i can only get behind this meme if the apartments have fantastic sound deadening, because sharing walls with strangers is fucking awful
I live in a building that was new in 2021. I have never heard any of my neighbors. Modern building materials and techniques go a long way.
That's wild, I feel like all the new build condos near me are paper thin walls but granite countertops so it can be sold as "luxury"
Yeah, capitalism making every aspect of your life worse but still charging you more is what you would expect to see
I think it depends a lot on whether you're in a 5-over-1 wooden frame thing or a bigger concrete tower. The wooden buildings I've been in all have seemed passable to pretty bad at noise but the concrete ones have always been great, even the old run-down 1950s ones I've lived in (mold was awful in that 1950s one, but the noise was never an issue).
I'd assume older buildings to be better on noise than a modern build.
My main boomer opinion is agreeing that "they don't build em like they used to"
My building is relatively new, concrete and steel construction, and my neighbor could take up chainsaw sculptures and I wouldn't know.
Those wooden 5-over-1s where the wood is actually sawdust and oil though? Yeah those let a lot of noise through.
In the handful of concrete buildings I've lived in both old and new they've all been the same. Nothing super-new though. Maybe the newest I've lived in was built 15 years ago or so.
My main boomer opinion is agreeing that "they don't build em like they used to"
they literally don't, this is 90% capitalism's fault, 10% "the way they used to build 'em substantially reduced the life expectancy of everyone involved", depending on the 'em in question
Yeah, I live in a wood building now (technically a 4-over-1) that's like 5 years old and it's super fucking noisy. My last place was in a concrete tower from the 80s and I once tested the soundproofing around dinner: my downstairs neighbor didn't hear an adult jumping up and down and stomping on the floor, and neither neighbor on the side heard me playing music so loud it was uncomfortable for me.
I live in a 1960's concrete and brick building and you can hear everything. People walking on the stairs, your next door neighbours flushing the toilet or the people living above you fucking. On the other hand the insulation is a cruel joke and mold has optimal growth conditions.
100% feel that. When I lived in the city I had other college aged adults living around me and most of the weekend I couldn't ever get a good night's sleep with them blasting the stereo until like 3am.
Unfortunately in america theyd also pave all the nature for parking lots
That’s like, actually a beautiful view though. The actual view is more like:
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Totally disagree that it's beautiful, lol. To me it looks like a smoggy choked out hellscape. Of all the cities I've been to, New York is the one I disliked the most, bar none.
It really depends on the city. That view in particular, yeah, it's kinda depressing. I think the skylines of the DPRK's big cities are beautiful, though. No advertising, colorful buildings, lots of public art, clean streets, clean air.
LA and East Coast LA (Orlando) are far and away the worst cities I’ve ever been in. Hell calling Orlando a city is a stretch.
Ok you got me there, never been to the West Coast and I'd probably hate LA from what I've heard about it
90% of it looks like that stroad picture I posted
Yes I liked Chicago more than New York. Not my favorite city but my visit there didn't stress me out nearly as much. This would be shocking to fox news enjoyers, but I didn't have a single bad interaction there. Meanwhile in New York it seemed like everyone wanted to beat me up, lol.
Meanwhile in New York it seemed like everyone wanted to beat me up
I like NYC but this is a large part of why I could never live there. Northerners are the fucking worst, why are you all so hostile all the time, why can’t you just be friendly?
