[meme] How would you rather see this land developed?
[meme] How would you rather see this land developed?
You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.
Yeah fuck lawns too, they aren’t meant to exist
Why not prefer apartments in your own town?
Noise. Neighbours being closer.
That’s only true if the apartment is a shitty American 5 over 1 stick building. In a modern concrete apartment with concrete internal walls you wouldn’t hear the neighbors.
You don't even need concrete. I'm in a modern building made from mass timber construction, and it's dead quiet inside my apartment -- except for the hum of my AC and the sounds of my cat meowing whenever he wants attention.
Well, I live in a America and can't wait to get out of apartments. I've moved a lot in my life and have a lower middle class income. I've never found an apartment or condo where I didn't have to deal with hearing neighbors yelling, stomping, talking outside my front door in the hallway, opening sliding doors, listening to music, etc. Only twice, when I lived with a friend in their house, did I feel like I had any peace or privacy.
Sure, there would be lawns mowed and all that, but I'd take that over the things I've heard and worried about my neighbors having heard.
If I could have real privacy in an apartment I could afford I'd continue to rent, assuming I don't get priced out of the market completely at this rate.
Oh so you're also going to rebuild all apartment buildings in the US now? Lol
I wish you were right
We lived in a concrete apartment, couldn't hear the neighbors in their apartments but could in the hallways, and smell everything too, could hear the cars revving outside, and had to put up with the weekly (if not more often) fire alarm at 2am which meant evacuating the building. And no space for anything, no hobbies that might generate noise. Also have to deal with STRATA, hope you didnt want to put anything on your balcony cause they didn't want that, hope you can wait 12 months for the leaking ceiling to be fixed thats dripping and growing mould.
Also it cost a fortune to heat or cool the place, we're in a bigger place now that costs 1/2 as much to heat/cool
Ownership. You will not own your apartment, it will be owned by your landlord and you will pay him whatever he demands. You will not own the forest, either. The state will, or some private entity will. No trespassing.
You can still own and buy appartements in most places in the world. Then there are many forms of social housing.
Rent to own is also a possibility but not seen in most countries.
Seems your problem is not ownership but landlords.
Some countries in Europe have the right to roam on any land. State owned and private owned. (Maybe more countries somewhere else have it to but I don't know)
It does not need to be so terrible. In some places it just is because of profits
what no right to roam does to a mfer
Yeah that’s my main concern. Also less space to store things like my bike.
Then there’s the upstairs neighbors. Like I get that the kids are loud. But also could the kids stop throwing stuff at my bird feeder. And their upstairs neighbors flooded the dang place
Uh yes, the suburban tranquility of non-stop leaf blowing, lawn mowing, and pickup humming.
Musics to my ears.
Suburbs are the worst of both worlds. Gimme a cave on the top of the mountain miles from anywhere, thanks.
All the fun of overbearing neighbors telling you what you can or can't do with all the inability to take the train anywhere
It'd take it over the sound of the upstairs neighbor fucking his microwave while bowling at the same time
I can't hear shit when i clise my windows.
This isn't a particularly convincing analogy. Islands have limited space. The suburbs where I live border tons of open space and parks. Meanwhile, our school district is already overwhelmed with children, so converting commercial spaces into apartments will merely add to congestion and sprawl. NIMBY's make a convincing argument against denser residential construction.
A better focus would be the ability to simplify public transit and walkability. Town centers and public spaces could be more accessible with denser residential construction, and the additional green space can be closer to where you live without everyone needing their own half-acre yard to mow and water.
God I hate living in high density housing. Dogs yapping, bass and loud music booming, smelly, loud, animal poop and pee on every green/natural area, higher crime, more traffic, etc.
The issue is that all of those apartments are owned by one person getting filthy fucking rich from rent.
Then organise the renters, let them buy the house to transform it into syndicate or cooperative housing. Social apartment construction isn't impossible.
Not necessarily i don't know about the situation all arouns the world but in atleast the herman speaking countries we have the concept to buy flats like one would buy a house and own it. So not all of it is owned by the same person. You still have the house maintainer which looks after the infrastructure but afaik you don't pay them rent.
Yeah I'd say it's pretty normal all over Europe, it might just be a common case of Americans being weird.
The type of arrangement I'm used to, property of the building is shared among the owners of the flats, who vote on how to run it in an assembly. They also appoint (and pay for) the maintainer you spoke of, but their role is more centered on overseeing/administering the building, handling paperwork, hiring contractors and such. Also, even for very large flats you end up paying a couple hundred euros a year for their services, so it hardly compares to rent.
Maybe in the US. In Germany this defintly isn't the rule. Many people own their own flats and a lot of people own 2-4 flats to rent them out as an extra income.
No, maybe you are in a more wealthy environment. It is not possible that everyone has multiple flats to rent out. In fact, Germany has one of the lowest ownership rates.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate
I spent seven years living in an apartment. I so enjoyed hearing the neighbors having sex, the thumping music they played, the smell of their cigarette smoke inside my apartment with all my windows closed, the random intrusions by management to repair something unrelated to my apartment, the random rent increases. Add this to the fact that I had no space for a work shop to make anything, and paying the equivalent of a mortgage with no equivalent home equity. Some people love apartment life, but it definitely was not for me.
the problem seems to be when people take "apartment life isn't for me" and then go to the conclusion of "they shouldn't build apartments for anybody"
you don't have to live in one. just let people build them. only allowing single family homes doesn't make single family homes more accessible for anybody, it just makes land more scarce and housing less affordable all around.
