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Apartments are houses!
Around the world, people live in apartments, have children in them, and sustain rich communities inside of them. I fail to understand why apartments are antithetical to housing ? Its a uniquely American (anglo) obsession. I grew up in a residential apartment building in India, and it was great ! A neighborhood must have narrow-enough (safe) streets, few cars and enough parks. That's all you need to make it friendly towards children. Suburban Culs-de-sac achieve this by limiting car entry and making everyone have their own park in their own house. But nothing about dense apartments stops a community from achieving the same things.
In the US, NIMBYs have made it difficult to build apartments. So apartments can only be built in undesirable places (eg:highways) or loud places for singles (city downtowns). In their working years, Americans are forced to live in either shitty or lifeless apartments. Inevitably, they hate apartments, and move into houses as soon as they can afford it. Once they buy houses, they become NIMBYs, keeping apartments shitty and lifeless. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
I randomly chose a bunch of suburbs and residential neighborhoods of peer cities to the US. Random Paris suburb, Geneva, Istanbul ourskirts, Mumbai, Bangkok outskirts. What about these places is hostile to families ?
Even in the US itself. Brooklyn, Queens, SF or Seattle have great example of apartment-dominant residential neighborhoods that are still desirable for families and accessible from public transportation.
Yes, some millenials have gotten radicalized into doomerist (managed decline) and communist (subsidize demand) beliefs. They're loud, but very much a minority. The majority just want to live in a nice apartment in a neighborhood they like.
Raising small children in apartments is relatively a huge pain in the neck though.
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I don't share nybbler's raging hatred for apartments, but apartments are most certainly not houses: no upstairs or downstairs neighbors, having your own garden/patio, being able to expand it, etc. Houses have a lot of things apartments don't.
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No, apartments are pods, in the "live in the pod and eat the bugs" sense. With a few exceptions for the ultra-rich, they're small, dark, cramped, noisy spaces that you can only enter and leave by passing by multiple other neighbors, at which point you are not in your outdoor space (which you don't have) but out on the street.
And why aren't you still there?
Get a bigger apartment.
Try windows and/or electrical lights, as well as building apartment blocks that are naturally lit.
Get a bigger apartment.
Build apartment blocks where walls aren't made of cardboard, and/or police noise.
As mentioned by someone else, hating to see neighbors was historically not terribly common. If it's the quality of neighbors that's your concern, that's the problem of loose policing and selection effects cramming all the bad neighbors (correlating with poor) into cheap apartments because the cheap apartments and the ultra-expensive ones are the only ones that exist.
I must agree with the poster above, the American apartment hate is entirely a unique cultural thing, probably born of the abundance of land. Well, it doesn't seem that desirable land is abundant now, judging from all the complaints about lack of affordable housing.
Unless you're ultra-rich and can afford a NYC duplex or something, apartments are almost all smaller than modest houses.
Because apartments are attached to other apartments, you get only one or maybe two walls with windows, and no skylights unless you're on the top floor of a luxury building. And because of the built environment apartments are in, even those windows are often shadowed by adjacent buildings. Artificial light is inferior.
Policing noise means micromanaging people's activity within their own space, which is another bad thing about apartments. Floors of thick concrete work, but are (except a few buildings for the ultra-rich) generally not economically feasible. Lesser soundproofing tends to be inadequate.
I suspect most people live in apartments for part of their lives, and learn to hate them there. Fights over noise from neighbors above, music, babies crying, etc. The abundance of land makes these failings seem like a problem with apartments rather than simply a fact of life... and that's true.
Again, most of those complaints sound like America just doesn't know how to build apartments. How come my country can build apartment blocks that don't shadow each other, and have soundproofing, and aren't dystopian pods 1 step across that you see in movies about South Korea or China, and can be afforded not just to rent, but to buy for many of the middle class?
One thing I'll give you is size of houses compared to apartments, but then again at some point I just don't see the value of having more space other than getting off on 'Murican gregariousness of life... and that point falls flat when in the same paragraph you're complaining that you can't afford a house. You got a family of 10 kids? Then sure, it makes sense to have a big house. How many families have 10 kids again?
I could possibly count on one hand the number of times where I've experienced something that could be fixed by having my own house in the 'burbs. Many things would be made worse. I'd need to drive to buy groceries, or to go to the gym, or do mostly anything that is done outside my own home. There'd be more shit to maintain. You can still have bad neighbors.
They can't.
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Have lived in apartments all my life, in the UK and Japan. With one exception, have never been troubled by noise from neighbours.
