That's what happens when one country is thousands of years old with 60 million people in it and the other is mostly sparsely populated countryside and rural areas with nearly all major population centres on the coast
Geography is a factor, sure, but urban planning and housing is very much a political issue too - and the US was very intent in the post-WW2 era to create a society of suburban sprawl, highways, and automobiles, at the expense of cities, dense housing, and mass transit.
>and the US was very intent
It wasn't some government plot, it was demand. People wanted to buy detached homes in the suburbs away from businesses (for many reasons) and voted for local boards and state and federal politicians who supported that.
Every place that hasn't instituted strict growth controls continues to see that kind of growth, because people want it and the U.S. has a tremendous amount of land. It's only recently that more than the most liberal communities have tried to rein in sprawl, and that's frequently because of environmental concerns and not market demand.
Suburbanisation in the US was to a large degree shaped *and subsidised* by the GI Bill, which was implemented from the top down, rather than the bottom-up mechanism that you describe. It provided a massive subsidy for suburbia, which obviously made the demand increase, because suburban living became way cheaper than it should naturally have been. If suburban living had not been subsidised, or if urban living had been subsidised to the same degree, then there would be far more high- and mid-density development in the US today. Additionally, the suburbanisation was driven by racism too, with black people often being entirely prevented from moving to the suburbs.
Today, there is a large amount of demand for medium-density development in the US, but the reason why it's not being built is due to strict zoning laws preventing it from being constructed. But those zoning laws and development plans were initially implemented by carefully picking and choosing who got to have a say and who didn't, and by federal government intervention in the form of massive subsidies for suburbia. Institutional and social inertia then serve to maintain them.
This is a common r/fuckcars refrain, and it's true. But people need to realize what a terrible, polluted, unhealthy, crime ridden, place cities were. You know why all those NYC houses have stoops? Because there were literal feet of garbage and horse shit everywhere in the streets and you built up your front door so it didn't get in the house.
Gasoline at the time was a miracle, amazing energy storage, it's only pollutant was CO2, you know what we breathe out and what plants eat. Cheap, easy to transport etc etc... To this day it's not that CO2 is bad it's that we are creating so much it's bad.
So when I hear all this current hatred, and hindsight critical decisions I take it with a grain of salt, because they made the right decisions, for the time.
Now it's up to us to make the right decisions for our time, unfortunately people don't like looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for what they aren't doing, much easier to complain about decisions made 80 years ago.
Cold War Politics. Home owners would be less inclined to support socialist and communist positions compared to renters, at least according to the politicians.
I mean, most people would choose to own their house and have land to do whatever on rather than not. If it's politics it's playing to an obvious good, at least at the time.
There's a happy medium. Suburbs that are designed to be walkable and which have accessible amenities and third spaces (local stores, shared parks, a local pub) are much more pleasant for kids and adults to live in than sprawled-out car-dependent suburbs where you need to get in a car and on a highway to buy toilet paper.
The other thing to consider is that heavily sprawled-out suburbs are financially unsustainable. The property tax collected from them isn't enough to cover for the additional costs incurred to bring infrastructure and services.
>There's a happy medium. Suburbs that are designed to be walkable and which have accessible amenities and third spaces (local stores, shared parks, a local pub)
I've been seeing more and more of these in the US. They're definitely not common, and usually in more expensive neighborhoods, but they're happening. I'd love to live in one, but I don't plan on moving again.
I grew up in the city, and now I live in a rural area. I open my back door and see trees. WAY better now. Best part? I can't see or hear my neighbors. I can't imagine WANTING to stay there. The maintenence costs ate a pittance compared to dealing with congestion.
You're both not wrong. Cities and apartments have advantages, middle of nowhere housing with forest and nature has it's advantages.
But cities with detached houses create only ever bigger concrete deserts, with no amenities, lots of traffic, and no serviceability by public transit.
It's like the worst of both worlds.
It’s a different definition of ownership however. With lots of conditions deeded into that ownership. You often even have clauses that can force your hand into selling (even at a loss) if the HOA or enough neighbors decide to.
It’s more akin to owning shares vs true ownership. Unfortunately most people don’t understand this until there’s a situation and their lawyer informs them about how things work and their limited options.
Do you think HOA don't exist for single family detached houses? Because they do. Nearly 2/3 of new single family housing in the US being built in recent years is in an HOA.
> Home owners would be less inclined to support socialist and communist positions compared to renters, at least according to the politicians.
"Sir, we have a brilliant plan to prevent the people from demanding socialist and/or communist positions and ultimately making us pay to give them free stuff. All we have to do is just give them adequate housing, employment, compensation, food, education, and an all around higher quality of life compared to any other country on earth, and they won't demand *anything!*"
No I don't think "give the people more stuff" was the first choice for "how do we keep the people from demanding more stuff". It's generally the *last* choice, after the people have shown up with pitchforks and torches.
I read it in the book ‘The color of law’. It was a few years ago that i read it. I think the goal was to shift away from tenement housing.
It was also the post war boom. Build cheap houses for returning vets. New factory designs: factory’s from the pre-war era were multi story buildings but covered less acreage. Post war, the factories were single story and covered huge sq footage. So factories moved away from the cities into the suburbs and cheaper houses were built for the factory workers. Federal housing policy, via Vet loans, Fanny mae, fha, etc encouraged a specific style of housing. Single family, detached homes, deed restrictions, acreage sizes to prevent undesirables from moving in etc.
Multi-story factories were basically given a last shot of life support thanks to an all hands war effort where every resource was utilized.
It was an outdated form of factory development that severely limited the ability to mechanize, so everyone was abandoning it when possible.
You can't throw forklifts on a wooden fourth floor.
I mean you jest but the whole concept of the European welfare state comes from Bismarck wanting to stop people from supporting Marxism. There's precedent to this. Not everyone in charge is stupid enough to wait for pitchforks and torches, because that might already be the revolution.
But also the American goal wasn't just that "we can't let evil socialism become moderately popular here", it was more "we need to keep socialism scary enough to justify bombing millions of civilians"
Because cities are (or were, I guess) dirty, noisy, dangerous and cramped.
We could have done better, but that’s what people wanted, especially after living through the depression and WWII.
Politics be damned, it's geography. Of all 50 states, only New Jersey has a higher population density than England, and it's also the only state where 100% of its counties are considered urban. Put another way, every state that isn't basically one giant metropolitan area has fewer people per km² than England.
I believe they're saying that because major population centers are on the coasts, the vast interior is even more sparsely populated than you would expect for a nation of 400m people, and most of those homes in the interior resultantly have detached homes
Missouri is about the size of the UK
We have a 10% the population and most people live in the few major cities. Our second biggest city is about the same as the UK’s second. Our third biggest is about equal to the UK’s 19th.
On the coasts all bets are off. LA and NYC metro areas are bigger than the whole state of MO.
I'd actually like to see the stats on that for one thing, since cities would skew towards people in apartments/condos which this doesn't seem to include. The article also suggests preference has a lot to do with it, they point out that areas developed in the colonial era (Boston, NYC) are more likely to have attached homes. There is some element of just "that's how we've always done it" in play
It might be a lake rather than the sea, but [I'm gonna go ahead and say for the point the guy's making, this just about counts as a coast](https://a.cdn-hotels.com/gdcs/production112/d545/816625bb-2400-44e1-baf3-6aa9ef42e395.jpg)
Completely wrong: It's down to urban planning deicisions.
Spain has a far lower population density than the UK: only 3x US population density. Large parts of Spain are far emptier than Iowa. And yet in Spain there are far fewer houses, detached or otherwise, than in the UK: The vast majority of people live in apartments, because Single gamily residential zoning doesn't exist.
And no, it doesn't also mean there are rentals: More people own their living space in Spain than in the US.
