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 Stacksโข๏ธ - y'know, so that there'll room for more windows.
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.
The way i see it is people prefer to fence themselves from the world in their tiny square, rather than enjoy a larger piece of land they have to share.
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.
If the island were 100 times larger, the houses would take 1% of the land area, leaving 99%.
Singapore government: if only.
Also wildlife, carbon capturing, and distance to everything. There's reason why denser city is easier to go around, in this island, you might not even need a car.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 youโre 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.
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.
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.
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 (๐ค) 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.
Iโve lived in shitty apartments but dated two people who lived in โmodernโ 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 โmodernโ apartment generally price out people who are up all hours making noise itโs more the fact that these appartments usually have body corporates or people that live on site. Being the typical โup all hours stomping aroundโ 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.
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 few 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"Why didn't you take time out of your day to help us manage the property, for free, after all the times we did nothing about the reported noise violations??"
Man, apartment owners and landlords are fucking useless...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: White dwarf clover is what people think of when they think of clover. It's not something exotic. Do not get crimson clover and especially not red clover lol. Red clover is a perennial and gets very tall.
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.
No worries. I wasn't trying to make assumptions, just point out that the process is much less involved than you'd guess given what replacing grass usually looks like.
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 youโre 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 donโt know how to do even basic DIY shit and you donโt 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zoning bylaw might require 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling unit. Three buildings would then need 450 spaces at roughly 128 sqft. each which would take up nearly an acre and a half.
The three buildings on their own probably wouldn't need even a single acre.
In the original position, one is asked to consider which principles they would select for the basic structure of society, but they must select as if they had no knowledge ahead of time what position they would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a "veil of ignorance", which prevents them from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially in Rawls's formulation, their or anyone else's idea of how to lead a good life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally.
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.
In 2, the owner of the building likely owns the rest of the land as well as the apartment. You are a slave to the owner as he owns the island and your "beautiful view" will either be absolutely not developed at all so it is difficult to use as a park or a source of food without explicit consent from your ruler. No community gardens without tons of power tripping and infighting of course either.
In 2, the owner of the apartment and land can and will bulldoze the entire forest and completely pave it over if there is the slightest hint that he can make more money that way, then jack up your rent for the privelage of living in a hellhole. Conservation of nature my ass. The building owner has a 99% chance about not giving a shit about conserving the rest. They will turn it into monoculture or cattle farming or a parking lot and stores. This post is literally landlord propaganda.
You don't have to own the building. It's not like a trailer park where you have to lease the land. You pay management fees for upkeep and you get a say in how you want the building managed.
That's where then fun starts. You "own" your apartment but can't do shit without approval by 20 nimbys. Also you pay into a HOA fund for general stuff.
Owning apartments is the worst of both worlds. Get a huge loan just and still don't get to do with your property what you want. It's "property" commodified and enshittyficated. But what can one do these days? Buy a house? hahahahaha.
In 1, if there was a workplace, it's likely way farther away from 2, with more limited choices.
Want to do office job as a disabled person in 1? Bad luck, your only options are a few different factories with different kind of workplace abuses, all requiring you to wake up at 4AM, because the factory opens up at 6AM. Disabled? No, you're not, you have all your limbs, you just want to take money from the government to then spend it on luxury cars, and maybe a few months of lifting at the factory will make it "magically go away". Maybe your "wanting to do art" will also be cured, which hopefully got crushed by the good AI, as artists are evil because they don't get cool injuries during their craft.
People were okay with apartments, but then some upper-middle class Karens and their male counterparts started to whine about not having "a kitchen garden" (which none of those fuckers can care about at all, thus becoming hotspots for bugs) and "a place where their child can play" (alone), and who knows, their neighbors could be a migrant/black/Roma/whatever is the current boogeyman at your local area.
Also if you're in the US, you're owning the 1 way less than 2 in Europe, thanks to HOAs.
We could also all live in cells. Maybe even hook us up to VR so we dont even need to get out into nature. You could maybe even harvest energy, by keeping us in nutrient filled tubs while simulating a perfect world into our neural perception.
If you'd build an apartment tower surrounded by food forest and nice fields everyone would get an amazing view. Better view than from ground level. Make the ceilings high and very good noise insulation and great windows. And it would be cheap because the land could be cheap.
I dont think food forrests are viable solutions. Maybe in very particular places in the world. But globally, commercial food productions will not be replaced by food forrests any time soon
I think there are some trees who are very efficient in creating calories - so maybe with more genetic engineering.
But yeah mostly you'd have smaller fields like potato or wheat or corn between hedgerows, and food forest or orchards for fruits and most of all for a nicer view. The main idea would be that you don't need to transport food except from the surrounding area to the apartment tower. You'd produce / recycle food, water and energy locally.
The theory is great! But i doubt that modern consumers will accept this. Sadly! We want our bananas, and oranges all year round and they must be as affordable as possible.
We do need change to change things but personally i think that what is driving denaturation is the chase of profit not comfort and ease of life. I am not moving into a 1 room condo and stop eating watermelons so that multi trillion companies can increase their proffit margins and make even more money for people who dont live the same life as the rest of us.
We are already producing too much food and too much land is being used to create food that goes into feeling animals that will become food. Eating less meat will have a larger effect that eating locally grown onions to save on transportation
Well for me Solarpunk is about what would be possible - except for our current global regime preventing it. So yeah it's fantasy.
I don't know if the costs work out low enough, but you could build such a lone apartment tower on farmland right now. If you had like a government owned "eco bank" funding this. If the land and construction costs can be kept low enough. It would be really cheap with some advances in premanufactured parts or 3D printing or house building robots. Kite power for very cheap wind energy.
If you could buy in for 50k and get all your living costs, food, energy, water and internet basically for free for the next 20 years, plenty of people would jump at this. And if it's big enough (500 units?) you could justify having a doctor and a kindergarden and hybrid local / remote school. If we were serious about climate change, everyone could live in luxury with a killer view.
