That’s true but I virtually never call tradespeople to do work for me. I like to be as self sufficient as possible and I derive happiness from working with my hands. I’m in my workshop almost every day, repairing and creating. I love the feel of materials and the heft of hand tools, it’s my happy place.
In the past I’ve used off site workshops and they have their advantages but usually what happens is that I use them less and they are more vulnerable to thieves. They’re far more expensive too.
If an apartment block had a shared workspace in the basement, that could work. I’ve never seen one like that. People who live in apartments tend not do things for themselves and have no need for tools.
I think I’d join a maker’s space or other shop-type coop if I lived in a city again. That said, cities stress me out - I can only handle the overstimulation for so long before I start sprouting white hormone hairs randomly out of my forehead.
So far I’m liking this, that in Reddit fuckcars and other subs would become full circle jerks, with any discussion squashed and “me too” comments ruling the day.
So far, I’ve enjoyed that me balanced conversations emerge in Lemmy communities.
Fuck cars have had a lot of good points, but buried in falling to understand other perspectives. Here folks can actually see perspectives that would block their goals, and maybe actually talk about some paths forward that might get both sides living with it.
I would literally kill myself if I ever had to live in apartments again. I have severe social anxiety and agoraphobia and general anxiety. I started hallucinating when I lived in apartments (but never before or since). I became paranoid of people. There was never any solitude. Plus right now there’s no way to get around apartments without landlords (though I understand ideally there might be ways around this, it’s not likely to happen any time soon). When I lived in an apartment I considered just being homeless and hiding in the woods (and stupidly, isn’t legal).
We sure could stand to make more stores and businesses into high rises though. I live near Detroit (but not IN Detroit) and going down our streets it’s just a ridiculous waste of space. How many tire shops do we even need? Why does every business need its own lot with so much space around it? Everything being more “mall” style would waste less space.
You might have a point but you’re being an insensitive ass and it’s definitely possible that there are under-researched/discussed potential mental health side effects to apartments / city living. There is certainly a conversation to be had.
No, because it’s such a small number of people it’s not worth changing the whole of society for. Obviously, people with disabilities will be accommodated for. This one person having agoraphobia doesn’t change the fact that society-wide we should be striving for more dense housing.
That’s not really true though, most people are much happier in a house and have far fewer sources of stress in their life. Also high density housing is an awfull place to bring up kids, that’s the exact reason London is knocking down all the old tower blocks like elephant and castle, all the studies showed it was a horrible place to live for everyone there.
I know you want this solution to work because no one likes American suburbia but it doesn’t have to be a choice between two types of hell, there are actually good options like European suburbs with local shops, bus and cycle routes to pedestrianised shopping areas and lots of green spaces.
Studies actually show that medium density low rises allow for more housing and are more ecologically efficient than supposedly high-density high rises. I was surprised, but the models are irrefutable. It’s mainly due to the structural footprint of large buildings.
So that’s my ideal. Paris, not Manhattan. Side benefit is it just looks nicer and feels better.
I’m sure New York has areas similar to Montmartre where only rich people can afford to live, and areas like Seine Saint Denis where they cram all the poor people in awful environments which result in criminality and cyclical poverty
There’s a great point in here about ‘business density’. Shops and restaurants would benefit from higher density in world less populated by cars.
Another important idea here is that higher population density requirements should build in protections for residents’ mental well-being: Sound proofing, minimum square footage per person requirements, ceiling heights, green spaces, and convenient access to goods and services. People aren’t meant to live in cages.
Imo it’s because most of the “fuckcars” types are not “pro density” or “pro transit” types. They literally only care about “fuck cars, bikes rule”. Usually upper middle class WASPy types. High overlap with NIMBYs.
As has been pointed out in the article, this would result in several of the cars tested no longer functioning. And is not even allowed in all the cars small print.
I’m sure it’s an issue for self-driving cars. And that sucks. For the rest of us, it’ll just disable internet-based features like on-star, which is kind of the point.
As for “not allowed”, I don’t know what that even means unless it’s a lease. Is the manufacturer going to come steal my car from me? There’s not much small print when I hand the dealer a cashiers check. Just standard title transfer paperwork and such.
