We’ve been dead set on getting something fully detached since living in an apartment style condo. There’s 0 enforcement of the little bit of laws we have as soon as it’s an apartment building. The city is 100% hands off for anything not detached. None of the laws on the books are focused on or designed with any kind of density in mind.
The condo boards are HOA’s on steroids. The rulers of these little fiefdoms don’t just fuss at your lawn and paint. They decide if/when the roof will be looked at, if they should bother to top up the emergency fund as much as suggested, etc. It’s insane. As much as we prefer the low impact of high density, it’s just not livable.
Family have tried finding apartment buildings (condo or rent) but have given up. All of them are studio, 1, or 2 bedrooms. Max seems to be ~900 sqft, which would be fine if they were square. Unfortunately they all seem to be very long and narrow. The 900sqft also includes balconies, storage spaces, and parking spots here. It’s not great.
Every apartment style condo in this city also has serious building issues. The city just signs and doesn’t inspect. The builders (major builder #451) just disappear after each build as they “go under” and the major builder they were "part of " are not considered liable since it was a subsidiary. Regulations were put in place to prevent this with detached builds but they don’t cover condos.
Until regulations make them livable I doubt we’ll see a serious adoption of them for a while here.
All of them are studio, 1, or 2 bedrooms. Max seems to be ~900 sqft,
We’re renting a 3.5bd (the half is labeled a den as it’s only 7x9 vs 10x10) built this year.
When you find a good one, jump on it.
What nature? I have to drive 2 hours to see nature. Bring on the houses.
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.
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/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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Ok, misanthrop.
You say that like it’s an insult.
Someone who hates or distrusts humankind certainly isn’t a positive trait.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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’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
I’ll rephrase - this is a problem that has an established solution that you can easily copy.
so you’re agreeing it’s a solved problem then, just that wherever you live is refusing to implement it.
Everyone is going to need to agree on a noise level
This is true. In Holland we have laws and regulations about this. My wife’s job is enforcing this, although most of the work is designing places to minimize problems (don’t build homes right next to highways, or under flight paths, or next to industry), as well as dealing with cafe owners who let their customers talk in front of the bars smoking at 02:00. 😄
The real crime is that fucking font. I’d rather just burn down the whole island.
You mean the Avatar logo font?
It’s called Papyrus and it’s everywhere. From Arizona Green Tea to the band Lamb of God.
I hate it, maybe not for good reasons, but if I see that font on a product or document, I feel repulsed. Like reading someone’s resume printed in jokerman or one of those faux-handwritten cursive fonts that are all the rage on handmade hipster farm-to-table rustic authentic commodities.
I wish somewhere like this actually existed because I would move there instantly.
Places that are surprisingly similar to this do exist and unsurprisingly are very fucking nice places to live, and by dint of being high density it’s generally not that outlandish to actually be able to live there.
Look for areas around public transport lines, with a reputation for being largely inhabited by immigrants and poor people, those places at least in sweden tend to be really fucking nice. They get a bad reputation because of racism/classism, but that’s kind of good because it means there’s little competition for the housing and it’s going to be way cheaper than it would otherwise, and having lots of immigrant inhabitants mean there’ll be more neat businesses available to you.
There are plenty of high density places (usually very expensive in the US) but not surrounded by natural beauty like this. Maybe in Europe you have this I haven’t explored extensively but in the Americas it’s basically nonexistent.
Can you give an example of such a place? The closest that I can think of is Vancouver but it’s one of the most expensive places to live on Earth. And it’s really only some nice parks, not fully surrounded by nature like in this image.
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.
That looks great! Where is this?
Gentle density is awesome too! Rowhouses, duplexes, low-rises: all great options for cities that are zoned to only allow single family housing.
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.
I’d prefer the left. Fuck other people.
so much hate.
It’s a soft fuck. But too many people haven’t lived in a multi party house and are the loud annoying neighbors themselves, of course they don’t get my comment.
Because FUCK living that close to other people. Humans fucking suck to be close to and I’d go fucking postal having to deal with that shit.
I hate my neighbors as it is and barely see them. If I could hear their shithead kids screaming and throwing themselves into the walls I’d burn down a city block.
See that’s all fine and well. More people should do that. But then you get the people who don’t want to live near people, in the middle of a city. The “have your cake and eat it too” kind. And that’s just not feasible.
There really is no one-size solution to housing. We need, and all benefit, from having some degree of options, but importantly, those options should be attainable, and all have their costs/drawbacks.
Modem building codes usually have noise separation requirements.
You have to remember that people who advocate for apartments usually aren’t trying to make everyone live there, they’re just trying to make apartments/condos an option for who those who want them. In much of the US and Canada it’s illegal to build medium and high density housing, for essentially no reason beyond aesthetics and racism.
Consider that if you have one bad neighbour in an apartment, then everyone on your floor will also be talking to them and helping to regulate their disruptive behaviour.
Apartments usually have concrete walls so you can’t hear your neighbours. Unfortunately, there are some new builds made by developers trying to maximise profit at the expense of the residents who don’t do this.
Unfortunately, there are some new builds made by developers trying to maximise profit at the expense of the residents who don’t do this.
AKA every developer in an american suburb
Basic sound proofing can make apartments very quiet. We could pass regulations requiring sound proofing
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.
Lol
Yeah but those are almost every time overpriced as fuck.
We all know that soon enough, the center of the island will be filled with cheap appartement blocks, and all the beaches and access to water will be owned by rich people with huge houses.
This is interesting. Where do the 100 families in the apartments get their food?
…where do the 100 houses get their food?
Uber, duh
Looks like they have room for gardens
Uh huh. How many of your neighbours grow their own produce. Maybe 3 in the entire neighbourhood?
More than in apartments
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.