First of all, farmland is a diversity graveyard. Just because it is green, does not make it natural or even pretty. I live in a country that uses 61% of its area for farmland and although it makes for a cool Windows background, there is not much life in fields like that. Changing the farmland to food forests could maybe change this, but this leads to the second point
The reason why farmland is accumulated into larger and larger fields is, because it is cheaper and easier to run. Going the other way, diving it up into smaller production and mixing it up, will make everything more expensive, complicated and require a lot more (manual) work to run.
500 units is not even enough to support a local grocery store in current times, let alone a doctor or a school.
That said, i had not realized where this was posted in. It just popped up on my feed, so I guess you are right in that it could be a great setup if it could work.
Yeah I have no idea if or how it could work. Commie blocks used to design local neighborhoods with shops and kindergarden. Maybe it would be that when you have kids your move to a block with a kindergarden and school, then it would make more sense.
Maybe it would be harder to farm but maybe it could also be solved through lighter robotic farm equipment. I once calculated that you only need ~250mยฒ for potatoes to produce enough calories so feeding yourself so it's theoretically not that difficult. I also hope in the decades to come we can genetically engineer better food plants. Like higher / better quality protein crops.
But my main idea was how to create a view for people that want to "live in nature". But the hippie ideal for a farmstead is unsustainable with so many people. An apartment block would save a lot on heating, cooling and infrastructure. The proper sci-fi utopia would then be to have underground railway tunnels connect thousands of such apartment blocks in nature. Then much surface area could be rewilded instead of having roads and bridges. But tunnels are rather expensive.
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 wouldโve gladly stayed.
However. Apartments above 60mยฒ 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.
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.
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.
If the apartments are no shoe boxes and have lavishly big (garden) balconies I'm all in. The space should be around 100-120 qm each with flexible drywall placement for individual footprints.
I love living in a walkable city but I envy a friend of mine a little bit, who exits his apartment into a market center with cafes, shops, supermarkets, barber, doctors etc.
The nicest thing about the second picture is how much free untamed land it leaves for me to find a spot to bury the body of my asshole upstairs neighbor.
Edit: I'm not a murderer... But only because I moved out.
Who says only X amount of people will move to the island? The island will always fill up over time, at least with suburbs, there will be some green left
Itโs called Papyrus and itโs 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 someoneโs 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of people in this thread are mistaking the map for the territory. Like yes, obviously neither the development on the right, or the left would actually happen in real life, because why are these people even on the island? What do they eat? What do they drink? Where do they work? The sole statement of the graphic is that dense developments have a reduced impact on nature compared to sparse developments. Discussing the logistics would exceed what can be conveyed by such a format.
"This cladding can burn and kill so many people so well"
(Genuinely though, Grenfell was ridiculously tragic, and its disgusting how making decisions to cut costs and be cheap cost lives, I mean in no way to be mocking that. I'm sorry for any losses you may have incurred in such a tragedy yourself.)
It's possible to own a condo apartment, or if the building is structured as a co-op, then rent is permanently affordable and you have a stake in how the building is run.
Sound proof walls are a thing, as is owning a single apartment. It works pretty well.
Also this idea of owning is just bs. Most of the money goes to a bank in form of a mortgage intrest. Once you paid that off, the children leave the house and you are stuck with a property designed for a larger family. Much better to move to a smaller space at that point, which is cheaper and easier to maintain. That is not even talking about the option of moving to a better job or something similar. Selling and buying a house can easily cost a years worth of rent.
Decomodified housing, like housing cooperatives solve a lot of the renting problems.
How many landlords do you believe would install soundproofing or even allow the renter to do it? Before i hocked my soul for my home here i was a renter for a half century. No landlord i ever dealt with would allow the tenant to so much as swap an outlet to a proper code one. Nor would they entertain the thought of doing so themselves. Long as it was working it was left alone
Ah, a housing cooperative is where everyone who lives on the property has an ownership stake in the property. There's a bunch of different ways to organize it, but that's the general idea. You don't have a landlord so much a neighbors that you make decisions with when something needs to get done that will impact multiple owners. Anything that only impacts your own space is totally your call.
And that is exactly the point. In a housing cooperative the owner is the homeowners association of which all tenents are members. If done right that means cheap rents and decent upkeep, as soon as the debts are paid off.
Counterpoint: they didn't need to clear all the trees, or at the very least, they could have replaced them with more native trees once they were done building. I'm not gonna pretend that houses don't cause a ton of environmental destruction, but imo they really don't have to continue to be destructive long-term; they do it because people usually go with the lowest bidder.
Counterpoint: they didnโt need to clear all the trees
You're not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won't allow it. You've got to clear the whole lot and then replant.
they could have replaced them with more native trees
That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.
From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn't in any way conducive to ecological preservation.
You're not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won't allow it. You've got to clear the whole lot and then replant.
Okay, but... What if... You didn't bury the pipes and wires and put them overground (you have good points, I'm just shit-posting NCD-style now)? Snake them between the trees. You don't have to have houses all in a row. Sure, they're less efficient space-wise, but then you can have your yard and your white picket fence without disturbing the surrounding environment!
That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn't in any way conducive to ecological preservation.
Yeah, well, we're gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
From a semi-serious standpoint, if our population keeps growing, we're either going to have to learn how to tear up ground and then replace it in an ecologically-friendly manner, or we're going to have to push off into space. We're currently scheduled to have a population collapse due to climate change, but let's be honest here, that's going to come with significant ecological destruction which will require significant ecological reconstruction if we ever want to try to return earth to its pre-change state.
Cough I mean: nature put it there, just have nature put it back. Simple as.
Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren't below the frost line, then they'd freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you'd be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you're going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you'd gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that's kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.
I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you're gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you'd have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that's going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you're still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you'd have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it's better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.
Yeah, well, weโre gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won't outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.
Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.
But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can't really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I'm not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you'd wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don't get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.
No, the bigger problem there is that, I don't really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we've already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn't even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.
You're also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we're trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don't really know.
I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.
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.
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.
You could go out to the middle of the forest and yell, would disturb less people that way anyway.
You could also have a community workshop in the basement like how a lot of buildings have gyms these days. Similar to gyms it would probably have more machines as well since the cost can be spread out. You probably can't justify buying a lathe for one project but a lathe for a whole apartment block makes more sense.