Condos and Housing coops go a long way I think to reduce some of the pain points most people have had with apartment living. The issue now is that most people are comparing owning a home where you have a lot of control over your circumstances and price stability, vs having a landlord that is doing the minimum and raising rents every chance they can. If apartments were built for people, and not landlords would they still have cramped hallways and balconies, would they have poor insulation and sound proofing, would they have old noisy AC units, etc, etc. The thing is, even in cases where people do choose to not have an amenity, people still had the choice.
In my country, there’s no distinction between apartments and condos or whatever you have in the US. An apartment could be owned by anyone and that person can choose to live in it or rent it out. Institutional ownership of entire apartment buildings DOES happen (legally nothing is stopping you from doing it), but it’s not super common. Most companies prefer to get their quick buck out of building the place and then selling the apartments. And bailing on you before the warranty is over lol
But instead of a population of 100 with small houses you will get a population of 1000 because they built 10 apartment complexes. I think I’d prefer the small houses didn’t have lawns and left the nice trees and natural growth.
The point is for any given population size, a city is a better way to house them. Though IMO this drawing makes the difference too stark. Personally i think the optimal is a medium-highish density city of separated buildings with nature interspersed, rather than a single super high density mega block building.
Yeah, the image is really just for illustrative purposes. Imo, if we just abolish restrictive zoning codes and other land use restrictions that essentially mandate sprawl, then tax carbon appropriately and build good public transit, that would likely achieve the overall “optimal” outcome. No need for a mega-arcology, but no need for government-mandated car-dependent sprawl either.
Agreed. They would just be birthed elsewhere. It has yet to be seen if we can hit a global population cap. It seems like it has to be reached eventually.
There is a population cap but it’s societal, people have fewer children as they get more education and higher quality of life.
Which is the solution that conservatives don’t want to acknowledge, if you think overpopulation is a problem then you solve it by making people not live in such abject misery that they need 6 kids to make sure enough of them survive to take care of their parents when they grow old.
We are in a hypothetical plot of tiny land that can be thought of as the entire world. If you have an argument to make based on this rather silly hypothetical world we are talking about then feel free to make it.
Blocks of flats are awful places. No garden to put up a workshed, or greenhouse or anything at all, or play with your dog or kids (and no dog - it would be cruel to keep a dog in a flat and not have it able to roam a garden all day), they’re noisy, loud neighbours can be above, below, to the left, to the right, and in front …
You can’t modify your home how you’d like, can’t choose what utility companies run into your home, can’t let your kid cycle up and down the street and still be able to see and hear them from the windows etc.
I see your point about density absolutely, but I HATE flats. Awful places.
I also hate how people have started trying to make them sound fancy and posh by calling them “apartments” to try to sound fancy and European/French, as if that will make them more appealing.
I agree with you fully, except the last part. Which is just a regional gripe, as to say "apartments" in the States is just as degrading/non-special. So it's interesting that you find specialty in that term when my region is anything but.
can’t choose what utility companies run into your home,
This is the most farcical complaint. I guess sometimes you can pay a lot to get a new utility option to your owned home, but that's usually not an option.
In a lot of apartments you have no choice of ISP regardless of whether the building has a choice, which might be what they're on about. But I've never owned a home where I could choose which utilities were available. (Except for electric choice which works in apartments, too.)
even then it’s a problem we choose to have, in my apartment area we have a platform that allows us to choose between like, i think around 30? different ISPs, and switch between them freely at any time.
Not everyone wants a yard and/or a dog! Very, very, few people modify their houses in ways that wouldn’t be applicable to apartments/flats too - interior changes are common, but exterior is usually far too much money for far too little in return. And if you’re complaining about people calling them “apartments”, which is what they’ve always been called in the US, I assume you’re in the UK where terraced houses are the most common form of housing, and neighbours are on both sides anyway. (Is it possible you’re hearing people calling flats apartments because of the influence of American TV? Where are you getting “fancy” from, or assuming it’s just because the same word is used in French? Do you avoid American TV shows? They were extremely common on British TV when I was growing up. If you’re not in Britain, apologies! But it seems likely, given most other English speaking countries I can think of use the term too.)