The whole north-east seems like they want to beat people up constantly
NYC is a literal garbage island and smells accordingly, substantially worse than every city in the northeast US and also Chicago.
i think that reactionary suburb brain is almost a kind of stockholm syndrome. literally, for all of history the overwhelming majority of people have always congregated in walkable units.
suburbs were created as a corporate racist policy a vast number of people simply had the most access to, not because there was a fair and weighed decision on everyone's part. and following that it's sunk cost & aversion to change. like literally all the nascent suburbanites came from apartments, tenements, and public projects, there wasn't some groundswell of people demanding, against every civilizational instinct to spread themselves out in isolation that corporate demands "met", it's that the availability of newly-built properties the tenant would eventually own shifted almost entirely to suburban development---and lets not forget that early suburbs were much, much better served before neoliberalism began cannibalizing it, you couldn't very well get all the whites out of the city & into food deserts, they provided all the amenities and created all these suburban municipalities so suburbanites could pretend they still lived in cities, simply with more privacy, segregation, and automobiles.
tldr, if corporate greed hadn't created suburban sprawl as a product, we wouldn't even have people defending it, but they also created a constituency of people whose only capital is tied up in the suburban ponzi scheme who are now vociferous defenders of it
You save nature by bulldozing vast areas of land to build ze Industrie und Autobahn???Deutschland has had 0 bears for the last 150 years, mind you!
Live in Ireland, can confirm. Usually they'll put parks around and plant trees in holes in the concrete. I recently went back to my parents place and saw a lot of the development nearby - just hundreds of houses ages away from the town. I think I maybe saw a couple of vertical duplexes, that's the closest to apartments it got. No commercial zoning in sight, guaranteeing most people will drive every time they need to buy milk or whatever. Big shame.
I hate this picture because I should be allowed to ride my bicycle inside the store!
I ain't sharin' a fucking building, do I look like some commie?! Also I want the nearest convenience store to be 1000 miles away and I can only get there with my gas guzzling penis compensator!
this is actually pretty generous considering those houses are right next to each other. most suburbs are way more spaced out
Yeah, with equivalent density to the majority of suburbs in my area you would only be able to fit 20 houses on that island. Also, the streets are a grid? Fuck that we need weird curvy roads that dead-end in cul-de-sacs.
I FUCKING LOVE DENSE POPULATIONS WITH NATURE CLOSE
Bring back the 50s ethos of the complete walkable suburbs. The million programme (showing my Swedish here) is the best period of Swedish architecture actually building habitats. Having a forest 200 meters away from my high density population social housing was the highlight of my childhood.
Also, imagine if you twisted your ankle, have a really bad stomach ache, or have a disability, or in a snowstorm, and had to walk all the way across the island to and from your errands. Density equals accessibility as well as less time spent going to where you want to go and more time being at where you want to be at.
The quickest way to any destination is a straight line, thats why we need to build this golf course here in the middle of everything.
You must get at least five hole-in-ones before you will be admitted to the hospital.
I'll allow it but only if you burn down an ecologically critical forest that was there for millions of years.
But I hate both nature and other people. Were it up to me, the whole of the world would be a closely manicured golf course and the only animals would be in processing centers.
Hey now, don't forget your private jet so you have something to do errands in.
Apartments also seem nice since it would mean being surrounded by people and more chances of doing stuff with them and having fun instead of being alone and isolated.
I grew up in a rural town of mostly farmland. The biggest store was a gas station owned by my grandfather's half brother.
For college and a few years afterwards I lived in a city. I really liked being able to go do something at any point, but I hated the roommates, neighbors, city noise, ordinances, light pollution, traffic, cost of living, high crime rates, and low job prospects.
I moved back to an adjacent town and while there isn't much to do, I pay less for my mortgage now than I would have for a studio apartment back in the city. I can see the stars, my neighbors don't give a shit about me, traffic only exists to slow me down a few minutes a day, I can leave my doors unlocked, and since the pandemic I could change careers at any point.
It's all about what people want. The grass is always greener, and the green is always green.
city noise, ordinances, light pollution, traffic, cost of living, high crime rates, and low job prospects.
Caused by capitalism, not urbanization
Hate to be the typical 🗾
guy, however Japan does manage to have far less of these problems in some of the densest cities in the world. You can probably thank an actual commitment to public transit for 80% of it.
