Yeah man if you solution doesn’t completely solve the problem, fuck it! Throw it away it must be entirely useless right. No merit. And plus we have all the time in the world to wait until we have a perfect solution right? Duh!
With the exclamation mark, it’s obvious to me that this is sarcasm. However Lemmings seem to take anything not marked with /s seriously or interpret things in the most negative way to the degree that I’m starting to question myself.
Even if we kept the car way of life (not saying we should) doesn’t it seem like there are way too many cars being produced? Like how many new cars do we really need every year? I honestly do not know the numbers, I’m just saying it sure seems like this many brand new cars don’t need to exist.
We made produce useless shit fucking all over the world nonstop, the stuff with functionality to me is like a drop in the bucket. How many stupid fucking packaging materials are in the guts of fishes because little Cindy wanted to get a W this year with her daughter and decided to buy her a pack of miniature plastic foods
I live in an apartment. I want to live in a house.
Cunt upstairs neighbour smoking cancer sticks on the balcony, making my room smell like shit when he does it, dumbass neighbour to my right who phones some other dumbass at 6 in the morning, screaming into his phone, waking me up. No garden, can’t have a cat or a dog.
I don’t want to live in a suburb where I am forced to use a car, but you can live in a house and still be able to get anywhere you want without a car.
But that’s only because other people live in apartments. If everyone gets the privilege of living in their own house, than it won’t be economical to have everything you need in walking distance. And you can have shitty house neighbors as well.
Nah. I’m sorry, but fuck apartments. I was spending $22k a year. Apartment complex did a crap job clearing snow in the winter. My neighbors were disgusting. I had to walk across the complex to get to my laundry room, where the machines rarely worked. The AC wall units were expensive to run, and did little to cool the apartment. The downstairs neighbor’s front door slammed every time they closed it. The people next door would vacuum for an hour every night starting at 10pm. I got a $45 fine for hanging a beach towel over a chair on my balcony.
I mean shit, they decided to renovate the apartment beneath me, and turned off my heat and left for the weekend in the middle of winter. They turned off my water multiple times with no notice making me late for work. And then the construction workers stole my package before heading home.
I bought a house. Every time I pay my mortgage I build equity in my home. I have my own laundry room. I may have to clear the snow myself, but I have plenty of space to store a snow blower and shovels - something I could never do before. I can buy bulk sized non perishables too and save money, because I have plenty of space to store it. I can sleep at night without being awoken by my neighbors fucking to the sounds of Bob Marley. I can hang up a towel to dry without being fined for it. And if I need to do work, I can determine when or if the water is being turned off.
Oh, and renewing my lease would have seen me paying almost as much in rent as my mortgage payment. For what?
Isn’t the point of a 15 minute city that you can get anywhere within 15 minutes without a car?
(By the way, from a European standpoint it sounds really funny that 15 minute cities are not a reality for you. Like, why would you ever build a city differently in the first place?)
It’s pretty disingenuous to claim that your city founded in 1300 has tight streets and isn’t car-friendly because people in 1300 were really big on public transport.
And the answer is that cities grow descriptively rather than prescriptively. They generally add what is in demand/what they need piecemeal, and most US cities really grew in the 20th century.
That’s why NYC, for example, has significantly better public transport than most of the nation - it’s one of the oldest cities
This is also why moving to mass transit is a hard sell. It’s expensive and there is less demonstrated need and more forethought behind the switchover.
There’s an few distinctions about American culture as it relates to car culture.
America had/has a lot of land
Much of this is/was vastly underdeveloped right outside of urban hubs, unlike Europe/related which benefits from a tighter interconnected network of cities that more immediately benefit from mass transit systems
In the US post-WWII middle class and privileged were often sold an idea of peaceful suburban lifestyles away from urbanized areas
Car manufacturers marketed this successfully as a way to encourage families away from city life and thus build a more solid reliance on their vehicles
City planning was therefore often built around a suburban-city sprawl rather than a cohesive urban community designed around efficiency
Like, why would you ever build a city differently in the first place?