Waivers exist and are very easy to enforce in this situation. Either you'd have to sign one with your lease or hoa agreement. If not then then the room would have some sort of access control and in order to go in you'd have to sign a waiver. It's the same as a gym, pool, rooftop area where you can also easily hurt or kill yourself if your dumb.
Insurance companies don't care about access controlled areas with dangerous objects, otherwise shooting ranges wouldn't exist. They care about random people coming into your lobby, tripping and then suing the place because they didn't sign a waiver.
I am planning to get my own metal lathe and mill as is but having access to a shared table saw or bandsaw would be nice but I'm will to pay extra to not disturd others while in at home
We also have a gym and a sauna, along with an apartment you can rent per day for cheap if you have visitors and a space you can rent if you want to host parties.
Yelling for the fun of it would perhaps not be the most respectful thing to do to our neighbors, so I would advise against it. It's not strictly speaking something that I miss, though.
Eh maybe is something like a tik but I honestly enjoy being loud either talking like some kind of opera singer or laughing muniacly at full volume but that could just be from being weird and growing up outside of town
my only gripe with apartments is that people are too fucking stupid to sort their garbage and recycling according to the giant fucking posters in the garbage room.
and strata vote manipulation to make idiotic changes that benefit nobody that actually lives there, while never fixing anything that breaks.
I got bad news for you. Recycling and Trash go to the same landfill. But your point about needing better education and parents who are qualified to raise children into adults is valid.
it's fucking wild how difficult of a concept trash incinerators seems to be for people to grasp, or the idea of melting glass and metal back down into new products.
How about we agree that the majority the world's recycling is not recycled? I'm trying my hardest not to be a prick to you, you tall blue eyed, fishy breath, boozer.
so many people in comments need fucking therapy. idolizing atomization and misanthropy and then wondering why the world has gone to shit. "fuck other people and their children" Andys wondering how fascism is on the rise and why people do mass shootings. it's you. the only difference is you haven't pulled the trigger yet. get help.
No worries bro, u just have to take it on yourself and buy a noise reduction headset, other solution is to touch grass, never did as i am a league player
If I touched grass my laptop would get glare? I've got noise cancelling headphones but I paired them to my TV and now it won't play from my phone unless I unpair them from my TV but the UI has several layers of riddles before I can do that so I just have to walk far away so the TV is out of range before I turn the headphones on and then they work with my phone but by then my neighbour has finished beating his kids so I'm left being annoyed more at Bluetooth technology instead of my neighbour hey did you know Bluetooth is named after a person? King Harold Bluetooth anyway the point is terraced housing sucks and my neighbour is a prick
i currently live in an apartment and have only lived in apartments for more than three decades. i had noisy neighbors all my life. i usually let it go because it's people living their lives and it's fine.
i have once knocked on the door of my neighbors upstairs because their music made it hard for me to actually hear myself talk. turns out they had friends visiting from abroad and they got carried away having fun. they apologized and turned the volume down. believe it or not, we survived that day.
and where i live now there happens to be a noisy kid upstairs who loves jumping around. guess what, it's a kid, that's what they do. I'm an adult. saying fuck the planet I'm gonna live in a suburb because hearing other people annoys me is more childish than anything that kid will ever do.
I guess you're right. My comment wasn't very nice. Although I really miss living in a village. City life is easier on the environment, but fuck is it lonely.
Density zoning is the source of the housing crisis.
People think it's market forces that have created the housing crisis, but it is exactly the opposite: government ha been artificially restricting supply for decades.
There are so many places where 100 units is a more profitable use of land than 10 units, but it's prevented by density zoning.
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, constant 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...
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.
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.
You shouldn't. We most certainly should have more free choice than what we do. You also shouldn't say you want to kill people. I get you're venting, but there are more creative and productive ways to vent your frustration with the capitalistic hellscape we live in. Please keep it somewhat light-hearted, as indicated in the sidebar.
Anything and everything kills and dies all the time. Can't suffer if you don't exist my dude. It's this imposing of experiences and stimuli that is bad.
Noise separation is pretty easy to design into a building. Air separation is possible but would require design that no one bothers with, as far as I know.
Noise separation is pretty easy to design into a building.
I wonder why more don't do it then.
I would be very interested (and I assume I'm not the only one) in a condo + association which advertises strong noise controls. HOA's always seem to concentrate on the wrong things IMO.
It's slightly more expensive, and most developers are trying to build the cheapest thing they can sell. A good number of places have put in noise separation into their building code though, so depending on where you live any new place will be dead quiet.
In a wood-frame building, for example, you increase the thickness of the unit-to-unit walls by a few inches and leave a small air-gap between two layers of insulation. The hard-soft-air-soft-hard boundary makes for a very difficult path for sound to travel through. You have to purpose-build the walls if you want maximum noise isolation, because the studs have to be staggered so they don't bridge the gap and transmit the sound through your defenses.
When we lived in an apartment someone set off the fire alarm several times a week, sometimes at 3am which is a shitty way and time to awaken.
Never want to live in one again
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. ๐
Had an apartment. Guy's girlfriend upstairs smoked. His apartment caught on fire when she fell asleep smoking in bed. Guess where the water goes when the fire department put out the fire. And that's not just water, it's water mixed with toxic soot. No more apartment.
Yup, but this is mine. I don't ever wish to live in an apartment. I want my own space. I can site way more examples than this. But, hey, you like apartments? That's great, YOU go live there. Live and let live.
i can do you one better: 1/3rd each of apartment buildings, quadplexes, and row homes.
This is how they're building a new development in my town and while it's pretty fucking sad to see how much more space the low density housing gets, it's so fucking good to have a mix of densities near each other. It means you don't get the extreme segregation between young/old, rich/poor, and native/foreign people, and that if you want to move to a different density of housing you don't have to leave behind all the people you know.
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.
Edit: we agree that hoarded greenspace isn't a public park, right? Like, that's almost the opposite thing?
But I mentioned the suburbs because
gestures at a forest a bajillion times the scale of Central Park, a contiguous forest area the size of the Amazon
Central Park is awesome - I loved watching the falcons at Mr Allen's place back then, and I had a lion lunge at me in the zoo - but I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough to point out that consolidated park space is the opposite mindset from the hoarded greenspace attached to each individual unit of sprawl of the sort we need to bulldoze for proper space.
