You see one apartment building. A property developer sees room for 100 apartment buildings.
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.
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.
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 comment tells me you’re from the states, right? There is no other country in the world where GA is as ubiquitous as in the US.
Yeah, they’re everywhere so technically 90% of the population is within driving distance to an airstrip here. The same methodology applies to every country though, a lot of people are intimidated by “official” or industrialized settings and don’t realize there is a lot of small unused real estate an owner or manager would love to get used by a motivated individual.
Definitely not the case for large corporations but after they move out the facilities usually are struggling to turn a profit and are an easy grab (or government subsidized places are less greedy), it also looks more professional if you’re trying to do public work.
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What nature? I have to drive 2 hours to see nature. Bring on the houses.
When we lived in an apartment someone set off the fire alarm several times a week, sometimes at 3am which is a shitty way and time to awaken. Never want to live in one again
in both scenarios developers eventually buy up the entire island and fill it with either
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.
Valid point, did not consider.
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.
Can we get a version with all treehouses?
If the apartments are no shoe boxes and have lavishly big (garden) balconies I’m all in. The space should be around 100-120 qm each with flexible drywall placement for individual footprints.
I love living in a walkable city but I envy a friend of mine a little bit, who exits his apartment into a market center with cafes, shops, supermarkets, barber, doctors etc.
I’ve lived in an apartment and I just can’t do it. I hated every day in it.
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.
And your dog can run out the dog door into your small yard anytime or do you have to walk them every day. How is your garage? Is there a workshop in it? Can you have friends over into your basement DnD room setup to play games? Apartments suck I don’t care how many people stuck in cities tell me they don’t. Like being born in the zoo they don’t understand it’s awful. Also good security, yeah sounds like a great place to live. I don’t need security in my neighborhood and it’s a working class not a rich one too. Why do you need security? Is it because cities suck and the density makes you more likely to be a crime victim?
Did you hate the apartment, your landlord, your neighbors, or living in an apartment?
I hated my proximity to so many people and their noises. I hated the apartment, I hated living in the city, it felt inhuman and I felt absolutely trapped. The landlord was fine. Not to mention bugs and rats. Tell me that apartment building doesn’t have roaches.
Sharing walls sucks
Yes.
As someone who is sensitive to noise, I hated the lack of adequate standards regarding wall thickness and/or sound proofing. And the mail thief.
Yes. I’d rather live under a bridge than in an apartment complex.
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.
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.
Based on your description we might be neighbors
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.
I was thinking the exact same thing. It just feels like 2 extremes. Take the left one, don’t put concrete everywhere, and add 80% of the trees from the right.
A garden is not wild nature.
What point are you trying to make?
Or are you just adding a random fact to the thread?
He-She is just telling that there is a difference between a garden and an actual wild nature space. Gardens are manicured environments with a fraction of biodiversity that are made to serve human needs, and also frequently require constant maintenance and resource consumption on garden tools, fertilizers, etc, and frequently are changed whenever the house changes owner or tenant. They do not contribute to nature preservation at all actually, they just provide more comfort to the inhabitants like some trees for shading. A real wild nature space demands a lot of continuous space devoid or almost devoid of human presence or interference, like a whole Manhattan island of trees that will not be cut, and no fertilizer maintenance at all, and big animals that are dangerous to humans such as wolves, bears, moose, etc.
why
Well, you could count the trees on the right and find a way to fit them in between the houses on the left.
the simplest solution is to stop having so many babies. population reduction is critical to quality of life.
That’s not a real solution.
the fuck it aint. all you got to do is have only one child and you will reduce the population by half in a single lifetime.
We have more than enough resources for more than the world’s population. The problem isn’t overpopulation, it’s manufactured scarcity. Telling people to just have less kids is victim blaming when capitalism requires letting some people starve to maintain the artificial value of products.
the resources aren’t the problem (although i would still only half agree with you on that statement). it’s the quality of life. do you want to live your life packed into an apartment? do you want to get on a 5 lane freeway to go get groceries? do you want to go to a state park and not be able to find a parking space? do you like crowded spaces? do you want to continue to burn rain forest to create range lands? do you want to watch the suburbs continue to expand into natural areas? do you want to continue to global warming?
we are a much more sustainable species at half our current population level.
A lot of people in this thread are mistaking the map for the territory. Like yes, obviously neither the development on the right, or the left would actually happen in real life, because why are these people even on the island? What do they eat? What do they drink? Where do they work? The sole statement of the graphic is that dense developments have a reduced impact on nature compared to sparse developments. Discussing the logistics would exceed what can be conveyed by such a format.
A lot of people in this thread are deliberately missing the point because they don’t want to hear it.