Exactly. Unfortunately, in Australia, we tend to borrow stupid ideas from the US to make money and have sprawling suburbs with zero amenity.
For instance, we had a new suburbian development within 20km from the CBD with the promise of schools, community centres etc. in the early 2000s. When all the houses were bought and built, suddenly there’s no money for amenities so they just sold the land to developers who then put more houses in. Now the only way to get anything you need is by car because there’s no train or buses because it was supposed to be accessible by bike/walking but now isn’t. And not to mention gridlock of vehicles looking to get out of the suburbs for food etc. out of the one intersection provided.
I would love 15min cities without cars for my country but the attitude to cars here is similar to the attitude about guns in the US.
Nice. I have to travel like 17 miles to the nearest bus station. This fixes everything! /s
Better off with my own vehicle when it’s only like 8 miles to work. I’d be literally wasting 9 miles to the bus station and 9 miles back in my own vehicle to even get back and forth to the bus station.
Edit: Seriously, have any of you tried traveling 17 miles to the west, only to catch a bus going 25 miles to the east, passing your own town to get to work? Then going 25 miles back, only to have to drive your own vehicle back home, because the bus don’t stop there?
The area I live in actually used to have its own bus station within walking distance from my place. Until 2009 when they totally shut it down, for basically no good reason.
They nickname our town Ghost Town ever since then. We’re even a bicycle friendly community, but not a single bicycle shop in town anymore either. Ever since 2011 we bicyclists gotta travel at least 8 miles to get tires and tubes.
Please make sure to read my other comment, our town was once developed with mass transit in mind. We even have our own railroad tracks, also within walking distance.
But God forbid the citizens get to use such things, too much industrial transportation on the tracks.
Sounds a lot like my town. This place used to have a train station and regular trains to major cities, and now it’s used only for freight and they turned the old station into a railway museum. It’s absurd.
If the people living in apartments had a say in how they were built… yeah
Nobody chooses to live in a fucking tin can hanging from suspension wires that is so poorly insulated you can hear every bird flying into the windows as though you’re inside a bass drum.
The sounds of my neighbors at 3 am snoring are not a feature you can call part of the “shared experience.”
The prospect of being trapped together because the elevator went out and there’s a fire… oh so joyous. Not to mention all the people’s pets that get left at home throughout the day and I can hear crying with desperation to be let out as though they’re in the next room…
I’m quite happy not to live in a fucking modern apartment thank you very much.
I live in a 51 story condo tower and it’s great. Thick concrete walls, can’t hear a thing. High above the street, so not much street noise gets up to my unit. The hallways are pressured higher than the units, so smells don’t get out.
It’s great; I never want to live in a house, and deal with all the shit that comes with that.
A 51 story tower sounds like a nightmare in any kind of emergency. The hallways are pressurized so one infected person can spread the latest virus to every apartment on the floor, and if there’s a fire, you get to see just how short the ladders are at the local fire department. I lived in a well built three story apartment building at university, literally only one year old when I moved in. The noise was minimal due to lots of concrete construction, but the general consensus was in any kind of earthquake the entire building was going to be a death trap due to a lack of emergency exits with external staircases.
I’m never sharing walls or living in a multistory building again unless it can be designed to my spec, and I’d want it built to withstand 10,000 year events because 100 year events just aren’t really uncommon anymore.
The hallways are pressurized so one infected person can spread the latest virus to every apartment on the floor,
The opposite actually, since the one infected persons virus stays contained in their unit. We had virtually no spread of Covid in the building during lockdowns, with infected people’s illness staying contained to their unit.
and if there’s a fire, you get to see just how short the ladders are at the local fire department.
The fire department doesn’t need ladders to get up the building, the all concrete construction prevents fires from easily spreading unit to unit. We’ve never had a fire spread from one unit to another in the 13 years I’ve lived here.
in any kind of earthquake the entire building was going to be a death trap
Also false, tall towers can easily be built to be Earthquake proof, just look at Japan, or LA.
Seems you don’t really know anything about the actual construction of tall towers or what it’s like to live in them, and are just going by false convictions.