This meme is advocating it as the only option
Of course. Everyone can live in an apartment if they wish. I will be the one with the house at a reasonable distance.
I so enjoyed hearing the neighbors having sex
best thing to ever happen when I was a horny preteen. Neighbors moved in and boned EVERY night and that girl was LOUD as fuck. And holy shit was she cumming apparently lol
My mom was soooo mad. And she couldn't do anything about it cause the neighbors refused to acknowledge her!
Some of the points are unrelated like yeah you got higher rent but that is if you rent, nothing to do with being apartment or not. The same with the mortgage comment, you can buy apartments you know.
Then clearly those apartments were shit, on mine I usually don't hear anything of the other neighbors except if I am next to the wall connecting to them and they really make super noise or in the bathroom due the vents. And the smoke thing yeah... That also points to shitty insulation and air can get in.
The workshops thing yeah I get it. Technically you could setup something, of course small, if you have a spare room but based on the noise things you said probably not a good idea you might have gotten noise complaints.
This would just become a 100 apartment buildings.
Sadly, that's more likely to happen. I like apartments more than houses, but it's not just about building apartments alone.
Exactly. People who advocate for densification are basically advocating for everywhere to be Amsterdam or NYC with continuous human habitation and maybe small concessions in the form of city parks (a joke compared to real natural areas, IMO).
I'm not sure if they're aware that this will be the logical conclusion of those policies.
Man so true. I live in Dallas Tx home of suburban sprawl. I just spent a month in North Carolina and I had no idea what I was missing. The unspoiled nature in the Appalachians just blew me away. Hard to come back to miles of concrete.
I agree that if we could build a few wall label buildings, and leave the rest untouched that would be the best way. But I’ve seen how hard it is to stop development once money starts being thrown around.
But what about THE LINE!
What is going on in this comments section? Building dense is massively better for the environment than SFH, both in the construction phase and for the life of the units as far more residents can be served with less infrastructure sprawl. It also doesn't mean that detached housing will suddenly stop existing if we let developers build densely packed housing. Doesn't even need to be high rises, it can be townhomes, duplexes, five-over-ones, etc. You'll still be able to get a white picket fence suburban home or a farmhouse on some acreage if you want. In fact, it will become cheaper because all the people who want to live in cities will actually be able to move there and not take up space in that low density area you want to live in.
An island of this size should probably have neither.
Judging from the top rated comments, this post is surprisingly controversial for fuckcars.
I would literally kill myself if I ever had to live in apartments again. I have severe social anxiety and agoraphobia and general anxiety. I started hallucinating when I lived in apartments (but never before or since). I became paranoid of people. There was never any solitude. Plus right now there's no way to get around apartments without landlords (though I understand ideally there might be ways around this, it's not likely to happen any time soon). When I lived in an apartment I considered just being homeless and hiding in the woods (and stupidly, isn't legal).
We sure could stand to make more stores and businesses into high rises though. I live near Detroit (but not IN Detroit) and going down our streets it's just a ridiculous waste of space. How many tire shops do we even need? Why does every business need its own lot with so much space around it? Everything being more "mall" style would waste less space.
There's a great point in here about 'business density'. Shops and restaurants would benefit from higher density in world less populated by cars.
Another important idea here is that higher population density requirements should build in protections for residents' mental well-being: Sound proofing, minimum square footage per person requirements, ceiling heights, green spaces, and convenient access to goods and services. People aren't meant to live in cages.
A good amount of them also seem to be unaware of middle housing (still have your own house, with much, much, much less sprawl)
Exactly! Townhouses/multi family homes are amazing. I can’t wait to own one when I’m older.
Lemmy is just too small so it doesn't attract the same hard core crowd that it did on reddit. Lemmy also promotes controversial comments by default.
So far I'm liking this, that in Reddit fuckcars and other subs would become full circle jerks, with any discussion squashed and "me too" comments ruling the day.
So far, I've enjoyed that me balanced conversations emerge in Lemmy communities.
Fuck cars have had a lot of good points, but buried in falling to understand other perspectives. Here folks can actually see perspectives that would block their goals, and maybe actually talk about some paths forward that might get both sides living with it.
I've noticed that once a post gets enough up votes (and presumably starts to appear in people's 'all' feeds), some different opinions start to appear.
Imo it's because most of the "fuckcars" types are not "pro density" or "pro transit" types. They literally only care about "fuck cars, bikes rule". Usually upper middle class WASPy types. High overlap with NIMBYs.
But instead of a population of 100 with small houses you will get a population of 1000 because they built 10 apartment complexes. I think I'd prefer the small houses didn't have lawns and left the nice trees and natural growth.
The point is for any given population size, a city is a better way to house them. Though IMO this drawing makes the difference too stark. Personally i think the optimal is a medium-highish density city of separated buildings with nature interspersed, rather than a single super high density mega block building.
Yeah, the image is really just for illustrative purposes. Imo, if we just abolish restrictive zoning codes and other land use restrictions that essentially mandate sprawl, then tax carbon appropriately and build good public transit, that would likely achieve the overall "optimal" outcome. No need for a mega-arcology, but no need for government-mandated car-dependent sprawl either.
So those 900 people live where? In the sea?
Name one good reason the average apartment experience could ever be better than living in a house.
