Most people never get a chance to visit North Korea, let alone see the inside of a North Korean house. But in recent weeks, state media has given a lot of airtime to images of a quaint, “socialist fairyland” housing project in Kangbuk-ri —  an effort to show off the government’s flood recovery efforts after thousands of homes were destroyed this summer.

In all truth, the pastel, cookie-cutter buildings were under construction well before the country was hit with three successive typhoons, meaning that they weren’t really built to deal with this season’s devastating storms.

Propaganda aside, the