You might want to listen to the first season of The Big One, which was on NPR. One of the things they talk about is how many towers haven’t really faced a big quake since they were built, and the City of LA refuses to say which buildings won’t stand up to even a medium quake. Quake liquifaction is a thing you should read up on; it’s scary because it’s a distinct possibility in some of the most populated cities in the world. Japan has done a great job of building earthquake resistance into their buildings, but again, very few of them have actually faced a massive, local quake, so it’s all based on best guesses. I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower, and I can personally turn off my natural gas line to reduce fire risk. Towers don’t have individual gas shutoffs AFAIK.
All concrete construction reduces the risk of small fires spreading, but like the Twin Towers proved, once the building is on fire the only way down is the stairs, because external ladders aren’t tall enough. It also doesn’t help when the buildings are clad in flammable materials, like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle. I literally don’t stay above a certain floor in hotels when I travel in the US because even the FDNY’s tallest ladder only goes up 137 feet (41.75 meters for the metric lovers). Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor, because most fire departments don’t have ladders to reach much higher than that.
That your building escaped without people inadvertently infecting others is great, but I hope you realize that part of what made Covid so dangerous, especially in the first year, was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission. It’s not crazy to think some of those characteristics will be shared with other, much more deadly, viral strains, given that we’ve seen such hopping in bacteria. That’s why antibiotic resistance is so dangerous; germs share with each other. Positive pressure in the hallways being a positive presumes contagious individuals know they’re contagious and will stay inside their flat until they’re no longer contagious. I don’t think I need to tell you how unlikely that is for large segments of the population.
I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower,
No, but good chance it collapses anyway. I know 100% my building isn’t going to fall due to an earthquake ever.
And those towers in parts of Japan and LA have faced severe earthquakes without collapse.
but like the Twin Towers proved
Several entire floors were destroyed and set ablaze simultaneously, blocking off the stairwells and ensuring an incredibly large part of the building was on fire at the start. Not in any way comparable to a standard fire starting in a condo tower.
like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle
Sure, and in any sane country that’s entirely illegal to do. There are zero buildings with flammable cladding in my city. And having seen apartments on fire in other buildings, and that fire failing to ever spread to another unit, I can indeed confirm that most buildings do not have fire spread between units.
Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor
Utterly ridiculous of you, that is a completely irrational phobia. If tall buildings were as dangerous as you think they are we’d have millions of people dying in them annually, but we don’t. Even considering some of the shoddier builds in China, apartment fatalities are rarer than people dying in their own houses.
was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission
And yet in a positive pressure building it did not spread, even with confirmed cases in some units it never spread to any neighboring units. We would have been very aware if someone had been symptomatically spreading it in the building as we would have had cases spike, but that did not happen. So no, even a very transmissible airborne virus will not spread between units in a well designed tower.
Fair enough. I start to get grumpy at 24 but I grew up in the desert SW USA but have acclimated to our temperate PacNW weather. I’d say similar to Manchester and Liverpool but summers definitely get hotter.
Lmao exactly. I’m all for better public transportation but these comments seem like they’re from kids who don’t have people depending on them for a roof and food.
Let me lose my job so I can go yell into the void for better bus routes
If you don’t have a bus route, no one is here telling you to hitch hike or cycle in heat stroke weather for long commute or not go to work. Can you please point out where I or anyone here said so?
But “what can I do” was the question.
You can recognize the benefits of a good urban infrastructure and public transportation, highlight the lacking infrastructure in your areas, and support the goals of building that up by contacting your local officials or participating with groups who do organize.
This “child” lives within walking distance of his work office (for the few times I even have to to in) and on a bus route that can get me there as well (a bus system that is highly lacking in its own ways, to which I make note of to my local council).
I guess I should act like an “adult” and go “oh your work isn’t near a bus route. What can I do? Guess nothing.”
That is how we solve problems.
This post isn’t attacking you for your area’s lack of infrastructure.
If they can make an apartment where I cant hear my neighbors, cant smell them burning food, and 100% will not be damaged from other units flood/fire then I am all for it.
I live in one of these. They’re amazing, and totally changed my mind on apartments. I just wish I had an extra room and a lower floor. I can get a garage for $100/m which is not bad at all.