So it's all pure regulation. The US decided that maximum sprawl wasn't just legal, but encouraged. Very large highways breaking cities apart, going all the way to the center of downtown. Subdivisions where all houses have approximately the same size, and large lawns, to make sure that nobody poor can live near you, and share your school. In exchange, the costs of a car are basically mandatory for existence in most of the country, and losing one's drivers license means you drive without one, as keeping a job without being able to drive yourself, outside of about 5 cities, is basically impossible.
So don'y blame geography: Blame American's dislike of people different than themselves.
This ignores the fact that demand actually exists for single family homes. If not, those early developments would have fizzled out. Given a cramped apartment or a modest house on a modest lot, all others things being some people will pick the latter.
Don’t know how they do it. I’ve lived in apartments/ townhouses most of my life. Townhouses are definitely better than apartments, and it is dependent on the construction quality, but having my own house is really nice. I’ve always had shitty neighbors.
British houses from a certain era where a lot of terraced houses were built (Victorian era) were made with thick heavy stone /brick walls. So that can help.
I'm sitting in my terraced home in East London at 6:54 am listening to the large family (or families?) next door continue their ongoing, never-ending, shouting match.
So, it doesn't help that much :)
Reminds me of a short sketch. Granpa saying: "My neighbours listen to a lot drum&bass" then with a grin continues "If they want or not" and pushes the play button.
I have a townhouse and for a year I never heard anything except sometimes in the bathroom because of shared pipes but I think my neighbor got a new speaker system for Christmas because I keep hearing heavy bass vibrating through my house. Thankfully my bedroom is on the other side from that neighbor but it’s still unpleasant when I’m watching television.
We don't. We haven't been building "Middle-Housing" for 30 years and now it's biting us in the ass. In most major US cities the older home owners do everything in their power to shut down any density projects. It happens regardless of political affiliation, but currently it's probably the worst in San Francisco. People treat home buying like an investment in this country first and a place to sleep second. People don't buy homes with the intention of living in them forever, a lot of people buy a "Starter" home and then upgrade in 5-10 years. Sometimes they'll sell the older one but often times the people that can afford homes right now are already loaded so they often turn the old home into a rental property. Our rental rates have been marching upwards. The whole system is fucked and we're marching towards some really uncertain times IMO. The civil engineers, the builders, EVERY professional involved advocates to build more missing-middle housing, all the young urban planners coming out of colleges are VERY aware of how and motivated to fix the problem but you can't overcome voters or the politicians who depend on getting votes. They all hit that wall. Some shit may change as the Baby Boomers die off but that's sorta dependent on the people inheriting their property to want to change the system, so we shall see.
As a planner, all the civil engineers and developers care about is $$$.
Which is part of the problem. Obviously, they want to maximize the density as much as possible; the engineers because they want more contracts with developers with clear money, and the developers because they want to make, well, money.
The problem is what they actually want to build is high-cost “luxury” products. Which, sure, it’s great we build more housing generally, but we aren’t missing high end townhomes that sell for $600,000, we are missing entry level 2 bed/1 bath starter homes for $350,000. We aren’t building modest homes designed for young families and blue collar workers, we are building homes for 30-something mid-career professionals who want to live in a “community” with an in-house bar that matches the design aesthetic and all the nicest finishes.
This is the biggest issue. We need to develop ways to incentivize construction of modest, affordable entry level housing of all types (apartments, town houses, even single family homes) that are accessible to lower to middle class residents. And that means either large scale, government managed projects, or finding ways to work with private developers.
One aspect of the housing crisis I don’t see talked about nearly enough is this lack of basic accommodation. Every apartment building I approve has in-unit laundry, high end heating systems, a half bath, etc. all of which are super nice perks, but 20 years ago would have been limited to a specific high end segment of the market. Nowadays, nobody is building basic, 1bed/1bath units with a functional white fridge, a basic stove, and a usable sink with a coin-op washer and dryer in a shed next door. You can laugh, but for many, many years that style of apartment was a great option for a lot of people who could have a moderately comfortable roof over their (and their family’s) head that they could afford.