Pretty green, right? Plenty of space to expand those towns and cities.
Zoom in. It's pretty much all farmland. There's precious little nature in that.
Density isn't going to save nature. Having fewer people and sustainable farming will save nature. Density is useful for having things like efficient public transport, and reducing the need to have a car. It also localises noise, and I feel we don't value quiet enough.
The picture on the left could be even worse. There are areas where people move in and tear all the greenery out of the garden and then either cover everything with paving stones or gravel. Everything around the house! Then there's also an ugly metal fence or plastic elements in the garden, sometimes you can see fake plants.
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.
I'm not american so i can't speak for that, but here in sweden some examples are Fisksรคtra in Stockholm, and Gothenburg (my fave city) has two northeastern lines of tram-centric suburbs that are just commie blocks in a forest, a similar slightly smaller suburb to the west which sits at the edge of the urban area, Jonsered which is a group of smaller apartment buildings way out in the forest with a commuter train station, and to the south there's a new area called Nya Hovรฅs which isn't quite as removed from other stuff but still has the same feel of being a dense area surrounded by less urban area.
And at least the gothenburg suburbs are perfectly affordable since they have shiteloads of housing and are very much considered low-status areas. Also come to think of it, gothenburg has a bunch of natural (or at least still very pretty green park) areas throughout the city, so arguably many parts of the downtown area count as well.
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.
Sadly 7x9 is a legal bedroom size here, so long as it has a window. There's also no requirement for any of the walls to be straight, so I've seen some really unlivable room shapes
It's impossible to not hear your neighbours in an apartment. There are ways to reduce that, but almost no apartment is built like that. Not to mention that often you want to open windows for fresh air and get to breathe in smoke from cigarettes. It's a different kind of hell to live in one.
I agree that it looks nicer from outside. There can even be parks nearby. But never venture there after dark, because you'll get your vallet stolen.
Due to that every street must be light up during the night, and now you can't see the stars...
While I'm all for this, the problem I see with high-density buildings is that it's easy to put them up, but it's hard to then build the services that this many people need. You can put an apartment block with hundreds of new residents, sure, but where are the doctors, the schools, the hospitals, the public transport routes, etc?
All very solvable problems, but one that high-density living often fails to cater for, because some rich developer cunt is happy to throw a high rise up and forget the rest.
The meth head neighbor fighting with the scary guy who is always mean mugging people, the shoddy repairs and maintenance done to the lowest standards, the ever increasing rent even though the building is paid offโฆ
We have plenty of space, we just need an economy that allows people to afford a single family home. A sfh can be built with nature in mindโฆ the earth has plenty of room for 10 billion people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Stacksโข๏ธ - 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.
The way i see it is people prefer to fence themselves from the world in their tiny square, rather than enjoy a larger piece of land they have to share.
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.
Singapore government: if only.
Also wildlife, carbon capturing, and distance to everything. There's reason why denser city is easier to go around, in this island, you might not even need a car.
Easier travel is definitely a great reason to increase density. Walking & biking > cars
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
That's the difference between America and Western Europe. Western Europe is already mostly built up, they don't have room. America does.
That's not even remotely true. Do Americans actually believe this?
Spoiler: No it isn't.
Yea, everything is pretty full here. We have plenty of nature, but there's always traces of civilization.
I often miss the vastness of nature. Been to Alaska some years ago and being in nature is an entirely different feeling.
But then you have to live in an apartmentโฆ
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.
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.
If I could live in the city and never see another person I think I wouldnโt 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 youโd 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.
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.
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.
Iโve met more decent wild animals than I have people.
Ok, misanthrope.
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:
(Maybe you know the rest) If you give that some thought for the rest of the week (assuming youโre 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. Thatโs 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.
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.
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 (๐ค) 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.
Iโve lived in shitty apartments but dated two people who lived in โmodernโ 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 โmodernโ apartment generally price out people who are up all hours making noise itโs more the fact that these appartments usually have body corporates or people that live on site. Being the typical โup all hours stomping aroundโ 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.
LOL no, it's a 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.
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 few 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.
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.
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.
"Why didn't you take time out of your day to help us manage the property, for free, after all the times we did nothing about the reported noise violations??"
Man, apartment owners and landlords are fucking useless...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: White dwarf clover is what people think of when they think of clover. It's not something exotic. Do not get crimson clover and especially not red clover lol. Red clover is a perennial and gets very tall.
that would cost as much as just paying the lawn people, I can't do it myself.
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.
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
No worries. I wasn't trying to make assumptions, just point out that the process is much less involved than you'd guess given what replacing grass usually looks like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
in both scenarios developers eventually buy up the entire island and fill it with either
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.
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.
That looks great! Where is this?
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.
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_%28gardening%29
This is a solved problem.
that's called terraced housing and it's really astoundingly enjoyable.
Now imagine apartment buildings taking up 100% of the island and that's what you get under the current system.
Three apartment buildings and the rest is all parking lot
Zoning bylaw might require 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling unit. Three buildings would then need 450 spaces at roughly 128 sqft. each which would take up nearly an acre and a half.
The three buildings on their own probably wouldn't need even a single acre.
Great, that means people have a place to live.
not sure how you imagine it's better for those people to just.. not have a place to live?
Yes because housing is the only thing that matters. More houses! Cover the planet in housing!!!
Don't have children.
so you're literally just saying people should go homeless then, wonderful!
You are allowed to wildly infer anything you would like.
In current system it'd be all air bnbs and hotels
And most of them are unoccupied.
I'll go with 99 apartments and one house on the other side so I can be as far from them as possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
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.
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.
What not many people are touching on:
In 2, the owner of the building likely owns the rest of the land as well as the apartment. You are a slave to the owner as he owns the island and your "beautiful view" will either be absolutely not developed at all so it is difficult to use as a park or a source of food without explicit consent from your ruler. No community gardens without tons of power tripping and infighting of course either.
In 2, the owner of the apartment and land can and will bulldoze the entire forest and completely pave it over if there is the slightest hint that he can make more money that way, then jack up your rent for the privelage of living in a hellhole. Conservation of nature my ass. The building owner has a 99% chance about not giving a shit about conserving the rest. They will turn it into monoculture or cattle farming or a parking lot and stores. This post is literally landlord propaganda.