I personally disagree with anyone who promotes a one-size-fit-all approach to housing etc, but I don’t actually think most advocates of density really are doing that. They’re usually Americans fighting the completely insane zoning laws and building practices in the US that force people to own cars, make public transport uneconomic except with massive subsidies, and require Americans own houses that are far bigger and more expensive to maintain than they need. Nobody’s actually better off because of these laws, not even the people who want to live outside of real cities and drive to work - it ends up taking just as long to get to the supermarket to get a gallon of milk in a suburb where you have to leave your home, get into your car, drive it, drive out of your residential neighbourhood where businesses like supermarkets are banned, drive it past large numbers of buildings built for individual businesses each with enough parking to support the maximum number of customers it might conceivably need, 5-10 minutes later getting to the supermarket’s parking lot, which is again, absurdly oversized because it has to have one parking spot per potential customer, finding a spot, walking across this vast expanse to the supermarket, and then doing the same thing in reverse. Time savings? Nil. Tesco was five minutes walk away when I lived in the UK, and while that was unusual, most places I’ve lived in the UK had some kind of supermarket within walking distance. Money savings? Worse: my grocery bill tripled when I came to the US and I had to pay gas prices and for car maintenance on top of that. Not surprising when every store needs 4X as much land as it needs in the UK, just so it has enough parking.
So that’s what the pictures are likely about. The option of high density housing ought to be available to everyone, in the UK it is for the most part, hence it looks odd to you and you’re assuming the intent is to take your detached or semi-detached house from you. But in the US, no it isn’t, the few places that have good high density development are either impractical to live in, because you still need cars to work, or uneconomic for most people because those places are in such high demand to live the property prices are astronomical (think SF or NYC.)
The houses could grow stuff also but they might be in a homeowners association banning gardens and solar panels. The apartment has designated that land as a park bc the owner is a real dick and owns the only store.
I mean there are genuine reasons you might want a house over an apartment. If you have a big family or the fact that you own it and don’t have a land lord that can just raise rent and force you out. You gotta have a mix of types of housing that actually matches what the needs of the people are, which is still the exact problem we have now.
You can also own an apartment and live in it. The problem in the US, as far as I know, is that many cities make it very hard to actually build apartments or rowhouses or really anything other than a single family house on a big lawn.
Spot on. In pink below is all the land where it’s literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. And that’s not even touching on all the other restrictive land use regulation, such as the insanity that is parking minimums. If we want to have a mix of housing types, it needs to actually be legal to build more than one type.
Yup, they’re one of the examples I love to use on how to fix the housing crisis! They abolished SFH zoning in 2018 I believe, and their average rents have only risen 1% since then.
There are always going to be certain compromises when you share walls and/or floors and ceilings with neighbours. Even if everyone owns their own unit, there’s a lot of shared infrastructure, and that means discussing, dealing and compromising on all kinds of things. If you own an entire building and the land surrounding it, you have a lot more autonomy.
I’ve had one friend vow never to buy a condo again after having to deal with his condo board for a few years, and he lived in a small 8ish unit building. Another friend served on her condo board for under a year and said it was one of the worst experiences she’d ever had to deal with.
From an environmental point of view, apartments and condos are great. They’re great for public transit. They’re much more efficient in how they use land. They are much better for heating and cooling. But, people being upright apes, a partially shared living arrangement like that can be truly awful.
Definitely. Noise from neighbours is a huge thing, and when you have good sound insulation that massively cuts down on fights with neighbours. But, you still get confrontations when you have a lot of people living close together. Fights about parking, smells, whether or not to upgrade the building in a certain way, how much everyone should contribute to collectively pay for X, whatever.
You can also get fights with neighbours when you live in a house. But, because of the distance and more strict division of property, they tend to be fewer and smaller.
Another part of it in the US is that the construction used in many apartments should be criminal. Every corner possible is cut. In every one of my apartments, save the one that was a converted 1920s hospital, I could gain access to neighbors’ apartments through the ceiling, if I wanted, with no tools beyond a chair to stand on.
Every apartment that I’ve lived in also had electric baseboard heating placed before windows and poorly insulated, often mold-infested walls, the windows were usually modern and well-sealed (except for one that was not properly flashed, causing water to pour in during a storm), this means that the placement was about as energy inefficient as possible - without drafty windows, that placement just resulted in thermal loss through the shoddy insulation.
And that’s before the landlords who cut every corner possible in maintenance, legal or not.
Quality construction would likely help with adoption of owner-occupied apartments but, that’s something that we’re unlikely to see without forcing it.
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