They want to live in independent suburban homes, in isolated subdivisions where you can only get to jobs or groceries or social events by car, with big yards soaked in pesticides so they don’t have bugs in their houses, etc, etc.
They want to live high consumption lifestyles. They don’t want to live in resource efficient, high density housing because they imagine it will reduce their standard of living.
So they nitpick the image and make up reasons why it’s unrealistic because they don’t want to admit the kinds of homes seen on the left are unsustainable and unrealistic in the long term.
I don’t have to imagine, I’ve lived in both, it is a reduced standard of living and saying it isn’t is a lie. I’ve seen pictures of how you people want us to live, Hong Kong and Tokyo exist. I’d rather die of exposure in the woods than be forced into a coffin sized little apartment room that the poors get there.
What do “the poors” in America get? Right, they get to
die of exposure in the woods
I’ll take it over horizontal closet living.
I did some quick research, I looked for cheap living spaces in Tokyo, and then in Austin. For Tokyo, I found this: https://www.villagehouse.jp/en/rent/kanto/tokyo/hachioji-shi-132012/kobiki-3019/#3DK-5-503/ 50m^2, for about 400$ a month, less than 5 minute walk to the train station, where you can take a train towards the center of Tokyo.
For Austin, Texas, I searched on Zillow for living spaces in Austin, TX under 600$. I found this: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/400-E-6th-St-Austin-TX-78701/2057083232_zpid/? About 11m^2, for 450$ a month. To be fair, it’s in the center of Austin, but I didn’t limit my search to the center of Austin. And unlike Tokyo, Austin is not known for having great public transit, so you can’t save money by forgoing a car.
In conclusion, chances are if you’re low income, you’ll have more space Tokyo.
I don’t want to live in either 20 foot box. Hard pass. Thank you for making my point.
Logic here is broken because we don’t make these decisions anyway. A developer will instead put 30 apartment buildings while chopping down anything that gets in the way, then charge more for rent than you’d be charged for the mortgage on the house. There’s also the fact that this picture assumes every family on the left pic doesn’t give a fuck about free scaping, preserving trees, or planting new ones? Idk, whole thing is jacked.
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.
Renting sucks and relying on a landlord is awful. I bought a small house and keep my yard wild.
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.
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.
Cool, call me when that comes to the Detroit area I guess. I’ll probably be dead though cuz it ain’t happening.
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.
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.
I have both owned and rented, and there is no comparison. Owning is a million times better. Not having a landlord that can just raise the rent or kick you out whenever they feel like it, plus the freedom to do whatever you want with the place, plus the almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you’re not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.
There is nothing about owning a house that even approaches the cost of renting unless you don’t know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don’t have any friends who can.
almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you’re not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.
Hard disagree, as I have had the exact opposites happen and know many others in the same boat. Both houses I sold were at a loss, after I got sick of things breaking all the time and being too expensive to fix.
unless you don’t know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don’t have any friends who can.
Or you are disabled and don’t have anyone to help.
Replace your lawn with white dwarf clover. It looks lawn like but doesn’t get super tall. Also it feeds the pollinators.
Edit: White dwarf clover is what people think of when they think of clover. It’s not something exotic. Do not get crimson clover and especially not red clover lol. Red clover is a perennial and gets very tall.
that would cost as much as just paying the lawn people, I can’t do it myself.
You are not thinking about the large picture.
Renting a tiller and throwing down some clover seeds is cheap compared to a lifetime of lawn people.
Just like with your first comment. Yes things break and are expensive, but you’re not throwing ~1500 a month out the window renting.
No tiller necessary.
Nah, the process you’d want to do is called over seeding. You trim the grass super super short, spread seeds, and that’s it. You can get seeds and a spreader for pretty cheap. It’s not as expensive as something like sod or ripping up your old grass.
I would still have to pay someone as like I said I cannot do it myself. Thanks for the suggestion though
No worries. I wasn’t trying to make assumptions, just point out that the process is much less involved than you’d guess given what replacing grass usually looks like.
First one. I’ve lived in condos and I will do anything to always live in a house now. It’s the literal reason we sold a condo to buy a house.
Life has been much better ever since.
As stated lower down in the thread, there are more options than just suburban sprawl and tight apartment buildings.
Let me guess, the walls seemed “paper thin”? That is very easily fixed by basic sound proofing and insulating shared walls. Or by using brick or concrete. I lived in an apartment with 3 other guys that had brick walls and I could scarcely hear anyone. It was amazing.
If the place you are in is already built poorly, then the it is neither “very easily” or cheaply fixed.
But the conversation is implicitly about how we should be building going forward.
There are tons of poorly built detached houses as well, that are also not easily or cheaply fixed, that is orthogonal to the debate between house or apartment.
