this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
1070 points (94.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
9643 readers
280 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Decorative open space is important for making cities livable but uh... lawns ain't it.
Also nice to have space between your neighbors for privacy and mental health
This doesn't require single family housing on giant lots. Just well built buildings with proper insulation and sound proofing. I used to think apartments were just noisy until my partner and I moved into our current place. I live on the top floor of a 2 building, 6 unit complex of loft apartments cascading down the side of a hill. The buildings had to be built to withstand the extremely strong winds from the bay, and as such they're solid as fuck.
Despite our downstairs being tile floor our neighbors have told us they haven't heard any noise from us at all. My partner and I started being less concerned about noise and began playing somewhat loud music frequently and yell to each other across the unit. Despite this our downstairs neighbors still haven't heard a peep from us. For a while I genuinely thought our neighbors were just trying to be nice as everyone in our complex is super friendly and gets along well.
One day our neighbor in the adjacent building was woodworking in his garage. Normally the noise wouldn't bother me, but I was focused on something so I shut the window facing the courtyard which made me realize just how soundproof this giant concrete building is, both between units and to the outside world. I couldn't hear our neighbors saw unless I opened the curtains and tried to hear it, otherwise it might as well have been very faint background noise. I really wish buildings like this were the norm for apartments because they provide all the privacy of a single family home with all the benefits of apartment buildings.
That’s great.
Might say almost all the benefits. Or all the benefits that are reasonable given we have to share our planet with others.
Like, it’s too great of a privilege to be able to park an emission-spewing cage in a garage and walk directly into a first floor kitchen to load the fridge with groceries. (Plus stairs are healthy anyway. Not referring to disabled folks or special circumstances of course.) I can’t say it’s not a benefit of a single family home, but easy to argue it’s an unjust enrichment for any one able-bodied person at the expense of others and the environment.
Glad you found such amazing and comparatively equitable housing 😃
Edit: remembered many town homes can offer easy grocery loading with their first-floor kitchens! Then you’re just missing a handful of windows on one or both sides. Big apartments should def be much more of a reasonable option, still, for a given footprint.
I mean, if you want to be privileged not to use stairs, once the housing gets dense enough they start putting in elevators...
True!
Thanks! The whole street we live on are similar units and they're genuinely awesome. Everyone has balconies for plants, and if you want to chill in some grass there are great parks within a 10 minute walk. They would definitely pose a problem for the less able bodied, but the hills of San Francisco aren't very friendly either. Our unit is one of the two at ground level so groceries aren't a problem, but we don't have a car so grocery trips are frequent and small anyway (we also run a HelloFresh discount scheme). Highly recommend giant concrete buildings. They're a little industrial looking but damn are they great.
We lived in a townhome before actually and it was pretty good as well, but the sound proofing just wasn't there unfortunately. Not awful but nothing compared to our current place.
This is when we find out rent is $4000/month
Places like this are only expensive in the first place because everyone builds single family homes that use up tons of space. Then we run out of land and the price of everything skyrockets and only then do cities start building vertical. This is largely the problem with affordable housing in the US, but we can't have property values go down because real estate has become an alternative stock market I guess.