‘The Five’ co-hosts discuss New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s platform.

In 1997, in the early, optimistic, post-Soviet days, I visited Odesa, Ukraine, to lead discussions about democratic governance systems for the region’s public officials. That beautiful, historic city on the Black Sea, once a polyglot center of commerce — now horrifically targeted by Russian bombs — was just awakening from socialism. 

Private hotels and restaurants had opened, even as Soviet-era "sanitoria" — government-owned resorts for labor unions — continued to operate. But the green shoots of private ownership had not yet reached its housing market — such as its long blocks of "Khruschevka" concrete slab, three-to-five-story, 1950s-era apartment blocks, named for the former Soviet premier who once promised to "bury" the U.S. Public housing was the rule, not the exception, under socialism. 

That helped explain the absence of a type of business I noticed was missing on the streets of the city made famous by Sergei Eisenstein’s film, "SS Potemkin:" pe They are ubiquitous in the U.S., of course, from the Home Depot and Lowe’s giants to the hundreds of small-town "True Value" affiliates. Their absence during the hangover from the socialism period led me to realize that the outlets for everything from lumber to wall plaster to bathroom grout hold a significance that goes beyond their thousands of inventory items. They say much about America — from private homeownership to personal agency and required........

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