So would I, but when you try to talk to ultra-urbanist zealots about that, they act like you’re deranged for wanting your own land in a quiet place, using the devil’s transportation to go places public transit could not reasonably service.
Cope and seethe all you want, but a house is a house is a house is a home. An apartment is a box in the sky, really just a big room. And you don’t get to pick your housemates. So you bought a great apartment and everything is lovely and then some asshole rents the unit next to you and starts having parties, getting his junkie friends visiting all the time. Sure you call the police but they have more important stuff to do.
A house is a house. Everyone should have a house. The left should abandon minimalist loser politics. Everyone gets a house!
‘yes it’s true’ except it’s objectively not, there’s about two and a half trillion acres in the United States and only 330 million people, there’s over a billion acres of actively productive arable land alone.
And no you don’t need to bulldozer nature, learn to live as part of it and be a positive impact on the worlds ecosystems. Low impact living and permaculture gardens with local sustainable food networks are far better than cities on every metric
There are many chunks of that they are unliveable. Also who said this discusion only involved the US? Do you think erasing farms from existence would some how be a good idea? Or are you in favor of people returning to agrocultural serfdom?
The numbers are the same for the rest of the world, it’s a huge planet.
And yes monoculture industrial farms are awfull for the planet and bad by every other metric. Community produce exchanges and permaculture gardens is the best solution, automated tools for home growing should be a key focus of government r&d budgets.
Your source says even just land currently used for grazing livestock is more than enough to house everyone, that’s without considering all the land already used for habitation and etc.
It really is a very big planet, I don’t know if you hate people and want them to suffer or what your deal is but you’re welcome to live in the smallest box you can find, don’t try and force the rest of us to though.
An apartment is a box in the sky, really just a big room.
You realize that not every apartment is a studio in a skyscraper, right?
and then some asshole rents the unit next to you and starts having parties, getting his junkie friends visiting all the time
How is this different from an asshole moving into the house next door?
A house is a house. Everyone should have a house.
Houses are fine. The big problem with them is that most are in a boring sprawling soulless suburbia. The most important thing about where you live isn’t the physical structure itself but location, location, location.
Houses offer more sound insulation because of all the air that’s between the two houses. In an apartment, even a big one, if someone is doing renovations you’ll hear it because sound travel faster and better through solid matter.
As for sprawling suburbia, I am very against that. I’m for a more european village-like layout.
The other big problem is most places in the US and Canada make it literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. If houses are really what people want, why are the alternatives literally illegal in most places?
How is this different from an asshole moving into the house next door?
What a silly question. You don’t share walls, hallways, mailboxes, front doors, laundry machines, and parking lots with your neighbors when you live in a house. Honestly, have you ever even lived in an apartment?
I’ve literally never had a problem sharing hallways, mailboxes, front doors, laundry machines and parking lots with people.
The only problem you tend to have with neighbors is noise. And you can easily get that in suburbia as well, particularly if they’re throwing noisy late night parties.
It’s funny how every time we come up with a funny insult to describe you people, you just take that same exact phrase and use it against us without understanding what the hell it means.
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.
Right? And the only thing adjacent to an apartment that you can own is a condo, which you still have to pay rent for, plus buy the damn thing, and on top of it all, you get to be forced into an HOA.
Then organise the renters, let them buy the house to transform it into syndicate or cooperative housing. Social apartment construction isn’t impossible.
I guess I would’ve thought that the collective unit is in charge of stuff like property taxes, but you can’t have that many names on a property deed, right? Or can you?
That seems to be what’s going on The Arconia apartments in Only Murders in the Building (in New York). They have a coop board, drama over who is the president of it, people not able to pay taxes on their apartment, auntie sold the apartment, now I have to move, etc.
Have you heard the term “Condominium”? Often shortened to “Condo”? Shared ownership, with an entity (usually organized as an HOA) shared by the owners who pay the shared bills.
Very, very, common throughout the US, probably the most popular way of dealing with the issue of more complex land/ownership than “single building on plot all owned by one person”
As the sibling post mentions, there are Housing Co-ops too, but, for example, if you wanted to get a low cost property in Florida, ideally with someone else doing the maintenance, but with you owning the property itself, you’ll almost certainly want to buy a Condo.
I suppose but HOAs are dicks. That’s a single controller. The above mentioned many people paying into the fund for taxes but what if one does not pay taxes? Do the rest suffer?