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This idea that your existence is in some sense subhuman (or else what is "live in the pod and eat the bugs" supposed to imply?) if you can't leave your housing without passing by other people does seem like a uniquely American hangup. Since we left the whole hunting and gathering thing behind, most people everywhere across the globe have lived in settings where the walls of their housing unit are also the walls of someone else's. Cities existed for some 6000 centuries at least, and within the walls of a typical European city, maybe between zero and ten people would have a residence that meets your criteria. Over in Germany (admittedly relatively far in the direction of people not caring for houses among Western countries), even Chancellor Merkel lived in an apartment, which she could only enter and leave by passing by other neighbours including apparently a politician from the opposing party.
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I now live in NYC, in an even smaller (personal preference, I can afford bigger) apartment. So.....clearly I like it.
Idk if you're rage-baiting or sincere. There is no way you actually believe that about apartments. You're describing a prison, not an apartment.
Apartments have better sunlight and ventilation than SFHs because they sit higher up. An apartment is only as noisy as the cars on the street below. Live by the highway, suffer from noise. Live on a side-street, and it is quiet.
Engaging with your neighbors is as optional as engaging with suburban neighbors. You may see them once in a while, but that's about it. In my current apartment, I don't know their names and barely see them. In previous apartments, we were of similar age groups and became friends. If you buy a condo, you're expected to vet your neighbors like you'd vet your suburban neighbors. You can choose your own adventure.
Apartments can have patios or balconies. The building usually has a shared rooftop and a shared back-yard. I don't get the obsession with large private outdoors. The whole point of staying in apartment is to be in a dense city where one can walk to whichever amenity they want. Want to play a sport -> walk to the sports ground. Want serenity -> walk to the local garden. want to play with your dog -> walk to the local park. As a bonus, all of them are better maintained than anything I could manage on my own.
A prison cell is a studio apartment with no bathroom walls that you can't leave. Which makes it rather worse than a regular apartment.
Apartments can be anywhere from the ground floor to the penthouse of a skyscraper. Being higher up only helps because of the other apartment buildings shadowing the lower floors. And unless your apartment is its own floor (again, ultra-rich territory), you've got two walls, maximum, with outside exposure. Often only one.
And the neighbors. Particularly the neighbors above.
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This is emphatically not the case for every NYC apartment I've ever been in. The dismal, exclusively artificial lighting and contant stench of foul, artificial scents are the two biggest reasons I would cite for never wanting to live there. I married a NYer, and the time I spent either visiting her or with her visiting family were just horrid on that regard.
Have you ever actually spent time in a decent house on a decent lot with actual trees? This might be a "fish doesn't know what water is" situation. I've literally come home from day trips to NYC blowing black snot.
Yes. I've lived in rural and suburban areas. Sunlight was worse. There was nothing to do. I hated it. I'll give you this. The air was cleaner in the rural town. But, the suburb didn't breathe better than NYC.
NYC is large. Times Square, Harlem and Hell's Kitchen suck balls. NYC proper has the same population as Arizona. It matters where you live. Visitors get a skewed image of NYC because all the hotels and touristy bits are in the most concrete-clad and crowded part of the most crowded city. I sounds like your opinion of NYC is informed by those few neighborhoods.
Once you leave those neighborhoods, NYC quickly becomes livable. The subway remains smelly. But, the streets feel pleasant, or smell of hotdogs and halal carts. Either way, I approve. I haven't visited the Bronx or Staten Island much. But, Brooklyn and Queens have a ton of green spaces. Everyone living North of 50th street in Manhattan can walk to Central Park. If you need more, you can live beside Prospect Park.
That being said, I've heard NYC was worse in the 90s. Maybe things have gotten better since. Even today, Shitty NYC apartments are shitty. But a shitty trailer park home is shitty too. Poverty sucks in general.
This seems crazy to me. Maybe in a choice Manhattan skyrise. Most of my experience was Brooklyn on the 14th floor and sunlight was about as rare as integrity in a congressman. Being high up isn't a boon when all the surrounding buildings are even higher! Most people don't get to live on the top floors.
This I'll give you. For certain categories of "to do", NYC can't be beat.
This I disagree with. I'm a walker; I feel claustrophobic if I can't go for a walk for a few hours every few days. The weeks I spent in Brooklyn felt cramped and dismal, cloying and choking.
Manhattan is marginally nicer. Central Park is fine. But my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance, and just walking down the street feels closer to a "green space" than a city. Admittedly, it helps that I'm in what is basically an old colonial suburb, not some Arizona step-and-repeat.
