The picture on the left is just an argument against lawns.
Right? And also…who needs space between two homes if there are no lawns? Just moosh all the outer walls together.
Come to think of it…that’s gonna result in a ridiculously long line of houses. Maybe we could moosh roofs and bottom floors and stack 'em up a bit to make the line of houses only a half to a third as long, and then leave a little space between Consecutive House Stacks™️ - y’know, so that there’ll room for more windows.
Lawns aren’t the reason people want to have space from their neighbors.
It’s amazing what insulation and proper sound proofing can do. Never lived in thicker walls than here in Germany. Other than the blasted church bells, it’d be hard to convince me I was living next to people if the windows were opaque.
And why don’t we stick the whole thing underground to further minimize damage to the landscape. Besides it’s way cooler to be called a vault dweller than a condo resident.
Partially, even if you got rid of the lawns the houses would still take up significantly more space for both the road infrastructure as well as the houses themselves.
If the island were 100 times larger, the houses would take 1% of the land area, leaving 99%. The apartment complex would take up .04%, leaving 99.96%, which isn’t much of an improvement. The proportions of our planet are much closer to my scenario than this made up island. That’s a reason why we might not “prefer apartments in our own town.”
There are good reasons you might want density, this just isn’t one of them.
Yeah, but most people don’t live in that other 90% . Most people live in urban and suburban areas where most if not all of the land is privately owned. Because of this the problem shown of fitting 100 households into 25 acres is way more common than your scenario of fitting 100 households on 2500 acres
And having trees and nature near urban venters is very much desirable, to help with air pollution (tho really not a lot), heat concentration and humidity.
If the island were 100 times larger, the houses would take 1% of the land area, leaving 99%.
Singapore government: if only.
Also wildlife, carbon capturing, and distance to everything. There’s reason why denser city is easier to go around, in this island, you might not even need a car.
Easier travel is definitely a great reason to increase density. Walking & biking > cars
There is approximately 15.77B acres of livable land and there are 8.2B people so if each person had just 1/4 acre that would be 13% vs if you gave each person 2000 sqft it would only be 2%. Then you need to factor in how to built transit for low density and how many more stores you need due to the lower density and you can see that it would be much better for the environment if we had higher density
That’s the difference between America and Western Europe. Western Europe is already mostly built up, they don’t have room. America does.
That’s not even remotely true. Do Americans actually believe this?
Spoiler: No it isn’t.
Yea, everything is pretty full here. We have plenty of nature, but there’s always traces of civilization.
I often miss the vastness of nature. Been to Alaska some years ago and being in nature is an entirely different feeling.
But then you have to live in an apartment…
The neighbors kids who live above you will stomp around at 2:00am.
The neighbors below you will complain when you make the slightest noise.
I guess that’s just an argument for better made apartments.
That’s really the foundational problem. If you could exist without bugging or being bugged by the neighbors dense housing would be so much more appealing
This is absolutely correct.
I live now in a well-made townhouse. I can’t hear the neighbors, ever, even the living room, or the kitchen. Or the bedroom! I love this place compared to my last crappy townhouse, or any apartment I’ve ever been in, ever.
Unfortunately, where I live it’s very hard to find a well-made apartment or townhouse. I love the idea of an apartment or townhouse where I couldn’t hear the neighbours no matter what they were doing, and I couldn’t smell their cooking, or be exposed to smoke when they’re smoking, and so-on. But, that just isn’t realistic. Even if laws were passed to make that a requirement as of today, it would be decades for the existing housing stock to be sold off.
These threads are full of people making the straight-up weakest arguments for destroying nature…
“…but privacy and noise!”
Ugh, just take all that money you would have spent on the ridiculous driveways, extra lengths of road, utilities, and lawn care and put it into higher quality building materials for the apartments/townhouses.
We build crap quality places in the US and all I hear from my fellow countrymen is “we can’t (or don’t want to) do it any other way”.
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IMO this is a universal problem. I’ve had neighbours in a single family house that choose to mow their lawn at 7am on a Saturday and have a very loud pickup truck that I can hear start up any time they drive it.
