The picture on the left is just an argument against lawns.
Right? And also…who needs space between two homes if there are no lawns? Just moosh all the outer walls together.
Come to think of it…that’s gonna result in a ridiculously long line of houses. Maybe we could moosh roofs and bottom floors and stack 'em up a bit to make the line of houses only a half to a third as long, and then leave a little space between Consecutive House Stacks™️ - y’know, so that there’ll room for more windows.
Lawns aren’t the reason people want to have space from their neighbors.
It’s amazing what insulation and proper sound proofing can do. Never lived in thicker walls than here in Germany. Other than the blasted church bells, it’d be hard to convince me I was living next to people if the windows were opaque.
And why don’t we stick the whole thing underground to further minimize damage to the landscape. Besides it’s way cooler to be called a vault dweller than a condo resident.
Partially, even if you got rid of the lawns the houses would still take up significantly more space for both the road infrastructure as well as the houses themselves.
If the island were 100 times larger, the houses would take 1% of the land area, leaving 99%. The apartment complex would take up .04%, leaving 99.96%, which isn’t much of an improvement. The proportions of our planet are much closer to my scenario than this made up island. That’s a reason why we might not “prefer apartments in our own town.”
There are good reasons you might want density, this just isn’t one of them.
Yeah, but most people don’t live in that other 90% . Most people live in urban and suburban areas where most if not all of the land is privately owned. Because of this the problem shown of fitting 100 households into 25 acres is way more common than your scenario of fitting 100 households on 2500 acres
And having trees and nature near urban venters is very much desirable, to help with air pollution (tho really not a lot), heat concentration and humidity.
There is approximately 15.77B acres of livable land and there are 8.2B people so if each person had just 1/4 acre that would be 13% vs if you gave each person 2000 sqft it would only be 2%. Then you need to factor in how to built transit for low density and how many more stores you need due to the lower density and you can see that it would be much better for the environment if we had higher density
But then you have to live in an apartment…
The neighbors kids who live above you will stomp around at 2:00am.
The neighbors below you will complain when you make the slightest noise.
I guess that’s just an argument for better made apartments.
That’s really the foundational problem. If you could exist without bugging or being bugged by the neighbors dense housing would be so much more appealing
This is absolutely correct.
I live now in a well-made townhouse. I can’t hear the neighbors, ever, even the living room, or the kitchen. Or the bedroom! I love this place compared to my last crappy townhouse, or any apartment I’ve ever been in, ever.
Unfortunately, where I live it’s very hard to find a well-made apartment or townhouse. I love the idea of an apartment or townhouse where I couldn’t hear the neighbours no matter what they were doing, and I couldn’t smell their cooking, or be exposed to smoke when they’re smoking, and so-on. But, that just isn’t realistic. Even if laws were passed to make that a requirement as of today, it would be decades for the existing housing stock to be sold off.
IMO this is a universal problem. I’ve had neighbours in a single family house that choose to mow their lawn at 7am on a Saturday and have a very loud pickup truck that I can hear start up any time they drive it.
If I could live in the city and never see another person I think I wouldn’t mind it.
No, wait, still not enough trees or animals or stars in the sky.
That’s why we should build “luxury” apartment blocks in nature with high ceilings and very good noise cancellation, surrounded by agriculture and food forests, ideally growing their own food. Everyone gets a killer view and can quickly go out into nature.
And then connect these big ass apartment blocks with underground train.
If it were like that you’d find me living in the food forest and not the apartment.
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Seriously. Solid concrete apartments are so impervious to noise that the only times i hear any noise other than them dropping anvils on the floor is when it comes through an open window! I’m more annoyed by people in the room next to me than i am by anyone outside the apartment.
We can’t live in an apartment because it will always have bad insulation. We should all live in single unit housing with… checks the quality of insulation in your average 1970s ranch house oh shit, oh fuck.
Also, gotta say, love to live in a street level neighborhood Cul-de-sac with that one guy revving his motorbike at 3am. Single pane glass, noisy neighbors, and god help you during July 4th or Jan 1st when someone gets ahold of fireworks.
But for some reason, we completely forget about this shit when we talk about apartments. Like the suburbs - particularly the corners near intersections or school yards or big churches or highway on-ramps - aren’t routinely noisy af.
The suburbs are noisy as fuck. That’s why I want to live in the middle of nowhere.
I have been to a high-density suburb that is honestly not that far from being the second image, and it was literally so dead quiet that i could reliably use the distant sound of the highway to orient myself.
I’ve lived in shitty apartments but dated two people who lived in “modern” high rise appartments. In mine I heard the neighbours occasionally since they were clearly old motels that they half arsed into units. The modern apartments I practically never heard anyone.
Though “modern” apartment generally price out people who are up all hours making noise it’s more the fact that these appartments usually have body corporates or people that live on site. Being the typical “up all hours stomping around” type would be a quick way to have your lease terminated.
Edit: Duh and the super obvious thing I forgot, improved sound insulation in modern apartments I imagine as well.
Concrete framed buildings help a lot with this. Other noise proof options are out there as well
My favorite is a few hundred meters of trees with a fence and stone walls
This has literally been a non-issue for me in every apartment I’ve lived in for the last 10 years here in Sweden. You probably need some better building codes, this is a solved problem.
Renting sucks and relying on a landlord is awful. I bought a small house and keep my yard wild.
Having renting be the default for apartments is part of the problem. It is very normal where I live that a developer build an apartment building and the sells the apartments to individuals who own the living space and co-own and maintain the shared spaces. The developer takes the winnings and never interferes with the building again.
But then you have to deal with the politics of running the complex.
It’s like having an HOA but even more impactful on your daily life since you have to walk through the common area and such - at least with a standalone home you own the land and are directly connected to a public street.
Having lived both in buildings where my family owned one apartment, and houses where there was an HOA, i can tell you that the politics of the apartment building was not even close to how insne an HOA is. it was mostly taking about the budget, prioritizing repairs, and security
If you buy into a poorly managed building though you are screwed. Many buildings don’t keep enough cash on hand for unexpected bills because they want to keep the fees low for residents. Then an elevator breaks, sewage backs up, someone floods their apartment, and all of a sudden there’s a $20,000 bill that everyone has to pony up money for.
that is true, we had to change administrators one time and it was not an easy process. my comment was mostly that the blanket statement of “politics in an apartment complex are worse that an HOA” is not true, it depends on the building and the HOA
Sadly this is true, my parents are living this in their condo right now.
At least in my country it is very normal to own your apartment
In the US you can be kicked out of your apartment with only 60 days of warning without cause (the owners only have to claim they need it for personal use or some other bs).
That is part of why people hate renting. 60 days isn’t enough time to find a new place, pack everything up, and move all while working 50 hours a week.
Co-operative run housing largely eliminates those problems.
Sounds like the other hell on earth … an hoa
housing co-ops are basically the standard here in sweden and it’s perfectly fine, just because america makes things suck doesn’t mean they have to inherently be bad. Obviously if you execute a concept in the worst way imaginable it’s going to suck, that’s not rocket science.
Cool, call me when that comes to the Detroit area I guess. I’ll probably be dead though cuz it ain’t happening.
You lost me at buying a small house
There’s a principle in economic analysis called “Ceteri paribus”, “other things equal”. So, if you’re renting in the image on the right, you’re also renting on the image on the left.
Because I lived in apartments for my entire adult life until maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and I can say most apartments suck because of the neighbors. Ya my neighbors across the street from me are awful and trashy but they are not directly above me or one wall away from me.
Your neighbours don’t suck, your insulation sucks. Any time I had annoying neighbours, 9/10 times it was poor insulation. Sonic insulation is hugely important.
We moved into a concrete building and then another and then another. The horrible neighbors we had in our last wood frame building - Fire’s Favourite food! - ensured we’re never going back. Now I’m aware I have neighbours but, like bigfoot, you’re never really sure they’re there.
Sometimes yes sometimes no, I don’t hear my current neighbours
I work nights, so it didn’t bother me, but my wife said the upstairs neighbors stomp and yell and stuff all the time from like 11 pm till 3 am all the time. When I would confront them, they would blame it on their religion or their small kids. They would talk about how now that the sun is down, they can eat and would celebrate it. After the third time, I started talking about the scriptures of their religion that tell them to respect their neighbors, and then I started reporting it to the leasing office a few times a week.
After they were finally moved out, I was talking to one of the leasing people and complained about how they were loud all the time. They asked why I didn’t report it more, and I had to tell them that I would have been calling them every single day at least once a day.
Its mostly because all of the older apartment 20th ce try or older have wood floors that reverberate lime a drumhead. Newer buildings with concrete construction elminate noise. I dont hear my neighbors ever. Will never go back to an old building.
Most suburbs suck because of the neighbors, too.
Seems the common problem is neighbors.
So um, why are the houses and nature mutually exclusive? I live in a suburban detached single family home, and my whole neighborhood is filled with trees, wildlife and even a tree lined creek that separates the back yards on my street from the back yards on the opposite side. You can’t even see my actual yard from google maps because it’s nearly entirely covered by tree canopy (at 6pm in summer my yard is 100% shaded). We have all sorts of wildlife including deer, foxes, owls, frogs, mallards, rabbits, squirrels, etc.
While I agree that we do need more housing options of all sorts, I don’t for a second agree that nature and suburban housing are mutually exclusive. We just need to stop tearing down all the trees when we build, and plan better.
Don’t forget the huge energy savings (heating/cooling, transportation, infrastructure) by having denser housing. It isn’t just a measurement of “I can see trees,” but all the daily human activities that have a reduced environmental impact in denser development. It’s counter-intuitive, but rural areas that are “nearer to nature” are often worse for the environment.
There is probably a break-even point, I don’t think everyone living in skyscrapers is ecologically ideal and I wouldn’t want to live there anyway. But medium-density development with multi-unit (shared wall) buildings allows huge energy costs, while also making public transit more viable and providing a tax base that actually pays for its own infrastructure.
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Based on your description we might be neighbors
why
Well, you could count the trees on the right and find a way to fit them in between the houses on the left.
What about something like that ?
8 houses in a row, built using a wood structure and straw bale wall for insulation (thermal AND phonic insulation) and clay plaster. So the construction material is storing CO2 rather than emitting tons of CO2 like concrete does.
It collects rainwater for the garden and has enough solar panels for the community and to contribute to the electrical consumption of the village around it.
It leaves a lot of space for land to develop a food forest, permaculture projects and leave space for biodiversity.
Gentle density is awesome too! Rowhouses, duplexes, low-rises: all great options for cities that are zoned to only allow single family housing.
That looks great! Where is this?
i will take literally anything that is denser than single family houses, row homes are generally a pretty good middle ground for most people who can’t fully grow out of the suburban mindset.
in both scenarios developers eventually buy up the entire island and fill it with either
This. Whenever people use “if we don’t eat meat we need this much less land” I’m immediately thinking if we don’t need to plant all that grass and other things then people would just make more houses on those land not grow a forest.
Yes, but the development on the right is going to discover the colony of cannibalistic cave dwellers much quicker, as the high density makes it more difficult to hunt unseen.
Valid point, did not consider.
It depends also on the type of houses. It’s not the same a cabin in the woods and a house with a garden.
Yeah give my 5th floor apartment a back yard to garden in and the we’ll talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_gardening
Very common in and around the old Soviet style Eastern European blocs. The style of construction was known as “Towers in the Park” and was often paired with rail stops and local commercial centers for the convenience of pedestrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
This is a solved problem.
that’s called terraced housing and it’s really astoundingly enjoyable.
Apartments are never built right. Always cheap out on sound proofing and appliances. Also fuck you if you have a dog
Plenty of high quality apartments where I live, in Europe.
Plenty of low quality apartments in Europe as well.
If you think the Grenfell Tower cladding issue was just a UK problem, oh are you in for a world of disappointment.
Yeah but those are almost every time overpriced as fuck.
because there aren’t enough of them, it’s literally that simple.
Here in sweden we built just an absolute shit ton of cheapo commie block-esque apartments areas in the 60’s and nowadays it’s some of the best housing available IMO, it’s hilariously cheap (i have seen small apartments that cost like 200 dollars per month), the apartments are perfectly fine, and the areas themselves are generally car-light and at worst just kinda boring but still fine.
You see one apartment building. A property developer sees room for 100 apartment buildings.
You think the corporate apartment developer is going to let all that stay green? That many people in apartments, you need a few parking lots, shopping malls, corporate centers, and then some more apartments once the rent goes up.
Perhaps in some parts of suburban north america. However, well-designed walkable, bikeable cities with proper transit don’t require mega big box stores all in one zoned area that you drive to from a sprawling suburb.
But you’re describing a city. The graphic does not show a city, it shows one apartment building. The rest of the city you’ve described would swallow the rest of the green space. That’s what sprawl is, when the desirable land becomes more valuable so nearby land is further developed and becomes more valuable becomes more developed becomes more valuable.
It’s an inperfect metaphor anyway, because island development works under its own constraints. An island can only support so many people, regardless of whether they live in an apartment or a single family home. There are limits, and growing beyond those limits will result in feedback loop which can cause systemic collapse. See: San Francisco, where retailers must raise prices because they cannot afford to hire someone who can afford to live there because everything is so expensive.
I’m with you that we need more walkable cities. But car-dependent development is a result of regulatory capture by land developers. Zoning and public transit spending are the battles we need to win. And if we can tax corporate landlords out of existence, that would go a long way, too.
Neither shows a completed city, but with a little imagination you can imagine businesses on the ground floor of the apartments and dense walkable areas connected by light rail or bus. The example on the right has room to build all the stuff people need.
But the urban sprawl development doesn’t have room to build businesses. It would need to destroy another island and build roads for every individual to commute each and every day.
So would you rather have dense, walkable cities that destroy half of nature, or would you rather have urban sprawl which destroys all of nature and then has a housing crisis because it is logistically impossible to build individual houses for 10 billion people?
I think you missed the point. If you build all of those things you mentioned in a similar compact fashion you still have lots of room for nature and more efficiency when compared to sprawl.
You’re missing my point. Development density doesn’t preserve green space. It just puts more people in a smaller space. Protecting green spaces requires actual protections.
This graphic implies that there is a market solution to protecting green spaces. It’s suggesting that NIMBYs who oppose high-density zoning are the reason for suburban wastelands. Zoning regulation should prioritize preserving green spaces and public lands, but deregulation is not the fix (as is implied).
I agree with you actually. As usual, text conversations don’t really convey the entirety of the thought/concept, and lead to misunderstandings.
Anytime a complicated subject is condensed to such simplicity as in the original image, all the nuance of the topic is left out. It’s a problem with all true political topics.
You can sell the wood and drill for oil, maybe there is some gas or coal to burn.
If the building is mixed function, like commerce on the floor level and offices on the first floors, and residential on the rest, you don’t need as much parking and car infrastructure.
bruh you do realize hong kong exists right? that’s almost literally a real life example of this image.
First one. I’ve lived in condos and I will do anything to always live in a house now. It’s the literal reason we sold a condo to buy a house.
Life has been much better ever since.
As stated lower down in the thread, there are more options than just suburban sprawl and tight apartment buildings.
Let me guess, the walls seemed “paper thin”? That is very easily fixed by basic sound proofing and insulating shared walls. Or by using brick or concrete. I lived in an apartment with 3 other guys that had brick walls and I could scarcely hear anyone. It was amazing.
If the place you are in is already built poorly, then the it is neither “very easily” or cheaply fixed.
But the conversation is implicitly about how we should be building going forward.
There are tons of poorly built detached houses as well, that are also not easily or cheaply fixed, that is orthogonal to the debate between house or apartment.
Except you don’t need to soundproof your detached house. You can run and jump and yell all you want without bothering anyone.
If you live in a high quality house with large space between houses, maybe. Sound is very transmittable by air, if you are in the garden or open a windows there goes the sound insulation. There are tons of houses with ‘special cardboard’ as walls and not really that much distance laterally between the houses, so all the loud sounds will be heard. Again, if you build with bad quality, anything will be bad.
sweden has a lot of “commie blocks” built around the 60’s, which are generally basically solid concrete, and straight up the only time i hear my neighbours is if they drop heavy stuff directly onto the floor or if we both have a window open.
These buildings were made specifically to be cheap housing, and yet they seem to be some of the better housing available in the world, fucking wild. I maintain that our commie block areas are some of the best places to live within the country, you get hilariously cheap rent, car-light surroundings, generally very decent public transport connections, and it’s not unusual for them to effectively be the situation depicted in OP’s image, some example areas being Bergsjön, Fisksätra, and Jonsered, the latter of which is wonderful because it’s effectively a small town consisting solely of apartment buildings.
I lived in a condo that had thick stone walls built after WW2
It was still shit and I will do everything in my life to never have to live in these giant human hutches.
My house is right next to an actual forest. I can hop out of my vegetable garden and be hiking on a moment’s notice.
The holes in your logic are the individualism and scale. Very few people will ever be able to live in a detached house like yours, by definition. Either the forest will eventually be cut (rendering the nature dead), or the supply will forever be small and expensive (not accessible to millions of masses). The only way millions of people could have access to a large natural area to hike is indeed apartment blocks urban islands surrounded by large spaces of nature, like the 2nd image. They don’t have to have tens of floors, just 5 floors of large apartments can house many people with comfort while also having amenities (that can be paid sustainably too) to boost.
Bullshit. Once you’ve built your giant rabbit hutches for human, you’re going to need all the accompanying services these giant misery factories need. Industrial scale services for industrial scale human storage facilities.
Go live in one of you want to, share that one sad looking tree in your one sad looking park where you’re not allowed to walk on the grass with ten thousands of other people.
Don’t forget your antidepressants and your sleeping pills.
I will tell that to these Parisian people here.
Lmao this is a shitty park full of druggies and dog shit.
Anyone who’s actually been there will tell you.
Fine suburbanite, everything that is not a private garden will automatically suck for you, and apparently there is not a single dirty ugly and bad backyard, garden or house itself wherever you live. Here in Brazil, tons of people leave mosquitoes proliferating in suburban houses, turning them into vectors for dengue, chicungunha, zika, etc. Can i say every suburban house is a cesspool too ? are all these Moscow parks , Tokyo parks full of dog shit and druggies all the time too ?
Logic here is broken because we don’t make these decisions anyway. A developer will instead put 30 apartment buildings while chopping down anything that gets in the way, then charge more for rent than you’d be charged for the mortgage on the house. There’s also the fact that this picture assumes every family on the left pic doesn’t give a fuck about free scaping, preserving trees, or planting new ones? Idk, whole thing is jacked.
I just moved from an apartment to a house.
If the apartment had the same floor space and the city actually accommodated my hobbies (I need a large garage to work on cars and finish fixing a boat) then I would’ve gladly stayed.
However. Apartments above 60m² are rare and expensive, and all garages/industrial sites are unfavorable because you can put another bloc or supermarket in there. The cities became living hubs for corporate workers whose entire lives can be crammed into a 40 meter apartment and their only entertainment is a depression rectangle or a gaming console.
This is probably too late, but may help someone. If you’re looking for an “industrial” type of setup for a workshop, look at small, local Airports.
There are small airstrip airports all over, and their filled with warehouses that aren’t being used. My friend rented a small hanger for a couple hundred (he did small engine repairs) which the owner allowed him to build or do whatever he wanted in there, eventually he made an overnight loft/hangout room on one side when he felt like crashing on late nights. He enjoyed having a dedicated “away from home” space to work and the airport gave him business when locals drove by and saw him working (some local pilots always had stuff that needed work). The really cool bonus part was pilots would just show up and ask if he wanted to go with them for a joy ride, guess it’s more fun when you get to share the experience with someone.
This comment tells me you’re from the states, right? There is no other country in the world where GA is as ubiquitous as in the US.
Yeah, they’re everywhere so technically 90% of the population is within driving distance to an airstrip here. The same methodology applies to every country though, a lot of people are intimidated by “official” or industrialized settings and don’t realize there is a lot of small unused real estate an owner or manager would love to get used by a motivated individual.
Definitely not the case for large corporations but after they move out the facilities usually are struggling to turn a profit and are an easy grab (or government subsidized places are less greedy), it also looks more professional if you’re trying to do public work.
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This is exactly it. Where the fuck can I do my hobbies in an apartment that are loud. Can I run a torch? Fuck that.
