I think broadly, the life-saving and pro-human efforts are simultaneously so important to our cause as communists but also difficult to articulate. A death statistic is easy; you just count the bodies. A life statistic is harder. There's rising life expectancies and lowered child mortality, but fundamentally it's really difficult to find people and point them out and say "in the alternate timeline where communists weren't there, this person would be dead."

One example that's really clear, for instance, is communism's opposition to fascism. Without this opposition, Eastern Europe, China, and likely the rest of the world would have been enslaved/genocide by the nazis and imperial Japan, at least for an extended period. The USSR's opposition to nazism was so life-saving that Western Europe almost went communist, if not for the Marshall Plan. But this one is very transparent. Pointing out the importance of having an apartment vs being homeless from war and poverty, as you have highlighted, are all much subtler.