HOAs are the name given to a type of legal association, there’s nothing in the law that says they have to be made up of “Karens” (and male equivalents), or even have the powers that you generally see in the suburbs.
Additionally, for an apartment block, they literally can’t have the powers you generally see in the suburbs that people complain about. How are you going to paint the outside of your 3rd floor apartment? What grass do you need to keep short? How is the deputy chief officer of the HOA going to sneak into your non-existent yard and fine you for planting the wrong sorts of flowers?
Literally all an HOA can do in this instance is pay for (and organize the) maintenance of common areas and pay the taxes. So for these kinds of situations, it’s a positive entity.
The above mentioned many people paying into the fund for taxes but what if one does not pay taxes? Do the rest suffer?
The HOA pays the taxes, you pay the HOA. If you don’t pay the HOA, then the HOA can get a lein on your property and ultimately force you to sell it, like a local government would if it was a single family home and you refused to pay your taxes. Which given it is, ultimately, levied for the same reason as local government taxes, seems appropriate. Do others suffer in the mean time? In theory, they could, in the sense that they’d have to pay increased HOA fees, but ultimately there’s no incentive to not pay the HOA, any more than there is to not pay taxes.
I only the know the version of that in Germany and Austria where the property is being held by a GmbH, similar to a LLC, whose half owned by an e.V., a registered voluntary association acting as the united juridicial person of the inhabitants and half owned by a syndicate e.V. that acts as insurance and solidarity among the syndicate and makes sure that no one can overtake and profit from the property. Inhabitants pay off rent-like loans and but can leave anytime. Rent is usually really low and acts as solidarity towards other houses.
yeah the apartment I rent, bills are already separate so it wouldn’t be that different. We’d still all be paying the water company and power company. And for garbage. Like we already do.
I get that my text came off as sarcastic. I wasn’t being clever.
Let me retry:
I think it sounds like a great idea but I have concerns such as, who will pay the community bills? Who will be in charge? And other related administrative duty questions.
Right, well again refer to the fact that this is a solved problem in many countries, including the US. Housing co-ops consist of a nonprofit cooperative organization that owns the building and then residents own the right to live in an apartment, which comes with a monthly fee for maintenance and voting rights within the co-op.
It’s the same principle as HOAs owning and maintaining common infrastructure, just within a single building rather than a group of houses.
The issue here is, in my country at least, the people who could possibly afford to buy one aren’t wanting to live in an apartment and the people who live in apartments aren’t capable of buying one.
Not necessarily i don’t know about the situation all arouns the world but in atleast the herman speaking countries we have the concept to buy flats like one would buy a house and own it. So not all of it is owned by the same person. You still have the house maintainer which looks after the infrastructure but afaik you don’t pay them rent.
Yeah I’d say it’s pretty normal all over Europe, it might just be a common case of Americans being weird.
The type of arrangement I’m used to, property of the building is shared among the owners of the flats, who vote on how to run it in an assembly. They also appoint (and pay for) the maintainer you spoke of, but their role is more centered on overseeing/administering the building, handling paperwork, hiring contractors and such. Also, even for very large flats you end up paying a couple hundred euros a year for their services, so it hardly compares to rent.
We have em in the US too. They’re called HOA’s. Most get a bad wrap for being ran by shitty people/busybodies with nothing to do but fine other homeowners. All condos have em here.
The problem, in the US, with the picture is that a condo would cost you pretty much the same as a house with a yard so why opt for the condo at all. If they were cheaper I would own one to live in now VS just trying to save to buy a house since they’re all expensive.
Canadian condos are like that, generally individually owned and there’s a condo board made up of residents that deals with management of the building. I don’t know of many buildings that are mostly owned by corporations in Toronto.
Maybe in the US. In Germany this defintly isn’t the rule. Many people own their own flats and a lot of people own 2-4 flats to rent them out as an extra income.
No, maybe you are in a more wealthy environment. It is not possible that everyone has multiple flats to rent out. In fact, Germany has one of the lowest ownership rates.
But it is defintly not a given that an apartment has to be the tool of a slum lord, the way they portrayed it to discredit the idea that appatments are a more sustainable way of living…
Apartments can be owned by the people who live in it and this is quite common in many countries.
If one person rents out 4 appartments, that means that at least 4 others do not own their home. It’s the same with houses of course.
Germany is just a particularly bad example unfortunately. Low ownership is a problem because it increases wealth inequality, which is also worse in Germany than many other nations.
Low ownership is a problem because it increases wealth inequality
True, but even here their statement that “all of those apartments are owned by one person” is far from a given. Especially with new developments this is rarely the case, even here.
