Americans will do anything but build townhouses
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Americans will do anything but embrace economic policies that benefit the working class.
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
Just build a good, thick wall. If you can hear your neighbor through the wall, your house is shit
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.
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.
Do you have a link to more info about this design? I'm also curious in achieving the same thing in floors, so even someone jumping up and down with steel toed boots can't be heated between floors
Townhouses are everywhere on the mid-east coast.
They exist, buy definitely not as common as makes sense for people
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).
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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.
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 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.