at that they built between 1965-1975 in the suburbs of our capital city when they built a large number of apartments during those years to alleviate the shortage of available homes.
People still live in them today, they are not beautiful but they are functional, and it's all rentals pretty much.
Winter is hell for me. I live in Sweden, and the winters are just the worst. Everything sort of comes to a stop, people feel miserable, it's constantly dark and you sort of go into an emotional hibernation of sorts. Also dressing for the cold is not exactly easy either, you would have to go around with a balaclava to not get that biting cold that just cuts through all clothing and hurts your face.
But yeah, cold in itself would be manageable to a certain degree if it was bright until like 7 PM the winter around. Cold is annoying and difficult, and dark is annoying and difficult, but together it's almost handicapping to me, even though I don't feel like I have SAD or anything like that.
It doesn't help that it seems as though our climate has changed so we either have A) Summer from June to August, and then a fucking eternal autumn (but the sad part of autumn without any leaves and constant grey skies and wet brown leaves on the ground) from September to January, and then winter from January to April, spring from late April to June.
B) Summer from June to August, autumn in late september to October, then winter and snow from November to fucking May, and then we have spring for 2 weeks and then we head directly into summer.
Yeah idk. Winter is not for me.