Edit: owns the apartment building, not apartment.
You're assuming that in 1 you own the property and in 2nd you're renting. A strawman argument if I ever saw one.
Most single family homes are owner-occupied. Most apartments are not.
Even if you own your apartment in 2, you still likely don't own the building
You don't have to own the building. It's not like a trailer park where you have to lease the land. You pay management fees for upkeep and you get a say in how you want the building managed.
Typically apartment blocks are owned and managed by a HOA.
That's where then fun starts. You "own" your apartment but can't do shit without approval by 20 nimbys. Also you pay into a HOA fund for general stuff.
Owning apartments is the worst of both worlds. Get a huge loan just and still don't get to do with your property what you want. It's "property" commodified and enshittyficated. But what can one do these days? Buy a house? hahahahaha.
It seems only Americans actually have this problem though. Rarely here complaints over here about HOAs.
There are European countries that have similar systems for apartment buildings where every unit is owend by a different person.
Lmao. This argument isn't worth having.
In 1, if there was a workplace, it's likely way farther away from 2, with more limited choices.
Want to do office job as a disabled person in 1? Bad luck, your only options are a few different factories with different kind of workplace abuses, all requiring you to wake up at 4AM, because the factory opens up at 6AM. Disabled? No, you're not, you have all your limbs, you just want to take money from the government to then spend it on luxury cars, and maybe a few months of lifting at the factory will make it "magically go away". Maybe your "wanting to do art" will also be cured, which hopefully got crushed by the good AI, as artists are evil because they don't get cool injuries during their craft.
People were okay with apartments, but then some upper-middle class Karens and their male counterparts started to whine about not having "a kitchen garden" (which none of those fuckers can care about at all, thus becoming hotspots for bugs) and "a place where their child can play" (alone), and who knows, their neighbors could be a migrant/black/Roma/whatever is the current boogeyman at your local area.
Also if you're in the US, you're owning the 1 way less than 2 in Europe, thanks to HOAs.
I've lived in an apartment and I just can't do it. I hated every day in it.
We could also all live in cells. Maybe even hook us up to VR so we dont even need to get out into nature. You could maybe even harvest energy, by keeping us in nutrient filled tubs while simulating a perfect world into our neural perception.
If you'd build an apartment tower surrounded by food forest and nice fields everyone would get an amazing view. Better view than from ground level. Make the ceilings high and very good noise insulation and great windows. And it would be cheap because the land could be cheap.
I dont think food forrests are viable solutions. Maybe in very particular places in the world. But globally, commercial food productions will not be replaced by food forrests any time soon
I think there are some trees who are very efficient in creating calories - so maybe with more genetic engineering.
But yeah mostly you'd have smaller fields like potato or wheat or corn between hedgerows, and food forest or orchards for fruits and most of all for a nicer view. The main idea would be that you don't need to transport food except from the surrounding area to the apartment tower. You'd produce / recycle food, water and energy locally.
The theory is great! But i doubt that modern consumers will accept this. Sadly! We want our bananas, and oranges all year round and they must be as affordable as possible.
We do need change to change things but personally i think that what is driving denaturation is the chase of profit not comfort and ease of life. I am not moving into a 1 room condo and stop eating watermelons so that multi trillion companies can increase their proffit margins and make even more money for people who dont live the same life as the rest of us.
We are already producing too much food and too much land is being used to create food that goes into feeling animals that will become food. Eating less meat will have a larger effect that eating locally grown onions to save on transportation
Well for me Solarpunk is about what would be possible - except for our current global regime preventing it. So yeah it's fantasy.
I don't know if the costs work out low enough, but you could build such a lone apartment tower on farmland right now. If you had like a government owned "eco bank" funding this. If the land and construction costs can be kept low enough. It would be really cheap with some advances in premanufactured parts or 3D printing or house building robots. Kite power for very cheap wind energy.
If you could buy in for 50k and get all your living costs, food, energy, water and internet basically for free for the next 20 years, plenty of people would jump at this. And if it's big enough (500 units?) you could justify having a doctor and a kindergarden and hybrid local / remote school. If we were serious about climate change, everyone could live in luxury with a killer view.
so... I love the dream, but it is a utopia.
First of all, farmland is a diversity graveyard. Just because it is green, does not make it natural or even pretty. I live in a country that uses 61% of its area for farmland and although it makes for a cool Windows background, there is not much life in fields like that. Changing the farmland to food forests could maybe change this, but this leads to the second point
The reason why farmland is accumulated into larger and larger fields is, because it is cheaper and easier to run. Going the other way, diving it up into smaller production and mixing it up, will make everything more expensive, complicated and require a lot more (manual) work to run.
500 units is not even enough to support a local grocery store in current times, let alone a doctor or a school.
That said, i had not realized where this was posted in. It just popped up on my feed, so I guess you are right in that it could be a great setup if it could work.
Yeah I have no idea if or how it could work. Commie blocks used to design local neighborhoods with shops and kindergarden. Maybe it would be that when you have kids your move to a block with a kindergarden and school, then it would make more sense.
Maybe it would be harder to farm but maybe it could also be solved through lighter robotic farm equipment. I once calculated that you only need ~250mยฒ for potatoes to produce enough calories so feeding yourself so it's theoretically not that difficult. I also hope in the decades to come we can genetically engineer better food plants. Like higher / better quality protein crops.
But my main idea was how to create a view for people that want to "live in nature". But the hippie ideal for a farmstead is unsustainable with so many people. An apartment block would save a lot on heating, cooling and infrastructure. The proper sci-fi utopia would then be to have underground railway tunnels connect thousands of such apartment blocks in nature. Then much surface area could be rewilded instead of having roads and bridges. But tunnels are rather expensive.
They supplement and decentralise food production, building resiliency into our systems.
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 wouldโve gladly stayed.
However. Apartments above 60mยฒ 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.
You see one apartment building. A property developer sees room for 100 apartment buildings.
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.
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.
If the apartments are no shoe boxes and have lavishly big (garden) balconies I'm all in. The space should be around 100-120 qm each with flexible drywall placement for individual footprints.
