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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.
People who don't live in New York often have cars!
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