Except you don’t need to soundproof your detached house. You can run and jump and yell all you want without bothering anyone.
If you live in a high quality house with large space between houses, maybe. Sound is very transmittable by air, if you are in the garden or open a windows there goes the sound insulation. There are tons of houses with ‘special cardboard’ as walls and not really that much distance laterally between the houses, so all the loud sounds will be heard. Again, if you build with bad quality, anything will be bad.
sweden has a lot of “commie blocks” built around the 60’s, which are generally basically solid concrete, and straight up the only time i hear my neighbours is if they drop heavy stuff directly onto the floor or if we both have a window open.
These buildings were made specifically to be cheap housing, and yet they seem to be some of the better housing available in the world, fucking wild. I maintain that our commie block areas are some of the best places to live within the country, you get hilariously cheap rent, car-light surroundings, generally very decent public transport connections, and it’s not unusual for them to effectively be the situation depicted in OP’s image, some example areas being Bergsjön, Fisksätra, and Jonsered, the latter of which is wonderful because it’s effectively a small town consisting solely of apartment buildings.
Try convincing land-leeches to do anything but the bare minimum cheapest option and you’ll be out on the street in no time.
Or move to a country with more strongly regulated housing construction.
Right because that’s a feasible option for most people.
I lived in a condo that had thick stone walls built after WW2
It was still shit and I will do everything in my life to never have to live in these giant human hutches.
My house is right next to an actual forest. I can hop out of my vegetable garden and be hiking on a moment’s notice.
The holes in your logic are the individualism and scale. Very few people will ever be able to live in a detached house like yours, by definition. Either the forest will eventually be cut (rendering the nature dead), or the supply will forever be small and expensive (not accessible to millions of masses). The only way millions of people could have access to a large natural area to hike is indeed apartment blocks urban islands surrounded by large spaces of nature, like the 2nd image. They don’t have to have tens of floors, just 5 floors of large apartments can house many people with comfort while also having amenities (that can be paid sustainably too) to boost.
Bullshit. Once you’ve built your giant rabbit hutches for human, you’re going to need all the accompanying services these giant misery factories need. Industrial scale services for industrial scale human storage facilities.
Go live in one of you want to, share that one sad looking tree in your one sad looking park where you’re not allowed to walk on the grass with ten thousands of other people.
Don’t forget your antidepressants and your sleeping pills.
I will tell that to these Parisian people here.
You think the corporate apartment developer is going to let all that stay green? That many people in apartments, you need a few parking lots, shopping malls, corporate centers, and then some more apartments once the rent goes up.
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.
But you’re describing a city. The graphic does not show a city, it shows one apartment building. The rest of the city you’ve described would swallow the rest of the green space. That’s what sprawl is, when the desirable land becomes more valuable so nearby land is further developed and becomes more valuable becomes more developed becomes more valuable.
It’s an inperfect metaphor anyway, because island development works under its own constraints. An island can only support so many people, regardless of whether they live in an apartment or a single family home. There are limits, and growing beyond those limits will result in feedback loop which can cause systemic collapse. See: San Francisco, where retailers must raise prices because they cannot afford to hire someone who can afford to live there because everything is so expensive.
I’m with you that we need more walkable cities. But car-dependent development is a result of regulatory capture by land developers. Zoning and public transit spending are the battles we need to win. And if we can tax corporate landlords out of existence, that would go a long way, too.
Neither shows a completed city, but with a little imagination you can imagine businesses on the ground floor of the apartments and dense walkable areas connected by light rail or bus. The example on the right has room to build all the stuff people need.
But the urban sprawl development doesn’t have room to build businesses. It would need to destroy another island and build roads for every individual to commute each and every day.
So would you rather have dense, walkable cities that destroy half of nature, or would you rather have urban sprawl which destroys all of nature and then has a housing crisis because it is logistically impossible to build individual houses for 10 billion people?
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.
You’re missing my point. Development density doesn’t preserve green space. It just puts more people in a smaller space. Protecting green spaces requires actual protections.
This graphic implies that there is a market solution to protecting green spaces. It’s suggesting that NIMBYs who oppose high-density zoning are the reason for suburban wastelands. Zoning regulation should prioritize preserving green spaces and public lands, but deregulation is not the fix (as is implied).
I agree with you actually. As usual, text conversations don’t really convey the entirety of the thought/concept, and lead to misunderstandings.
Anytime a complicated subject is condensed to such simplicity as in the original image, all the nuance of the topic is left out. It’s a problem with all true political topics.
You can sell the wood and drill for oil, maybe there is some gas or coal to burn.
bruh you do realize hong kong exists right? that’s almost literally a real life example of this image.
