I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments. Instead of spreading out over dozens of acres, you could have a couple of complexes with nice communal gardens/parks/playgrounds and have people live vertically densely enough to encourage shops.
Instead they either have single family homes (that's okay) or they have trailer parks --if it's a college town then they have squat apartment buildings with little in the way of design other than cheap and utilitarian with very little noise dampening, for the most part.
If you travel thru rural California (HWYs 49, 120, 99, etc) there is so much sprawl consisting of cheap housing --instead of gobbling up farmland with crappy buildings they could build alright apartment buildings resulting in better quality of life for the residents (better concentrated service, more walkable for the poor folks, etc.) on the other hand, fewer taxes for the municipality, given the property tax system.
I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments.
It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.
I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.
I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.
There's nothing racist about demolishing apartments. It's stupid because it segregates the rich from the poor, but it has more to do with socioeconomic status than race.
Because of its brevity, my story is stripped of context here. In context: 1) this was just one of many such moves on the part of the city government 2) it was very much in line with the prejudices loudly and unashamedly expressed by many in the once-very-white suburb 3) these moves got underway only after non-whites began moving to the city in significant numbers and therefore clearly were not about economic status at all. (That is, the city didn't want to knock down the affordable housing when it was full of low-income white people.)
When I was 20 years younger, I might well have made the argument you're making. But I would have been wrong.
Because there's no downtown to speak of, and everything in the town is built with single family homes and strip malls in mind, from the roads to commercial districts. There's a lot of space to sprawl and the sprawlers are the first to move in.
I'd love a smaller (in land use) community to move to that is walkable and dense enough, but it just doesn't exist, or the downtown core is too expensive for the area (apartments the same as a largish house just outside).
Put enough people in proximity and you'll create that downtown.
Having lived in high(ish)- and low-density developments, the biggest difference is that in higher density, you walk ... a few blocks and there is at least some level of commercial activity. In low density ... you travel at least a mile, often several. And even the old town centers are evicerated -- commerce is on boulevard strips (and now is fading fast even there).
Small rural towns have a WalMart, Love's, Sonic, and a boarded-up downtown.
Even Silicon Valley, with its staggering home values, barely has the density to support a marginal commercial district -- Castro, California Ave., University Ave., and Santa Cruz Ave. in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park, respectively, come to mind. Yes, there's some retail and activity there, but it's only modestly functional.
In older and more compact places which haven't entirely died, you'll find that density, and it works. It's almost always some sort of tourist destination these days, in the United States, though.
>Put enough people in proximity and you'll create that downtown.
I will be a fossil before this ever happens in Mountain View.
I used to live in a garden-style apartment within walking distance of downtown Mountain View. It was an old building, and my rent was $1900. That was considered affordable for Mountain View, but no amount of savings could ever persuade me to move back to there. Like someone stated above, there were no amenities - no in-unit washer/dryer, no updated appliances, etc. The walls were horribly thin, and none of the cabinets or drawers closed properly.
So, I'm now living in a newly-built, sterile mid-rise 12 miles away in downtown SJ. I would have loved to stay in Mountain View and keep my short commute, but there is still not enough density to bring prices down for the nicer buildings. The newer construction on El Camino are going for $3k for a 1-bedroom (and this, when the market is supposed to be cooling off). There was talk of another building going up on Shoreline, but of course the NIMBY crowd shot it down fast.
There is usually a "business district" in those 3-20k-resident towns, usually a couple of blocks with shops on either side or an intersection with strip malls and shops, but one or two blocks out, it's all flat and squat architecture. In some places like Alaska you do occasionally get a few apts buildings, I guess the cold kind of forces that option a bit.
The small-town ideal, IMO, would be an apartments-over-shops Main Street that runs for a few blocks, maybe similar construction for a few blocks on the cross streets. Then duplexes and small lot single-family homes farther out, then larger lots and farms.