If I could live in the city and never see another person I think I wouldn’t mind it.
No, wait, still not enough trees or animals or stars in the sky.
That’s why we should build “luxury” apartment blocks in nature with high ceilings and very good noise cancellation, surrounded by agriculture and food forests, ideally growing their own food. Everyone gets a killer view and can quickly go out into nature.
And then connect these big ass apartment blocks with underground train.
If it were like that you’d find me living in the food forest and not the apartment.
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Seriously. Solid concrete apartments are so impervious to noise that the only times i hear any noise other than them dropping anvils on the floor is when it comes through an open window! I’m more annoyed by people in the room next to me than i am by anyone outside the apartment.
We can’t live in an apartment because it will always have bad insulation. We should all live in single unit housing with… checks the quality of insulation in your average 1970s ranch house oh shit, oh fuck.
Also, gotta say, love to live in a street level neighborhood Cul-de-sac with that one guy revving his motorbike at 3am. Single pane glass, noisy neighbors, and god help you during July 4th or Jan 1st when someone gets ahold of fireworks.
But for some reason, we completely forget about this shit when we talk about apartments. Like the suburbs - particularly the corners near intersections or school yards or big churches or highway on-ramps - aren’t routinely noisy af.
Most of my apartment neighbors are actually really cool, chill people. There’s a handful of people who stink, but like… Oh well?? That’s living around other humans? You adapt to the shitty ones and get along with the good ones.
If you run around assuming all your apartment neighbors will forever be annoying, you’ll never get to know any that aren’t. Same with neighbors in the suburbs. Being around humans can suck sometimes, but if you look you can often find decent people.
I’ve met more decent wild animals than I have people.
Ok, misanthrope.
You say that like it’s an insult.
Someone who hates or distrusts humankind certainly isn’t a positive trait.
Awww surely not!
Ever heard that quote, paraphrasing the start of it:
You run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk.
(Maybe you know the rest) If you give that some thought for the rest of the week (assuming you’re out and about), interested to hear any thoughts on it :)
Part of the reason I hate people is I put a ton of effort into trying not to be a jerk, stressing myself out with constant worry from monitoring my behavior at all times, but other people don’t seem to give anyone else the same courtesy.
And that doesn’t even get into how hard it is for me to relate to almost everyone. I watch weird TV shows, listen to weird music, read weird books, and have weird hobbies. Outside of the weather I don’t really have anything to talk to them about, despite their seemingly constant need for interaction.
The suburbs are noisy as fuck. That’s why I want to live in the middle of nowhere.
try: Alaska
you can have trees with people or trees without people, we have train, boats, and airports. Enjoy the tundras full of moss and few people, the largest city in the United States (by area) and the reasonably tall mountains.
You joke but the Canadian Rockies are pretty high on my list of places to wander naked until I die.
I have been to a high-density suburb that is honestly not that far from being the second image, and it was literally so dead quiet that i could reliably use the distant sound of the highway to orient myself.
The thing is, you can’t really engineer against anti-social behavior. For every better made apartment you will find that there is an even bigger anti-social idiot who still manages to make life hell for their neighbors.
I’m pretty blessed with my mostly boomer neighbors (🤞) who don’t make a peep after 10PM, but my girlfriend has had some shitty neighbors even though her apartment is pretty well made. Sound insulation between apartments is no match for cigarette and marijuana smoke wafting in from the balcony below any time you want to open the window to air out, or if, heavens forbid, you want to sleep with the window open in the summer, nor does it help much if they are partying and speaking loudly on their balcony until 4AM on weekdays. And then I’m not even getting into how they’re treating shared spaces.
The proximity makes everything so much worse than it would be with a house, at some point only adding distance helps.
I’ve lived in shitty apartments but dated two people who lived in “modern” high rise appartments. In mine I heard the neighbours occasionally since they were clearly old motels that they half arsed into units. The modern apartments I practically never heard anyone.
