My upstairs neighbors seem to like clog dancing at 2am. What would you do?
I will never live in a shared space again.
- they’re making more people. Maybe there’s too many already
- we need more space for carbon capture and agriculture
- they’re not making more space
TL;DR? Unless you can continue to be rich, you may find yourself needing to re-enter the dense housing market; either for more reliable services as the suburbs get their just rewards (hi Detroit) or for more features as the gym and stores and hospitals and physiotherapists are a 5 min walk away.
Did you live in a cheap wood-frame (aka Fire’s Favourite Food) apartment where all the noises echo in the walls and then in our heads? I have a story about sharing a wood wall with an 11-occupant townhouse unit whose stairs were on the other side. Never wood housing: for the noise and because I don’t need to lose everything again when the neighbor leaves his soup boiling.
But consider a proper-built concrete unit. I’m aware I have neighbours, as one of them will drop something and I can hear the impact, but the other 86399 seconds in the day afford no clues that this space is shared. The car I rarely use is secured downstairs, my triple-pane windows are above-ground-level, it’s (mostly) fireproof, has gobs of natural light and is a/c cooled when windows aren’t enough, it has a kickass rooftop patio and barbecue and pool room on 34 and meeting room and coffee shop on the ground and even space for moving vans under the building near the freight elevator. Food shopping and dentist and opto and gp and X-ray and urgent care and subway and takeaways are 5 min away when we want them, and at nights when we sit on our little private patio space it’s still blissfully quiet despite the bustling walkways below.
There is a happy medium between land-hoarding bungalows and neighbours from hell.
In other words, my answer to OP’s question is “lobby for improvements to building codes so that all multifamily housing is required to be decently soundproofed.”
(I live in a single-family house myself, but I’m not so naive as to think that the zoning laws that led to such an oversupply of houses/undersupply of dense multifamily housing are either equitable or sustainable.)
Did you live in a cheap wood-frame (aka Fire’s Favourite Food) apartment where all the noises echo in the walls and then in our heads?
Yup, and that’s been just about the only thing available. I’m sure that some high end places will be decently soundproofed; but, about that “Unless you can continue to be rich” bit, projecting much? Honestly, nothing about a city is attractive to me. I do recognize that we need a lot more mid and high density housing in the cities. And those cities need proper, modern transportation networks and to kick cars out of the city centers. I just have zero desire to live in one. I have a nice little home, out in the sticks, and have every intention of dying out here. I work remotely, so I don’t even have to drive in for that. At best, I come play tourist from time to time and that’s all the city I want in my life. Y’all can keep them and quit trying to force everyone to live the life you want.
As for demographic issues, birth rates in the US are below replacement level. It’s only via immigration that our population is growing. And that’s probably a good thing, as a shrinking population has a lot of negative economic consequences. But, we have plenty of room for both people and agriculture. We just waste a lot of it on feed crops and ethanol production.
