Is the alternative that we all rent/buy (?) apartments? That sounds awful to me. I’ve lived in apartments my entire life and it is not pleasant due to the large amount of people that absolutely fucking suck. I would love to put some space between myself and these assholes. Ideally, I’d like to not really have neighbors at all after my lifetime of experiences.
The alternative is that not everything needs to be either a skyscraper or a single family home. The phenomenon is called “missing middle housing”, even has a wiki article you can read. Some people need to live in a flat due to not being able to afford a house. Property value would drop if middle housing became a thing - because developers wouldn’t be able to scalp you on a house you need to have, because you could just get a cheap flat instead. Living in a 6-flat building is an entirely different thing from leaving in a huge block of flats too.
That’s interesting. While there are some outliers, there are only really 2 types of “urban” areas I’ve seen across the US. The single family/town home neighborhood and the apartment/businesses neighborhood. That’s pretty broad, of course, but it covers a lot of it. Perhaps if there was more variety things would be better. I still think I’d like to move out of the city, personally, I’m burnt out on people.
Some of the best neighborhoods I’ve seen/lived in in America have been neighborhoods that were built ~100 years ago when zoning didn’t really restrict things. You’d end up with mansions next to smaller homes next to duplexes and apartments. Some of the mansions end up divided into multi-unit housing. A person can be born in the neighborhood, and live their whole life there moving into different housing types as they need to. You can end up with greater social cohesion across age and socioeconomic ranges. If a kid from a working class family grows up in an apartment across the street from a wealthy kid, they will have more social mobility than of they were in segregated neighborhoods.
To add to this, the ask isn’t to build more apartments, the ask is to LET US
Single Family Zoning makes higher density housing illegal. If there are people who WANT to live in apartments they don’t have that freedom because it’s illegal in so much of the US.
No one wants to force you to live in an apartment, we just want to be able to choose to if we want to. let the market decide if we want houses or apartments
While there are other options which have been mentioned to death in the comments below. I’d also like to point out that this could be less of an issue if Apartments were not built like absolute trash shit garbage.
There is no reason you could not build an apartment by taking a standard single family home that you would find in a more rural like area and the simply stacking another one on top of it and continuing that until you no longer get approval to go higher.
Apartments are small, with crappy layouts, and generally cheap materials that makes it difficult to sound isolate. We don’t have to make them like that we could just make an actual fucking house with proper materials and then just put another fucking house on top of it and another fucking house on top of that one and so on
Whenever people say this, my first response is: you should support building mixed use/mixed density.
You would have an easier time affording a single family home if there were a couple of duplexes, quad plexes, and low rise apartments around, with some small shops in the ground level.
Fewer people competing for the same single family homes and close access to bodegas and bistros. Easier time finding babysitters and dog walkers too.
We don’t all have to love like Manhattan. Most of the nicest neighborhood in America are mixed density.
I used to think apartments sucked until I lived in a concrete and brick unit. It was amazing how quiet they were. The concrete walls blocked out all noise of my neighbors and traffic. I made some good friends in the units next to mine and those were honestly 2 of the best years of my life. I miss living like that
Dog a two bedroom apartment down the street from me costs $2,750 a month. I lived there for years. My two bedroom house has a mortgage of $2,170 a month that I get equity in, has more space and a basement, no degenerate crackheads busting my car window at night anymore, and I can actually hang stuff on my walls without losing a security deposit.
Plus I don’t have to go pick up my Amazon packages at the front desk between the hours of 9am to 5pm weekdays, that shit just gets delivered to me. And I don’t have to fight with property managers to fix my God damn washing machine for three months because they refuse to order a new motor for it. I even get to park in my driveway ten feet from my front door now and not park three lots away because there’s not enough space for everybody who lives at the apartments to park.
All the years I spent renting apartments has been a disgrace compared to what it’s like to own a house. Choke on my balls, Bell Partners Incorporated. Large scale shared living situations that are run by faceless corporations and government entities like section 8 housing and apartment complexes feel like incubators that turn normal happy people into suicidal misanthropes. Fuck cars, and fuck apartments
It sounds like most of your grievances are due to renting vs ownership. I’ve definitely had similar experiences, but most of things aren’t issues with decent duplex/townhouse/condos that you own.
The real problem is the huge corporations building apartment complexes with the cheapest materials and no thought of proper urban fabric while dressing them up like something off the magnolia network and renting them as “luxury apartments”. You end up paying top dollar for a shitty pile of monochromatic chipboard and petroleum distillates.
Not the previous commenter, but your comment was spot on and reminds me that I have actually rented apartments with “magnolia” in the name that looked nice from 500’ away, but were poorly build and poorly managed shitholes.
Lol, that’s exactly it. The pictures all look nice, until you actually live there and realize everything is crooked, built from paper, and held together with paint.
That sounds like a dream. Just the other night, the chick across the hall kicked her dude out after they argued in the hall for three hours. I had to listen to him stomp back and forth until 4am and knock everytime to be let back in a he collected his shit. Fucking trashy motherfuckers.
That’s just not realistic in major metro areas anymore. We need to do more to foster a sense of community in buildings because we can’t build enough housing any other way.
Is the alternative that we all rent/buy (?) apartments? That sounds awful to me. I’ve lived in apartments my entire life and it is not pleasant due to the large amount of people that absolutely fucking suck. I would love to put some space between myself and these assholes. Ideally, I’d like to not really have neighbors at all after my lifetime of experiences.