People live in apartments to afford shelter, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
Sure you can make arguments about the concept of centralized feeling being better for nature, but no one actually wants to do it.
you’d be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
It's definitely a cultural thing. Here in Korea, the vast majority prefer apartments. Lower maintenance. More security. Convenience. The social aspect.
Change the apartment to a condo and the answer shifts quite a bit. Condos offer lots of amenities and more luxury. Many people choose condos over houses because they like the lifestyle of not maintaining property and living in a dense area with lots of things to do. Even people living in suburban houses like dense cities, they just spend an hour driving to the city for evening or weekend recreation activities that a condo resident can walk to.
One problem with the picture is that if you want to spend much time doing certain things in nature, such as camping or kayaking, you need storage space for equipment. Condos and apartments tend to lack storage space.
I think problem there is more that people think you need huge pipes of stuff just to go camping. I don't know of single person anymore who camps with a tent. They just can't handle being so close to nature, I guess, even though that's purportedly the reason they burned 100 litres of fuel hauling their
mobile home40 foot camper to thetrailer parkRV site.
As a student, I would rather rent in a modern apartment building than a house. No yard to take care of, closer to other stuff (grocery store is literally across the street), safer, no insects. I would 100% rather have a nice apartment over a meh house.
There are reasons I chose to live in my apartment.
You can achieve a very high quality of life if you are willing to waste resources. See private jets for an example.
If we want to preserve nature, we need to live denser than the large detached single family homes pictured.
However, row houses with a coop garden is probably a good compromise where people don't have upstairs neighbors, and can grow things for fun. But you aren't taking up a ton of space.
I don't disagree. That actually sounds good to me. I'm just saying on a mass scale, most people don't want to do the apartment thing.
I'd also rather not have to go up and down a million levels every time I leave home.
I've never lived in an apartment, so I don't personally know the struggle of upstairs or downstairs neighbors.
I've only ever lived in 2 different houses when growing up, and then me and a few friends rented out another friend's house when they moved out of town.
So that's a pretty awesome situation, plus being able to smoke weed inside just by going down to the laundry room and almost always having at least one person around to smoke with is great.
But I'm used to having houses close by, so moving to row houses with a garden sounds perfect, especially if we can grow our own weed in said garden 😂.
I live in an apartment. I want to live in a house.
Cunt upstairs neighbour smoking cancer sticks on the balcony, making my room smell like shit when he does it, dumbass neighbour to my right who phones some other dumbass at 6 in the morning, screaming into his phone, waking me up. No garden, can't have a cat or a dog.
I don't want to live in a suburb where I am forced to use a car, but you can live in a house and still be able to get anywhere you want without a car.
A truth most people don't want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is "I don't like people". That shouldn't really be a priority.
For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.
Yeah but then I gotta listen to my upstairs neighbor make tik toks.
In a well made apartment building you cant hear anything from your neighbors.
Better than listening to your upstairs neighbor beating his wife. I would call the cops, but they couldn't do anything unless she pressed charges, and she never would. We would get quiet for a couple of days though, but then he'd be doing it again.
the only time i hear any neighbours are when they're either outside, or the upstairs neighbours drop a fucking anvil on the floor, then i hear a slight "thunk".
Insulation
I know this is a joke but I wanna hijack this comment to say you could spread out the housing a little to not be apartments but still only take like 30%
But what if your neighbour shoots porn?
Density doesn't save nature. Habitat protection laws save nature. Make sure that's part of the plan.
Also, the picture shows the saved nature very accessible to the density. This is not usually what these zoning plans have in mind.
Many important species, especially insects and their predators, can absolutely make good use of patchy suburban habitat if it is properly managed, moreso if it is networked, and natural space nearer homes benefits residents and the environment.
We can't keep saving mountaintops and deserts, we need to rehabilitate more of these nice valleys and riversides we all like to build cities on.
A lot of people are pro-apartmemt before living in one, so here are some fun facts:
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Apartments usually have a maintenance cost, that covers as little as possible while still costing a lot. You never really own the flat, the building company does.
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You often have a communal garden; it's looked after by the lowest bidding contractor. Not all flats have balconies, so you are unlikely to have your own.
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Fear of fire and flooding - if someone else messes up, your stuff is toast/soaked. Insurance companies love that extra risk, it gives them an excuse to charge more.
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No flat has good sound proofing - the baby screaming downstairs at 5am and the thunder of the morbidly obese person upstairs going to the bathroom at 1am will denote your new sleep schedule (i.e. disturbed)
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I hope you're in for deliveries - apartments have no safe spots to leave things.
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You will not be able to afford a flat with the same floor space as a house. I'm sorry, welcome to your new coffin.
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Good luck drying your laundry (spoiler, your living room is going to have a laundry rack).
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Good luck owning a bike (it's either the bike or your laundry, take your pick).
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Vocal intimacy becomes a community event.
Living in a flat is a pile of little miseries grouped together.
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It's simple: blocks are not built in cities to minimise the footprint like in your meme but to build cheaper and sell more and in the same time externalising the costs of infrastructure development.
A mid density block is something, a heavy packed "bedroom" neighborhood is another.
This is a pretty terrible way to make this point. The pic on the left is neater and the one on the right leaves almost no space for the people living there to do anything. You probably want a little bit of cleared land for literally anything to do on the island.
Then again, there isn't a dock. So I figure the island on the right has a better way of building boats to leave.
fuck ... houses?
