You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.
Yeah fuck lawns too, they aren’t meant to exist
We can thank England for those damn things.
We used to be a great nation... Invading... Murdering... Stealing... Imposing grass deserts... Now we have left the EU, are implementing government spyware and have no plans to make anything better...
I don't remember what my point was, but England is shit and I don't want to be here anymore.
But you still need way more infrastructure for the Houses.
Yup, tons more parking and tons more road space per capita as well. Low-density sprawl just needs a lot more stuff per capita.
They should pay a significant land tax instead of leeching off the high-density dwellers.
The issue is that all of those apartments are owned by one person getting filthy fucking rich from rent.
Then organise the renters, let them buy the house to transform it into syndicate or cooperative housing. Social apartment construction isn't impossible.
I spent seven years living in an apartment. I so enjoyed hearing the neighbors having sex, the thumping music they played, the smell of their cigarette smoke inside my apartment with all my windows closed, the random intrusions by management to repair something unrelated to my apartment, the random rent increases. Add this to the fact that I had no space for a work shop to make anything, and paying the equivalent of a mortgage with no equivalent home equity. Some people love apartment life, but it definitely was not for me.
You hate shitty apartments, not apartments.
Why not prefer apartments in your own town?
Noise. Neighbours being closer.
That’s only true if the apartment is a shitty American 5 over 1 stick building. In a modern concrete apartment with concrete internal walls you wouldn’t hear the neighbors.
Exactly. Here in Sweden if you love into a newly built apartement you are basically guranteed grade A sound isolation.
Even older ones usually hold high quality because of renovations.
You don't even need concrete. I'm in a modern building made from mass timber construction, and it's dead quiet inside my apartment -- except for the hum of my AC and the sounds of my cat meowing whenever he wants attention.
An island of this size should probably have neither.
Name one good reason the average apartment experience could ever be better than living in a house.
People live in apartments to afford shelter, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
Sure you can make arguments about the concept of centralized feeling being better for nature, but no one actually wants to do it.
you’d be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
It's definitely a cultural thing. Here in Korea, the vast majority prefer apartments. Lower maintenance. More security. Convenience. The social aspect.
Change the apartment to a condo and the answer shifts quite a bit. Condos offer lots of amenities and more luxury. Many people choose condos over houses because they like the lifestyle of not maintaining property and living in a dense area with lots of things to do. Even people living in suburban houses like dense cities, they just spend an hour driving to the city for evening or weekend recreation activities that a condo resident can walk to.
One problem with the picture is that if you want to spend much time doing certain things in nature, such as camping or kayaking, you need storage space for equipment. Condos and apartments tend to lack storage space.
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.
I won't consider living in apartment buildings unless they have good soundproofing and proper open spaces. I don't want to be cramped in with noisy neighbors and have no privacy.
This would just become a 100 apartment buildings.
Well if that much housing is needed then the idea of not providing it is kind of.. monstrous? evil?
A truth most people don't want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is "I don't like people". That shouldn't really be a priority.
For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.
Apparently no one in the comments has seen people live outside of an American suburb.
What is going on in this comments section? Building dense is massively better for the environment than SFH, both in the construction phase and for the life of the units as far more residents can be served with less infrastructure sprawl. It also doesn't mean that detached housing will suddenly stop existing if we let developers build densely packed housing. Doesn't even need to be high rises, it can be townhomes, duplexes, five-over-ones, etc. You'll still be able to get a white picket fence suburban home or a farmhouse on some acreage if you want. In fact, it will become cheaper because all the people who want to live in cities will actually be able to move there and not take up space in that low density area you want to live in.
Judging from the top rated comments, this post is surprisingly controversial for fuckcars.
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.
If people had tree Icons in their gardens in the left image, it would look much better wouldn't it.
Density doesn't save nature. Habitat protection laws save nature. Make sure that's part of the plan.
Also, the picture shows the saved nature very accessible to the density. This is not usually what these zoning plans have in mind.
Many important species, especially insects and their predators, can absolutely make good use of patchy suburban habitat if it is properly managed, moreso if it is networked, and natural space nearer homes benefits residents and the environment.