Might be a silly question, but would it be better if we somehow turned suburbs into being more akin to rural towns? Like the suburbs could maybe have nearby town centers that they could walk to in 10-15 minutes that would allow small businesses to operate in.
I don’t live on the mainland, so no idea how it actually works.
Yes, absolutely. You can also combine both proposals, and have apartment blocks near those neighborhood shopping centers. The people who want their yards and lawns can have them, there’s room for more people who don’t mind living in an apartment, and the businesses that open in those town/neighborhood centers have more customers living close by. I live in a city in the Netherlands that has put this concept into practice, and it’s really great.
I mean, that’s kind how it is where I live. I live in a 1400sf home on .23 acres of land. I’m five blocks from downtown, where there’s businesses, a courthouse, a train station, thousands of apartments. All the schools are walkable. Parks are walkable, with amenities like pools/splash parks, playgrounds, a paved trail network. We fit about 6,000 people per square mile, which is pretty dense.
I don’t think it exactly fits the 15m city concept, because I don’t think there are enough jobs in town to support everyone, but it’s a pretty good mix. A variety of housing types is important, simply because people want what they want, and I think it makes a more cohesive society to try to have something for everyone.
"Streetcar suburbs" were a thing in this country for a long time. Towns would get built up along streetcar lines, and people would walk to the streetcar to commute into the city. Because there weren't huge numbers of cars density was a lot higher and it was very walkable.
The US. Denver used to have 160 miles of streetcars. The Streetcar Conspiracy that they make fun of in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Straight up what happened.
Absolutely. Back in the day before the car, even rural towns were built fairly densely, typically around a train station. They had to be, because you had to be able to walk everywhere in town, and the train was the main way to get in and out of town. Even to this day, many streetcar suburbs exist, where they had lain out a streetcar line radiating from the city center into the countryside and built mid-density along it. Many of these suburbs exist to this day, and they are often dense, walkable, transit-oriented, highly desirable, while not being anything so dense as Manhattan.
This style of development has been made literally illegal in most of North America through restrictive zoning codes, parking minimums, setback requirements, and other local regulations.
If we just made a return to traditional ways of building communities, our cities and towns and suburbs would all be vastly more human-centric than they are today.
I can’t see the NYT article, it’s behind a paywall, or maybe just an email wall, I dunno, but I find it hard to believe that “most” of America restricts density. I live in NJ and density is almost a must these days, we’ve essentially developed everywhere. Even the towns with multimillion dollar homes are being forced to accept density.
Personally, the solution needs to be tax land higher. You want your 2 acre property? You’re gonna pay for it. And that money will be used to help keep housing affordable.
I look to my own state because it’s what I know. A city like Jersey City has an R-1 zone for it’s least dense zone. At a minimum, you’re talking two family housing. Replacing old housing stock is a process, and so while the zoning has changed to allow for greater density, it’s just taking time.
New York looks pretty good to me, and I think could be a model. I think even 65/35 would be a good mix of high and medium density to single and two family housing.
In regards to all these cities, zoning may be in place for SFH, but how old is that zoning? Some places just don’t update their master plans. And like I said, I can’t really speak outside of NJ because the law is going to be different anywhere. I like to think it’s just a matter of time before things get modernized, but I don’t know.
For sure, agreed. But there’s so much goddamn land and so few people. It’s not like the sprawling suburbia of NJ. I just don’t know that we can apply the same standard, or what the value would be for doing so. It makes sense along the northeast corridor. Land is valuable, and it’s a great place to live, and in an effort to keep things affordable we can apply density. Out west, in states that, when I look at a map, I need to really think about what state it is, I don’t know that the density is as necessary. And where it is necessary, cities exist. But I’ll admit, I’ve been to St. Louis once, but probably nowhere else within maybe 250 miles of it, so it’s a mystery to me.
I’m not even sure what I’m talking about anymore, I’ve lost the point.
I like the idea of a villiage square type plan. You have a bunch of 2-5 story buildings around a central green area. Each square is essentially a little community and you can allocate some of the ground level space to retail.
I live in an area with great green space and great neighbours, I just wish I didn’t have to leave my area to get to literally any shop.
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.
Just got my bike back from shop for a hefty maintenance. A lot had to be done and couple of parts had to be changed. At the end it costed me just 50€. If this was a car with a similar maintenance, it would have been at least couple of hundred, if not even close to a 1k€. Bikes are awesome.
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