I'm okay with these high rises so I can enjoy the quiet tranquility of rural Spain. Everytime we do stay in an apartment in Spain the lack of sound proofing really stands out. Perhaps even more so because everything is tiled, no carpets.
I live in northern ireland in an actual house and the walls are thin enough I could dip my bread into my neighbours' soup.
It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.
I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.
Point being that it depends.
Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.
Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.
Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.
The problem is that while the shape of single-family home suburbs are meticulously controlled (e.g. minimum width between each house, minimum width from the street to your home), the world of apartments are conversely very lightly regulated. California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard. I live in a multi-family unit where the HOA meticulously controls R-value of the units and puts up a huge process/review phase when changing any flooring material, but the end result is that unless kids are screaming at the top of their lungs we hear nothing. We've held karaoke parties past midnight and our neighbors have heard nothing (we've asked.)
In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.
> California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard.
Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.
Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.
I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.
A lot of units use 1/2 inch or in many cases less. Upgrading to 5/8" makes a big difference, and installing another 1/2" on top of that gives impressive noise dampening via additional mass. As does fiberglass insulation, and filling gaps around the edges. If you don't have to meet firewall code for certain walls, you can go a lot thinner and noise reduction goes down dramatically. We had an apartment that was converted from condos and noise dampening was significant. Noise was a major consideration (closely after neighborhood) when doing selection.
There's often not much insulation requirement between units because the entire building envelope is what carries the main insulation, so it's builder's choice if they want to noise insulate above and beyond the firewall requirements.
The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.
Just a tip for anyone dealing with noise in a multi-tenant situation. Get yourself a white noise machine. It's a life changer. I thought I was going to murder my neighbor with his own leaf blower until I got it.
The most important thing is that it be 'non looping'. I hated white noise until I ponied up for a machine that generated non looping white noise. My mind would automatically latch on to any repetition.
Having stayed in Norwegian houses many times, I can attest they've really sorted their insulation out. Similarily my Swedish sister-in-law always complains about British houses when she visits, saying their cold and draughty
British houses have a worldwide reputation of bad insulation. They live in a mild climate where you don't need to heat the entire house to ensure the pipes don't freeze, and don't really need much AC to be livable in the summer. As such it is really common for people who live there to only heat the room they are in.
Nonsense. Most of the 19th century buildings are perfectly ordinary brick terraced houses and the later ones have cavity walls. I lived in one built in 1890 in Southampton for four years. Solid house but not of any kind of historical importance. They can be insulated by blowing fibre into the cavity or filling it with expanding foam..
It also depends on a neighbor. I heard my previous downstair neighbors only when they had guests. Now, there’s a single person who is a god damn elephant. They way she always stomps and throws things on the floor…
> even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.
My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.
It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.
Not disagreeing with your point but I’d like to support what the op said regarding “modern” buildings often having excellent sound deadening. My previous Dutch residence also had those “fake” (non concrete) walls but I couldn’t hear others in their rooms even when they played loud music (and they had different nationalities). But if no effort goes into soundproofing, it can be unsurprisingly pretty bad.
Yeah, before living where I live now, I lived for a while in an building from the late 1800s. The smaller units were of course added cheaply in modern times, and didn't align well with how it was originally built.
One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.
I lived in a relatively old apartment block in Austria. Only time I heard my neighbours was when they did drilling. The sound outside echo'd a lot so I could hear things in the courtyard (3 floors down) and people in nearby blocks louder than my neighbours.
I live in northern Nevada in an exurb. I go for a walk everyday that requires me to go on a road for half a mile before I get to the dirt path. On that half mile road the traffic is so constant and so loud (from my small gated community) I can’t hear whatever I’m listening to on my headphones. The clamor is so aggravating I’m usually a bit angry by the time I hit the dirt path. My exurb neighbors (multiple) have loud grinding ACs and they run them all night. I can’t leave my windows open while I sleep even when it’s in the 50s outside, because of their grinding noise.
I recently walked about 20 miles back in SF again. It was comparatively pleasant. Road traffic was slower. The materials they use to make the roads reflect less of the sound than here in Nevada. I wasn’t triggered by vehicles or traffic or trucks. I stayed in the Panhandle and could sleep with the bedroom window open.
There’s a way to make heaven or hell in both cities and rural areas.
If he's from reno he probably works at tesla. NV has no state income tax which lures a lot of people. The AC-at-night gripe seems off to me, you only need AC in northern nevada about 3 months of the year (they could be heat pumps for the 50F overnight lows). Reno changed a lot in the last 8 years, mostly for the worse. A lot of people who bring their big-city aggression and driving style to a medium-size town that has no infrastructure to support it. A lot of people ended up there against their will due to all the crazy covid-era migrations.
I live in an apartment in Dublin -- noise is not a problem for me. I'll concede there is a bias in Ireland against apartments. I suspect it's because of the perception that 'flats' are either like the Ballymun flats or Luxury apartments no one can afford with little room in between.
It's a real shame this bias exists in Ireland it really does little to help the housing crisis or the egregious amount of one off housing in rural Ireland does little to help infrastructure connections.