Note: The official USAian definition of "walking distance" is 1/2 mile (0.8 km). (Of course, it's possible that different jurisdictions have different definitions.)
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I assume that what you mean is "comparable quality-per-area", but it's amusing to imagine a little town with like 5000 people, 10% of whom are employed maintaining the 5 square miles of neighboring park/zoo/lake/forest/museum/hiking/garden/ice-skating/boating complexes.
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You have multiple 800 acre parks within walking distance of your house? How does that work?
Most aren't quite that big, and only one that I would walk to instead of taking a 5-15 minute drive. But they all easily exceed the "many nice, varied trails that you can wander in deep enough to smoke a joint in total seclusion" standard that I have in mind for Central Park. The biggest is twice the size of Central Park, and it's extra nice because I can walk all the way from the museum at the front and end up in my best friend's backyard 4 miles away.
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I have one 2000 acre park within walking distance of my house (1.1 miles) and one 400 acre park 3.5 miles away. And another 2000 acre one about 8 miles away that I sometimes bike to and through. Fortunately I also have a car.
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Not within walking distance, but there are cities with all kinds of parks around the city. Phoenix is one example, and that list doesn't include a number of parks that are on the farther edges of the metro.
Certainly there are cities near nature areas, and NY is quite bad in this sense. But multiple parks comparable to central park within walking distance beggars belief.
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Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments. From tiny cheap ones next to the stations for young folk who are out and about all day anyway to bigger ones for families where the kids can get their own rooms. Apartments can be great, we've just decided we don't care.
And so many of the issues I see listed with apartments are completely fixable. Like one of the main complaints I see is noise, and I get it. I hated having upstairs neighbors but that is not inherent to apartments, that is just because we don't do sound insulation properly. It's insane to me that we over regulate basically everything else and drive up the costs of building to an insane degree and then with the biggest complaint apartment dwellers have we just shrug and go "oh well, nothing we can do". Sound insulation is not some new technology, we can make apartments that are quiet no matter how much your upstairs neighbor stomps. We just don't.
This is the case with so many problems people got about apartments. Completely fixable, but instead we're wasting money on pointless regulated shit like second stairwells and parking minimums way over the amount of occupants.
The noise I had to suffer in every single housing unit in the US (whether apartment or free-standing), due to your HVACs routinely sounding like jet engines and fridges like idling trucks, not to mention even wind and rain being loud due to your paper-thin walls and bad windows, is well in excess of anything you hear in a half-decent European apartment in a major city. In Germany it probably would be sufficient grounds to drag your landlord to court and have your rent slashed.
On the other hand, if you have your own house, you can have a quiet A/C unit put in.
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Honestly, my takeaway when I visited, expecting an unending sea of apartments was that I was surprised at how many freestanding (small footprint) single family houses Tokyo has. They exist within walking distance of even the densest city centers. Plenty of them only slightly larger in footprint than the single car garage they stand on top of.
Also lots of small multi-family houses, seemingly where a single small-footprint house was presumably replaced with a five story (ish) walkup.
Tokyo is constructed very differently from European Metro centers, and both are quite different from American ones.
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I'm not saying that the apartments are why Japanese people have given up on romantic relationships, but "Tokyo does it" isn't a strong argument when the concern is with family formation
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Specifically, typical US code requires a sound transmission class of at least 50 between apartments, but at least one study (found via this article) has found that an STC of 60 may be a better threshold.
It requires a 50 but there's basically no actual testing or enforcement of it done so STC ratings in the real world are often much lower. In part because even a tiny mistake can dumpster the rating. https://www.slrconsulting.com/insights/the-devil-is-in-the-acoustic-details-part-two-acoustic-caulking-wall-joints/
Because there's no actual require testing and enforcement of insulation, so many buildings just go wasted.
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Correct, it's inherent to neighbors.
Well.
Certain neighbors. The ones I pay handsomely not to have anymore.
Hey, you know something else interesting about Tokyo? It's virtually entirely ethnically homogeneous. At least compared to your average European city where Europeans are the defacto minority.
Big if true. How did you arrive at this conclusion? (I want to check for myself.)
Whatever numbers anyone supplies you with - please keep in mind that the natives are old, and the foreigners are young. Even if there are many natives left on paper, they aren't the ones who dominate the streets.
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It is insulation quality, not neighbors.
Sound insulation can make even the loudest neighbors playing a boombox basically unnoticeable, while leaky insulation (or lack of insulation) can make even basic everyday noise echo and amplify. And when very minor mistakes dumpster sound insulation quality, many people are left thinking that noise is just a part of life when it's really just shit construction.
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