Small towns in the US used to be like this, but the main streets are all dead now for various reasons. (The big reason that I can think of is that franchises prefer to build their own buildings on the fringe of town rather than move into main street buildings, plus the rise of Wal-Mart, but there surely must be others.)
There have been some good answers but it is also an issue of cost. Building a 3 story apartment building requires a much larger capital outlay. For a trailer park, all you have to do is run utilities over open ground. You can make a lot of money here vs the investment level with almost no recurring costs. If you have apartments, a lot of your profits for a unit each year have to be reinvested in new carpeting, paint, repairs, etc.
You also need to hire people to manage and show the apartment to renters again increasing your costs and reducing profits. The other thing to consider is that land is cheap as you get more rural. An apartment building likely needs to be closer to the city center and that land may be more expensive even though it is 20% of the size.
I wonder how much that outlay spread shrinks once you count for the fact that you need many times more roads, pipes, electric lines et al. when you spread out?
Imagine a small town as a square of 16 100 story towers. You wouldnt need much roads, public transit, cabling, pipes etc. You'd only need 1 police/fire hall (albeit a big one).
I imagine that my spouse's guitar playing would be a nuisance, as would my neighbor's dogs. Smells of stinky food would fill the hallways, and we are gonna hope that drunk people don't piss or puke in the halls while they are trying to get out.
I imagine that the 3 uncleanly neighbors will cause all 100 stories to be infested with roaches, and a place like that is too big to put up for a few days to exterminate.
I imagine you'll need a much better evacuation plan and a parking garage. You'll need stairs and a elevators and escape ladders and such things.
Some of them do have solutions, but most of them aren't normal things to put in place. Of course, I dislike living in large places and would rather live miles from the nearest neighbor, so I'm sure I'm biased. :)
You know, I considered not adding in the parking spaces because of that.
But to be honest, I don't need a car. I walk nearly everywhere - the the grocery and all that even. But I (we, I don't drive in Norway yet) do have a car and tend to use it about 1 or 2 times a month, plus vacations and short trips. It means we can visit his grandmother an hour away without being stuck overnight and relying on rides from folks and bus schedules. Just because folks aren't driving daily doesn't mean they don't need the parking space.
I can probably help you to understand this, at least in Indiana.
A good portion of trailers in parks are owned by the resident. They simply pay lot rent, which is usually around 1/3 of the price of rent. The folks that rent usually find the place is often larger, cleaner, and/or more private (in the form of physical space between neighbors) for a similar price. Additionally, it is easier to find in a rural location.
The sorts of places you speak of are often unaffordable to a lot of folks as they tend to be newer and in cities. Most do have green space, but few shops and few parks.
My understanding is that the squat buildings are cheaper to build partially because it is simpler to follow the building codes: Higher buildings have more codes due to fire safety and such things. This is the main reason most apartment buildings in Indiana are only 2-3 stories. They also fit in a medium sized college town of 50-100k people.
It's not just a matter of code, it's a straight-up matter of physics. Every additional story adds a significantly greater burden on the floors below it than the previous one. You can get away with sticks and sheetrock for a story or two, but the building itself becomes expensive, fast, once you exceed about four stories.
Have you ever actually been inside of a modern mobile home?
They may not be luxury dwellings, but for what you can get in a prefab vs. what you get renting an apartment, it's not even close- the trailer is going to be more comfortable by a mile, and cheaper to live in to boot.
Add to that lack of apartments, and you can see why my 3 bedroom 2 bath (with juccuzi) on 11acres was 300/mo was a no brainer when I lived in rural USA. I had to pay a neighbor to run me a well line, and no garbage pickup was available. Not as uncommon as you would think.