Low-density sprawl essentially requires cars. Further, cars need a ton of space for roads and parking lots. Denser, more walkable communities don't need nearly as many cars and don't need nearly as much roads and parking lots.
Single family housing is a massive contributer to (sub)urban sprawl and car dependency. Increased residential density can reduce the need for cars by reducing the distance between people's homes and their workplace, shops, etc.
Zoning laws are a bigger contributor
Yes, let's pack people in a dense area where diseases and tempers can and will run rampant because THAT has never happened before.
Sorry, I refuse to live on top of other people. Housing is not the enemy of nature - housing that is not in tune with nature is. It is completely possible to build homes that blend in with nature without having to resort to ultra-dense, 5-story brick behemoths filled with people who loathe one another.
I see what you are trying to convey, and I agree with you to an extent, but density is not the answer to sustainable housing.
Housing is fine, several of my personal heros lived in rural commues far away from society, where they are mostly self-sustained. They dont live in apartments, but there is no doubt I have great respect for them and believe they live in a very responsible fashion.
The problem came when people want to live in the middle of nowhere, produces nothing for their own, pays low taxes; yet think society owes them giant road infrastructure and wasteful parking lots. So that they can terrorize the lives of pedestrians and cyclists, also our dying planet, just because only their oversized driveway princess and their ecological hellhole of a lawn can give them a little sense of achievement in their otherwise fruitless life.
Density reduces emissions. Low-density, car-dependent suburban sprawl is extremely unsustainable for the planet.
The fact that your immediate first association with dense housing is disease is rather telling
I'd prefer to live in a house over an apartment
So would I, but when you try to talk to ultra-urbanist zealots about that, they act like you're deranged for wanting your own land in a quiet place, using the devil's transportation to go places public transit could not reasonably service.
Ah yes, because that's how capitalism works. People would definitely stop developing the rest of the island because they don't need more housing.
Developers will stop building once there aren't any customers left, which absolutely does happen in countries that allow high density urban housing.
Your first statement is all well and good but your second statement is flat out wrong. That can only happen given a static population. But humans reproduce pretty rapidly. There will always be new customers until we hit a carrying capacity limit, but as technology improves the earths carrying capacity keeps going up, until of course we decimate resources and then it'll come crashing down.
If it's not housing, it's a golf course, or business district or something. The old "if you build it, they will come" plenty of people also don't spend their lives in the same place so moving to a newer, better facility is enticing to those that can afford it.
It's common for states to institute urban growth boundaries that protect forests / farms.
If you look at land use maps, you will see that the urban areas are so small compared to the agricultural and livestock area needed to support the population. This is the biggest cause of deforestation, and population density actually makes it much worse, because it centralizes consumption and requires more logistic costs to deliver the needed food, with much higher rates of wastes. If we lived in less dense areas, perhaps we could do with local, smaller-scale agriculture instead.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
It also just gets messy having that many people try to manage a property together. I lived in a high rise for a year. There was constant bickering over who put the wrong thing down the trash chute or who was using the elevator to move furniture without checking it out first. Everyone had to all agree to building repairs, which was a nightmare, and getting them them done took forever. From my understanding our building was pretty well run, but it didn't feel like it. I loved the idea of high rise life when I moved in but by the time we got out house I was ready to be done with it.
I mean is the building owned by its tenants or one entity/person who gets to own the building and a large amount of peoples homes thusly?
I mean there are genuine reasons you might want a house over an apartment. If you have a big family or the fact that you own it and don't have a land lord that can just raise rent and force you out. You gotta have a mix of types of housing that actually matches what the needs of the people are, which is still the exact problem we have now.
You can also own an apartment and live in it. The problem in the US, as far as I know, is that many cities make it very hard to actually build apartments or rowhouses or really anything other than a single family house on a big lawn.
Spot on. In pink below is all the land where it's literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. And that's not even touching on all the other restrictive land use regulation, such as the insanity that is parking minimums. If we want to have a mix of housing types, it needs to actually be legal to build more than one type.
There are always going to be certain compromises when you share walls and/or floors and ceilings with neighbours. Even if everyone owns their own unit, there's a lot of shared infrastructure, and that means discussing, dealing and compromising on all kinds of things. If you own an entire building and the land surrounding it, you have a lot more autonomy.
I've had one friend vow never to buy a condo again after having to deal with his condo board for a few years, and he lived in a small 8ish unit building. Another friend served on her condo board for under a year and said it was one of the worst experiences she'd ever had to deal with.
From an environmental point of view, apartments and condos are great. They're great for public transit. They're much more efficient in how they use land. They are much better for heating and cooling. But, people being upright apes, a partially shared living arrangement like that can be truly awful.
Another part of it in the US is that the construction used in many apartments should be criminal. Every corner possible is cut. In every one of my apartments, save the one that was a converted 1920s hospital, I could gain access to neighbors' apartments through the ceiling, if I wanted, with no tools beyond a chair to stand on.
Every apartment that I've lived in also had electric baseboard heating placed before windows and poorly insulated, often mold-infested walls, the windows were usually modern and well-sealed (except for one that was not properly flashed, causing water to pour in during a storm), this means that the placement was about as energy inefficient as possible - without drafty windows, that placement just resulted in thermal loss through the shoddy insulation.
And that's before the landlords who cut every corner possible in maintenance, legal or not.
Quality construction would likely help with adoption of owner-occupied apartments but, that's something that we're unlikely to see without forcing it.
