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  • Make it 100 appartments in 3-4 times the space (in 4 smaller buildings with balconies, community gardens, shared spaces, picnic areas and so on) as a compromis and I am all in!

  • I won't consider living in apartment buildings unless they have good soundproofing and proper open spaces. I don't want to be cramped in with noisy neighbors and have no privacy.

  • A truth most people don't want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.

    Really the only argument against tight packed cities is "I don't like people". That shouldn't really be a priority.

    For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.

  • A lot of people are pro-apartmemt before living in one, so here are some fun facts:

    1. Apartments usually have a maintenance cost, that covers as little as possible while still costing a lot. You never really own the flat, the building company does.
    2. You often have a communal garden; it's looked after by the lowest bidding contractor. Not all flats have balconies, so you are unlikely to have your own.
    3. Fear of fire and flooding - if someone else messes up, your stuff is toast/soaked. Insurance companies love that extra risk, it gives them an excuse to charge more.
    4. No flat has good sound proofing - the baby screaming downstairs at 5am and the thunder of the morbidly obese person upstairs going to the bathroom at 1am will denote your new sleep schedule (i.e. disturbed)
    5. I hope you're in for deliveries - apartments have no safe spots to leave things.
    6. You will not be able to afford a flat with the same floor space as a house. I'm sorry, welcome to your new coffin.
    7. Good luck drying your laundry (spoiler, your living room is going to have a laundry rack).
    8. Good luck owning a bike (it's either the bike or your laundry, take your pick).
    9. Vocal intimacy becomes a community event.

    Living in a flat is a pile of little miseries grouped together.

  • I mean is the building owned by its tenants or one entity/person who gets to own the building and a large amount of peoples homes thusly?

  • In this image I can't help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don't forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.

    This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.

  • The only thing i can see on the right bad is that many people dont like beeing cramped in with many other people. + want to have a garden Balcony can be a "garden" but not as good. I have nothing against the right, but keep in mind not everyone is the same.

  • When I see the image what came to mind was that experiment where they had an overpopulation of rats in a cage and how all of the rats turned on each other and killed each other.

    Too much human density is not good. You have to be sure to get the percentage of humans to a acre of land just right, to prevent the rats situation.

    Nature is important, but Humanity moreso.

  • Thank you for explaining why suburbs suck. Also, the mass of people flooding an area all at once is just a niceness.

804 comments