These remind me of the post-1906 earthquake shacks](https://sf.curbed.com/2017/4/18/15333168/sf-quake-shack-houses-camps). Better built attached housing would likely let people live better at a similar, if they could manage to agree on reasonable rules about living just a bit closer.
Americans will do anything but build townhouses
Townhouses are everywhere on the mid-east coast.
Americans will do anything but embrace economic policies that benefit the working class.
They exist, buy definitely not as common as makes sense for people
We need denser than that but it would be an improvement.
Man I would actually consider this over sharing a wall. If you’ve never had a very loud, persistent neighbor you just don’t get it
You lived in cheaply built places. I’ve never had a problem after decades in apartments. Older buildings tend to be better built than apartment complexes.
Ok Mr Richey rich
lol funny thing to go on the offense over
Find yourself a 100 year old building. They were made to heat and cool before refrigeration was discovered and are far more comfortable. All the best stuff was put up before 1935.
Approximately 2% of the buildings in the city where I grew up were built before 1922. You can’t expect everyone in a city to be able to fit into 2% of its buildings, even if you convert all the non-residential buildings in that age range into residential buildings. Hardly anybody could be bothered to live out here before air conditioning was available so the whole region is new construction.
K. Seems you’ve decided we shouldn’t invest into better infrastructure for some reason.
Cool story, “just move” is a privileged statement.
Did I tell you to? No. That was in your head. I get that this is all about your own insecurity. You really are a toxic little booger aren’t you?
You opened up saying I lived somewhere cheap, an insult. Anyone being toxic here is the one passing sweeping advice for lots of folks who can’t afford to move. You specifically said “find yourself a” which yes, means telling someone to change buildings.
Why would I care about the construction of your magic building? Why’d you feel the need to educate me, without considering the availability of buildings in my area, even disregarding price issues?
Did you think I chose a building with thin walls, or couldn’t understand how a thick wall can block sound?
Just build a good, thick wall. If you can hear your neighbor through the wall, your house is shit
The most effective wall you can build is a concrete block wall/insulated air gap/concrete block wall. It seems like overkill but this is the type of construction that cinemas have between individual theaters. The only way to get more isolation (aka the “good, thick wall”) is to decouple the walls, and at that point you’re at separate structures anyway which adds the advantages of fire breaks and not having to have a legal entity governing common components like that roof.
Cool that you had the privilege. That, or you built your own apartment complex?
That would have to be an extremely thick wall for some of the neighbors I’ve had.
Yes, it should be at least a foot of concrete. Or, more environmentally friendly, a foot of compressed earth.
But lots of places just do wood stick frame and that’s fucking terrible between two different units.
I’m not sure that’s enough concrete to drown out neighbors I’ve had. I’ve lived in buildings with about that much concrete between apartments but I’d still hear the bass of music at 3 AM.
It was probably coming out of a window
You better hope that wall can keep out the bed bugs.
I’m not terribly against this kind of thing, houses are huge
I wish they showed more of the interiors, and you know, those tiny side yards could probably be squished down, or even removed, to build row houses that increase living space and density.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The shift is a response to conditions that are found in cities across America: Neighborhoods that used to be affordable are being gentrified, while new condominiums and subdivisions mostly target the upper end of the market, endangering the supply of “starter homes” in reach of first-time buyers.
The iconic Cape Cods in Levittown, N.Y. — often considered the model post-World War II suburb — were typically about 750 square feet, roomy for a one-bedroom apartment but small for a free-standing house with two bedrooms.
Driving through the downtown on a snowy afternoon recently, Deborah Flagan, a vice president at Hayden Homes, pointed left and right at storefronts that used to be boarded and are now part of a vibrant ecosystem of retailers that includes numerous high-end coffee shops, a “foot spa” and a bar where people drink craft beer and throw axes at wall-mounted targets.
The upscaling extends well beyond downtown to adjacent neighborhoods, where the small-footprint “mill houses” that once served a blue-collar work force now sit on land that is so valuable they are being slowly erased by two-story moderns with seven-figure sales prices.
Toward the end of the snowy driving tour, Ms. Flagan pointed toward one of those old mill houses — a compact, ranch-style home with fading yellow paint and a white picket fence pocked with broken boards.
Its business model is to deliver middle-income housing that local workers can afford, Ms. Flagan said, and it does this by skipping larger cities like Portland and Seattle in favor of lower-cost exurbs like Redmond (where the company is based).
The original article contains 2,343 words, the summary contains 262 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Enough fucking sprawl.
We don’t have enough surface for homes, hoarded greenspace lawns, all the roads, plus wild space plus farms plus plus plus…
Build up. Tax the hell out of anything single-family or single-storey.
Tax credits if density builders buy a home adjacent to wild space or farmland, and hold it through its rezoning back to something beneficial so it’s removed from the sprawl machine.
This looks exactly like what some urbanists have complained about, a lack of “missing middle” housing between apartments and large single family dwellings. Sounds good with me.
Why not a trailer home at this point?
Mostly if you live in one, you own the house but not the land. This means the landlord takes the bulk of the equity instead of the trailer owner
