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Is the alternative that we all rent/buy (?) apartments? That sounds awful to me. I've lived in apartments my entire life and it is not pleasant due to the large amount of people that absolutely fucking suck. I would love to put some space between myself and these assholes. Ideally, I'd like to not really have neighbors at all after my lifetime of experiences.
The alternative is that not everything needs to be either a skyscraper or a single family home. The phenomenon is called "missing middle housing", even has a wiki article you can read. Some people need to live in a flat due to not being able to afford a house. Property value would drop if middle housing became a thing - because developers wouldn't be able to scalp you on a house you need to have, because you could just get a cheap flat instead. Living in a 6-flat building is an entirely different thing from leaving in a huge block of flats too.
Like half of Europe lives like this.
That's interesting. While there are some outliers, there are only really 2 types of "urban" areas I've seen across the US. The single family/town home neighborhood and the apartment/businesses neighborhood. That's pretty broad, of course, but it covers a lot of it. Perhaps if there was more variety things would be better. I still think I'd like to move out of the city, personally, I'm burnt out on people.
Yeah its a major problem in the US.
Wanting a bigger, more spread out home is totally reasonable.
Townhomes, for the US.
Wait, I'm stupid and didn't read it all. I'm seeing a pattern of mistakes on my end.
Some of the best neighborhoods I've seen/lived in in America have been neighborhoods that were built ~100 years ago when zoning didn't really restrict things. You'd end up with mansions next to smaller homes next to duplexes and apartments. Some of the mansions end up divided into multi-unit housing. A person can be born in the neighborhood, and live their whole life there moving into different housing types as they need to. You can end up with greater social cohesion across age and socioeconomic ranges. If a kid from a working class family grows up in an apartment across the street from a wealthy kid, they will have more social mobility than of they were in segregated neighborhoods.
San Francisco has a bunch of mixed stuff.
To add to this, the ask isn't to build more apartments, the ask is to LET US
Single Family Zoning makes higher density housing illegal. If there are people who WANT to live in apartments they don't have that freedom because it's illegal in so much of the US.
No one wants to force you to live in an apartment, we just want to be able to choose to if we want to. let the market decide if we want houses or apartments
While there are other options which have been mentioned to death in the comments below. I'd also like to point out that this could be less of an issue if Apartments were not built like absolute trash shit garbage.
There is no reason you could not build an apartment by taking a standard single family home that you would find in a more rural like area and the simply stacking another one on top of it and continuing that until you no longer get approval to go higher.
Apartments are small, with crappy layouts, and generally cheap materials that makes it difficult to sound isolate. We don't have to make them like that we could just make an actual fucking house with proper materials and then just put another fucking house on top of it and another fucking house on top of that one and so on
Yeah my grandmother got a condo in a large condo development when she moved to the area and its incredible how I never hear any neighbors at all, meanwhile every apartment I've been in you can hear and sometimes smell the neighbors if they so much as have a conversation or try to cook. It all comes down to the quality of construction
Whenever people say this, my first response is: you should support building mixed use/mixed density.
You would have an easier time affording a single family home if there were a couple of duplexes, quad plexes, and low rise apartments around, with some small shops in the ground level.
Fewer people competing for the same single family homes and close access to bodegas and bistros. Easier time finding babysitters and dog walkers too.
We don't all have to love like Manhattan. Most of the nicest neighborhood in America are mixed density.
I used to think apartments sucked until I lived in a concrete and brick unit. It was amazing how quiet they were. The concrete walls blocked out all noise of my neighbors and traffic. I made some good friends in the units next to mine and those were honestly 2 of the best years of my life. I miss living like that
Dog a two bedroom apartment down the street from me costs $2,750 a month. I lived there for years. My two bedroom house has a mortgage of $2,170 a month that I get equity in, has more space and a basement, no degenerate crackheads busting my car window at night anymore, and I can actually hang stuff on my walls without losing a security deposit.
Plus I don't have to go pick up my Amazon packages at the front desk between the hours of 9am to 5pm weekdays, that shit just gets delivered to me. And I don't have to fight with property managers to fix my God damn washing machine for three months because they refuse to order a new motor for it. I even get to park in my driveway ten feet from my front door now and not park three lots away because there's not enough space for everybody who lives at the apartments to park.
All the years I spent renting apartments has been a disgrace compared to what it's like to own a house. Choke on my balls, Bell Partners Incorporated. Large scale shared living situations that are run by faceless corporations and government entities like section 8 housing and apartment complexes feel like incubators that turn normal happy people into suicidal misanthropes. Fuck cars, and fuck apartments
It sounds like most of your grievances are due to renting vs ownership. I've definitely had similar experiences, but most of things aren't issues with decent duplex/townhouse/condos that you own.
The real problem is the huge corporations building apartment complexes with the cheapest materials and no thought of proper urban fabric while dressing them up like something off the magnolia network and renting them as "luxury apartments". You end up paying top dollar for a shitty pile of monochromatic chipboard and petroleum distillates.
Not the previous commenter, but your comment was spot on and reminds me that I have actually rented apartments with "magnolia" in the name that looked nice from 500' away, but were poorly build and poorly managed shitholes.
Lol, that's exactly it. The pictures all look nice, until you actually live there and realize everything is crooked, built from paper, and held together with paint.
And all the new apartments are 99% studio/bedsits.
You need something from a hundred years ago if you want to raise a family in a high density area
Yeah, I'm not one to really keep up with what's on the market, but I don't think I've ever really seen many 3-4 bedroom apartments outside of college towns.