I work in municipal develpment.
The thing with developers is that they build that density, but over ALL of the land. Apartments kill more trees and create more impervious cover than any other type of housing.
Our city requires parkland dedication for development. Single-family developments build public parks and preserve trees wherever possible. Apartments just pay a fee in lieu for tree mitigation and parkland dedication and improvements because they absolutely will not have a millimeter of land not dedicated to housing.
If the people living in apartments had a say in how they were built... yeah
Nobody chooses to live in a fucking tin can hanging from suspension wires that is so poorly insulated you can hear every bird flying into the windows as though you're inside a bass drum.
The sounds of my neighbors at 3 am snoring are not a feature you can call part of the "shared experience."
The prospect of being trapped together because the elevator went out and there's a fire... oh so joyous. Not to mention all the people's pets that get left at home throughout the day and I can hear crying with desperation to be let out as though they're in the next room...
I'm quite happy not to live in a fucking modern apartment thank you very much.
If "modern" means "shoddy and cheaply built" sure, I agree, but it doesn't have to mean that.
I feel like the people promoting high density housing don't live in high density housing. It's probably promoted by rental developers 😅
I live in a 51 story condo tower and it's great. Thick concrete walls, can't hear a thing. High above the street, so not much street noise gets up to my unit. The hallways are pressured higher than the units, so smells don't get out.
It's great; I never want to live in a house, and deal with all the shit that comes with that.
This is such a dumb comment. Have you ever lived in good high density housing?
Wtf kind of apartments do you have ? XD
Build a co-op garden around the apartment and you've got yourself a deal.
Everyone in the place gets X amount of space. More then 60% of people won't garden at all and their share can be maintained by the gardeners.
Fruit trees and berry bushes will be grown for all to use.
And a really cool waterslide
Maybe the problem isn't the houses. Maybe it's the grass lawns.
Both, the problem is both.
Nice to see you swedneck it's been a while. How you been?
Throw 99 families into the sea and live on my private island.
I swear to God if I do this again and you back out I'll be super angry
Might be a silly question, but would it be better if we somehow turned suburbs into being more akin to rural towns? Like the suburbs could maybe have nearby town centers that they could walk to in 10-15 minutes that would allow small businesses to operate in.
I don’t live on the mainland, so no idea how it actually works.
Absolutely. Back in the day before the car, even rural towns were built fairly densely, typically around a train station. They had to be, because you had to be able to walk everywhere in town, and the train was the main way to get in and out of town. Even to this day, many streetcar suburbs exist, where they had lain out a streetcar line radiating from the city center into the countryside and built mid-density along it. Many of these suburbs exist to this day, and they are often dense, walkable, transit-oriented, highly desirable, while not being anything so dense as Manhattan.
This style of development has been made literally illegal in most of North America through restrictive zoning codes, parking minimums, setback requirements, and other local regulations.
If we just made a return to traditional ways of building communities, our cities and towns and suburbs would all be vastly more human-centric than they are today.
I can't see the NYT article, it's behind a paywall, or maybe just an email wall, I dunno, but I find it hard to believe that "most" of America restricts density. I live in NJ and density is almost a must these days, we've essentially developed everywhere. Even the towns with multimillion dollar homes are being forced to accept density.
Personally, the solution needs to be tax land higher. You want your 2 acre property? You're gonna pay for it. And that money will be used to help keep housing affordable.
Yes, absolutely. You can also combine both proposals, and have apartment blocks near those neighborhood shopping centers. The people who want their yards and lawns can have them, there's room for more people who don't mind living in an apartment, and the businesses that open in those town/neighborhood centers have more customers living close by. I live in a city in the Netherlands that has put this concept into practice, and it's really great.
I mean, that's kind how it is where I live. I live in a 1400sf home on .23 acres of land. I'm five blocks from downtown, where there's businesses, a courthouse, a train station, thousands of apartments. All the schools are walkable. Parks are walkable, with amenities like pools/splash parks, playgrounds, a paved trail network. We fit about 6,000 people per square mile, which is pretty dense.
I don't think it exactly fits the 15m city concept, because I don't think there are enough jobs in town to support everyone, but it's a pretty good mix. A variety of housing types is important, simply because people want what they want, and I think it makes a more cohesive society to try to have something for everyone.
Yeah low density housing with lots of green space, local stores public transport links is a far better environment to live in
Low rises (<5 stories) is actually the best of all worlds. Allows for more density but doesn't feel crowded.
I like the idea of a villiage square type plan. You have a bunch of 2-5 story buildings around a central green area. Each square is essentially a little community and you can allocate some of the ground level space to retail.
I live in an area with great green space and great neighbours, I just wish I didn't have to leave my area to get to literally any shop.
In this image I can't help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don't forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
I love my own yard with privacy and a firepit where I can get drunk, loud and high as a kite without anyone bothering me.
Apartment living was hell, it's what convinced me to get a house.
Best decision ever
Have you not heard of mixed density? There should be houses, semi, townhomes, 3 story walk-ups and apartment buildings. You could probably do all that and still keep 50% of the island nature.
Not only this, but in the second picture, that other 96% is ripe for rezoning - money men will not stop until they buy off enough politicians to develop it into something resembling the first picture.
Edit: I'm not saying I like it, I'm just stating facts.
