this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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You can also own an apartment and live in it. The problem in the US, as far as I know, is that many cities make it very hard to actually build apartments or rowhouses or really anything other than a single family house on a big lawn.
Spot on. In pink below is all the land where it's literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. And that's not even touching on all the other restrictive land use regulation, such as the insanity that is parking minimums. If we want to have a mix of housing types, it needs to actually be legal to build more than one type.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html
Positive progress has been made at least, Minneapolis has done quite a bit recently to change this
Yup, they're one of the examples I love to use on how to fix the housing crisis! They abolished SFH zoning in 2018 I believe, and their average rents have only risen 1% since then.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents
There are always going to be certain compromises when you share walls and/or floors and ceilings with neighbours. Even if everyone owns their own unit, there's a lot of shared infrastructure, and that means discussing, dealing and compromising on all kinds of things. If you own an entire building and the land surrounding it, you have a lot more autonomy.
I've had one friend vow never to buy a condo again after having to deal with his condo board for a few years, and he lived in a small 8ish unit building. Another friend served on her condo board for under a year and said it was one of the worst experiences she'd ever had to deal with.
From an environmental point of view, apartments and condos are great. They're great for public transit. They're much more efficient in how they use land. They are much better for heating and cooling. But, people being upright apes, a partially shared living arrangement like that can be truly awful.
i hear this often, turns out a lot of these compromises are due to the shit construction with no sound dampening
Definitely. Noise from neighbours is a huge thing, and when you have good sound insulation that massively cuts down on fights with neighbours. But, you still get confrontations when you have a lot of people living close together. Fights about parking, smells, whether or not to upgrade the building in a certain way, how much everyone should contribute to collectively pay for X, whatever.
You can also get fights with neighbours when you live in a house. But, because of the distance and more strict division of property, they tend to be fewer and smaller.
Another part of it in the US is that the construction used in many apartments should be criminal. Every corner possible is cut. In every one of my apartments, save the one that was a converted 1920s hospital, I could gain access to neighbors' apartments through the ceiling, if I wanted, with no tools beyond a chair to stand on.
Every apartment that I've lived in also had electric baseboard heating placed before windows and poorly insulated, often mold-infested walls, the windows were usually modern and well-sealed (except for one that was not properly flashed, causing water to pour in during a storm), this means that the placement was about as energy inefficient as possible - without drafty windows, that placement just resulted in thermal loss through the shoddy insulation.
And that's before the landlords who cut every corner possible in maintenance, legal or not.
Quality construction would likely help with adoption of owner-occupied apartments but, that's something that we're unlikely to see without forcing it.