[schnitzelstoat]

Yeah, American houses are massive compared to what we have in Europe and often have large amounts of space around the house too.

In England, row housing is quite common and that seems a good compromise between density and comfort.

I live in an apartment block in Spain and it's quite a lot worse than even row housing due to noise from neighbours, lack of parking etc.

It's okay for young people, but it'll be hard to raise a family in, which is probably partly why we have such low birth rates here.

[throwaway1105q]

I have lived in an apartment my entire life. I'm in a building with 15 floors and 5 flats on each right now. My direct neighbors have a newborn baby. I don't hear a thing, literally - I wouldn't know there are other people if I wasn't 20 meters above the ground. Don't compromise on build quality like the Spanish do, build it like the Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks do - and you won't have any issues.

[pandaman]

People living their whole life in apartments do not create nearly as much nuisance as people who moved into apartments from detached houses, where they grew up. They don't wear hard-soled shoes inside, they don't drop stuff on the floor, they don't blast music and don't even own 1500W subwoofers, or weight racks, or treadmills.

For some reason people believe that a little baby is the most noise possible and it's often used in such discussions as an evidence of complete sound-proofing of their dwellings. While people do instinctively get agitated from a child's screams the power of these screams is very low. This is why parents get baby monitors as the screams don't propagate well even between floors in a single-family house. Even adults, unless trained, can't scream nearly as loud as a 200W Bluetooth speaker. Get your neighbor upstairs to drop an empty barbell bar and see how you won't notice it. And in the US your neighbor can be dropping a 300 pounds barbell while having a party with people dancing with accompaniment of 2.5kW sound system, at 2:30 am.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Rented six apartments in the US. Only once had a noise problem, solved by an email to the leasing office. Though admittedly they were all in the "nice" neighborhoods.

[pandaman]

With the 46.8M multi-family units in the US, that bing shows, your sampling of six is not very significant.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

If the percentage of noisy apartments were 90%, the probability of me randomly landing in 6 quiet apartments out of 6 would be 0.1^6, or one in a million. If the percentage of noisy apartments was 10%, that probability would be 0.9^6 = 0.53. So, given my experience, the latter case is 0.53 / 0.000001 = 530,000 times more probable.

[pandaman]

"conditional probability" is the concept you might find enlightening.

[schnitzelstoat]

Yeah, that's true. I guess I don't trust developers to build decent buildings, especially affordable ones.

In England, the new-build homes are often of a far inferior build quality to the older ones built after the war.

[FireBeyond]

Yup. You would think "builder grade" materials and work in a home was a sign of quality, a la "craftsman"... but no, it's "built using the cheapest shit that met code, and put together on deadlines".

[prawn]

And Australian houses are, as I understand it, bigger again. There was a thread somewhere about where to put your washing machine: bathroom or kitchen. And every Australian was in there getting completely confused because the vast majority of houses in Australia have a dedicated laundry room usually with a trough, bench top, washing machine, dryer, etc.

[amluto]

And yet there is a shortage of urban units with 3+ bedrooms in most US cities.