Anything cheap is going to be bad. We need to raise the standards to a minimum. The unfortunate thing I need to move to a house to be closer to my new job, otherwise an apartment like this would be fine.
I own a townhome that i rent out. Have had good tenants for the most part but don’t want to deal with the HOA anymore. So we want to sell but sadly the next door neighbor smokes in her unit so much that it smells in our unit.
In this state there is absolutely nothing we can do legally about the problem. The guy across the street destroyed the grassy area in front of his unit and a lean was placed on his unit until it was fixed or he was evicted in 90 days. But actual damage to our unit we were SOL.
This is why people don’t want shared units. When your neighbor is an asshole you’re usually screwed.
When I do drive, I follow the rules of the road exactly. People have commented on the fact that I actually come to a complete stop at stop signs, and didn’t turn right in front of a crossing pedestrian.
The thing with developers is that they build that density, but over ALL of the land. Apartments kill more trees and create more impervious cover than any other type of housing.
Our city requires parkland dedication for development. Single-family developments build public parks and preserve trees wherever possible. Apartments just pay a fee in lieu for tree mitigation and parkland dedication and improvements because they absolutely will not have a millimeter of land not dedicated to housing.
That sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be fixed by making it not legal to do that lol
It’s not a problem inherent to apartments, it’s a problem with lack of regulation in your area.
But more importantly, if that many people need housing, it’s better to put them in apartments than single family houses. Less nature will get destroyed. What are we gonna do, not give them housing?
The point of the graphics is 100 homes vs 100 homes. If you say “well, in the second picture developers would just keep building” then you’re comparing 100 homes to like 1000 homes. It makes no sense.
Apartments kill more trees and create more impervious cover than any other type of housing.
Is this per-acre, per-person, or per-unit?
Per acre doesn’t make a lot of sense, comparison-wise, because people have to live somewhere. It seems more logical to compare on a per capita basis than anything else, in terms of the number of people who will on average live in those units.
People like ignoring per-capita analysis because it would force them to rethink the sustainability of their own lifestyle. There is absolutely nothing sustainable about every single person living in ultra low-density, car-dependent sprawl.
If you refuse to build dense communities to house people, they’ll just build sprawl elsewhere, and more forest and farmland will be destroyed for it, more cars will clog up the streets because of it, and more neighborhoods will have to be demolished to build freeways because of it.
Typical apartment density still results in a higher per-capita impact. Yeah - that home lot may take up a lot of space, but it’ll be maybe 20-30% impervious cover. So you get triple the density with an apartment, but once you account for the parking (no garages inside the apartments), the higher percentage of impervious cover, and the lack of parkland dedication for the neighborhood you actually have more impervious cover per capita for multifamily than single-family.
And that’s not even touching the extra traffic mitigation in the road network required to accommodate a dense development. Traffic isn’t spread out, so more infrastructure has to be built everywhere to accommodate the choke points created by apartments. You throw in a 400-unit apartment complex you have to add another lane to the road, plus decel and turn lanes at the site. You add 400 single-family homes along that same road and it isn’t a problem because you don’t have the stress-point on the network created by having hundreds of cars using the same access point. When your peak-hour trips for a site get over about 100, you’re gonna cause a lot of traffic.
The solution we’ve implemented with single-family to make it less impactful is a super strict tree ordinance. Any trees removed have to be double, triple, or even quadruple-mitigated (depending on tree size) and we additionally charge $500/inch for tree removal. We make it so fucking expensive to bulldoze nature they have to build around it.
If they “accidentally” kill a tree, they have to pay quadruple the fee, mitigate on-site, and development in the critical root zone of an improperly-removed tree is permanently prohibited. We’ve had million-dollar pieces of land made worthless when they tried to get around the rules.
Single-family builds around the trees and incorporates them into the neighborhoods. Multifamily just pays the mitigation fees and passes the bill to the residents.
Of course, not everywhere has the space for single-family. But if you’ve got the space, single-family can be way less-disruptive to the local environment than multifamily.