I love living in a walkable city but I envy a friend of mine a little bit, who exits his apartment into a market center with cafes, shops, supermarkets, barber, doctors etc.
The nicest thing about the second picture is how much free untamed land it leaves for me to find a spot to bury the body of my asshole upstairs neighbor.
Edit: I'm not a murderer... But only because I moved out.
I know you're not serious but this is a really sad and hateful worldview.
You never met my neighbor...
Joking aside, I really did have to move away to prevent things getting worse.
I pride myself on getting along with people, but this experience made me admit that some people just genuinely suck.
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.
What makes you think it would be just one apartment building instead of filling the island with apartment buildings?
No no, one apartment building and the rest of the island is a surface level parking lot because an underground lot was too expensive.
This is a consequence of the inane policy of mandatory parking minimum requirements in local zoning codes. Remove them and this problem goes away.
For the same amount of people, you wouldn't need to.
Who says only X amount of people will move to the island? The island will always fill up over time, at least with suburbs, there will be some green left
The real crime is that fucking font. I'd rather just burn down the whole island.
You mean the Avatar logo font?
Itโs called Papyrus and itโs 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 someoneโs 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.
Still one of the greatest all time SNL sketches, Gosling's magnum opus. I hope they make a 3rd Avatar just so we can get another skit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AKA every developer in an american suburb
Basic sound proofing can make apartments very quiet. We could pass regulations requiring sound proofing
Neither have water, so neither?
Obviously the blue part is land
A lot of people in this thread are mistaking the map for the territory. Like yes, obviously neither the development on the right, or the left would actually happen in real life, because why are these people even on the island? What do they eat? What do they drink? Where do they work? The sole statement of the graphic is that dense developments have a reduced impact on nature compared to sparse developments. Discussing the logistics would exceed what can be conveyed by such a format.
Fires (i live in london)
*slaps cheap cladding
"This cladding can burn and kill so many people so well"
(Genuinely though, Grenfell was ridiculously tragic, and its disgusting how making decisions to cut costs and be cheap cost lives, I mean in no way to be mocking that. I'm sorry for any losses you may have incurred in such a tragedy yourself.)
concrete is a magical material
It is, but we have a tendency to decorate it with kindling over here
Simple. People desire to own what they pay for, and they prefer not having to hear their neighbors partying, arguing, fighting, fucking, etc.
It's possible to own a condo apartment, or if the building is structured as a co-op, then rent is permanently affordable and you have a stake in how the building is run.
More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk&t=0
Ok thx for the link. Still not something id be interested in as i like my space
Sound proof walls are a thing, as is owning a single apartment. It works pretty well.
Also this idea of owning is just bs. Most of the money goes to a bank in form of a mortgage intrest. Once you paid that off, the children leave the house and you are stuck with a property designed for a larger family. Much better to move to a smaller space at that point, which is cheaper and easier to maintain. That is not even talking about the option of moving to a better job or something similar. Selling and buying a house can easily cost a years worth of rent.
Decomodified housing, like housing cooperatives solve a lot of the renting problems.
How many landlords do you believe would install soundproofing or even allow the renter to do it? Before i hocked my soul for my home here i was a renter for a half century. No landlord i ever dealt with would allow the tenant to so much as swap an outlet to a proper code one. Nor would they entertain the thought of doing so themselves. Long as it was working it was left alone
Is a housing cooperative a landlord?
Anyone youre paying for the ability to live on/in their property is your landlord
Do you understand the concept of a housing cooperative?
No,just the concrete facts lessee/lessor and having dealt with shady versions of the latter
Ah, a housing cooperative is where everyone who lives on the property has an ownership stake in the property. There's a bunch of different ways to organize it, but that's the general idea. You don't have a landlord so much a neighbors that you make decisions with when something needs to get done that will impact multiple owners. Anything that only impacts your own space is totally your call.
And that is exactly the point. In a housing cooperative the owner is the homeowners association of which all tenents are members. If done right that means cheap rents and decent upkeep, as soon as the debts are paid off.
And as usual just like reddit, truth gets downvoted. Too much to handle it seems
Never heard of such a thing myself.
They're genuinely amazing, especially when you learn how they're built. Little changes to wall design make a crazy big difference.
Not to people who live in properties whose walls are already built without such design considerations.
Well, duh?
Counterpoint: they didn't need to clear all the trees, or at the very least, they could have replaced them with more native trees once they were done building. I'm not gonna pretend that houses don't cause a ton of environmental destruction, but imo they really don't have to continue to be destructive long-term; they do it because people usually go with the lowest bidder.
You're not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won't allow it. You've got to clear the whole lot and then replant.
That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.
From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn't in any way conducive to ecological preservation.
Okay, but... What if... You didn't bury the pipes and wires and put them overground (you have good points, I'm just shit-posting NCD-style now)? Snake them between the trees. You don't have to have houses all in a row. Sure, they're less efficient space-wise, but then you can have your yard and your white picket fence without disturbing the surrounding environment!
Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.
Yeah, well, we're gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.
From a semi-serious standpoint, if our population keeps growing, we're either going to have to learn how to tear up ground and then replace it in an ecologically-friendly manner, or we're going to have to push off into space. We're currently scheduled to have a population collapse due to climate change, but let's be honest here, that's going to come with significant ecological destruction which will require significant ecological reconstruction if we ever want to try to return earth to its pre-change state.
Cough I mean: nature put it there, just have nature put it back. Simple as.
Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren't below the frost line, then they'd freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you'd be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you're going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you'd gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that's kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.
I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you're gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you'd have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that's going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you're still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.
Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you'd have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it's better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.
I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won't outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.
Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.
But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can't really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I'm not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you'd wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don't get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.
No, the bigger problem there is that, I don't really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we've already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn't even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.
You're also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we're trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don't really know.
I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.
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.
Nailed it. Either they're annoying me with noise, or I'm constantly worrying that I'm annoying them with noise.
it really feels like this post is either being brigaded or just straight up astroturfed by bots
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.
There is so much possible between these. Both options suck.
Different families have different needs.
Why build up when we can build down to utilize geothermal. Under ground houses saves nature!