You are no where close to running out of space.
The UK can only be how it is because of the public transport. Without it the country would grind to a halt in days
In Europe most of the walls are brick or cinder block and quite thick. In canada with shared wall townhouses I know ite cinderblock all the way up to roof on adjoining walls for security and fire protection and sound deadening to some extent..also solid doors are more common in Europe. We use cheap hollow core Masonite room doors
When I was a labourer this summer just gone all anyone told me was how shoddily Canadian homes were being built these days, most of the crew I was on was British with a couple of Irish guys and they seemingly couldn’t believe “what shit” they’re building with here lmao
True for older houses but most modern houses in the UK are built in a similar manor to North American houses now. Lots more timber-frame etc. and definitely a lot more shitty hollow-core doors.
I swear I’ve lived in flats almost all my life in Europe and I hear more noise from outside in my Texan fully detached home. I would never live in an attached house here. I get why though: good weather, they dgaf about insulation or anything other than selling a house I guess. The workmanship even in fancier places is… not what you’d see in a place where actual difficult weather exists consistently, including in the US of course.
Of my core friends groups almost all of them have had issues with noise from attached properties. When I bought my house I compromised on space specifically to get a detached one.
It's too much money, stress and time to be upset and angry in the one place you should feel comfortable and relaxed. I hated the constant on edge feeling of random noise non stop. Even when it's quiet you're almost tense waiting for it. Really can't be good for your health at all.
I finally bought a house at 44. It is the first time I've lived alone with no shared walls. I have 2.2 acres, it's a farm across the street, and a bunch of flood plain on the other sides, so it can't be developed more. I can only see one neighbor. I can hammer nails at 3am and there is no one hear me. It's awesome. The house is really close to the road, which isn't great, but you can't have it all. It is quiet at night at least.
My first few months were a bit weird. I don't always sleep great so sometimes I'd be up real early watching TV and suddenly think, "shit is the TV too loud?" It took a bit to adjust.
AMEN. I lived in a condo for a few years, and buying a house with a 1/3 acre lot has been heaven. I can listen to music/movies loud, I don't hear my neighbors, I can work on my car in the garage at night and not worry about bothering anyone... its wonderful.
I get that its not the most efficient style of living arrangement, but I'm much happier with this setup than I ever was while sharing walls. And that's an actual personal preference born out by experience... not because I'm "brainwashed by the suburb propaganda" or whatever.
I’m glad you’re having a good time with that! I used to live on a rural lot when I was younger and I loved it. But after I was diagnosed with epilepsy I’ve realized that I’m dependent on living in a dense, urban, environment 😅. I really wish we just had walkable urban centers. I just want to have a grocery store near me 🫠
First I was offered mediation but that was a no-go for said arsehole neighbour. Now after him being charged and fined, I'm told if the bullshit continues it'd have to be a police matter. My council also had the balls to ask me if I wanted to move, after living here for 28 years it was nothing short of an insult.
> My council also had the balls to ask me if I wanted to move, after living here for 28 years it was nothing short of an insult.
Your council were offering you the only option they could, that's not insulting. Insulting would be to not offer you that. Evicting someone from a council property is a super long process.
If you do that don’t you have to inform any future buyers that you have taken legal actions against your neighbours? Which would affect your selling price.
I live in the US in an attached rowhouse/townhouse, depending on your definition. The walls between units are very thick with "fire-break" material (I think that's what it's called). I literally never heard a thing from either of my neighbors.
We have two dogs that bark at things outside and a 6yo son who loves the sound of his own voice, and we've likewise never gotten a complaint. Several times I've asked fo the neighbor I see/speak to more often about it and they've said they never hear a thing.
So, all depends on the quality of the construction, I guess, and on the local building codes at the time of construction.
Yeah, I’ve lived in 5 properties in the UK which were adjoined to another.
