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 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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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.
What nature? I have to drive 2 hours to see nature. Bring on the houses.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
I’ve lived in an apartment and I just can’t do it. I hated every day in it.
Did you hate the apartment, your landlord, your neighbors, or living in an apartment?
Sharing walls sucks
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.
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.
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?
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.
Can we get a version with all treehouses?
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.
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.
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.
I am disabled, and the work needed to upkeep a house is orders of magnitude less than the stress of being forced to move every couple of years because the landlord raised the rent, or won’t upkeep the place, or they’re selling the house, or the agent takes an irrational dislike to you. I’ve had all of those happen, many of them concurrently. That’s not to mention the disability issues involved in not being able to fix your own space and solve problems that exacerbate your illness.
Not having friends is a problem that could be addressed with a stable local community, something that gets broken up when people are forced to move and can’t put down roots anywhere.
And you lost money twice? Okay, unlucky, but are you going to tell me you lost more than you would have in rent? Did you give up on owning and go back to renting, and do you prefer it? Are you telling me you made the choice to rent rather than own, or were you forced to rent by financial hardship? Or wait… do you still own and you’re just bitching about it? Why don’t you go back to renting if owning is such a burden? (EDIT: Also, in case you didn’t realise, you’ll still have to mow the lawn if you rent, so that’s a weird problem to focus on)
I owned a house outright with my partner, with no debt, but then my disability became too much for me to work, the relationship broke down, the assets were split and we both fell off the property market. All of the money we made selling the place has now disappeared into various landlords’ pockets. I’m sure I could’ve bought one of their places for all the money I’ve given them over the years. And I could’ve made a down payment once upon a time, but without a steady income I can’t get approved for a loan, yet another problem forcing me to rent. Now, any money I could’ve made a downpayment with is gone.
And before you say that this is a downside of owning, I will remind you that the problem I am describing is no longer being able to own and being forced to rent, so if that’s a problem, then renting is worse.
Oh by the way, renting is worse. It is a fucking crime against humanity. The village is gone, and landlords destroyed it. The destruction began with the fencing of the commons, that brutally violent theft by proto-capitalists from the peasants, and it’s never stopped since. It won’t stop until we organise and take back what’s ours.
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.
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.
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.
So you don’t know that 50 > 11? You’re supposed to have learned this in 1st grade.
Edit: Sorry I just realized that given your level of education, I can’t assume you know what “>” means. It means “is larger than”. “50 > 11” means “50 is larger than 11”. Or completely in words “Fifty is larger than eleven”.
The picture on the left is just an argument against lawns.
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.