Triple the density sounds quite low. A five over one is going to be more like 6x or more the density.
It sounds like most of the rest of that is parking minimums and car-dependant roads. The last apartment I lived in just had on-street parking because it was in a walkable neighborhood and a couple min from the subway. I don’t know how many people living there even owned a car.
The reality is that in most of the US a car is a hard requirement. Building apartments without parking means nobody will live there. You can’t solve the parking problem without first addressing the need for cars. The US is sprea out enough that installing enough public transit to remove the need for a car would be the largest civil project in history.
You do both incrementally and simultaneously. Yes, this is a terrible idea in the middle of exurban sprawl. Don’t build them there.
The people most likely to move into these buildings are the people best served by existing transit. If you’re able to bike, train or bus to work, you’re more likely to get one of those units than if you drive 120 miles to work.
A number of cities already have decent to ok transit networks. So you make it so expansions to those networks result in transit-oriented development, and upzone existing walksheds of your transit to transform them into pleasant walkable mixed-use areas if they aren’t already. You improve things over time and people who prefer walkable, bikeable urbanism will move in.
Simultaneously simply isn’t realistic. A developer isn’t gonna drop 40 million dollars on a TOD complex without the transit being in place. Otherwise they’re throwing away the money when the transit project falls through (which 90% do).
Aren’t those regulation issues? What’s stopping the municipality (or whoever is in charge) to mandate a maximum of say 70% of the land to be built on? Or buying back land to preserve its natural state? Developers will work ruthlessly whether they are building individual or communal housing. At the end of it, i think it may just come down to greed and greasing the right pockets.
70 percent is actually a high number, and is actually the highest we allow anywhere. Single-family is usually limited to 50%, and a lot of our city is in the recharge zone of an aquifer and limited to 15%.
I’d argue that 100 houses and 1 playground is much more destructive to the land than 1 building with 100 apartments and no playground. Single family homes still have a massive amount of impervious ground cover ranging from their roofs, driveways and patios.
Its also not an inherrent problem to the denser developments themselves but moreso an issue its legal to pay a fine to get out of a building standard. The city could just refuse any development that fails to meet their public park and tree goals.
Multifamily development requires large buildings and parking lots that are fundamentally incompatible with low impervious cover and tree preservation.
Attached garages are what allow single-family homes to be so efficient when it comes to impervious cover. The cars are parked inside the building, with living space above and around it within a door of the parking space. It’s extremely compact, and with proper minimum setbacks in the code you eliminate a lot of pavement.
The average apartment requires 2.2 parking spaces. The average house requires 2.5. Multiply that out by 100 units and you’ve got 220 versus 250, but by having garages the driveways can be shortened to only 2 have room for 2 spaces. Now you’ve got 4 spaces’ worth of parking for the impervious cover of 2, so the parking requirements for single-family are more than twice as efficient while being lower in absolute terms.
A parking space requires about 100 square feet of IC, so for a 100-unit complex you’re looking at 22,000 square feet of IC just for the parking spaces. Plus another 1500 for ADA spaces. Throw in drive aisles (which due to emergency vehicle access are just as wide as a SF road) and that number more than doubles. Also put in fire lanes, hammerheads/turnarounds, etc and you’re quickly looking at 150,000 square feet of pavement just for the parking lot, plus the extra road lanes and decel lanes required to support its traffic impact.
The thing about SF roads is that they serve multiple purposes. They provide access to the site, as well as emergency vehicle access, fire lanes, etc. They also can do storm water detention under the roads to limit the required off-site detention, so they don’t have to clear-cut as large of an area for detention and water-quality facility as an apartment complex does.
So the road, drive aisle, emergency access, fire lane, storm sewer, and more can all be combined in a lower-density area in a manner that combines to decrease the per capita environmental impact.
There’s no additional ADA requirements because every parking space has open space on at least 1 side and they’re all close enough to the houses that reserving empty parking spaces for ADA isn’t required. And half the parking spaces are inside the house. And the occupancy rate of SF houses is half-again higher than an apartment, but with fewer drivers per capita (higher percentage of multiple-child households in SF).