I could get behind this if I could continue yelling just for the fun of it and have a space for a decent workshop
You could go out to the middle of the forest and yell, would disturb less people that way anyway.
You could also have a community workshop in the basement like how a lot of buildings have gyms these days. Similar to gyms it would probably have more machines as well since the cost can be spread out. You probably can't justify buying a lathe for one project but a lathe for a whole apartment block makes more sense.
The community workshop would be shut down by the insurance company within a year.
Waivers exist and are very easy to enforce in this situation. Either you'd have to sign one with your lease or hoa agreement. If not then then the room would have some sort of access control and in order to go in you'd have to sign a waiver. It's the same as a gym, pool, rooftop area where you can also easily hurt or kill yourself if your dumb.
Insurance companies don't care about access controlled areas with dangerous objects, otherwise shooting ranges wouldn't exist. They care about random people coming into your lobby, tripping and then suing the place because they didn't sign a waiver.
I am planning to get my own metal lathe and mill as is but having access to a shared table saw or bandsaw would be nice but I'm will to pay extra to not disturd others while in at home
a horribly dangerous tool can is only a liability if other people can use it, and disturbing others should always be a goal.
My apartment building has a shared use workshop.
We also have a gym and a sauna, along with an apartment you can rent per day for cheap if you have visitors and a space you can rent if you want to host parties.
Yelling for the fun of it would perhaps not be the most respectful thing to do to our neighbors, so I would advise against it. It's not strictly speaking something that I miss, though.
Eh maybe is something like a tik but I honestly enjoy being loud either talking like some kind of opera singer or laughing muniacly at full volume but that could just be from being weird and growing up outside of town
my only gripe with apartments is that people are too fucking stupid to sort their garbage and recycling according to the giant fucking posters in the garbage room.
and strata vote manipulation to make idiotic changes that benefit nobody that actually lives there, while never fixing anything that breaks.
I got bad news for you. Recycling and Trash go to the same landfill. But your point about needing better education and parents who are qualified to raise children into adults is valid.
Speak for yourself, this is not universally applicable.
Sure bro whatever fairy tales you want to believe. I didn't believe it until I saw with my own eyes.
Sweden sends less than 1% of waste to landfills, this is well documented. No fairy tales.
Again, not universally applicable, I'm sure other countries are a lot worse in this regard.
it's fucking wild how difficult of a concept trash incinerators seems to be for people to grasp, or the idea of melting glass and metal back down into new products.
How about we agree that the majority the world's recycling is not recycled? I'm trying my hardest not to be a prick to you, you tall blue eyed, fishy breath, boozer.
This thread is an object lesson in why the whole world hates Americans.
so many people in comments need fucking therapy. idolizing atomization and misanthropy and then wondering why the world has gone to shit. "fuck other people and their children" Andys wondering how fascism is on the rise and why people do mass shootings. it's you. the only difference is you haven't pulled the trigger yet. get help.
LOL getting help won't make the neighbours any better.
Help I'm trying my best to stop being a fascist but I can still hear my neighbour screaming at his children through the wall
No worries bro, u just have to take it on yourself and buy a noise reduction headset, other solution is to touch grass, never did as i am a league player
If I touched grass my laptop would get glare? I've got noise cancelling headphones but I paired them to my TV and now it won't play from my phone unless I unpair them from my TV but the UI has several layers of riddles before I can do that so I just have to walk far away so the TV is out of range before I turn the headphones on and then they work with my phone but by then my neighbour has finished beating his kids so I'm left being annoyed more at Bluetooth technology instead of my neighbour hey did you know Bluetooth is named after a person? King Harold Bluetooth anyway the point is terraced housing sucks and my neighbour is a prick
Understandable, have a nice day
Where does fascism come into it?
I dunno that's what the other guy said
I see you haven't lived in an apartment, if you believe people here hate just because they hate people.
i currently live in an apartment and have only lived in apartments for more than three decades. i had noisy neighbors all my life. i usually let it go because it's people living their lives and it's fine.
i have once knocked on the door of my neighbors upstairs because their music made it hard for me to actually hear myself talk. turns out they had friends visiting from abroad and they got carried away having fun. they apologized and turned the volume down. believe it or not, we survived that day.
and where i live now there happens to be a noisy kid upstairs who loves jumping around. guess what, it's a kid, that's what they do. I'm an adult. saying fuck the planet I'm gonna live in a suburb because hearing other people annoys me is more childish than anything that kid will ever do.
I guess you're right. My comment wasn't very nice. Although I really miss living in a village. City life is easier on the environment, but fuck is it lonely.
Density zoning is the source of the housing crisis.
People think it's market forces that have created the housing crisis, but it is exactly the opposite: government ha been artificially restricting supply for decades.
There are so many places where 100 units is a more profitable use of land than 10 units, but it's prevented by density zoning.
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, constant 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...
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.
Noise reduction in buildings have come a long way. Anyone living in an old apartment is going to find it more noisy.
how old is that generally? my apartments is from around the 60's and i generally forget i have neighbours at all, the magic of solid concrete.
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.
Be mindful of suggesting you want to kill people. Not exactly a great take, and one liable to get you in trouble if people take you literally.
Why should I have to live with whoever the money people decide I'm to be stuck with?
You shouldn't. We most certainly should have more free choice than what we do. You also shouldn't say you want to kill people. I get you're venting, but there are more creative and productive ways to vent your frustration with the capitalistic hellscape we live in. Please keep it somewhat light-hearted, as indicated in the sidebar.
Anything and everything kills and dies all the time. Can't suffer if you don't exist my dude. It's this imposing of experiences and stimuli that is bad.
Take me out to the black, tell โem I ainโt comin back.
?
I was implying that the new-fashioned way would be leaving the planet
Ooohhh. Yeah that's the one that doesn't exist.
Only if the apartment has very strict noise and smoking rules that are actually enforced.
Noise separation is pretty easy to design into a building. Air separation is possible but would require design that no one bothers with, as far as I know.
I wonder why more don't do it then.
I would be very interested (and I assume I'm not the only one) in a condo + association which advertises strong noise controls. HOA's always seem to concentrate on the wrong things IMO.
