[mtalantikite]

> The second model: you rent an apartment, but: it’s a soulless experience; do you even meet your neighbors, much less have any friends in your complex? Does it feel like home, or just a place to sleep? Are you proud to bring friends and family to visit, or hesitant?

Excuse me, what? I've absolutely met my neighbors. In past buildings in Brooklyn I've gone out to dinner with some, spent hours on the stoop having conversations with others, taken care of their kids while they ran an errand, and had all sorts of positive (and negative) experiences with them. That's what living in apartments in a dense city community is like. People come hang out in my place all the time.

It's hard to even comment on what they're proposing, since there are no details, but the last thing we need is more single family homes and corporate landlords.

[iancmceachern]

This is so classist (not your comment but op). To imply that folks who don't own their home shouldn't/couldn't be "proud" to bring their loved ones there. Are you kidding me? Entire generations, communities, families have lived and died in rental housing. Entire swaths of the population. This shows very little respect for them.

[mtalantikite]

Absolutely. My mom grew up in a predominately working class Irish public housing complex that my grandmother lived in for almost her entire adult life. It was small, but 5 kids grew up there, and when they had their own kids, we'd go over every Sunday for dinner. Not once did anyone feel ashamed to have all the extended Irish family over in that small apartment. It always amazes me how people that know so little about the world try to tell the rest of us how we should live or feel.

[UncleMeat]

To a ton of tech people I guess their only understanding of rentals is prefurnished single bedroom "luxury" apartments in tech hubs. And then you get the classic "well I didn't spend meaningful time in my apartment so everybody else must be just like me" problem.

[resalisbury]

The suggestion that renting is bad is wrong and insulting.

The US has made a series of poor choices to try to treat housing as a means wealth generation.

Housing can be affordable or a good investment it cannot be both. Ownership incentivize's NIMBYism, which has huge detrimental effects. Renting does not.

[mpalmer]

I guess the only frame of reference this set of VC/founders have to go on is the last time they rented before becoming millionaires.

[vagabund]

This stood out as the weakest part of the thesis to me as well, but I think in general it's true that apartment living trends towards atomized, low-community existence. Even classics of modern high-density architecture like Unite d'habitation with its multi-floor, windowed interior hallways don't really function in their stated intent of building social spaces. Not that Adam Neumann is the person to solve it, but creating vertical communities that are as deeply integrated as horizontal ones has been a central open question in architecture and urban planning for nearly a century.

[mtalantikite]

For sure, there certainly could be improvements architecturally, and I agree the Adam Neumann probably isn't the person to solve it.

I do love Brooklyn's planning for the most part, with mixed use commercial avenues and largely residential streets, but I'd also like more outdoor space to socialize in. Half my family is Algerian and I love the style of the Casbah, with interior courtyards surrounded by apartments or multi-use spaces. There's some good footage of this typical Casbah style building in a music video by the Blaze, for those that haven't seen it [1]. I've seen a similar style in Oaxaca as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s