You can’t just look at building sizes and get the full picture of a development’s impact.
I don’t know what houses you see that have garages but don’t have driveways long enough to park on. The drive up area of a multiunit can also allow emergency service access, often allowing full access to the perimeter of the building by using the sidewalks or lawns during emergencies.
As for stormwater it is very rare that it is detained underground or underneath the road, most developments have storm sewers that lead to a stormwater retention or detention pond and in some cases the sewers directly lead into creeks, lakes or empty land.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
It also just gets messy having that many people try to manage a property together. I lived in a high rise for a year. There was constant bickering over who put the wrong thing down the trash chute or who was using the elevator to move furniture without checking it out first. Everyone had to all agree to building repairs, which was a nightmare, and getting them them done took forever. From my understanding our building was pretty well run, but it didn’t feel like it. I loved the idea of high rise life when I moved in but by the time we got out house I was ready to be done with it.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
Loads of people in SFHs lose their homes due to the actions of others. An entire town burned to the ground because their power company was too cheap to trim vegetation.
And cockroaches and bedbugs and hoarders and rats and she died but had no family and never left her apartment so we didn’t know until she started leaking into the ceiling.
I won’t ever live in an apartment again after this.
Oh yeah, I use to work at a pest control company making their appointments.
Most apartment complexes just signed up for the year packages to keep the places free of stuff like ants cause that’s the big issue where I live. Roaches are rare but bed bugs are also common. Bed bug treatments are crazy expensive too, even for just a single unit of an apartment building, their prices were into the $1000’s.
And then for house calls where they got bed bugs, even more money. In fact, most people who had houses who called in for bed bug rates would back out half way through the treatment because they couldn’t afford to continue.
absolutely terrible to get caught with bed bugs. If you don’t already, get the plastic bed coverings to keep them out.
People attach a stigma to bugs without realizing - you don’t need to be dirty or live out in the woods, bugs are just out there and can and will get into your house. The only way to stop that is to be preventative.
Fortunately I’ve found a solution. I’ve been slapped on Reddit for misinformation, but anecdotally I can say with 100% certainty that what I’ve done worked in multiple apartments in separate buildings.
4 of those blower kerosene heaters. Blast those bastards until it’s just hot enough that it don’t melt your records and bam, problem solved.
Bedbugs are worse, but roaches are harder to beat when you’ve gotta get everyone on board.
Some people just consider living with them a part of normal life and they don’t even care.
4 of those blower kerosene heaters. Blast those bastards until it’s just hot enough that it don’t melt your records and bam, problem solved.
Makes sense because that’s how some places treat for bed bugs. The pest control place I worked at would partner with another company who did heat treatments on bed bugs for more intense invasions - think homeless shelters that are infested with them.
The issue with heat treatments is that in order to get it hot enough to kill them completely, you end up taking a lot of stuff out of the apartment/room.
I hated going over the lists with people on how to prep for bed bug treatments cause I had to basically ask them about everything in their home in case it would catch fire or just melt.
My concern with multi unit living is that your home is now dependent on the actions of others. You could lose everything because some dumbass next to you dropped cigarette burning on their floor, or overflowed their tub.
your entire life is dependent on the actions of others. see: climate change, pollution (air/water/noise/light), road safety, etc. etc.
in the first examples you give (cigarette leading to fire, overflowing bathtub leading to water damage), it sounds like you’re thinking of a complex with deeply inadequate fire safety and waterproofing.
for the rest, yes, communities are fractured – some would say as a deliberate means of social control through isolation – and little in the world is going to be improved without fixing that.
also, to reheat a comment from elsewhere in this discussion, calling housing “property” is doing free PR work for those who financially exploit others through control of land: consider finding alternative terms.
I feel you. But the same logic has our earth in shambles. Because I keep cleaning MY room / house /city /country by throwing it out to some other city /country /continent (and soon maybe another planet).
What the hell is going on in your apartments, that an overflown tub destroys everything? Is the floor in your bathroom not waterproof? In Europe water damage typically happens with bursting tubes and that can happen in your own home as well. You are typically insured against this.
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