The shores become resort property. The rest becomes a mini-mall. The resort buys the apartment complex a year later. With any houses, all houses get bought by cooperations and rented out as overpriced Airbnb houses. Fuck we can't have anything nice with unfettered capitalism.
Edit: Sorry, off-topic rant.
Condos and Housing coops go a long way I think to reduce some of the pain points most people have had with apartment living. The issue now is that most people are comparing owning a home where you have a lot of control over your circumstances and price stability, vs having a landlord that is doing the minimum and raising rents every chance they can. If apartments were built for people, and not landlords would they still have cramped hallways and balconies, would they have poor insulation and sound proofing, would they have old noisy AC units, etc, etc. The thing is, even in cases where people do choose to not have an amenity, people still had the choice.
The island on the right probably isn't as hot either.
When I see the image what came to mind was that experiment where they had an overpopulation of rats in a cage and how all of the rats turned on each other and killed each other.
Too much human density is not good. You have to be sure to get the percentage of humans to a acre of land just right, to prevent the rats situation.
Nature is important, but Humanity moreso.
Fewer people ..1 house
I'm sure this solution works well with cities like London or New York. /s
just genocide eh?
Thank you for explaining why suburbs suck. Also, the mass of people flooding an area all at once is just a niceness.
I'd rather live in my own few acres of forest with a creek running through it and a big house.
I would think looking at this comment section most individuals on this sub hate cars, but love homes with large driveways and massive streets. To drive the cars we hate?
Mid-density apartment are a thing, maybe 4-6 floors tall.
Though north america apartment design is another issue IMO. North america apartment floor plates are unfortunately not designed for families. When was the last time you saw a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment?
Edit: I should add, when was the last time you saw a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment that cost less then a full size family home in the suburbs.
Lmao what are these comments, are lemmers thicker than redditors?
Give me a European style apartment with high ceilings and generous space and you have yourselves a deal!
That said, I've been working in my local building industry for almost 20 years and the trend that I see is that though there are more apartments being built, the quality has tanked. We have huge issues with mould, flammable facades, exploding glass, alternatives are rampant through the roof and price gouging.
Unfortunately this has fed the idea that apartment living is no good.
Not to mention real sound insulation between flats.
Out of curiosity, isn't this the case for houses as well?
For my local industry, at least, generally houses are built better (not that they're that great compared to houses built in the 80s or earlier) because the materials aren't bought in bulk like they do for apartments and there's less opportunity to 'off spec' (cheap alternative products).
That's not to say that cheap materials aren't used but there's a lot less pressure to go bottom of the barrel. Plus, the home owner also has a bit more control than an apartment owner during construction.
There's also a lot more that can go wrong in an apartment than in a house. Lifts, for example. We had an issue in one of the high rises in the city where a lift was broken and there was a huge queue. Whereas in houses, the main issue I've been seeing in housing is poorly built housing extensions from unqualified builders.
All in all, it's more liveable to be in a poorly built house than in a poorly built apartment.
Diversity is good. Different types of homes and zoning. Mix of nature and buildings
abolish zoning
Yeah sure, that could also be nice. I guess I meant that even in that case, without pre-zoning, the end result should be diverse
I live in a flat and it sucks. I'll probably move to living in a car eventually.
Yeah, try living in an impoverished town, where it's the housing on the right, spread out like the housing on the left. There are, like, no jobs (none that are actually sustainable long-term for living in this economy), but they just leveled a huge area of forest for more low-income housing (AKA Projects)
Here, buying an apartment makes you liable for any structural issues to the whole building, it's a huge risk and with how terrible build quality is these days I'd never buy an apartment
There are many highrise buildings in Australia with residents paying hundreds of thousands each for issues caused by dodgy builders. The builder simply closes the business during the warranty period and they are off the hook for claims
Do both import 100% of the goods?
No, on the island with the apartments, there is space for agriculture etc
The houses could grow stuff also but they might be in a homeowners association banning gardens and solar panels. The apartment has designated that land as a park bc the owner is a real dick and owns the only store.
I mean, yeah, apartments and such should be widely available. Awesome for high population areas, young folks, temporary housing situations, etc. Had a flat for years and will for at least a few more. However, as a drummer (and general loud music enthusiast) I am very ready to get out of the flat and get into a proper house with a basement, garage, patio for grilling with da boyes, etc.
A good mix of both is ideal. I sure wish we took better measures to mitigate the insane housing prices tho'. Sick of thin walls and and a single room trying to replace 4 rooms.
Assuming the needs of a living space is the same across both populations, this graphic seems disingenuous. The pixel count of the apartment suggests it could fit 6½ of the homes per floor. Across 9 floors that's 58 homes worth of square footage.
I assume the homes have garages, which would not account for living space. But garages don't account for 42% of a homes' size.
But garages don't account for 42% of a homes' size.
You should see some of the houses around here. Sometimes, the garage is more than 60% of the whole house.
Car parking isnt needed because there’s nowhere to go
True, but what I'm saying is that there are losses in livable square footage represented in the apartment. A home's SqFt excludes the garage, so a 1500 SqFt home is actually 1740 SqFt with a 1-car garage. I.e. a 1-car garage only takes up 14% of the area underneath a roof of a 1500 Livable-SqFt house. Yet, the represented apartment has lost 42%.
That implies that if the the houses in the picture are 1500 livable square feet, then the apartments are 1009 livable square feet; a ⅓ loss in livable area.
