this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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A lot of people are pro-apartmemt before living in one, so here are some fun facts:
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.
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.
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.
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)
I hope you're in for deliveries - apartments have no safe spots to leave things.
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.
Good luck drying your laundry (spoiler, your living room is going to have a laundry rack).
Good luck owning a bike (it's either the bike or your laundry, take your pick).
Vocal intimacy becomes a community event.
Living in a flat is a pile of little miseries grouped together.
Apartments works very different in your country. For me it's like this:
Building companies build apartments, usually they are owned by whoever paided them. That can be a private company, it can also be state owned, a cooperative, or a collection of privates. It's not uncommen to buy single apartments here. Depending on the constellation you have a say in what is what done in what way. However: cost like garbage collection, tax,... Are always there. No matter if you live in an apartment or single home.
Same as 1. Depends on the constellation. Many people living in apartments have a garden plot somewhere else. There are places (close to nature, away from streets) where you can rent a garden and have a place of piece. Quieter than your lawn next to the next house.
If apartments are that more dangerous then insurance companies will want more money, sure. As far as I looked for my neighborhood the cost seems to be related to the living area, I. E. Same size same price. So it does not has to be more expensive.
Of course can you have sound proofness. Usually here walls are massive and not made out of paper.
And houses do? Isn't it a thing that people steel packages from your doorway/garden in the US? But nevertheless: usually I was friends with other people in the house who could get my parcels for me, like the elderly lady on the ground floor. It does not get safer than that.
Yes? Flats are obviously cheaper for the same size as a house. You will not find 500m^2+ appartements, but >200m^2 can be found. How big are your houses usually?
Dryer? Balcony? A lot of apartments have an extra room in the basement, or a sun roof.
Bike or laundry? What are you on about? A lot of places have an extra bike room. Most of the time you have also your own compartment in the cellar. Bigger apartment complexes here are also required to have room for cars, I.e.you can rent a garage if you really want more space.
Same as 4.
I am really not sure if you are trolling or houses work differently in your area.
Probably an American, that hears 15min cities and runs away screaming.
I've lived in a flat, a student dorm, 2 terrace houses, and a detached house.
The flat is better than the student dorm and one of the terrace houses. It's larger than only the student dorm.
The list is a comparison to the decent terrace and the detached.
I've not had theft issues, just polite refusal to leave the package due to too much foot traffic (solved by a kind elderly neighbour). A dryer is great, if your energy bills are reasonable - the rest of us use trying lines/racks.
Not all flats have built in facilities - indeed not all flats began life as flats. The best of flats is still worse than a detached in terms of noise, space, and privacy, however it can outstrip the worst terrace. However, that's a matter of design, which could be solved by a government that wasn't drunk at the wheel...
Yeah, these issues are all really weird. I live in a flat with one other person, it's two stories so there's one person in the top flat and one in the bottom, they're in a terrace and we each have our own entrance. It's nice we have plenty of space and a decently large living room and bedrooms (though annoyingly one room is much larger than the other, I suppose because it is for families.) We also have a small bit of fenced of space outside and most have a full garden space.
This is in a council estate in the UK, so equivalent of a "project" but the whole area is very nice, there's lots of grassy spots to take our dog on and there a decent amount of trees around. We have both just been really happy here, much more than I was living in a house before which had no outside space, no trees or grass for a good 50 metres or so and there was more crime despite not being a council estate where as where I am now is. I mean a house is nice I can get why people would prefer living in one, but apartments/flats are nice too.
Oh yeah and we don't really ever hear our neighbours either.
Everything works different in the US. Worse.
Your apartment is just shit
That is pretty pessimistic. I never lived in a big block of appartments but in 8 flat/building houses. We have thick walls, so flooding and noise isnt really a problem. We know our neighbours, they even take deliveries inside (into the stairway) so they dont get stolen from outsiders. We have a dedicated bike-room downstairs, with a dedicated bikeramp from the outside, every house in the area has this. We have a communal parkinggarage with electric charging-spaces.
The cost of living i cannot really compare, the inability of repairing something or our own (as we are renting) is a negative. The fire risk is something I have never thought about but is a fair point I guess.
Big minus is smoking neighbours
Flooding from above is the big one - I've been lucky so far, the guy across from me was not so lucky.
Your milage may vary with flats, but you're going to enjoy at least 2--3 of these issues living in one (or some of the unlisted ones).
Out there, the ideal block of flats probably does exist. However, so does your winning lottery ticket!
You've never lived in a large apartment building but you think the issues people have with them are pessimistic?? I wouldn't have a problem with a townhome but apartments definitely have some trade offs
I want to say that living in an european low-/midrise block isn't as bad as said in the comment
ITT: dude's been living in $200/month flats and wonders why people living in $2000/month luxury apartments are enjoying it so much
£900 a month to rent actually - definitely not as bad as $2000 a month!
About £300,000 if I wanted to buy sadly.
FWIW a lot of your problems with apartments were fixed in the Soviet Union lol
This made me stop and do a double take.
Have you lived in one?
They might have fixed the cost issues to an extent during the Soviet Union, but that is about it.
Everything they list applies and more. They are generally small, 90m^2 is generally the biggest sizes, with some exceptions, they have nearly no parking space because when they were built, parking was not a huge consideration. There is very little yard space usually, not really anywhere decent for kids to play unless the building or community have forked up for it (spoiler, they favor parking spaces). The walls are in fact fairly thin, the floors are often creaky as hell.
Plumbing is old, metallic and corroded / clogged. Water pressures up top are abysmal. Don't even get me started on electrical, the people who built them did not give a hoot unless the building was meant for more than common workers. You can literally hit a live wire in the middle of the wall while hanging a painting, because, again, the people building it didn't give a hoot and often layed wires using the shortest path not rational right angles.
Many of these houses are in a subpar state. Like okay, they wont probably crumble, but heat insulation is near non-existant, leading to high heating costs. The elevators are tiny, many of them smell like piss, accessibility for disabled people was never considered, nor was access in general - moving in large furniture, or bringing down people on stretchers (EMS) is often a PITA.
And all of this leads to a huge issue they didn't explicitly outline - getting shit done for your building, is often impossible. One such building I lived it had a resident who was pushing for a full renovation, he had surveyed other houses that have done this across the city, did the math and presented how doing this would lead us to pay less overall, even with the loan considered, than before, with higher property value and a nicer property to boot. Some 60% refused to even take it as far as getting an actualy consultant involved.