Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments
Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments
31 comments
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Wow, yet another way our bylaws are terrible. It's starting to feel like it's on purpose.
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always has been 🧑🚀🔫
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I like a lot of About Here videos. He does a good job of boiling down city policy and design issues without sounding condescending.
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Strong Towns is good too. They got a new media guy about 10 months ago and he's put out some great videos.
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In North America, every bad design is a feature. 🤦♂️
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Such as the terrible illusion of freedom that is car dependancy.
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Even Europe has stopped producing those buildings. Each era comes with its own stylistics expressions. Amsterdam's newer district is full of modern cubical buildings. Even if they look a bit better than the one's shown in this meme, they belong to the same post modern movement.
Another thing to consider is that every other extra luxury that is purely a stylistic addition will be an extra expanse on the end buyer
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Living in an area that is beautiful matters, and our urban landscapes are a big part of that. Trees, decorated facades, town squares, they may add some economic cost, but why is that the only cost that matters? What about the emotional cost of living in an ugly noisy jungle of concrete and glass?
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Anyone else notice Canada was the only country on the map with the two stairwells from 2 floors & up requirement and every other country started it with 3 or higher?
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Yeah, he also mentioned it in the video. (He is from Vancouver.)
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I remember him saying (English) North America requires 3 floors and then I saw that map.
This isn't my first video of theirs, btw. I watched it before I even saw this thread, because I'm subscribed.
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More detail / similar concepts if you're not a video person: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
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All the 'nice apartments' he's showing are from beginning of XX century. No one builds like this in Europe anymore. Most new developments are exactly like the ones he shows in America.
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While I think this is an issue, I think it's a minor one. If it was a big problem, we'd see a whole bunch of 2 storey apartments sprinkled amongst single family homes. But I've never seen one in all my time in Toronto. Because there's a whole ton of regulations that make it impossible by just plain making it illegal without jumping through a whole ton of other hoops that make it far too expensive.
I'm not saying fixing this won't help, but it's just one of dozens of issues, and a minor one compared to some of them.
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*Anglo America, Northern Anglo America or U.S.A. & Canada.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Is it elevators and disability requirements?
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Close, it's stairways and "fire safety" requirements.
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It seems to be more that houses in the USA were being built cheap and burn down easier. While Europe obviously had the same issue with fires (looking at you Brugge - how often do you wooden town need to burn down, until you place a fucking stone?), but they approached it with better, fire proof materials - like bricks instead of wood.
The regulations in the USA seem to include those zig-zag stairs (probably I mixed up the name), where 2 stairways are on the same place, cross crossing each other.
In case of smoke/fire or demolition of this block, I don't see how those 2 stairs make a better exit, when they are in the same place.
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That was three minutes of info in a 12 minute vid
Please fuck off with this shit, it's ruining Lemmy
31 comments
TLDR: money. There isn't a profit in making a pretty building when you can build a utilitarian one and still milk the poor bastards that have no other option but to leave there.