Just to chime in on apartment living in Dublin. There was a period during the late 80s and 90s when awful apartments were built in dublin (private buildings as well as social housing). Really bad sound insulation, build quality and design. They had mold problems, were poorly ventilated always too hot or too cold and were extremely grim. Even thinking about them now grims me out.
This really poisoned the well in Ireland towards apartment living.
Me too! Do you ever hear music from neighbors that goes on for hours? But the problem is, it’s not so loud that they’re having a party and you can complain. No, it’s just loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to record or for others to easily hear.
I had one set of neighbors who fell into this range for about a year. I suspect their place was sparse, I could even hear them push their chair out from dining table. I felt happy when they moved out!
I want to second this. Living in flats sounds cute for most of the people who never lived in ones that are being built with cheap materials and thin walls. It's all nice and dandy until a sill neighbour moves in and then you've got nowhere to hide.
Living in a poorly built flat is a bad experience, sure, but there are well built flats out there, where you can only hear your neighbors if they're actually being loud--really not that big a problem.
I live in Finland in a modern apartment building. Walls have good sound insulation, and triple pane windows insulate for both heat and sound. I am next to a busy road, but can not hear it inside, unless I open some windows.
Same. I try to rent exclusively on the top-floor (next to impossible in a big city) because of a memorable experience I had with a an overweight upstairs neighbor who favored jumping jacks as his primary form of exercise.
I have lived/stayed in places in the middle of dense urban areas where you essentially never hear anything (occasionally sirens if the windows are open, that sort of thing), and others where you can tell when your neighbor is stirring tea.
One of the factors is cost, yes, but also age of the building and materials/techniques matter. I suppose it also matters if any of your neighbors are 23 and like powerful stereos - but that holds pretty much anywhere that isn't very rural.
Oh, and in dense urban/busy areas, height matters too. Living on the first 5 floors is far different than say 15+, in terms of how much street noise etc. you will hear with an open window (or even without).
Construction methods and quality vary a lot. Older concrete and brick multistory apartment buildings generally have excellent soundproofing. Wooden apartment buildings, like five-over-one or 3-4 story all wood apartment buildings, not so much. Low rise wooden hotels, built as cheaply as possible, are at the lower limit of “I can know exactly what my neighbours are doing if I pay attention”.
I lived in flats in the New Town of Edinburgh (i.e. fairly old buildings) for ~30 years and never heard a sound from neighbours - probably because the walls appeared to be ~1m thick sandstone!
I've lived in 3 flats across New Town and Stockbridge and every flat was horrible. I could hear the footsteps of people upstairs. Most flats have floorboards and they are not kind to the neighbors below. I'm not living in a flat ever again.
I lived in the Leith colonies for twenty years, and while I never heard my neighbours from above, or the sides, I would always hear people running up and down the stairwell, and the maindoor slamming shut.
I’ve lived in multiple modern apartments and never heard my neighbors. One time I did hear someone playing music loudly, but my watch measured it at 35dB
was gonna comment the same :melting face: I'm an armchair urbanist and all about density, and in well built buildings it's fine, even with tiled floors you can't really hear your neighbors
but in Spain it's as if the buildings are built with zero soundproofing - you hear every single neighbor in the whole building and their tvs, radios, conversations, footsteps... it's maddening, I don't understand it
The Spanish just don’t seem to care about noise at the institutional level. I spent a week in a small Spanish city last year & the local rubbish collection went down the street outside the door, pouring bins full of bottles from the local bars in the back at midnight. Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.
Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.
I am living in south of spain and not only spanish do not care about hearing noise, I think they actually do like being noisy and hearing noise. They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example. At the beginning I almost felt I should have interrupted couples in the middle of their conversations. I thought they were arguing and were about to become physical against each other, shouting mere inches from each other face with arms throwing all over the place. But no, you quickly realize they are just talking about trivial things, agreeing on something or just complaining about something external.
I am living in Andalucía (originally US) and have had the _exact_ same experience. I have gotten used to it...except for when my upstairs neighbors decide to make a glorious racket every night at exactly midnight, right when I'm trying to sleep.
> They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example.
That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.
> Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.
I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.
This was midweek in the autumn after the bars had all shut & everyone had gone home. It might even have been a bit later! Either way, my point is that it was the worst possible time to be upending bins full of glassware in a residential area. That noise was far louder than the people in the bars had been an hour earlier.
The actual truck that collect those glasses pass between 2 to 4am. What does it do? It lift the glass collection tank and let the glass fall into the truck bed. So yes I don't think anyone cares that someone if binning some glassware one hour before the truck will do that same noise at much higher scale.
I was referring to the truck here, not the individual bars putting their bins out. They closed relatively early for Spain, as it was mid-week & not high-summer.
The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...
I can confirm this. I am from Spain and I have lived in a few cities all around the country and the lack of soundproofing in every building is a common thing, regardless of town or area, it seems like all buildings from 1970 were built ignoring any sound proof.
The Spanish love the noise is my theory. They are a very social people. They probably think of it as comforting versus annoying, and like the person that lives next to the waterfall that can't hear it, it probably fades into the background of their consciousness.
Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!
And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D
Each American men bears a hat with mouse ears and every American woman is dressed as Cinderella. They hear Disney music all the time while letting children to take selfies with them. Is a very strange place.
Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.
Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.
Is true that Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands care less about proper insulation. The north and center is different.
Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it.
It just happens that big cities, sport events, drinking areas and heavy traffic streets are noisy places. Here and in Australia. If you go where the drunkards join; expect to meet a lot of drunkards. But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
> But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.
Noise is the largest complaint my spouse has with dense buildings. I tune things out easily, but I also found myself self conscious about walking softly when I lived above people.
Me too. What's annoying is it seems hard to tell what it's going to be like before you actually move in.
I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.
In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.
In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.
I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.
But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.
This is my theory with respect to hearing voices from downstairs. It only takes the tiniest little air gap to make a huge difference and I can tell there is one somewhere.
I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.
Noise is not the biggest problem: Cheap apartment buildings from the 60s and 70s has such thin walls what they have no thermal isolation whatsoever. In poor neighborhoods you will see air conditioner machines everywhere because there is no other way to keep the flats livable.
As someone who grew up in a commie block, I think density over a certain point just sucks.
Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.
I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.
Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.
I live in Malmö on the southern edge of Sweden opposite Copenhagen, it's quieter here (pop: 350,000~) than my friends home village in Northamptonshire (Thrapston; pop: 6,239 as of 2011).
This was largely because of the sheer volume of cars on the road, because you essentially have to drive to get anywhere. London is similar, despite not everyone needing a car there is traffic everywhere, you can notice that there's back streets and they tend to be very quiet until there are lots and lots of people, think >200 in a 100sqm area.
Having the ability to escape noise is the most important part of noise management. Cities like London have almost no respite from the noise and thus it can be physically draining for many people to experience it. Including myself.
Cities are loud, cars are one (major) reason, but not the only one.
I lived in a downtown area in a high-rise. 2am in the morning, no cars running but the hummming of all the equipment necessary to operate a city is noise pollution.
When I live in rural low noise areas bp is 125/75 range. high noise areas bp is 155/105 range. BP drugs only drop it a little.
Unfortunately just bought a house in a rush hour high noise area. wife loved in the house, I loved the visible sky, and we both loved the yard/garden. we saw it on a Sunday (very quiet day. :) Now I have a hard time being outside or taking my scope out for observing.
Waiting for a stroke or kidney failure from the high BP.
Only badly made cities, where authorities do not care about noise, are loud. And the irony is that most of the noise comes from people living outside of the cities, bringin their cars outside in the typical egoism of the modern suburbanite and rural inhabitants.
It is like people who complain about public teansports who are usually the ones actively participating in ruining it for everyone.
It's not just authorities, it's cultural. Some cultures are simply much louder than others. I live in Tokyo and it's generally very quiet here, despite (usually older) apartments having a bad reputation for paper-thin walls. Public transit is generally whisper-quiet (as far as the riders; the trains themselves of course are not), as people generally don't talk much, and talking on the phone is prohibited. People who make too much noise will probably get the police called on them, but that only works in a society where there's a culturally low tolerance for noise, so it's not really up to the authorities.
That's fascinating! I've lived in apartments or condos most of my life and it just wasn't an issue. Possibly structural, possibly cultural - people tended to live a quiet life, unless you were unfortunate and got a real party neighbour. I live in a house right now and in some ways my life is louder (closer to the loud streets, neighbour's barking dogs and lawnmower and snowblower machines and constant little constructions etc).
One time when I was younger, my mom was talking to my grandmother on the phone, in Spanish. I could hear my grandmother on the other end too. They're both yelling. No idea what they were talking about, but I had to ask, something to the effect of, "Mom, are you angry? Why are you and grandma yelling?"
Nope, nothing was wrong. That's just how they talk to each other in Spanish. Weird. It also never occurred to me why I didn't notice until whatever age I was, a teenager in high school. It never really occurred to me that they were always 'yelling' while talking to each other until that moment.
There is the possibility that they really were upset and yelling, but my mother didn't often keep things from me (at least not as far as I know). I also noticed the yelling afterwards, so I'm confident that was me simply realizing that's how they talked after years of not noticing.
Nowhere else I have seen a conversation to constantly erupt between total strangers than in Spain. They just can't. So I can imagine that this constant involvement in the lives of others might be not a problem for them.
Dunno about Spain, but in France, a relative in a ?9 story building basically gutted their place.
Unlike North American condos, in France they own their windows and can replace them.
They also built out a “frame” to install noise insulation on top of the shared walls, losing a bit of interior space (and a huge free bonus to the neighbours). Can’t remember if they did the ceiling too.
Unfortunately, no flooring standards are an issue. In my Canadian condo, if you redo the floors, there’s some noise insulating requirement for your choice of flooring as it’s against concrete.
I feel that's why many people, especially families prefer detached homes. Sound proofing is guaranteed by the air gap. And if there is a problem with soundproofing you can solve it yourself by making changes.
Perhaps row houses are best? Good density, and with a solid concrete wall seperating units to stop sound and fire from spreading?
