270
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
270 points (100.0% liked)
News
22926 readers
3402 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Having read this the other day, it seems the lots for them are smaller so it’s still better than typical suburban sprawl, but yeah not by very much. It’s like duplexes, just without the shared walls.
At the same time, I totally understand the logic of the buyers. Condos and apartments really aren’t the same as having your own property that nobody really has say over but you. You can’t make big changes to a condo without approval of the building owner or whatever even though you “own it”, you share walls, and have no yard.
It’s just one more piece to the puzzle, it’s not meant to be -the-solution, just one of many.
For a normal-sized lot, I agree — but based on the photo in the article, the lot is basically nonexistent. There's barely enough room for a lawn chair. This feels more like wanting the outward trappings of a detached house without any of the tangible benefits.
I mean, isn't that basically what a townhouse is?
Yes, except these have none of the advantages of townhouses (higher density, lower construction cost) and to make up for the cost of those shortcomings they are far smaller than a typical townhouse. These houses are the residential version of Elon's Hyperloop — something that looks cool at fist glance but gets increasingly nonsensical the more you think about it.
Except this doesn’t even look cool at first glance.
At least these things are able to physically exist and function (though still not a great option), unlike Hyperloop.
I don’t like either one of them, but I feel like the distinction should be made.
They got rid of side yards but have halfway decent back yards, according to the info in it, to smoosh them all together.
But also I’m down for that too. I hate mowing my lawn. I don’t use the lot for much, so what do I care if it’s tiny?
If they had gone for proper rowhouses, they could've increased the size of the homes and kept the back yards, all for the price of sharing a wall with your neighbors' houses. Or maybe not even that, as there are rowhouses that have individual walls separated by a few inches while all sharing the same foundation.
Too high a price.
Understandable, but they could've built detached rowhouses and got like 50% more space by getting rid of those gates to the backyard and building up to the edge of the lots. And if developers didn't cheap out on the construction (asking for a lot, I know), it wouldn't be an issue anyways. I live in a condo that's a duplex built in the 70s and I hear people out on the street, noise from a nearby construction yard, and gunfire at the range a quarter mile from here far more often than I hear my neighbor.
Its not just noise.
These are some of the kinds of things your neighbor can do that will affect your life or your property when you share a wall. Even 6 feet or a couple of meters separation between houses can save you from every single one of the things I listed above.
Maybe have one big communal courtyard in the middle
I’d definitely prefer that, personally, but I think that would be a tough sell in most of the US at this particular point in society. Especially when most construction of new homes isn’t really urban so people don’t feel the space confinement the way they would in a more urban setting (they just look past the row homes and go “well that field could be housing so I don’t want this”), and with the sprawling layout of suburbs, they would feel super out of place to the point where I bet NIMBY mentality would prevent it.
Perhaps if that was a more normal option here, but it’s pretty uncommon for now.
I agree, but I was surprised to see on the Wikipedia article for townhouses/rowhouses examples of what are apparently recent suburb developments of townhouses in the US. Things might finally be shifting back to some semblance of logic. Though, developments like the one in the article are valid evidence to the contrary...
That would be great! I’d love to be wrong about this one.
I really dislike the “shove them in smaller boxes” idea this seems to have to it, similar to the tiny house “movement” (which actively makes me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons), but in areas that don’t have basements or whatever, where it’s a house on a slab no matter how big, where people just have this “must have freestanding structure to fully own it” mentality (which in a lot of cases is legit, but if we planned for it could easily be handled). This is an option.
Just my own curiosity, and you seem fun to talk to; where you are from, are your foundations accessible spaces, or are you in a slab foundation swampy area? I ask because I’m from a “has basements” area, where the foundation of the house actually adds space to it. I assume most row houses have basement spaces, because you tend to find them in densely populated areas that existed before modern conveniences like refrigeration and roads. So maybe you’d need a basement to store preserved goods. I doubt there’s space on average to have that in the main space right? (Legit asking, idk, maybe space isn’t right, but root cellars have different conditions, cooler.)
But I lived down in Texas for a while and a lot of their land you can’t build basements on because it’s really flood prone, so it’s literally just floating concrete slabs on land with houses atop. Honestly if you are going to put houses on that, you might as well do it this way and maximize the space between them with native shade plants to use up the moisture.
I'm in Massachusetts, and we kinda have a mix of everything. I live in a condo on a concrete slab that was built in the 70s as a neighborhood of duplexes rather than what people think of today when they think of condos, while my parents' house has an unfinished, root cellar style basement in a flood zone, and a friend of mine recently moved back into his mom's furnished basement a stone's throw from where I live. There's a house near my parents that even had to put their front lawn up several feet with a concrete foundation so that they could put in the septic system above the aquifer.
As for rowhouses, I don't know much about them, but I assume that they're usually on a slab with no basement because they usually have 2 households in them with 2 separate entrances for them. The more fancy townhouses you see, like the brownstones in NYC or the ones in Boston, might have basements since they were built for the wealthy and are single family homes that even had servant's quarters, but I've never been in one to see. There's a cool section of Boston with townhouses that was originally built to attract the wealthy, and there's streets behind the buildings simply named Alley #1, Alley #2, etc. because they were only built to allow the servants to move out of sight of the wealthy.
Agreed. Just build an apartment at this point.