Though “modern” apartment generally price out people who are up all hours making noise it’s more the fact that these appartments usually have body corporates or people that live on site. Being the typical “up all hours stomping around” type would be a quick way to have your lease terminated.
Edit: Duh and the super obvious thing I forgot, improved sound insulation in modern apartments I imagine as well.
Concrete framed buildings help a lot with this. Other noise proof options are out there as well
My favorite is a few hundred meters of trees with a fence and stone walls
This has literally been a non-issue for me in every apartment I’ve lived in for the last 10 years here in Sweden. You probably need some better building codes, this is a solved problem.
this is a solved problem
LOL no, it’s a solved problem where you are
so you’re agreeing it’s a solved problem then, just that wherever you live is refusing to implement it.
I’ll rephrase - this is a problem that has an established solution that you can easily copy.
I grew up between a big house with it’s own forest, and a town house. At this point in my life, I have spent more time living in apartments, and the last 4 years living in studios. Gotta say, I have no desire to move into a house at any point. Having an apartment in a well built city with good public transport is just way nicer.
for a while now i’ve maintained that commie blocks (at least over here) are some of the best places to live, and i have to conclude that the only reason people think most other areas are at all appealing is because they have simply never actually been in the commie block areas.
It’s like how my dad had never once even considered the notion of riding a bike, then one day i convinced him to buy an e-bike and since that day he has driven a car… literally 3 times, i think. Once you actually consider the merits of it it’s so obviously better.
Yeah. I’ve lived in one in eastern Germany for a few weeks at one point. It was in a park, which had seating, locations for BBQ, playgrounds, and all streets around where very reduced speed. The flat was sized and partitioned well. Insulation sucked, though I’m pretty sure renovating one to modern standards is cheaper than leveling and replacing it.
Because I lived in apartments for my entire adult life until maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and I can say most apartments suck because of the neighbors. Ya my neighbors across the street from me are awful and trashy but they are not directly above me or one wall away from me.
Your neighbours don’t suck, your insulation sucks. Any time I had annoying neighbours, 9/10 times it was poor insulation. Sonic insulation is hugely important.
We moved into a concrete building and then another and then another. The horrible neighbors we had in our last wood frame building - Fire’s Favourite food! - ensured we’re never going back. Now I’m aware I have neighbours but, like bigfoot, you’re never really sure they’re there.
Sometimes yes sometimes no, I don’t hear my current neighbours
I work nights, so it didn’t bother me, but my wife said the upstairs neighbors stomp and yell and stuff all the time from like 11 pm till 3 am all the time. When I would confront them, they would blame it on their religion or their small kids. They would talk about how now that the sun is down, they can eat and would celebrate it. After the third time, I started talking about the scriptures of their religion that tell them to respect their neighbors, and then I started reporting it to the leasing office a few times a week.
After they were finally moved out, I was talking to one of the leasing people and complained about how they were loud all the time. They asked why I didn’t report it more, and I had to tell them that I would have been calling them every single day at least once a day.
I was talking to one of the leasing people and complained about how they were loud all the time. They asked why I didn’t report it more
“Why didn’t you take time out of your day to help us manage the property, for free, after all the times we did nothing about the reported noise violations??”
Man, apartment owners and landlords are fucking useless…
Its mostly because all of the older apartment 20th ce try or older have wood floors that reverberate lime a drumhead. Newer buildings with concrete construction elminate noise. I dont hear my neighbors ever. Will never go back to an old building.
Most suburbs suck because of the neighbors, too.
Seems the common problem is neighbors.
Renting sucks and relying on a landlord is awful. I bought a small house and keep my yard wild.
Having renting be the default for apartments is part of the problem. It is very normal where I live that a developer build an apartment building and the sells the apartments to individuals who own the living space and co-own and maintain the shared spaces. The developer takes the winnings and never interferes with the building again.
But then you have to deal with the politics of running the complex.
It’s like having an HOA but even more impactful on your daily life since you have to walk through the common area and such - at least with a standalone home you own the land and are directly connected to a public street.