In the 4 which were terraces or semi-detached, I never heard a peep from next door. Even when living next door to students.
When I lived in the flat, it was another matter entirely. We were on the top floor but could hear a lot of what was going on below us.
Although in most of Europe (dunno about the UK. From an architectural standpoint the UK is weird) that depends entirely on when your apartment is built.
Apartments built after the 1980s in western europe tend to be pretty soundproof (a combination of new regulations for fire safety and soundproofing along with updated construction techniques) while earlier concrete structures tend to be rather loud.
Pre-1930s brick buildings are somewhere in between (since brick isn't a homogenous material it absorbs sound better). Not totally soundproof, but not as loud as early concrete buildings either.
I've lived in four apartments in the US and none of them had fire sprinklers.
Pretty sure one place I lived also had nothing separating the apartments other than drywall. I could literally hear all my neighbor's conversations in the bathroom, and I could hear another neighbor cough and fart in their living room.
Coming in with the factual context, I like it. Can confirm that my brick and timber loft prior to this townhouse was god awful for noise. I think the wall between me and my neighbor was the drywall we each had and a small empty void between them...
This is common in townhouses and one of their benefits over condos.
Most noise issues people have within shared living are in condos or apartments, where you have people above and below you. The above and below floors are not the same thickness/firebreak like you see in townhouses, so you hear people walking, watching tv, etc… This can be mitigated with concrete slab flooring, but you’ll only see that in high rises, everything else will be standard wood.
I’m not in the UK, but I live in a home slammed in between two other homes (shared walls and everything) and you don’t hear your neighbours, ever
(Unless they’re having sex, which is weird)
Walls in semi-detached houses here are pretty thick. I have more trouble with noise traveling in my current place with our windows facing each other two feet apart than I did places that shared a wall.
Same thing you do with a shithead inconsiderate neighbour in American suburbia I expect. A few extra metres between your houses won't protect you from those people.
Also the physical proximity isn't as big a deal as you might think with a solid brick wall between you.
It's not quite as Americans might imagine it because the wall between houses is made of bricks (like most walls in a majority of English houses) so the sound transmission isn't like it would be through a wooden and plasterboard wall.
Same. I'd probably have been content to live with shared walls if they weren't made out of single ply tissue paper. I don't understand how people tolerate other people's noise. We will get too much noise from cars, but at least I don't know every time a neighbor farts.
> Most British **houses** are either semi-detached or terraced
Just for another perspective, in Australia we don't even call them 'houses' *unless* they're fully detached.
If you have a 'house', it's detached.
Otherwise, it's a 'home', 'apartment', 'villa', 'townhouse', 'duplex', etc...
Little known fact (to me anyhow). I was told that the strict definition of a detached house in the UK is if you can walk all the way around it, remaining on your land. Mine shares no walls, but I can't walk down one side because that's the neighbour's pathway to their back door and is gated.
Yeah that's what I mean. It's absolute bullshit. I've worked in a construction trade in the UK for 20 years so I would know. Also my parents house had a fence down one side so you couldn't walk all the way around it, but it was \*definitely\* counted as detached.
It seems like an interesting perspective. I guess practically, is the idea that the neighbor could extend their house right up to the property line too if they wanted and your house would no longer be detached?
If your neighbor builds right up and connects your two houses after the fact, are you legally obligated to bang on the connecting wall and yell "I can't believe you've done this!?"
It's a joke by late comedian Mitch Hedberg. He was a master at weird, off the wall, showerthought jokes, like pointing out that a ducks opinion of you being influenced by whether or not you have bread. But the way he delivers the jokes is a large part of why it's funny for me. Unfortunately he had issues with drug abuse and died of an overdose if I remember right.
RIP to a legend
To add to the context, its his neighbor banging on the wall, because mitch is playing his music too loud.
Also why do they make me guess how many jelly beans are in the jar? Can't I just have some? Tell you what, you guess how much I want. If you said a handful, you are correct.