I used to live on a 40-acre horse ranch, renting a mobile home right next to another few hundred acres of open space preserve. It was glorious, and the cost was far, far better than even a shoebox apartment in the city. I did have to take my trash about a kilometer to the shared dumpster, but I towed a utility cart with my motorcycle. No complaints at all, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
I can't say I prefer or even like trailer parks, but the single family home (with a yard/surrounding property that keeps your neighbors at a good distance, what's the point when you can reach out your window and touch your neighbor's window?) is way better to me than some apartment complex. And I can see the trailer park as a way for poorer people (or people looking to save a bundle) to capture some of that too, while also not strictly tying themselves down in their mind at least like a house would. Vertical living is a good solution for densely packed population, and I think that will continue being where the most stuff happens, but I don't want to live in such a way long term.
"Instead of spreading out over dozens of acres, you could have a couple of complexes with nice communal gardens/parks/playgrounds and have people live vertically densely enough to encourage shops." This sentence fills me with an irrational, existential dread. Likely influenced by my upbringing living in a developing neighborhood on the foothills of a smaller Wasatch Front city in Utah, but spreading out, having actual nature (not constructed nature parks) to enjoy, and not seeing an abundance of humans everywhere you go simply feels better, while high rises (like I see in Bellevue/Seattle) and the associated mini-parks/artisanal shops/population density are unsightly and less comfortable.
America seems to have a glut of poorly made "luxury" apartments. Luxury in this sense is they slapped up a standard wood frame multifamily until built to the absolute minimum building codes possible and threw in a concrete counter-top. Most seem to use the IBC which has incredibly lax sound transmission standards. Apparently they don't have to test for anything low frequency -- just standard human talking frequencies. The best part is that STC is measured in a lab, not in the actual unit during code inspection. (I believe if you measure it after a build it can be dramatically lower). I've always been able to hear neighbors talking in wooden units I've lived in. Always guessed STC isn't even part of the code inspection but no idea.
I'm with you 100%. Let's focus on building high quality units that will actually last longer than 10 years. Sure, it'll drive up the rental prices, but hopefully people would move out of the cheap garbage everyone is used into nicer units with privacy. That would open up a lot of space in now less desirable units.
Health code would be a good start. Hell, create a new sound transmission standard & test that actually requires the range of frequencies you'll hear in an apartment (including subwoofers and doors slamming), and make landlords have to supply that information if requested. At least I could actually shop around for something better instead of rolling the dice on neighbors.
Noise dampening isn't cheap though. How do you meet all the required regulations without massively cutting corners AND still have affordable apartments? If you're going to go through all the trouble of putting up a new building you might as well shoot for the golden goose.
Doubling drywall, making walls 2x6 instead of 2x4, and using insulation isn't prohibitively expensive.
Of course the cheapest thing of all is making a building out of concrete or masonry that can last for over a century and has inherently great noise dampening.
For S and I: use 'normal' wood, or if using metal mandate expanding spray-foam insulation (to dampen vibrations). I MUST be insulated (should be fire code, as well as noise and common sense code).
The brackets are 'dry wall' but mandate the higher quality stuff that won't support mold growth.
Yes, there's an inner gap between the outer walls, and the floor/ceiling have a bit of extra padding of some structured engineering product that dampens vibrations.
The outer walls have studding to allow for cords and in-wall plumbing.
Do NOT run plumbing or put any shelving/fixtures on walls adjacent to another unit.
I haven't seen, or figured out my self, how to make the vertical noise isolation equally effective. I suspect a dedicated between floor crawlspace would be effective (but raise costs notably).
The core-wall approach CAN lower costs since it allows for a structural core with studs as dense as desired and no cut-outs.
You'll need some kind of artificial "cork". Real cork is in short supply and very expensive. Most wine bottles these days have dumped real corks and switched to fake ones, or have just gone to screw caps (which is really better anyway; corks are an anachronism and inferior in every way to a screw cap).
As someone that's lived both in a concrete 10 story "high rise" apartment building as well as a 3 story wood-framed apartment building, concrete is far superior for noise dampening as wood.