Having lived both in buildings where my family owned one apartment, and houses where there was an HOA, i can tell you that the politics of the apartment building was not even close to how insne an HOA is. it was mostly taking about the budget, prioritizing repairs, and security
If you buy into a poorly managed building though you are screwed. Many buildings don’t keep enough cash on hand for unexpected bills because they want to keep the fees low for residents. Then an elevator breaks, sewage backs up, someone floods their apartment, and all of a sudden there’s a $20,000 bill that everyone has to pony up money for.
that is true, we had to change administrators one time and it was not an easy process. my comment was mostly that the blanket statement of “politics in an apartment complex are worse that an HOA” is not true, it depends on the building and the HOA
Sadly this is true, my parents are living this in their condo right now.
At least in my country it is very normal to own your apartment
In the US you can be kicked out of your apartment with only 60 days of warning without cause (the owners only have to claim they need it for personal use or some other bs).
That is part of why people hate renting. 60 days isn’t enough time to find a new place, pack everything up, and move all while working 50 hours a week.
Why does renting have to be the automatic assumption? We’re simply talking about two different ways to organize living space, not how it’s financed. Shit, we should take a page out of Finland’s book, and make some actually really good public housing and make it available to everyone.
Because capitalism.
Co-operative run housing largely eliminates those problems.
Sounds like the other hell on earth … an hoa
housing co-ops are basically the standard here in sweden and it’s perfectly fine, just because america makes things suck doesn’t mean they have to inherently be bad. Obviously if you execute a concept in the worst way imaginable it’s going to suck, that’s not rocket science.
Cool, call me when that comes to the Detroit area I guess. I’ll probably be dead though cuz it ain’t happening.
You lost me at buying a small house
There’s a principle in economic analysis called “Ceteri paribus”, “other things equal”. So, if you’re renting in the image on the right, you’re also renting on the image on the left.
So um, why are the houses and nature mutually exclusive? I live in a suburban detached single family home, and my whole neighborhood is filled with trees, wildlife and even a tree lined creek that separates the back yards on my street from the back yards on the opposite side. You can’t even see my actual yard from google maps because it’s nearly entirely covered by tree canopy (at 6pm in summer my yard is 100% shaded). We have all sorts of wildlife including deer, foxes, owls, frogs, mallards, rabbits, squirrels, etc.
While I agree that we do need more housing options of all sorts, I don’t for a second agree that nature and suburban housing are mutually exclusive. We just need to stop tearing down all the trees when we build, and plan better.
in both scenarios developers eventually buy up the entire island and fill it with either
What about something like that ?
8 houses in a row, built using a wood structure and straw bale wall for insulation (thermal AND phonic insulation) and clay plaster. So the construction material is storing CO2 rather than emitting tons of CO2 like concrete does.
It collects rainwater for the garden and has enough solar panels for the community and to contribute to the electrical consumption of the village around it.
It leaves a lot of space for land to develop a food forest, permaculture projects and leave space for biodiversity.
Gentle density is awesome too! Rowhouses, duplexes, low-rises: all great options for cities that are zoned to only allow single family housing.
i will take literally anything that is denser than single family houses, row homes are generally a pretty good middle ground for most people who can’t fully grow out of the suburban mindset.
That looks great! Where is this?
It depends also on the type of houses. It’s not the same a cabin in the woods and a house with a garden.
Yeah give my 5th floor apartment a back yard to garden in and the we’ll talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_gardening
Very common in and around the old Soviet style Eastern European blocs. The style of construction was known as “Towers in the Park” and was often paired with rail stops and local commercial centers for the convenience of pedestrians.
Check out Habitat 67 in Montreal - an architectural student solved this in the 60s. Apartments where everybody gets their own rooftop terrace. Given the funding, the original plan was for a 30-story terraced hill of mixed-use and apartments in an A-frame with public green space underneath that mixed the density of apartments with the benefits of single family homes.
Since everybody thought he was crazy, he only got a fraction of the funding for what he ended up building for the 1967 World’s Fair, but those apartments have the longest occupancy time of any building in Canada (some seeing 2 or 3 generations living in them) and a 5-year waiting list on units.