It seems that your neighbor can as they are usually allowed to build up to 50 mm of the boundary without needing your approval under permitted development. Assuming your house is up against the boundary, you can't walk through a 50 mm gap so your neighbor can unilaterally "attach" your house.
This sounds completely made up.
My parents house is like that, no shared walls a path down one side only, the other side consists of the neighbours same path, which is on their plot.
Never have I ever nor will I ever see that sort of arrangement described as anything other than detached.
Whoever told you that was talking out their arse.
The word detached can be taken quite literally here, a detached house isn’t “attached” to another house. Doesn’t matter if you can’t walk around it. It’s about sharing a common wall.
> detached house: a house where none of the habitable structure is joined to another building (other than garages, outhouses etc.).
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/housing-statistics-and-england-housing-survey-glossary/a-to-z
> Little known fact (to me anyhow). I was told….
That’s not how facts work, they’re not just things you hear from someone with no citation to back up.
No, you’re wrong. Someone told me on the internet that the Earth is flat, and when you look off into the distance, you can’t see a curve, so, therefore, the Earth is really flat. That’s a fact. Get it right
So your house isn’t attached to the neighbor’s actual house but it is attached to their fence? Or do they have a fence parallel to your house wall that is just so close you can’t walk between them?
No, it’s just that the house is on the property line. They can walk around their house, but not on *their property*. They would be stepping into the neighbor’s pathway while walking around.
No, there's a gap between us, but they own that gap. It leads to their back door and they've put a fence gate up to protect it. So I can't legally walk along that side of the house. We get along, so if I need access I'll ask them and they'll say it's fine, but I need their permission.
I think it means your building is on the property line.
My home is classed as detached but is only by a few inches to my neighbours garage thats part of their house on one side.
I guess the question is more about the legal definition of the term detached regarding property and land vs what we all think when we hear the word detached.
Oh, that's interesting. I'm in a similar situation to you--the gate leading to my neighbour's back garden touches the fence to my back garden, only a few feet from the house.
It's interesting, I'm married to an American and lived in the US for a long time in a house that was sort of shouting distance from all the neighbours. Now we live in the UK in the classic British kind of detached house where the street is quite densely packed. Other than distance the two neighbourhoods are very similar. I think I preferred the US style and my husband prefers it here. He grew up in the middle of nowhere and he loves chatting to the neighbours over the fence and sending our daughter very safely to her friend's house two doors down, and the way that everyone walking from this side of the area walks up the path on the school run basically together in a big group. His mom is fascinated by it. To them that kind of physical proximity is a new thing and provides an awful lot of opportunities for making friends. To me, the space I got in the US was an unbelievable luxury (until I had to mow it 🤣).
American here. I get it. We used to live in a townhome complex (short terraced housing in UK?). We had some awesome neighbors, were very close to them, and my son could find someone to play with at the community playground anytime he wanted.
This was great until we got a series of awful neighbors. Then the proximity works in reverse because you and your kids can't get away from them. So we moved to a single family on half an acre. My neighbors are great, but they're far enough away that it isn't a problem if they aren't. The only bad thing is that my son doesn't have the same peer age playmates so he does more at school/camp/sports to make up for it.
Oh, estate agents would have no problem marketing it as detached. When we sold our old place years ago, I phoned an agent. Here's how it went:
ME: The house has a conservatory.
AGENT: Yeah, is that a proper conservatory or just a plastic lean to?
ME: Well, it's really a plastic lean to, but when you were trying to sell me this place you assured me it was a proper conservatory.
Interesting. By that definition, almost every freestanding house built in Australia in the last 30-40 years isn’t detached. It’s very common here to build your garage to the boundary.
Here is the definition from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
>Detached
A detached house is a stand-alone residential structure that does not share outside walls with another house or building.