In the concrete building, we could never hear neighbors above of below us, in the wood framed building, we could hear foot steps and even voices. Our upstairs neighbor had a squeaky bed and we could clearly hear the bed every time they were intimate.
I think the difference is that in wood frame you can sometimes hear things through the walls. Whereas with concrete, any sort of impact (chairs moving, doors slamming, people walking in heels, the guy putting a nail in the wall to hang a picture on) gets transmitted to the entire building.
Plaster walls need to be the double-thickness type, AND have sound-proofing material between each wall. I've suffered a few piss-weak plaster walls in my time, thin enough to punch a hole through with my fist and strangle neighbour on the other side (never actioned).
Once I lived on the bottom apartment in a two storey apartment block. The floor boards were a nightmare and eventually we had to move. Upstairs footsteps across the floor were loud enough to wake us up, and I don't just mean squeaky boards, but just the thumping knocking sound resonation. Sometimes I could make out the words being said in their conversations. Never again.
Definitely depends on the construction type. I will say that floor-to-floor noise transmission in a 19thC brownstone is a tiny fraction of what it is in a mid-20th-C apartment block. In the latter, you can hear people moving furniture or turning on the shower multiple floors away on the far side of the building.
eh, a modern apartment built with modern noise-dampening standofs on the drywall (something like "resilient channel" - there are several technologies, but the idea is to make the attachment between the drywall and the stud absorb vibration) is better at preventing noise from one apartment to another than older mobile homes are.
Not an expert in noise dampening as a whole, but often building better has negative cost in the long run. Good windows with good insulation always pay off in the heating/AC bills, for example.
If you have not lived in the US, particularly in small towns or suburbs, you literally cannot imagine the mindset of the typical person living in them.
On the one side of the brain, you have this stubborn independent streak, where you have to own what you own. Then on the other side of the brain, you have this rabid fascist streak, where other people have to be told what to do with their property. And twixt the two, you have homeowners' associations, restrictive covenants, condominium associations, zoning laws, and local code ordinances.
On the one side of the brain, we have a burning desire to own the places where we sleep. On the other, we mortgage ourselves up to the eyeballs and beyond, NIMBY each other relentlessly, and generally spoil any effort to make housing more affordable, even for ourselves, because poverty is simultaneously a grave character flaw and a contagious disease. The cure is to make living in poverty cost more money (per quality-of-life-unit) than living middle-class, so that only the most diligent and disciplined can escape it.
You cannot understand it. It is indistinguishable from insanity to the rest of the world. Without looking too closely, it suffices to say that sensible community housing would severely impair our ability to mercilessly extract rents from each other. You can't really build a residence unless you can continue to make money from it long after you transfer title to a new owner. You have to let people think that they own something, even while you still control their use of it.
(This form of insanity often persists after an American travels abroad, even when the travel is explicitly for the purpose of building affordable housing in the destination country.)
As such, much sprawl is caused by the following pattern. Person finds local restrictions on property use too stifling, and too expensive, and builds just beyond the jurisdictional border. That person almost immediately votes to institute new restrictions on property use in their new jurisdiction.
It's pretty obvious. It's always preferable to not a share a wall with someone.
In the US you need a car anyway, so it's a better deal to buy or rent a trailer than to live in some shitshow apartment complex. Lot rents are cheap and getting a new or used trailer is also a better value.
Also, thanks to ADA, midsize building are out. You need to provide elevators on multi-story buildings in most cases. No playgrounds either for the same reason.
Instead they either have single family homes (that's okay) or they have trailer parks --if it's a college town then they have squat apartment buildings with little in the way of design other than cheap and utilitarian with very little noise dampening, for the most part.
If you travel thru rural California (HWYs 49, 120, 99, etc) there is so much sprawl consisting of cheap housing --instead of gobbling up farmland with crappy buildings they could build alright apartment buildings resulting in better quality of life for the residents (better concentrated service, more walkable for the poor folks, etc.) on the other hand, fewer taxes for the municipality, given the property tax system.