Last year, a 3d model of the original concept was released for Unreal Engine: www.unrealengine.com/en-US/hillside
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)
This is a solved problem.
that’s called terraced housing and it’s really astoundingly enjoyable.
Now imagine apartment buildings taking up 100% of the island and that’s what you get under the current system.
Three apartment buildings and the rest is all parking lot
Zoning bylaw might require 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling unit. Three buildings would then need 450 spaces at roughly 128 sqft. each which would take up nearly an acre and a half.
The three buildings on their own probably wouldn’t need even a single acre.
Great, that means people have a place to live.
not sure how you imagine it’s better for those people to just… not have a place to live?
Yes because housing is the only thing that matters. More houses! Cover the planet in housing!!!
Don’t have children.
so you’re literally just saying people should go homeless then, wonderful!
You are allowed to wildly infer anything you would like.
And most of them are unoccupied.
Apartments are never built right. Always cheap out on sound proofing and appliances. Also fuck you if you have a dog
Plenty of high quality apartments where I live, in Europe.
Plenty of low quality apartments in Europe as well.
If you think the Grenfell Tower cladding issue was just a UK problem, oh are you in for a world of disappointment.
Lol
Yeah but those are almost every time overpriced as fuck.
because there aren’t enough of them, it’s literally that simple.
Here in sweden we built just an absolute shit ton of cheapo commie block-esque apartments areas in the 60’s and nowadays it’s some of the best housing available IMO, it’s hilariously cheap (i have seen small apartments that cost like 200 dollars per month), the apartments are perfectly fine, and the areas themselves are generally car-light and at worst just kinda boring but still fine.
I’ll go with 99 apartments and one house on the other side so I can be as far from them as possible.
In the original position, one is asked to consider which principles they would select for the basic structure of society, but they must select as if they had no knowledge ahead of time what position they would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance”, which prevents them from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially in Rawls’s formulation, their or anyone else’s idea of how to lead a good life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally.
What not many people are touching on:
In 2, the owner of the building likely owns the rest of the land as well as the apartment. You are a slave to the owner as he owns the island and your “beautiful view” will either be absolutely not developed at all so it is difficult to use as a park or a source of food without explicit consent from your ruler. No community gardens without tons of power tripping and infighting of course either.
In 2, the owner of the apartment and land can and will bulldoze the entire forest and completely pave it over if there is the slightest hint that he can make more money that way, then jack up your rent for the privelage of living in a hellhole. Conservation of nature my ass. The building owner has a 99% chance about not giving a shit about conserving the rest. They will turn it into monoculture or cattle farming or a parking lot and stores. This post is literally landlord propaganda.
Edit: owns the apartment building, not apartment.
In 1, if there was a workplace, it’s likely way farther away from 2, with more limited choices.
Want to do office job as a disabled person in 1? Bad luck, your only options are a few different factories with different kind of workplace abuses, all requiring you to wake up at 4AM, because the factory opens up at 6AM. Disabled? No, you’re not, you have all your limbs, you just want to take money from the government to then spend it on luxury cars, and maybe a few months of lifting at the factory will make it “magically go away”. Maybe your “wanting to do art” will also be cured, which hopefully got crushed by the good AI, as artists are evil because they don’t get cool injuries during their craft.
People were okay with apartments, but then some upper-middle class Karens and their male counterparts started to whine about not having “a kitchen garden” (which none of those fuckers can care about at all, thus becoming hotspots for bugs) and “a place where their child can play” (alone), and who knows, their neighbors could be a migrant/black/Roma/whatever is the current boogeyman at your local area.
Also if you’re in the US, you’re owning the 1 way less than 2 in Europe, thanks to HOAs.
We could also all live in cells. Maybe even hook us up to VR so we dont even need to get out into nature. You could maybe even harvest energy, by keeping us in nutrient filled tubs while simulating a perfect world into our neural perception.