Apartment Complex = 58 Homes' worth of area including garage (1,740 × 58 = 100,920 SqFt) 100,920 / 100 apartments = 1,009 SqFt per apartment
Ok, double the pink block. Now what?
Then you'd be closer to genuine compared to what this graphic shows.
OP do you live in apartment complex?
Yes. And also importantly, I live in a city that has an abundance of missing middle housing, meaning it's probably the most affordable major city in North America, has a very high quality of life, has terrific walkability and bikeability, and punches well above its weight in terms of rapid transit.
The result is I live in a good quality apartment, in a very convenient location, without roommates, all for a surprisingly affordable price.
But because so many cities make it extremely hard -- if not straight up illegal -- to build anything but suburban sprawl, those cities are far more expensive and far more car-dependent.
I would prefer a middle ground where you have town homes for more privacy and room for families. Everything is still walkable, you preserved more green space, but everyone isn't crammed into tiny pods.
I want to see this graphic with an added 3rd panel showing the difference between homes, apartments and arcologies.
I'd rather see more than just housing if I have to live on a tiny fucking island.
You do know that individual houses can also have trees, right? Why are you ignoring that?
Having trees != ecosystem. The mere presence of tons of roads, buildings, and infrastructure (not to mention monocultured grass lawns, pesticides, herbicides, etc.) is super disruptive to ecosystems. If our cities needlessly sprawl all over the place, we're forced to drive more, pollute more, spend more (all that infrastructure and cars are super expensive!), and our built environment disrupts much more actual ecosystems.
True, but having them is still better than not, and it's bad faith to pretend like it doesn't matter.
How about apartments for people who want to live in apartments, and houses for people who want to live in houses, and proper civil engineering to limit sprawl?
Why does it always have to be black or white? There's a shade of gray here that's closer to the apartment model, but that would still allow freedom of travel. Public transportation SUCKS ASS. Cars are a central identity to Americans. They are part of our culture. Not having them just means everyone feels like another bee in the hive.
Because this "high density housing" is code for commie block slave quarters.
There are places, and I know this is hard for you city dwellers (which translates to "bourgeois" in French FYI) to understand, where there is still nature, there are still forests, the houses are a miniscule proportion of the land area. Its like that basically everywhere else except for where you insist on living and think everyone should live. It's really pretty, but the downside is that you cannot get by with a busywork job sitting at a desk doing nothing productive all day. I know that's a deal breaker for most of you. Some of us have the life you wish you were living, or something close to it, no expecting the whole world to bend over backwards to accommodate you required.
It’s really pretty, but the downside is that you cannot get by with a busywork job sitting at a desk doing nothing productive all day.
Not true. I've lived out in the country and had a WFH job where I sat at a desk and did nothing productive. It was awesome.
where you insist on living and think everyone should live.Where people want to and do live
No one is coming for your ranch/farm/cabin. If you had the life "we wished to live", you'd be in a dense community with access to local cafes, restaurants, markets, entertainment, and other neighborhoods without needing a car and with a healthy amount of green space as well. We're specifically, typically talking about population centers.
Single family homes need to be banned from cities.
Sorry, but fuck this idea in its entirety. This would allow for MORE apartment buildings to be built, since that is how capitalism works, which results in more damage to the surrounding wildlife. L
We need more regulations, and we need a more conscious approach to our housing in general. We should be approaching this with symbiosis in mind, cooperating with nature rather than bending it to our will.
Those houses on the left? Yeah, you could cram so many actual gardens that give you actual food and which could bring so much biodiversity, but we sticking to flat, pure grass gardens that do nothing other than be flat and look green. Fuck everything here.
This would allow for MORE apartment buildings to be built
Only if people need housing, and if they do...what's your alternative? Not allow them housing?
Sure, let's build what we NEED to build in a conscious way, but have you seen the housing market as of late? China was printing useless buildings everywhere they could just to keep their faux market going, and any place without regulations will try to cram as many people as possible in as little space as possible, forgoing any quality of life or even safety designs in place of profitable designs.
We love to come together in big cities, and even jobs that don't need to be on-site end up being on-site, thus worsening the problem. There's a ton of land out there that could be turned into sustainable housing solutions that could benefit both the people and the environment. I'm just saying we should probably consider other alternatives to "suburban hell" and "communist hell".
neither is good. A leads to sprawl. B leads to crime.
Yeah, but which one is sustainable inside the game?
i would prefer there just be less people in the world, then there wouldn't be this problem
That's complete bullshit.
People gather together in cities, which have always existed as long as civilisation has existed.
If you'd ever travelled out of your own small town then you'd know that there are huge swathes of land - and properties that are unused.
The population isn't the problem - the problem is needing to commute to centralised working locations.
Do you dare come say this here in Scandinavia please? FYI, you will suffer the date of Vigo the Carpathian, but I promis to erect a nice slab of stone for you.
Yeah, I love paying 2 grand a month for something I will never own.
Nah. I'm sorry, but fuck apartments. I was spending $22k a year. Apartment complex did a crap job clearing snow in the winter. My neighbors were disgusting. I had to walk across the complex to get to my laundry room, where the machines rarely worked. The AC wall units were expensive to run, and did little to cool the apartment. The downstairs neighbor's front door slammed every time they closed it. The people next door would vacuum for an hour every night starting at 10pm. I got a $45 fine for hanging a beach towel over a chair on my balcony.
