Decorative open space is important for making cities livable but uh… lawns ain’t it.
Also nice to have space between your neighbors for privacy and mental health
This doesn’t require single family housing on giant lots. Just well built buildings with proper insulation and sound proofing. I used to think apartments were just noisy until my partner and I moved into our current place. I live on the top floor of a 2 building, 6 unit complex of loft apartments cascading down the side of a hill. The buildings had to be built to withstand the extremely strong winds from the bay, and as such they’re solid as fuck.
Despite our downstairs being tile floor our neighbors have told us they haven’t heard any noise from us at all. My partner and I started being less concerned about noise and began playing somewhat loud music frequently and yell to each other across the unit. Despite this our downstairs neighbors still haven’t heard a peep from us. For a while I genuinely thought our neighbors were just trying to be nice as everyone in our complex is super friendly and gets along well.
One day our neighbor in the adjacent building was woodworking in his garage. Normally the noise wouldn’t bother me, but I was focused on something so I shut the window facing the courtyard which made me realize just how soundproof this giant concrete building is, both between units and to the outside world. I couldn’t hear our neighbors saw unless I opened the curtains and tried to hear it, otherwise it might as well have been very faint background noise. I really wish buildings like this were the norm for apartments because they provide all the privacy of a single family home with all the benefits of apartment buildings.
That’s great.
Might say almost all the benefits. Or all the benefits that are reasonable given we have to share our planet with others.
Like, it’s too great of a privilege to be able to park an emission-spewing cage in a garage and walk directly into a first floor kitchen to load the fridge with groceries. (Plus stairs are healthy anyway. Not referring to disabled folks or special circumstances of course.) I can’t say it’s not a benefit of a single family home, but easy to argue it’s an unjust enrichment for any one able-bodied person at the expense of others and the environment.
Glad you found such amazing and comparatively equitable housing 😃
Edit: remembered many town homes can offer easy grocery loading with their first-floor kitchens! Then you’re just missing a handful of windows on one or both sides. Big apartments should def be much more of a reasonable option, still, for a given footprint.
I mean, if you want to be privileged not to use stairs, once the housing gets dense enough they start putting in elevators…
nah this is just modern isolationist propaganda, people have lived without “privacy” for millions of years and were clearly happier for it.
People nowadays think they want privacy, when in fact they’ve just been robbed of closeness to others during their childhood and never learned to deal with having other people close to them. Like for fuck’s sake in the US it’s completely normal to put infants in a completely separate room! It’s inhumane!
Humans are profoundly social animals and thrive when surrounded by others, we are literally living in an officially recognized loneliness epidemic that is harming our physical and mental health.
Name a more wasteful use of land
Golf course.
What if I’m not christian?
My brother
I was about to say golf courses, but then I realized that people actually use golf courses to play golf, which is more then the average lawn is used for.
Hey that’s not true…. Lawns get used all the time for… err…… proving to neighbouring households that the Lawn Owner is rich enough to grow something useless there? Idk tbh
Yes, lawns are wasteful.
But there’s also water quality and flooding issues associated with using all available land for building.
Grass and dirt absorb water. Rooftops and concrete don’t. 1-inch of rain on an acre of grass will be absorbed. Replace that grass with impervious cover and you’ve got an extra 27,000 gallons of water, or about 2 swimming pool’s worth of runoff.
I just want to live in a world where I can just walk around and go shopping please I’m begging you world. I’m sick of flying around for tens of miles on end with terrible wings!
Just move to another country. You might also get free medicine as a bonus.
Fuck I wish it were that easy. I wanna get the fuck out of here.
Well, from my experience - it’s very easy. Pack your shit and move.
Really? How? Where did you move? Did you get citizenship, or like a work visa?
People should be allowed to own land and own homes with yards
They should equally be allowed to own homes without yards. But exclusionary zoning, minimum setback, and maximum lot coverage laws don’t allow that.
Exactly. People love to treat it as “a war on cars/lawns/etc.”, but it’s really a war on everybody who doesn’t want to be legally mandated to have those. All we’re asking for is to end the legal mandates (zoning, parking minimums, setback requirements, etc.) and for those who wish to partake in those wasteful luxuries to pay their true price without public subsidy.
![[meme] Lawns and car storage — name a more wasteful use of land](https://lemmy.kya.moe/imgproxy?src=lemmy.world%2fpictrs/image/c6a93d55-ab0b-4275-bd92-43931e7b7d77.jpeg){kind=link}