Density saves nature

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.

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.

The way i see it is people prefer to fence themselves from the world in their tiny square, rather than enjoy a larger piece of land they have to share.

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

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.

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.

I guess that's just an argument for better made apartments.

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

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.

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.

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

Most suburbs suck because of the neighbors, too.

Seems the common problem is neighbors.

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.

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.

At least in my country it is very normal to own your apartment

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.

Co-operative run housing largely eliminates those problems.

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.

You lost me at buying a small house

Owning sucks too. Shit is always breaking, it's expensive to fix and nobody else will handle it for you. Just paying for lawncare is bleeding me dry, and I don't even use the lawn... but the city/police get angry when I don't cut it.

Don't forget the huge energy savings (heating/cooling, transportation, infrastructure) by having denser housing. It isn't just a measurement of "I can see trees," but all the daily human activities that have a reduced environmental impact in denser development. It's counter-intuitive, but rural areas that are "nearer to nature" are often worse for the environment.

There is probably a break-even point, I don't think everyone living in skyscrapers is ecologically ideal and I wouldn't want to live there anyway. But medium-density development with multi-unit (shared wall) buildings allows huge energy costs, while also making public transit more viable and providing a tax base that actually pays for its own infrastructure.

I think the point of the island is to show that when you have limited space, residential density really matters. Even if you took away all the concrete, spacing, etc between houses in this example and just out 100 ranch style homes in a corner with no spacing in between them, it would leave room for significantly less nature.

Your neighborhood sounds beautiful, and that's great, but that ratio between nature and residents is probably being achieved with more land than if high density residential housing was in place.

Based on your description we might be neighbors

why

Well, you could count the trees on the right and find a way to fit them in between the houses on the left.

This. Whenever people use "if we don't eat meat we need this much less land" I'm immediately thinking if we don't need to plant all that grass and other things then people would just make more houses on those land not grow a forest.

Yes, but the development on the right is going to discover the colony of cannibalistic cave dwellers much quicker, as the high density makes it more difficult to hunt unseen.

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?

Yeah give my 5th floor apartment a back yard to garden in and the we'll talk.

Three apartment buildings and the rest is all parking lot

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?

In current system it'd be all air bnbs and hotels

And most of them are unoccupied.

Plenty of high quality apartments where I live, in Europe.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

Did you hate the apartment, your landlord, your neighbors, or living in an apartment?

Was it an old building? Did you share a shitty fence with annoying people?

I live in a two bedroom apartment in Aus. with my wife and dogs. The build is maybe 5yo. It's great. Noise is minimum, it stays at a steady temp most of the year, and security is really good.

It feels like whoever made this only sees those large suburban sprawls in the South West of the US where it's all flat desert. Or the suburbs built on large tracts of farmland that had trees taken down many years before for crops.

Housing development is expensive when you have to cut down and uproot large tracts of forest. They're not willing to do that unless there is a high rate of return... Such as an apartment building with a hundred tenants.

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.

You're assuming that in 1 you own the property and in 2nd you're renting. A strawman argument if I ever saw one.

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.

This is probably too late, but may help someone. If you're looking for an "industrial" type of setup for a workshop, look at small, local Airports.

There are small airstrip airports all over, and their filled with warehouses that aren't being used. My friend rented a small hanger for a couple hundred (he did small engine repairs) which the owner allowed him to build or do whatever he wanted in there, eventually he made an overnight loft/hangout room on one side when he felt like crashing on late nights. He enjoyed having a dedicated "away from home" space to work and the airport gave him business when locals drove by and saw him working (some local pilots always had stuff that needed work). The really cool bonus part was pilots would just show up and ask if he wanted to go with them for a joy ride, guess it's more fun when you get to share the experience with someone.

This is exactly it. Where the fuck can I do my hobbies in an apartment that are loud. Can I run a torch? Fuck that.

Perhaps in some parts of suburban north america. However, well-designed walkable, bikeable cities with proper transit don't require mega big box stores all in one zoned area that you drive to from a sprawling suburb.

If the building is mixed function, like commerce on the floor level and offices on the first floors, and residential on the rest, you don't need as much parking and car infrastructure.

I think you missed the point. If you build all of those things you mentioned in a similar compact fashion you still have lots of room for nature and more efficiency when compared to sprawl.

bruh you do realize hong kong exists right? that's almost literally a real life example of this image.

Modem building codes usually have noise separation requirements.

You have to remember that people who advocate for apartments usually aren't trying to make everyone live there, they're just trying to make apartments/condos an option for who those who want them. In much of the US and Canada it's illegal to build medium and high density housing, for essentially no reason beyond aesthetics and racism.

See that's all fine and well. More people should do that. But then you get the people who don't want to live near people, in the middle of a city. The "have your cake and eat it too" kind. And that's just not feasible.

There really is no one-size solution to housing. We need, and all benefit, from having some degree of options, but importantly, those options should be attainable, and all have their costs/drawbacks.

Consider that if you have one bad neighbour in an apartment, then everyone on your floor will also be talking to them and helping to regulate their disruptive behaviour.

Apartments usually have concrete walls so you can't hear your neighbours. Unfortunately, there are some new builds made by developers trying to maximise profit at the expense of the residents who don't do this.

Basic sound proofing can make apartments very quiet. We could pass regulations requiring sound proofing

I know you're not serious but this is a really sad and hateful worldview.

You mean the Avatar logo font?

No no, one apartment building and the rest of the island is a surface level parking lot because an underground lot was too expensive.

For the same amount of people, you wouldn't need to.