37
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...
Thanks! The whole street we live on are similar units and they're genuinely awesome. Everyone has balconies for plants, and if you want to chill in some grass there are great parks within a 10 minute walk. They would definitely pose a problem for the less able bodied, but the hills of San Francisco aren't very friendly either. Our unit is one of the two at ground level so groceries aren't a problem, but we don't have a car so grocery trips are frequent and small anyway (we also run a HelloFresh discount scheme). Highly recommend giant concrete buildings. They're a little industrial looking but damn are they great.
We lived in a townhome before actually and it was pretty good as well, but the sound proofing just wasn't there unfortunately. Not awful but nothing compared to our current place.
This is when we find out rent is $4000/month
Places like this are only expensive in the first place because everyone builds single family homes that use up tons of space. Then we run out of land and the price of everything skyrockets and only then do cities start building vertical. This is largely the problem with affordable housing in the US, but we can't have property values go down because real estate has become an alternative stock market I guess.
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.
Yeah I think a lot of that is true but I grew up in apartments and never want to go back to that, luckily we were able to split a house with my wife's parents so we still share a wall but it's with family and that is definitely better than random people, plus having some space where you can grow some plants or let your dogs run around is amazing. I wish my and my friends would have gotten together and bought a big pie e of land where we built our homes on and lived together I think that would be really cool
Lawns are a result of setback requirements imposed because people were building structures right up to and sometimes over the street.
Yeah, a garden is better than a lawn but most people don't have the time or care to maintain that. Much easier to just have a mono "crop" that can be relatively easily managed.
How can you build anything without a permit? Man, America is weird AF...
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
These grass lawns always looks awful. 1 color, 0 personality and no variety.
More plants are always better. Also even better plant a fucking tree.
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.
Grass has an extremely low runoff coefficient. The water absorption is almost on par with impervious surfaces. This is because the root system of most turf/gras systems is only a few inches deep. On the other hand native grasses, fescues, and trees are excellent for water infiltration! Rain gardens are also good choices as they promote pollinators. I'm a landscape architect --happy to answer any questions.
Errata: meant to say high runoff coefficient --not low.
Low runoff coefficient means more absorption and less runoff, even sod typically has a C of around 0.3, as opposed to the 0.95 of concrete.
I agree more natural landscaping is better!
Good catch. Still, very low infiltration compared to native grasses. I have the papers on it parked somewhere.
That's what public parks and other green spaces are for.
the only good lawn is a flood management lawn, there's two notable ones in my town and they literally turn into marshes when it's been raining a lot or the water level is high, and without them entire areas would flood.
What if I'm not christian?
My brother
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?
City is full? ROFLS my man there's not a single city in the US that represents anything close to 'FULL'. Not even NYC.
Combine them and you have a golf course. It's like park where everything has been killed and replaced with turf and only rich people are allowed to enjoy.
Name a more wasteful use of land
Golf course.
Unrelated to the actual topic, but is anyone else starting to find this "my brother in Christ" meme really irritating? I ain't your brother, and I don't give a fuck about your Christ.
Would you prefer they go back to using the n-word instead?
Edit: maybe the downvote was because you don't know:
From https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-brother-in-christ :
My Brother in Christ is a recaption meme trend using "my brother in Christ" as a slang term put on top of words, most often replacing the N-word, in other meme captions to enhance the original meaning by adding a flair of polite Christianity for humorous effect.
Edit: fixed link.
Colon is breaking your link, btw. Thanks for sharing, though, that was interesting.
Huh, today I learned. Thanks grue.
It's just a phrase. Like "how are you" as a greeting. Nobody who say how are you wants to know how you are or gives a shit about any answer other than "fine thanks! how are you". Just treat MBIC the same way, maybe invent your own responses, my sister in Buddha?
Lawns are better than concrete
You say that like those are the only two options.
What, do those plebs not have driveways or garages for their cars? I never have to park on the street, since I just drive up my driveway across my 1/2 acre lawn. It's quite nice having that "wasted" use of land for my kids to play on whenever they want.
Your kids play on your lawn? Mine don't, they much prefer the park, that's why I'm going full tilt into meadowizing my lawn.
It's also worth noting that there's almost no kids on our block, despite it being a pretty new neighborhood, because we're one of a very small handful of younger families that were fortunate enough that they could actually afford to buy a home. Almost everyone else in the neighborhood is older, and their kids have already grown up, because that's largely the demographic that could afford these houses. It makes me sad for my kids a lot, because there's really not much to do outside except look at everyone else's identical homes and kick rocks. We could be doing a lot better than this as a society.
Not everyone wants to risk their children getting stolen at a park.
Having a backyard lawn is a safe way to let kids play while adults don't have to supervise.
Front lawns aren't really useful but id absolutely have some form of backyard lawn even if it's AstroTurf once I have a house.
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.
sure, and people should also be guaranteed a right to housing, now which one do you prioritize?
It's not like children could use a lawn to play on or anything....
And our Public transit system is totally ready for nobody to have cars.... Our GDP totally won't fall to 10% is what it was before once nobody can go to work.
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
37 points (97.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
9375 readers
952 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS