Put a few more towers there for double or triple the housing and we’re in business.
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There was an episode of Sliders where Thomas Malthus was a significant person and the global population was kept under 250 million.
It sounded nice, even with the lottery system.
It sounded nice
That’s literally eco-fascism 💀
Not really. If you used money you were put in a lottery to commit suicide and if you were chosen you got a big party to celebrate your sacrifice. The only people who had a problem with it were the Sliders.
ok
I mean seriously, the first thought that came to my mind was: “How is this better for nature? They are going to poison the shit out of the ocean around their shores dumping their shit right into it because they’ve got nowhere else for it to go, because it’s still too many people for that area.”
Even if they try to build septic, it’s just too damn small for it to not be leeching into the water unless they dig the septic tank insanely deep.
Wouldn’t a water treatment facility for that much wastewater take up about as much space as the living area? What about electricity generation? And where is fresh water coming from?
These fucking simplistic ass views will be the death of us.
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because what I’m thinking is still a taboo on societal debates.
Yeah, eugenics is gross and you’re wrong that there are too many people for the earth to support
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For those complaining about noise in apartments: in my experience apartment dwellers are quite considerate and when living in an apartment I never had any major noise problems.
Now that I live in a single home let me tell you about the noise of neighbours mowing their lawns, costant noisy renovations etc. and in general a lot more car noise.
Quite honestly, it was more quiet in the apartments that I lived before.
Edit: and besides, I think people are confusing apartments with the real cause: housing areas with low socio-economic status tend to be more noisy. Correlation is not causation and all that…
Noise reduction in buildings have come a long way. Anyone living in an old apartment is going to find it more noisy.
Side note - even in an apartment (a large complex that is mostly parking lot and big patches of barren lawn) the lawncare guys that come through several times a week starting at 8am drive me up a fucking wall. I can’t fucking stand lawns dude. Give me patches of unmoderated and peaceful nature over that shit any day. Density and nature do not have to be mutually exclusive.
People are down voting you but I’ve had the same experience. The apartments I’ve lived in were very quiet. The suburban home I live in now is within earshot of lawn care daily. I literally never leave my land, when I say daily I actually do man daily.
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.
Check out Habitat 67 in Montreal - an architectural student solved this in the 60s. Apartments where everybody gets their own rooftop terrace. Given the funding, the original plan was for a 30-story terraced hill of mixed-use and apartments in an A-frame with public green space underneath that mixed the density of apartments with the benefits of single family homes.
Since everybody thought he was crazy, he only got a fraction of the funding for what he ended up building for the 1967 World’s Fair, but those apartments have the longest occupancy time of any building in Canada (some seeing 2 or 3 generations living in them) and a 5-year waiting list on units.
Last year, a 3d model of the original concept was released for Unreal Engine: www.unrealengine.com/en-US/hillside
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
This is a solved problem.
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.
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’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.
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.
this is a solved problem
LOL no, it’s solved problem where you are
so you’re agreeing it’s a solved problem then, just that wherever you live is refusing to implement it.
I’ll rephrase - this is a problem that has an established solution that you can easily copy.
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
I grew up between a big house with it’s own forest, and a town house. At this point in my life, I have spent more time living in apartments, and the last 4 years living in studios. Gotta say, I have no desire to move into a house at any point. Having an apartment in a well built city with good public transport is just way nicer.
for a while now i’ve maintained that commie blocks (at least over here) are some of the best places to live, and i have to conclude that the only reason people think most other areas are at all appealing is because they have simply never actually been in the commie block areas.
It’s like how my dad had never once even considered the notion of riding a bike, then one day i convinced him to buy an e-bike and since that day he has driven a car… literally 3 times, i think. Once you actually consider the merits of it it’s so obviously better.
Yeah. I’ve lived in one in eastern Germany for a weeks at one point. It was in a park, which had seating, locations for BBQ, playgrounds, and all streets around where very reduced speed. The flat was sized and partitioned well. Insulation sucked, though I’m pretty sure renovating one to modern standards is cheaper than leveling and replacing it.
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.
These threads are full of people making the straight-up weakest arguments for destroying nature…
“…but privacy and noise!”
Ugh, just take all that money you would have spent on the ridiculous driveways, extra lengths of road, utilities, and lawn care and put it into higher quality building materials for the apartments/townhouses.
We build crap quality places in the US and all I hear from my fellow countrymen is “we can’t (or don’t want to) do it any other way”.
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.
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.
Most of my apartment neighbors are actually really cool, chill people. There’s a handful of people who stink, but like… Oh well?? That’s living around other humans? You adapt to the shitty ones and get along with the good ones.
If you run around assuming all your apartment neighbors will forever be annoying, you’ll never get to know any that aren’t. Same with neighbors in the suburbs. Being around humans can suck sometimes, but if you look you can often find decent people.
I’ve met more decent wild animals than I have people.
Ok, misanthrop.
You say that like it’s an insult.
Someone who hates or distrusts humankind certainly isn’t a positive trait.
Awww surely not!
Ever heard that quote, paraphrasing the start of it:
You run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk.
(Maybe you know the rest) If you give that some thought for the rest of the week (assuming you’re out and about), interested to hear any thoughts on it :)
Part of the reason I hate people is I put a ton of effort into trying not to be a jerk, stressing myself out with constant worry from monitoring my behavior at all times, but other people don’t seem to give anyone else the same courtesy.
And that doesn’t even get into how hard it is for me to relate to almost everyone. I watch weird TV shows, listen to weird music, read weird books, and have weird hobbies. Outside of the weather I don’t really have anything to talk to them about, despite their seemingly constant need for interaction.
The suburbs are noisy as fuck. That’s why I want to live in the middle of nowhere.
try: Alaska
you can have trees with people or trees without people, we have train, boats, and airports. Enjoy the tundras full of moss and few people, the largest city in the United States (by area) and the reasonably tall mountains.
You joke but the Canadian Rockies are pretty high on my list of places to wander naked until I die.
I’ve lived in two separate but equal soviet era concrete blocks, and I could count on my three hands the number of times I’ve heard my neighbours do anything. I assume they dropped a neutron star or something.
That is except renovations… the type where they start drilling at 8am and do not stop until 6pm… those are not so rare.
I’m convinced one of our neighbours removed all of their internal walls by using a tiny drill bit to remove that much of one wall at a time. Nothing else can explain weeks of constant drilling.
I guess my point being: they had it figured out 50 years ago (except for renovations).
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.
The thing is, you can’t really engineer against anti-social behavior. For every better made apartment you will find that there is an even bigger anti-social idiot who still manages to make life hell for their neighbors.
I’m pretty blessed with my mostly boomer neighbors (🤞) who don’t make a peep after 10PM, but my girlfriend has had some shitty neighbors even though her apartment is pretty well made. Sound insulation between apartments is no match for cigarette and marijuana smoke wafting in from the balcony below any time you want to open the window to air out, or if, heavens forbid, you want to sleep with the window open in the summer, nor does it help much if they are partying and speaking loudly on their balcony until 4AM on weekdays. And then I’m not even getting into how they’re treating shared spaces.
The proximity makes everything so much worse than it would be with a house, at some point only adding distance helps.
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.
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.
Sadly this is true, my parents are living this in their condo right now.
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
Why does renting have to be the automatic assumption? We’re simply talking about two different ways to organize living space, not how it’s financed. Shit, we should take a page out of Finland’s book, and make some actually really good public housing and make it available to everyone.
Because capitalism.
Owning sucks too. Shit is always breaking, it’s expensive to fix and nobody else will handle it for you. Just paying for lawncare is bleeding me dry, and I don’t even use the lawn… but the city/police get angry when I don’t cut it.
Replace your lawn with white dwarf clover. It looks lawn like but doesn’t get super tall. Also it feeds the pollinators.
that would cost as much as just paying the lawn people, I can’t do it myself.
Nah, the process you’d want to do is called over seeding. You trim the grass super super short, spread seeds, and that’s it. You can get seeds and a spreader for pretty cheap. It’s not as expensive as something like sod or ripping up your old grass.
I would still have to pay someone as like I said I cannot do it myself. Thanks for the suggestion though
You are not thinking about the large picture.
Renting a tiller and throwing down some clover seeds is cheap compared to a lifetime of lawn people.
Just like with your first comment. Yes things break and are expensive, but you’re not throwing ~1500 a month out the window renting.
No tiller necessary.
I have both owned and rented, and there is no comparison. Owning is a million times better. Not having a landlord that can just raise the rent or kick you out whenever they feel like it, plus the freedom to do whatever you want with the place, plus the almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you’re not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.
There is nothing about owning a house that even approaches the cost of renting unless you don’t know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don’t have any friends who can.
almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you’re not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.
Hard disagree, as I have had the exact opposites happen and know many others in the same boat. Both houses I sold were at a loss, after I got sick of things breaking all the time and being too expensive to fix.
unless you don’t know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don’t have any friends who can.
Or you are disabled and don’t have anyone to help.
I am disabled, and the work needed to upkeep a house is orders of magnitude less than the stress of being forced to move every couple of years because the landlord raised the rent, or won’t upkeep the place, or they’re selling the house, or the agent takes an irrational dislike to you. I’ve had all of those happen, many of them concurrently. That’s not to mention the disability issues involved in not being able to fix your own space and solve problems that exacerbate your illness.
Not having friends is a problem that could be addressed with a stable local community, something that gets broken up when people are forced to move and can’t put down roots anywhere.
And you lost money twice? Okay, unlucky, but are you going to tell me you lost more than you would have in rent? Did you give up on owning and go back to renting, and do you prefer it? Are you telling me you made the choice to rent rather than own, or were you forced to rent by financial hardship? Or wait… do you still own and you’re just bitching about it? Why don’t you go back to renting if owning is such a burden? (EDIT: Also, in case you didn’t realise, you’ll still have to mow the lawn if you rent, so that’s a weird problem to focus on)
I owned a house outright with my partner, with no debt, but then my disability became too much for me to work, the relationship broke down, the assets were split and we both fell off the property market. All of the money we made selling the place has now disappeared into various landlords’ pockets. I’m sure I could’ve bought one of their places for all the money I’ve given them over the years. And I could’ve made a down payment once upon a time, but without a steady income I can’t get approved for a loan, yet another problem forcing me to rent. Now, any money I could’ve made a downpayment with is gone.
And before you say that this is a downside of owning, I will remind you that the problem I am describing is no longer being able to own and being forced to rent, so if that’s a problem, then renting is worse.
Oh by the way, renting is worse. It is a fucking crime against humanity. The village is gone, and landlords destroyed it. The destruction began with the fencing of the commons, that brutally violent theft by proto-capitalists from the peasants, and it’s never stopped since. It won’t stop until we organise and take back what’s ours.
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.
Co-operative run housing largely eliminates those problems.
Cool, call me when that comes to the Detroit area I guess. I’ll probably be dead though cuz it ain’t happening.
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.
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.
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.
Lol
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.
Why build up when we can build down to utilize geothermal. Under ground houses saves nature!
How about quadplexes? 50% of island used.
Those are great too :) with some small grocery stores at corners occasionally.
Dang, Lemmy really is misanthrope central
It’s easy to call it out like that, but I that apartments have design flaw, that it dehumanizes your neighbours.
Something along road rage. You are stuck in a container and interaction with others are limited to annoyance.
Maybe coop apartments would have a way to solve it, but it will break down if multiple suites are built next to each other. You can know/befriend a very limited amount of people.
You are stuck in a container and interaction with others are limited to annoyance.
Nailed it. Either they’re annoying me with noise, or I’m constantly worrying that I’m annoying them with noise.
Now, do the houses in the same density. I’m talking, wall-to-wall, stacked on top of one another in a brick filled with shingles, confusion, and misery, thanks to the lack of any connecting hallways, stairwells, or elevators. /j
Unironically houses. If you go for the apartment, The remaining land will still be filled up, just with apartments instead of houses, and you’ll have to deal with 50x more people then you would have with house model.
One of the main benefits of using houses instead of apartments is avoiding population density.
I wish apartments in major metropolitan areas had green space like this. If I could have just enough of a yard for my dog and a small vegetable garden I’d happily live in an apartment.
Zoning laws in at least some areas in my country mandate that for every floor higher, the surounding open space must enlarge by so much. The result is widely spaced towers.
You are probably looking for a small medieval town. Adding aparment blocks together makes transport cheaper. Hence you can built a walkable neighbourhood with good public transport. You then have green space outside the settlement. However that can be reached quickly in smaller settlements.
Major metros don’t have the extra space for hoarding. This is why people suffer the reduced economies of scale and move into rural areas. There’s gotta be tradeoffs, and what you pay in occasional power failures or road issues you get back in forests and streams.
Non-sense, there’s plenty of potential to have green spaces including community gardens in cities.