I mean shit, they decided to renovate the apartment beneath me, and turned off my heat and left for the weekend in the middle of winter. They turned off my water multiple times with no notice making me late for work. And then the construction workers stole my package before heading home.
I bought a house. Every time I pay my mortgage I build equity in my home. I have my own laundry room. I may have to clear the snow myself, but I have plenty of space to store a snow blower and shovels - something I could never do before. I can buy bulk sized non perishables too and save money, because I have plenty of space to store it. I can sleep at night without being awoken by my neighbors fucking to the sounds of Bob Marley. I can hang up a towel to dry without being fined for it. And if I need to do work, I can determine when or if the water is being turned off.
Oh, and renewing my lease would have seen me paying almost as much in rent as my mortgage payment. For what?
One thing I've learned in SimCity is that a higher population density means you need a corresponding concentration of utility structures as well. Employment opportunities, hospitals, businesses, and schools all need to be close by and in proportion to serve the population. Not to mention managing waste, water, and electricity. In summary, simply building apartments isn't the solution.
SimCity developers had to take off parking of the game because they destroy cities.
This is sort of like how I learned by playing Civ that if you bum rush to Nuclear bombs and ICBMs you can simply bombs your enemies until they don’t exist anymore. Which is great fun in a game, but doesn’t exactly equate to IRL (but damn you Montezuma).
Anyways, here’s the deal; you would have the same amount of population no matter what. So whether my population was 1 person per square mile or 100 persons per square mile makes a huge impact. If you have a suburb of 100k people and a city of 100k people you can utilize less piping, less waste water, and less electricity more often since you often have dozens of families living in the same building which can utilize electricity more efficiently.
Not to mention that of course more people means needing more jobs, healthcare and education, but that’s also why you tend to have more of those things. It’s not like suburbs exist as self sustaining parts. They rely on cities with jobs to sustain them. Building higher density living spaces is a great way to solve many problems of modern American/Canadian life. I’m saying all of this as the opposite kind of person you’d find on this group since I live in suburbia and drive a giant truck. I just don’t want other people on the roads with me that suck ass at driving so I support public transportation to get them off the damn roads, plus it’s better for the environment.
Exactly. The key thing a lot of people conveniently ignore is how much infrastructure is needed per capita. Sure there'll be more pipes/roads/etc. per sq km in a city vs the suburbs, but there's a heck of a lot more pipes/roads/etc. per capita in the suburbs. I mean, just looking out my window, 100m of street serves hundreds of people, compared to maybe 100m of street for maybe 8 households in suburbia?
Given that there are 8 billion people on this planet, it simply consumes fewer resources to not have everyone in sprawling suburbia.
Right, which is good! It means people aren't travelling huge distances to reach basic amenities and you don't need to occupy vast swathes of land just for piping and roads.
Option C, some selfish dipshit would rather have one building in the spot for the apartment that houses his 2 kids, wife, and himself and that's it
Blocks of flats are awful places. No garden to put up a workshed, or greenhouse or anything at all, or play with your dog or kids (and no dog - it would be cruel to keep a dog in a flat and not have it able to roam a garden all day), they're noisy, loud neighbours can be above, below, to the left, to the right, and in front ...
You can't modify your home how you'd like, can't choose what utility companies run into your home, can't let your kid cycle up and down the street and still be able to see and hear them from the windows etc.
I see your point about density absolutely, but I HATE flats. Awful places.
I also hate how people have started trying to make them sound fancy and posh by calling them "apartments" to try to sound fancy and European/French, as if that will make them more appealing.
"Apartment" is just what they're called in the US.
Brits are hilarious when they learn other countries do things differently
can’t choose what utility companies run into your home,
This is the most farcical complaint. I guess sometimes you can pay a lot to get a new utility option to your owned home, but that's usually not an option.
I agree with you fully, except the last part. Which is just a regional gripe, as to say "apartments" in the States is just as degrading/non-special. So it's interesting that you find specialty in that term when my region is anything but.
Houses. Apartments would mean I'd have to try my luck with the neighbors. A friend of mine has a neighbor upstairs that makes noise at all hours of the night. I've heard it. It sounds like his neighbor is constantly moving furniture.
My friend has asked the neighbor to quiet down, talked to the apartment complex about it, and even had to call the police to file a noise complaint one time. (My friend has young kids who might get woken up by the noise. That's the main reason he's concerned about it.)
I own a townhome that i rent out. Have had good tenants for the most part but don't want to deal with the HOA anymore. So we want to sell but sadly the next door neighbor smokes in her unit so much that it smells in our unit.
In this state there is absolutely nothing we can do legally about the problem. The guy across the street destroyed the grassy area in front of his unit and a lean was placed on his unit until it was fixed or he was evicted in 90 days. But actual damage to our unit we were SOL.
This is why people don't want shared units. When your neighbor is an asshole you're usually screwed.
Spelling pedant here to annoy you!
The word you are looking for is lien rather than lean.
The more you know...
Apartments suck ass
To paraphrase every fo3 vs fo:nv discussion, "But where do they park?!"
Given that this community is called "Fuck Cars," nowhere, because cars shouldn't exist.
Density builds no equity in the US. At least, not for the renters.
You're welcome to live up your neighbours arse; I'll keep my large leafy block and free standing home.
consolidate housing, and transportation. ussr, circa 1940
You know what, i have an argument against denser housing: induced demand. Just like more roads means more traffic, more dwellings means more people.
Good luck to the apartment dwellers when the next wave of COVID hits.
