why are haiti and korea ugly in the same specific way?

Reacting to Haiti's sudden prominence in current affairs, I have revisited my thoughts on joggers to maybe try and think about them in a newer, fresher way. I've started reading this

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68592

and it says largely the same thing I've found elsewhere: that Black living spaces are uniquely ugly and devoid of anything pleasant. I like how Eve Babitz has put it: while Black areas around LA are just bare sunburnt concrete and cinderblock with nothing pleasant, contrasting that to Latino poverty, which was full of color and smell of jacarandas. Or something like that.

But this particular description, maybe because of its 19th-centuryness, reminds me strongly of 19th-century descriptions of Korea. Everyonr who has been to Korea before ~1960s to write about it describes it as a uniquely ugly place, with the same ostentatious lack of ornament, and the same utilitarian-poverty aesthetic (cheap raw materials like dung or straw with no effort made to hide them or adorn them in any way). The same starkness of manners, rudeness of people, and the sense that everyone is always thinking about something else so they can't be bothered to make their life better. Everything feels like an endless string of temporary solutions.

Now of course, Koreans are one of the most intelligent peoples of the world on average, while Haitians are anything but. I'm wondering if there's a sort of horseshoe quality to this.

Thoughts?

19th century Korea being so terrible is an unsolved mystery indeed. China was pretty bad at the time but Korea was really something else, and for no good reason.

It's been four weeks since the first post, so I'm really hoping that Haiti's prominence in current affairs is now gone, or will be gone for a very long time at the end of the week. Maybe too much to hope for.