The alternative is that not everything needs to be either a skyscraper or a single family home. The phenomenon is called “missing middle housing”, even has a wiki article you can read. Some people need to live in a flat due to not being able to afford a house. Property value would drop if middle housing became a thing - because developers wouldn’t be able to scalp you on a house you need to have, because you could just get a cheap flat instead. Living in a 6-flat building is an entirely different thing from leaving in a huge block of flats too.
Like half of Europe lives like this.
That’s interesting. While there are some outliers, there are only really 2 types of “urban” areas I’ve seen across the US. The single family/town home neighborhood and the apartment/businesses neighborhood. That’s pretty broad, of course, but it covers a lot of it. Perhaps if there was more variety things would be better. I still think I’d like to move out of the city, personally, I’m burnt out on people.
Townhomes, for the US.
Wait, I’m stupid and didn’t read it all. I’m seeing a pattern of mistakes on my end.
Some of the best neighborhoods I’ve seen/lived in in America have been neighborhoods that were built ~100 years ago when zoning didn’t really restrict things. You’d end up with mansions next to smaller homes next to duplexes and apartments. Some of the mansions end up divided into multi-unit housing. A person can be born in the neighborhood, and live their whole life there moving into different housing types as they need to. You can end up with greater social cohesion across age and socioeconomic ranges. If a kid from a working class family grows up in an apartment across the street from a wealthy kid, they will have more social mobility than of they were in segregated neighborhoods.
To add to this, the ask isn’t to build more apartments, the ask is to LET US
Single Family Zoning makes higher density housing illegal. If there are people who WANT to live in apartments they don’t have that freedom because it’s illegal in so much of the US.
No one wants to force you to live in an apartment, we just want to be able to choose to if we want to. let the market decide if we want houses or apartments
While there are other options which have been mentioned to death in the comments below. I’d also like to point out that this could be less of an issue if Apartments were not built like absolute trash shit garbage.
There is no reason you could not build an apartment by taking a standard single family home that you would find in a more rural like area and the simply stacking another one on top of it and continuing that until you no longer get approval to go higher.
Apartments are small, with crappy layouts, and generally cheap materials that makes it difficult to sound isolate. We don’t have to make them like that we could just make an actual fucking house with proper materials and then just put another fucking house on top of it and another fucking house on top of that one and so on
Whenever people say this, my first response is: you should support building mixed use/mixed density.
You would have an easier time affording a single family home if there were a couple of duplexes, quad plexes, and low rise apartments around, with some small shops in the ground level.
Fewer people competing for the same single family homes and close access to bodegas and bistros. Easier time finding babysitters and dog walkers too.
We don’t all have to love like Manhattan. Most of the nicest neighborhood in America are mixed density.
I used to think apartments sucked until I lived in a concrete and brick unit. It was amazing how quiet they were. The concrete walls blocked out all noise of my neighbors and traffic. I made some good friends in the units next to mine and those were honestly 2 of the best years of my life. I miss living like that
Dog a two bedroom apartment down the street from me costs $2,750 a month. I lived there for years. My two bedroom house has a mortgage of $2,170 a month that I get equity in, has more space and a basement, no degenerate crackheads busting my car window at night anymore, and I can actually hang stuff on my walls without losing a security deposit.
Plus I don’t have to go pick up my Amazon packages at the front desk between the hours of 9am to 5pm weekdays, that shit just gets delivered to me. And I don’t have to fight with property managers to fix my God damn washing machine for three months because they refuse to order a new motor for it. I even get to park in my driveway ten feet from my front door now and not park three lots away because there’s not enough space for everybody who lives at the apartments to park.
All the years I spent renting apartments has been a disgrace compared to what it’s like to own a house. Choke on my balls, Bell Partners Incorporated. Large scale shared living situations that are run by faceless corporations and government entities like section 8 housing and apartment complexes feel like incubators that turn normal happy people into suicidal misanthropes. Fuck cars, and fuck apartments
It sounds like most of your grievances are due to renting vs ownership. I’ve definitely had similar experiences, but most of things aren’t issues with decent duplex/townhouse/condos that you own.
The real problem is the huge corporations building apartment complexes with the cheapest materials and no thought of proper urban fabric while dressing them up like something off the magnolia network and renting them as “luxury apartments”. You end up paying top dollar for a shitty pile of monochromatic chipboard and petroleum distillates.
Not the previous commenter, but your comment was spot on and reminds me that I have actually rented apartments with “magnolia” in the name that looked nice from 500’ away, but were poorly build and poorly managed shitholes.
Lol, that’s exactly it. The pictures all look nice, until you actually live there and realize everything is crooked, built from paper, and held together with paint.
“dog a tuah …bedroom apartment”
That sounds like a dream. Just the other night, the chick across the hall kicked her dude out after they argued in the hall for three hours. I had to listen to him stomp back and forth until 4am and knock everytime to be let back in a he collected his shit. Fucking trashy motherfuckers.
That’s just not realistic in major metro areas anymore. We need to do more to foster a sense of community in buildings because we can’t build enough housing any other way.
“I would be all for this, but you people all suck.”
Exactly! Lol
The issue is that everyone in the long chain of apartment construction tries to cut corner to pocket more money.
So you get these cheap cardboard new apartment where you hear everything happening in the building.
It doesn’t have to be like that. But the mentalities need to change, and the fuckfaces contractors need to be held accountable for their shitty work.
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