Hex, yeah. Truthfully I still like denser-style suburbs. Having a small garden plot while still being able to bike/bus most places is a dream of mine. Now many I know went with the extreme of McMansions, large tracts of boring lawn, and pricing out the local farmers. Hell, I wouldn't even mind an apartment if it didn't cost so damn much, but collective arrangements are near impossible with how capitalists have written the laws to favor landlords.
Also what if the buildings connected all the way around the block and closed in an area the size of a small park? And were strawbale-insulated so you couldn't hear through the walls? And had each level staggered back for privacy and for those roof/balcony yards? And had continuous porches or awnings that would stretch around the outside?
It would be totally within our capacity to build.
City noise and traffic are a direct product of the suburbs too, because if it weren't for the suburbs you could actually have everyone commute by mass transit which solves those issues. Or just walk tbh
Although I'm not anti urbanization, in my experience, people were always the disruptive factor. Cars didn't ever bother me, nor did mass transit. People though, people are loud assholes. They think that just because they don't see other people that they can't bother people, but they do.
I can see the appeal of both the city and the country, having lived in both. I generally will take having less to do if I don’t have to ever see or hear my neighbors
Because my neighbors are assholes.
Also I want a yard. And an attic. I've got nowhere to go to enjoy some sunshine in private, and nowhere to store my shit. Apartment/condo living sucks.
Wow, sunshine and storage. 2 incredible excuses that absolutely justifying utterly destroying the planet.
Acquire less "shit". Walk to the local park.
Apartment living won't do shit if they're burning coal, ordering Amazon and using lithium batteries.
See? Shades of gray.
Also wtf are those links
Suburbs = cars. Of course it fucking will.
EDIT: Oh wait you're the genocide justifying 196 user
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I've been trying to block this community of removed cause I keep coming here by mistake, but I can't find the option in Voyager. I keep falling for these stupid troll posts. I mean, people are actually trying to convince me that apartments are better. (And don't even get me started on all the MAGAts on here pretending to be communists.)
This is Malthusian nonsense. The United States, for example, is 4% of the World's population but still uses 25% of the world's resources annually. The United States outsources their pollution and their production to the third world, where the labor is cheapest due to imperialism, and then says "the third world is responsible for the climate change because of their carbon emissions! We need to cut down on the number of people!"
You've got suburbanites with 5x the carbon footprint of the average citizen of the third world, you've got billionaires who own thousands of hectares of land, you've got celebrities burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel on 1 minute flights, there are way more ways to cut down on carbon emissions than Epic Meme Thanos Policy. You could start with solar, wind, nuclear, ending fossil fuel consumption, ending wars (which btw, war both reduces the population AND destroys the environment, showing the two aren't as inversely proportional as you think), walkable cities, apartment blocks and public transit, but the reactionary fear of working class people of different backgrounds congregating with each other and realizing they actually have a lot in common, makes the ruling class scared.
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Nope, no Malthus, no tragedy of the commons. No eugenics or "policy".
Allow trends to go unaltered. That's all.
Do those other things actively. Energy, design, etc.
Let population decline. We don't need billions of humans. I'm not suggesting anyone goes without, or is curtailed. But nothing compares to the absence of a human. You can make every positively eco choice you can, but nothing will compare to you not existing at all.
There's no way to passively "let" the population decline as long as the birth rate remains above 2 kids on average. People will simply have kids unless most nations adopt something like China's 1 child policy, which I just don't see happening. The population will objectively grow. Even if the birth rate is low in your country, you will get climate refugees from other nations. The population will increase in the imperial core as the region around the equator becomes more unlivable, and the response of the imperial core to those declining conditions is decidedly genocidal violence. Look at ICE. Look at the rafts full of climate refugees being deliberately sunk by fascist coast guards. The message is loud and clear: the imperial core wants to decrease the birth rate of "undesirables" (read: black and brown people from the third world) while maintaining their own standard of living, continuing to wage endless interventions, coups, embargoes, and sanctions, and continuing to exploit the lower cost of labor in "underdeveloped" (colonized) nations. Something's got to give, and it's not going to be the population. It's going to be standard of living.
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Population will not forever grow, this is already forecasted by established scientists.
My point is that countries experiencing lower-than -replacement-birthrate should allow it, with the acknowledgement that climate refugees will come to fill their job positions. Over a longer period, birth rate should continue to be allowed to sink, as future humanity grapples with a post-climate-crisis world.
A far flung generation can have new opinions, when they've survived our sins, mastered technology, and can make a new try
To repeat: I don't think any group should be "reduced" via external pressure. Only that groups could be allowed to contract naturally, without policy intervention to "boost" birthrate. Immigration should serve.
Population will not forever grow, this is already forecasted by established scientists.
wasn't suggesting it will. Just suggesting that if the current birth rates are above 2, there's no way to say that we could passively "let" the population decline if that's not what it's actually doing. Globally the population is still growing. It will either decline on its own, eventually, or someone will implement malthusian policies.
Most of the parks near me are fairly empty. There are also decent trails that are generally empty. Apartment/condo living is fine.
Parks and trails aren't private. Maybe I just want to drop acid in a safe place anytime I want, and run around the yard naked, okay? Can't do that in an apartment.
Also you forgot to assess the issue of shitty neighbors. I need my space to get away from them.
Many parks are large enough that you can easily find privacy. Nudity is perfectly legal in most decent cities so dropping acid naked in a secluded part of the park would not be much of an issue.
I didn't address shitty neighbors because I don't have a decent solution. Same with shitty neighbors in SFHs. I could see noise being more of an issue especially if insulation is crap.
I'm not saying apartment living is perfection but I also would not say it sucks. Both apartments/condos and single family homes have their issues.
The worst six months of my life were spent in an apartment building with people living very loudly on both sides and above me, I got very little sleep that whole time. Couple above either fucked or argued in the early evening, children on one side were up at 3am screaming and the people on the other side were constantly moving shit around.
sounds like the owner of the building should have put in soundproofing
I don't know that putting 100 condos in a beachside flood-zone is actually a good idea in terms of construction, or land-use either, but like, you could maybe make a small cluster of buildings closer to the center of the island to achieve a similar effect.
Just going to throw out there that this is not an option for a lot of people.
My condo, built in 2005 has paper thin floors consisting of a thin layer of concrete and a thin layer of metal.
To sound proof from the sound of my neighbors above me would require literally destroying their floor and compromising the integrity of the building. I would never be allowed to do this even if I had the money to do it
Furthermore, I don't think it's me that isn't socialized, I think it's probably my upstairs neighbors who would scream at each other and throw a shopping cart across their condo at 3 am.
I'm all for condos, but condos or apartments actually working reasonably require that every single person living in them is capable of acting reasonably, and that they are built properly.
I should have rights too, just like the land should.
Until this is solved most people will always buy houses over apartments if possible.
You add sound proofing to the ceiling, then another sheet of drywall, or skip the drywall if door frames might get in the way. Also, your experience with a bad neighbor doesn't mean medium or high density housing isn't the correct solution to a lot of problems.
Not once did I say "medium or high density housing isn't the correct solution to a lot of problems."
I said:
I’m all for condos, but condos or apartments actually working reasonably require that every single person living in them is capable of acting reasonably, and that they are built properly.
Please don't put words in my mouth just because I wanted to raise a criticism.
I'm just raising the contention that for a major shift from people wanting houses to wanting apartments, apartments should be built such that they are as reasonable to live in as a house, ie, built soundproof.
For public support to shift heavily to medium/high density housing over houses, these kinds of issues having to do with build quality would have to be addressed first.
There is more to do with this than sound proofing as well such as the inability to install sufficient air conditioning in medium/high density housing, even with warming climates, due to condo board or HOA restrictions.
That emoji doesn't show up for me, so I don't know what the joke here is.
