You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.

Why not prefer apartments in your own town?

Noise. Neighbours being closer.

The issue is that all of those apartments are owned by one person getting filthy fucking rich from rent.

I spent seven years living in an apartment. I so enjoyed hearing the neighbors having sex, the thumping music they played, the smell of their cigarette smoke inside my apartment with all my windows closed, the random intrusions by management to repair something unrelated to my apartment, the random rent increases. Add this to the fact that I had no space for a work shop to make anything, and paying the equivalent of a mortgage with no equivalent home equity. Some people love apartment life, but it definitely was not for me.

This would just become a 100 apartment buildings.

You know how computers were supposed to make life so easy we'd only have to work a few hours a week, and how that never happened.

This is the same thing.

What is going on in this comments section? Building dense is massively better for the environment than SFH, both in the construction phase and for the life of the units as far more residents can be served with less infrastructure sprawl. It also doesn't mean that detached housing will suddenly stop existing if we let developers build densely packed housing. Doesn't even need to be high rises, it can be townhomes, duplexes, five-over-ones, etc. You'll still be able to get a white picket fence suburban home or a farmhouse on some acreage if you want. In fact, it will become cheaper because all the people who want to live in cities will actually be able to move there and not take up space in that low density area you want to live in.

Judging from the top rated comments, this post is surprisingly controversial for fuckcars.

An island of this size should probably have neither.

Make it 100 appartments in 3-4 times the space (in 4 smaller buildings with balconies, community gardens, shared spaces, picnic areas and so on) as a compromis and I am all in!

But instead of a population of 100 with small houses you will get a population of 1000 because they built 10 apartment complexes. I think I'd prefer the small houses didn't have lawns and left the nice trees and natural growth.

Name one good reason the average apartment experience could ever be better than living in a house.

People live in apartments to afford shelter, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.

Sure you can make arguments about the concept of centralized feeling being better for nature, but no one actually wants to do it.

I won't consider living in apartment buildings unless they have good soundproofing and proper open spaces. I don't want to be cramped in with noisy neighbors and have no privacy.

I live in an apartment. I want to live in a house.

Cunt upstairs neighbour smoking cancer sticks on the balcony, making my room smell like shit when he does it, dumbass neighbour to my right who phones some other dumbass at 6 in the morning, screaming into his phone, waking me up. No garden, can't have a cat or a dog.

I don't want to live in a suburb where I am forced to use a car, but you can live in a house and still be able to get anywhere you want without a car.

A truth most people don't want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.

Really the only argument against tight packed cities is "I don't like people". That shouldn't really be a priority.

For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.

Apparently no one in the comments has seen people live outside of an American suburb.

Yeah but then I gotta listen to my upstairs neighbor make tik toks.

If people had tree Icons in their gardens in the left image, it would look much better wouldn't it.

Density doesn't save nature. Habitat protection laws save nature. Make sure that's part of the plan.

Also, the picture shows the saved nature very accessible to the density. This is not usually what these zoning plans have in mind.

Many important species, especially insects and their predators, can absolutely make good use of patchy suburban habitat if it is properly managed, moreso if it is networked, and natural space nearer homes benefits residents and the environment.

We can't keep saving mountaintops and deserts, we need to rehabilitate more of these nice valleys and riversides we all like to build cities on.

A lot of people are pro-apartmemt before living in one, so here are some fun facts:

1. Apartments usually have a maintenance cost, that covers as little as possible while still costing a lot. You never really own the flat, the building company does.

2. You often have a communal garden; it's looked after by the lowest bidding contractor. Not all flats have balconies, so you are unlikely to have your own.

3. Fear of fire and flooding - if someone else messes up, your stuff is toast/soaked. Insurance companies love that extra risk, it gives them an excuse to charge more.

4. No flat has good sound proofing - the baby screaming downstairs at 5am and the thunder of the morbidly obese person upstairs going to the bathroom at 1am will denote your new sleep schedule (i.e. disturbed)

5. I hope you're in for deliveries - apartments have no safe spots to leave things.

6. You will not be able to afford a flat with the same floor space as a house. I'm sorry, welcome to your new coffin.

7. Good luck drying your laundry (spoiler, your living room is going to have a laundry rack).

8. Good luck owning a bike (it's either the bike or your laundry, take your pick).

9. Vocal intimacy becomes a community event.

Living in a flat is a pile of little miseries grouped together.

Yaay, space for 24 more apartment buildings!

It's simple: blocks are not built in cities to minimise the footprint like in your meme but to build cheaper and sell more and in the same time externalising the costs of infrastructure development.

A mid density block is something, a heavy packed "bedroom" neighborhood is another.

This is a pretty terrible way to make this point. The pic on the left is neater and the one on the right leaves almost no space for the people living there to do anything. You probably want a little bit of cleared land for literally anything to do on the island.

Then again, there isn't a dock. So I figure the island on the right has a better way of building boats to leave.

fuck ... houses?

I'd prefer to live in a house over an apartment

Ah yes, because that's how capitalism works. People would definitely stop developing the rest of the island because they don't need more housing.