We can't keep saving mountaintops and deserts, we need to rehabilitate more of these nice valleys and riversides we all like to build cities on.
Yaay, space for 24 more apartment buildings!
A lot of people are pro-apartmemt before living in one, so here are some fun facts:
Apartments usually have a maintenance cost, that covers as little as possible while still costing a lot. You never really own the flat, the building company does.
You often have a communal garden; it's looked after by the lowest bidding contractor. Not all flats have balconies, so you are unlikely to have your own.
Fear of fire and flooding - if someone else messes up, your stuff is toast/soaked. Insurance companies love that extra risk, it gives them an excuse to charge more.
No flat has good sound proofing - the baby screaming downstairs at 5am and the thunder of the morbidly obese person upstairs going to the bathroom at 1am will denote your new sleep schedule (i.e. disturbed)
I hope you're in for deliveries - apartments have no safe spots to leave things.
You will not be able to afford a flat with the same floor space as a house. I'm sorry, welcome to your new coffin.
Good luck drying your laundry (spoiler, your living room is going to have a laundry rack).
Good luck owning a bike (it's either the bike or your laundry, take your pick).
Vocal intimacy becomes a community event.
Living in a flat is a pile of little miseries grouped together.
Apartments works very different in your country. For me it's like this:
Building companies build apartments, usually they are owned by whoever paided them. That can be a private company, it can also be state owned, a cooperative, or a collection of privates. It's not uncommen to buy single apartments here. Depending on the constellation you have a say in what is what done in what way. However: cost like garbage collection, tax,... Are always there. No matter if you live in an apartment or single home.
Same as 1. Depends on the constellation. Many people living in apartments have a garden plot somewhere else. There are places (close to nature, away from streets) where you can rent a garden and have a place of piece. Quieter than your lawn next to the next house.
If apartments are that more dangerous then insurance companies will want more money, sure. As far as I looked for my neighborhood the cost seems to be related to the living area, I. E. Same size same price. So it does not has to be more expensive.
Of course can you have sound proofness. Usually here walls are massive and not made out of paper.
And houses do? Isn't it a thing that people steel packages from your doorway/garden in the US? But nevertheless: usually I was friends with other people in the house who could get my parcels for me, like the elderly lady on the ground floor. It does not get safer than that.
Yes? Flats are obviously cheaper for the same size as a house. You will not find 500m^2+ appartements, but >200m^2 can be found. How big are your houses usually?
Dryer? Balcony? A lot of apartments have an extra room in the basement, or a sun roof.
Bike or laundry? What are you on about? A lot of places have an extra bike room. Most of the time you have also your own compartment in the cellar. Bigger apartment complexes here are also required to have room for cars, I.e.you can rent a garage if you really want more space.
Same as 4.
I am really not sure if you are trolling or houses work differently in your area.
Your apartment is just shit
Make it 100 appartments in 3-4 times the space (in 4 smaller buildings with balconies, community gardens, shared spaces, picnic areas and so on) as a compromis and I am all in!
It's simple: blocks are not built in cities to minimise the footprint like in your meme but to build cheaper and sell more and in the same time externalising the costs of infrastructure development.
A mid density block is something, a heavy packed "bedroom" neighborhood is another.
I'd prefer to live in a house over an apartment
If the buildings are actual size, then those apartments must be the size of a closet
If you look at land use maps, you will see that the urban areas are so small compared to the agricultural and livestock area needed to support the population. This is the biggest cause of deforestation, and population density actually makes it much worse, because it centralizes consumption and requires more logistic costs to deliver the needed food, with much higher rates of wastes. If we lived in less dense areas, perhaps we could do with local, smaller-scale agriculture instead.
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.
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.
fuck ... houses?
Low-density sprawl essentially requires cars. Further, cars need a ton of space for roads and parking lots. Denser, more walkable communities don't need nearly as many cars and don't need nearly as much roads and parking lots.
This isn't how this would work. You'd get 100 houses, or 100 high rises.
In this image I can't help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don't forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
I couldn't live in a place that didn't have a workshop, that's what deters me from apartment blocks.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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