It's slightly more expensive, and most developers are trying to build the cheapest thing they can sell. A good number of places have put in noise separation into their building code though, so depending on where you live any new place will be dead quiet.
In a wood-frame building, for example, you increase the thickness of the unit-to-unit walls by a few inches and leave a small air-gap between two layers of insulation. The hard-soft-air-soft-hard boundary makes for a very difficult path for sound to travel through. You have to purpose-build the walls if you want maximum noise isolation, because the studs have to be staggered so they don't bridge the gap and transmit the sound through your defenses.
When we lived in an apartment someone set off the fire alarm several times a week, sometimes at 3am which is a shitty way and time to awaken. Never want to live in one again
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. ๐
that's true in SFH suburbs too, you don't magically get to launch rockets in your backyard at midnight.
Really good framing of it
Had an apartment. Guy's girlfriend upstairs smoked. His apartment caught on fire when she fell asleep smoking in bed. Guess where the water goes when the fire department put out the fire. And that's not just water, it's water mixed with toxic soot. No more apartment.
...insurance?
Neighbour had a garden with trees, guess where the tree fell during a storm? No more single houses... /s
You can litterally find examples for downsides like that of any kind of housing arragements.
Yup, but this is mine. I don't ever wish to live in an apartment. I want my own space. I can site way more examples than this. But, hey, you like apartments? That's great, YOU go live there. Live and let live.
As long as I can live in a hollow under a tree far away from the apartment building, okay.
But if not then Iโll just walk into the ocean because thatโs still too damn many people.
How about quadplexes? 50% of island used.
Those are great too :) with some small grocery stores at corners occasionally.
i can do you one better: 1/3rd each of apartment buildings, quadplexes, and row homes.
This is how they're building a new development in my town and while it's pretty fucking sad to see how much more space the low density housing gets, it's so fucking good to have a mix of densities near each other. It means you don't get the extreme segregation between young/old, rich/poor, and native/foreign people, and that if you want to move to a different density of housing you don't have to leave behind all the people you know.
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.
Edit: we agree that hoarded greenspace isn't a public park, right? Like, that's almost the opposite thing?
But I mentioned the suburbs because gestures at a forest a bajillion times the scale of Central Park, a contiguous forest area the size of the Amazon
Central Park is awesome - I loved watching the falcons at Mr Allen's place back then, and I had a lion lunge at me in the zoo - but I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough to point out that consolidated park space is the opposite mindset from the hoarded greenspace attached to each individual unit of sprawl of the sort we need to bulldoze for proper space.
But yeah, downvote away.
Non-sense, there's plenty of potential to have green spaces including community gardens in cities.
fucking central park????
Take a look at the UK on Google Maps.
Pretty green, right? Plenty of space to expand those towns and cities.
Zoom in. It's pretty much all farmland. There's precious little nature in that.
Density isn't going to save nature. Having fewer people and sustainable farming will save nature. Density is useful for having things like efficient public transport, and reducing the need to have a car. It also localises noise, and I feel we don't value quiet enough.
The picture on the left could be even worse. There are areas where people move in and tear all the greenery out of the garden and then either cover everything with paving stones or gravel. Everything around the house! Then there's also an ugly metal fence or plastic elements in the garden, sometimes you can see fake plants.
Some humans are so stupid...
What nature? I have to drive 2 hours to see nature. Bring on the houses.
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.
I'm not american so i can't speak for that, but here in sweden some examples are Fisksรคtra in Stockholm, and Gothenburg (my fave city) has two northeastern lines of tram-centric suburbs that are just commie blocks in a forest, a similar slightly smaller suburb to the west which sits at the edge of the urban area, Jonsered which is a group of smaller apartment buildings way out in the forest with a commuter train station, and to the south there's a new area called Nya Hovรฅs which isn't quite as removed from other stuff but still has the same feel of being a dense area surrounded by less urban area.
And at least the gothenburg suburbs are perfectly affordable since they have shiteloads of housing and are very much considered low-status areas. Also come to think of it, gothenburg has a bunch of natural (or at least still very pretty green park) areas throughout the city, so arguably many parts of the downtown area count as well.
Can we get a version with all treehouses?
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.
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.
That's awesome! I'm jealous. Congrats! :D
Sadly 7x9 is a legal bedroom size here, so long as it has a window. There's also no requirement for any of the walls to be straight, so I've seen some really unlivable room shapes
Either way is fine as long as I still get a house.
Left, 100%. I don't share walls with randos.
It's impossible to not hear your neighbours in an apartment. There are ways to reduce that, but almost no apartment is built like that. Not to mention that often you want to open windows for fresh air and get to breathe in smoke from cigarettes. It's a different kind of hell to live in one. I agree that it looks nicer from outside. There can even be parks nearby. But never venture there after dark, because you'll get your vallet stolen. Due to that every street must be light up during the night, and now you can't see the stars...
Anyhow. People fucking suck
Put a few more towers there for double or triple the housing and weโre in business.
Agreed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67610677
While I'm all for this, the problem I see with high-density buildings is that it's easy to put them up, but it's hard to then build the services that this many people need. You can put an apartment block with hundreds of new residents, sure, but where are the doctors, the schools, the hospitals, the public transport routes, etc?
All very solvable problems, but one that high-density living often fails to cater for, because some rich developer cunt is happy to throw a high rise up and forget the rest.
The landlord would sure prefer option 2.
The meth head neighbor fighting with the scary guy who is always mean mugging people, the shoddy repairs and maintenance done to the lowest standards, the ever increasing rent even though the building is paid offโฆ
We have plenty of space, we just need an economy that allows people to afford a single family home. A sfh can be built with nature in mindโฆ the earth has plenty of room for 10 billion people.
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.
Yeah, eugenics is gross and you're wrong that there are too many people for the earth to support
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.
That's literally eco-fascism ๐
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
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.
Everyone's gonna starve
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.
Humans turn food into poop. They don't just sit in an apartment. An apartment is a tool to bring in food and take out poop (and other waste).
You can draw a building like that, but to portray the apartment system correctly, you need to show where the poop goes, and where the food comes from.
This is interesting. Where do the 100 families in the apartments get their food?
the simplest solution is to stop having so many babies. population reduction is critical to quality of life.