If you’d build an apartment tower surrounded by food forest and nice fields everyone would get an amazing view. Better view than from ground level. Make the ceilings high and very good noise insulation and great windows. And it would be cheap because the land could be cheap.
I dont think food forrests are viable solutions. Maybe in very particular places in the world. But globally, commercial food productions will not be replaced by food forrests any time soon
I think there are some trees who are very efficient in creating calories - so maybe with more genetic engineering.
But yeah mostly you’d have smaller fields like potato or wheat or corn between hedgerows, and food forest or orchards for fruits and most of all for a nicer view. The main idea would be that you don’t need to transport food except from the surrounding area to the apartment tower. You’d produce / recycle food, water and energy locally.
The theory is great! But i doubt that modern consumers will accept this. Sadly! We want our bananas, and oranges all year round and they must be as affordable as possible.
We do need change to change things but personally i think that what is driving denaturation is the chase of profit not comfort and ease of life. I am not moving into a 1 room condo and stop eating watermelons so that multi trillion companies can increase their proffit margins and make even more money for people who dont live the same life as the rest of us.
We are already producing too much food and too much land is being used to create food that goes into feeling animals that will become food. Eating less meat will have a larger effect that eating locally grown onions to save on transportation
Well for me Solarpunk is about what would be possible - except for our current global regime preventing it. So yeah it’s fantasy.
I don’t know if the costs work out low enough, but you could build such a lone apartment tower on farmland right now. If you had like a government owned “eco bank” funding this. If the land and construction costs can be kept low enough. It would be really cheap with some advances in premanufactured parts or 3D printing or house building robots. Kite power for very cheap wind energy.
If you could buy in for 50k and get all your living costs, food, energy, water and internet basically for free for the next 20 years, plenty of people would jump at this. And if it’s big enough (500 units?) you could justify having a doctor and a kindergarden and hybrid local / remote school. If we were serious about climate change, everyone could live in luxury with a killer view.
so… I love the dream, but it is a utopia.
First of all, farmland is a diversity graveyard. Just because it is green, does not make it natural or even pretty. I live in a country that uses 61% of its area for farmland and although it makes for a cool Windows background, there is not much life in fields like that. Changing the farmland to food forests could maybe change this, but this leads to the second point
The reason why farmland is accumulated into larger and larger fields is, because it is cheaper and easier to run. Going the other way, diving it up into smaller production and mixing it up, will make everything more expensive, complicated and require a lot more (manual) work to run.
500 units is not even enough to support a local grocery store in current times, let alone a doctor or a school.
That said, i had not realized where this was posted in. It just popped up on my feed, so I guess you are right in that it could be a great setup if it could work.
Yeah I have no idea if or how it could work. Commie blocks used to design local neighborhoods with shops and kindergarden. Maybe it would be that when you have kids your move to a block with a kindergarden and school, then it would make more sense.
Maybe it would be harder to farm but maybe it could also be solved through lighter robotic farm equipment. I once calculated that you only need ~250m² for potatoes to produce enough calories so feeding yourself so it’s theoretically not that difficult. I also hope in the decades to come we can genetically engineer better food plants. Like higher / better quality protein crops.
But my main idea was how to create a view for people that want to “live in nature”. But the hippie ideal for a farmstead is unsustainable with so many people. An apartment block would save a lot on heating, cooling and infrastructure. The proper sci-fi utopia would then be to have underground railway tunnels connect thousands of such apartment blocks in nature. Then much surface area could be rewilded instead of having roads and bridges. But tunnels are rather expensive.
They supplement and decentralise food production, building resiliency into our systems.
I just moved from an apartment to a house.
If the apartment had the same floor space and the city actually accommodated my hobbies (I need a large garage to work on cars and finish fixing a boat) then I would’ve gladly stayed.
However. Apartments above 60m² are rare and expensive, and all garages/industrial sites are unfavorable because you can put another bloc or supermarket in there. The cities became living hubs for corporate workers whose entire lives can be crammed into a 40 meter apartment and their only entertainment is a depression rectangle or a gaming console.