I travel a bit with extended family and we stay in multi-room serviced apartments when we go to cities
They're almost universally old buildings
The main thing I hear from friends and family looking for a home is "I couldn't live in a flat, we need three bedrooms". That stuff isn't being built by the builders who are looking for maximum number of residences for minimum cost
And all the new apartments are 99% studio/bedsits.
You need something from a hundred years ago if you want to raise a family in a high density area
"dog a tuah ..bedroom apartment"
That sounds like a dream. Just the other night, the chick across the hall kicked her dude out after they argued in the hall for three hours. I had to listen to him stomp back and forth until 4am and knock everytime to be let back in a he collected his shit. Fucking trashy motherfuckers.
That's just not realistic in major metro areas anymore. We need to do more to foster a sense of community in buildings because we can't build enough housing any other way.
I've lived in NYC for ~15 years, in apartments, and I almost never hear neighbors. Nor have any of my friends complained about loud neighbors often. Problems with neighbors and noise is not an inherent property of apartments.
I have 36 years in apartments across 11 cities (not new york) and it was an issue in all of them.
Maybe NYC tends to have better built apartments? I've only lived here for any length of time. And I haven't been in fancy exclusively apartments.
You may have bad luck. You may also have lower tolerance. Sometimes I hear my neighbor coming or going, but it's unremarkable. It's not loud or disupritve. But If I absolutely hated any reminder that other people exist, it would be a problem.
I'm not talking about basic shit when I talk about loud people, read my list from another comment. Loud arguments, fighting, shooting, etc. Not to mention the bodily fluids left on and around buildings from tenants and their pets. Idk where this idea that shitty people are non existent comes from, but it is a beautiful fantasy.
I haven't had to deal with much of that. I don't know why your experiences were much worse.
It might a difference in income or cultures where we've lived, though I feel I've had a balance and a mixture of issues. These aren't all at once, usually. There are just people who don't give a fuck about how their behavior affects those around them and I'd like to reduce my chances of encountering them, personally.
Is the alternative that we all rent/buy (?) apartments?
No --- duplexes/triplexes/etc. exist. And single-family housing does exist in mixed zoning areas. An SFH next to a duplex next to an apartment building is common in my city. However, in this case, the "back yard" is probably enough for a small garden and a bbq, but not a large lawn...which is fine, because there are parks in walking distance.
Ideally, I'd like to not really have neighbors at all after my lifetime of experiences.
Then city and suburbs aren't really for you, and it sounds like something very rural would suit you, and those around you, better.
I like how the assumption at the end is that I'm somehow an issue for those around me. I never stated that I, in turn, cause problems for the assholes around me. One thing I know about assholes is that they only escalate, so it is best to disengage if possible. But i suppose you're right; people who are obnoxiously loud at all hours, run/stomp around, yell/scream at each other, fight, shoot, allow their animals to urinate/deficate anywhere, urinate/deficate anywhere themselves, have loud ass animals, park vehicles just anywhere, have loud ass vehicles, etc. are probably saints, and I'm just a menace to society.
I really don't see how you got that assumption at the end. It more seems like the commenter above is saying that if you would benefit from living in a rural area because there is less people and less possibilities to encounter nuisances, and that it would also be better for those people who are nuisances to also live in rural locations cause they would bother less people.
I think its also worth mentioning that with the way housing costs, and availability for utilities is these days, not a lot of people have as much freedom to live in a space they find 100% perfect. Like i love living in urban areas, but some cities design streets so poorly that people are freely able to speed loud cars down quiet residential roads. So, we either gotta get involved in our community we find ourselves in to make the changes we want, hope someone else does it, put up with it, or pack our bags and go somewhere else.
"if you meet one asshole, you met one asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you're the asshole."
We don't know you, but if you dislike everyone you have ever lived near or known enough to not want neighbors then you might be the common thread. Maybe you brought the worst out in people or failed to bring out any good. But who knows, maybe you were just unlucky in the people you have met
That movie quote isn't clever or original, especially out of context. I didn't "meet" these people or even interact with them. We simply existed within the vicinity of each other, and they were people that had no regard or consideration for the other people that live around them. This is very similar to people who blast shitty audio from their phones, walk on the left, take up the entirety of the sidewalk, don't yield for pedestrians, don't respect lines, etc. Assholes do, in fact, exist in many contexts.
bruh, look at you, i'm on the internet and don't want to be this close to you, trolls live in caves, maybe that'll be good for you, but then you might hear the water drip and the crickets chirp
Yes, how terrible of me! I hope you'll recover and find it in your heart to forgive me!
Then you agree that zoning should not force people to only live in one kind of home.
I agree that zoning, while necessary, has been used improperly in some cases. Obviously, you don't want a waste site near homes, hospitals, etc. On the other hand, there's no reason you can't have some kind of restaurant, grocery store, apartments, etc. in a neighborhood. In fact, that would be preferential, as it would reduce driving needs.
"I would be all for this, but you people all suck."
Exactly! Lol
The issue is that everyone in the long chain of apartment construction tries to cut corner to pocket more money.
So you get these cheap cardboard new apartment where you hear everything happening in the building.
It doesn't have to be like that. But the mentalities need to change, and the fuckfaces contractors need to be held accountable for their shitty work.
No, it's just zoning that allows businesses as well as dwellings. You can still live in a house, there just might be a business next door.