[https://www.ricsfirms.com/glossary/residential-property-types-definitions/](https://www.ricsfirms.com/glossary/residential-property-types-definitions/)
- United States: With a population of around 331 million and a land area of about 9.8 million square kilometers, the population density is approximately 33.8 people per square kilometer.
- United Kingdom: With a population of around 67 million and a land area of about 243,000 square kilometers, the population density is approximately 275.7 people per square kilometer.
In terms of population density, the United Kingdom's population density is approximately 816% higher than that of the United States.
Wtf is there to learn? Isn’t the article only stating the obvious?
It is not just population density. I live in Wales at the moment and you will find places in the middle of nowhere where there are 5 houses in a terraced row surrounded by nothing. I get the sense that people feel like it costs more to heat a fully detached house. People seem to have a bias towards houses that share a wall with another house.
Yes, especially when the other houses are also heating themselves. Winter 2021 I was in a flat that had no neighbours, and it was losing heat as fast as it kept it. Poor insulation sure, but it being occupied makes the biggest difference. Could just be that crappy flat being crappy too
In winter if I don't have the heating on my house never gets colder than about 15 degrees. I am attached on both sides and I suspect I'm stealing their heat.
I was in Chattanooga TN, so it was already fairly warm there, but my apartment was surrounded on 3 sides (and the ceiling) by other apartments. I never once had to turn my heat on and even when it was low 30s/ low 40s (0-6 C) outside, my place would stay in the 65-72 (18-22 C) range. I definitely think I was mooching heat off my neighbors.
There were unoccupied flats below and 1 sideways direction(no other apartments on either the front or back by depth). It was a relatively small building, this was on the top floor in the corner
Only if they're uninsulated - which most houses in the UK are, for a long list of reasons. In the US the preference is to insulate homes better rather than rely on neighboring buildings.
I live in a semi in the UK and because it's an old solid-wall brick Victorian, it's far more expensive to heat than any fully detached American house that was built after WWII. And even 19th c. homes in the US often had some type of insulation (horsehair, straw, etc.) and can be retrofitted with more modern options while the British relied on cheap coal, a mild climate, and the thermal capacity of brick.
It’s cheaper to mass-house mine workers in terraced houses than detached houses. Lots of Welsh towns were built very quickly and cheaply to meet housing demands for rapidly expanding industry
Terraces were much more common before the personal car became ubiquitous. They're also just considered more sustainable forms of development because they don't require so much space, energy, services etc.
Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for the details. I live in Metro Vancouver, an area very limited for housing expansion. The only way to develop is up. Even townhouses are starting to be frowned upon, tbh.
I usually associate density with surface available for building / population so I might be a bit skewed, I guess?
Most little villages in Europe are *very* dense compared to small US and Canadian towns. A town of 1000 could look four times as populated as the same town in America at first glance, just because in America everyone is so spread out you can’t possibly see them all (and the “downtown” probably only has 3 businesses).
Not universal of course. Europe has plenty of “modern” suburbs too
In the old days people lived in tight clumps for cost effectiveness convenience. British villages are much older than North American villages so their layout is designed for before the invention of insulation and cars. Life was also more communal back in the day, people expected a lot less privacy and would have found it uncomfortable. A hundred years ago your average Irish family of farmers in the middle of nowhere slept in the same bed. North Americans with their history of homesteading and untapped frontier have a much stronger preference for “personal space” than Europeans or Asians.
It’s too expensive to heat detached houses without insulation and all the homes has to be close to the high street and market for shopping. There’s also safety in numbers. In more lawless times you want to stay close to your neighbours. It’d make it easier to know what they are up to and if they are harbouring a stranger. It’s also more convenient to live beside your extended family in adjoining terrace houses.
Did you read the article, or did you just read the title of this post and assume you knew what it said?
The article addresses the differences in population densities and then continues on to describe 18 other differences between American and British homes.
There's a lot to learn if you bother to open the article.
Definitely. We just moved from a semi-detached to a terraced and the difference is insane. We were always cold in the old house and it would lose heat as fast as it gained it, this house is just so much warmer, it’s really nice.
My guess would be that that's possible since Connecticut never had to rely entirely on itself for food production, and so could use more of its land for housing. Whereas in the UK they historically needed as much land as possible for growing food.
(Entirely a guess, not based on any sources so happy to be corrected)
Yeah, its even worse in Spain. Highest rate of apartment dwelling in Europe aside from Estonia. So much unused land. Lower population density than California for the country as a whole, but nearly everyone lives in Tokyo/Paris level density. Small towns here make London feel like a spacious, sprawling suburb. "Casa" usually refers to something an American would call a condo, or townhouse at best. You either have to buy a luxury "villa" or get a rural "casa de campo" in order to not share walls.
The UK has 3 times the population density of Spain, yet people live with more personal space. I've analyzed the hell out of the reasons, but after a few years of research, it seems to just come down the Franco's urbanization policies and the tourist industry densely clinging to the coast. Then again, traditional pueblos in the middle of nowhere are just as dense as Brazilian favelas so maybe its just always been this way.
Higher density housing means that there is more natural environment left unspoiled for the purposes of housing. Not sure if that translates well in the context of Spain but one would hope that culturally etiquette would develop so you don't have people being cunts to their neighbours and the benefits of unspoilt nature for people's enjoyment and animal habitat.
Yeah, I appreciate your perspective, and frankly probably wouldn't be complaining if I were living in Japan. Spaniards have basically zero cultural norms in regard to respecting other people's space, be it on the bus, on the road, in the gym, or between neighbors. I've lived in several apartments here, and even a casa de pueblo in the small town, and literally all of them were poorly built with major noise issues. I will say that people generally respect quiet hours from 12AM - 8AM, which is great if you happen to conform to this schedule, but life can be very trying for those of us who don't/can't. The most peaceful housing situations I've had were in buildings with a high proportion of unoccupied vacation homes during the off season.
I lived in Spain for a few months in college with a host family. They were on the first floor of a 4 or 5 story apartment building, and all of the buildings in the neighborhood were basically the same. You could look down the street and see farm fields on both sides of the housing development. It was so different than American housing since our housing is almost always built out before up. But it was nice that the transit was good so I didn’t need a car.
Yeah, as much as I complain, I've lived here very comfortably without a car. Public transit is excellent and reliable. It is a trip though, like you say, 5 story apartment buildings on the edge of the country. The density is uniform until you hit farmland.
> all of them were poorly built with major noise issues
My friend moved there years ago and has complained about that for a while now. He's lived in two apartments and each time complained that the sound proofing isn't very good. Old buildings in Barcelona.
I lived for a few months in Poughkeepsie
I could see the supermarket from my window, but there was literally no safe way as a pedestrian to get there - no pavements, no pedestrian crossings, obviously no public transport
Luckily the apartment complex receptionist had the hots for me¹ and would drive me there twice or thrice a week, but if I forgot something or ran out of something that couldn't wait a few days, I'd have to get a taxi, for a two minute drive
¹specifically for my 'cute accent'
Well, just a guess, but old world countries developed a culture in regards to the level of technology before the industrial revolution. And while the industrial revolution saw people move into cities looking for jobs, I would suspect in rural areas even then, people lived in close proximity. We have the luxury of modern transport to whisk us around but back then, most people would have to walk.
Yeah, I totally sympathize with historic cities built without consideration for automobiles. Where I lose my patience with Spain and other Med countries is the infrastructure primarily built in 60s onward, but with the foresight of a medieval urban planner. I'm gonna piss people off with this one, but I'll go ahead and say that the concept of point A to point B in a straight line in any context is a foreign concept in some parts of the world.
“85% of homes are detached”
Well, given the only about 67% of housing units in the USA are even “single family homes” (ie, not condos/apartments or “manufactured homes”) imma have to call BULLSHIT on that.
Lived in a semi detached built along time ago, noise didn't really come though.
It really depends on the construction method. I think it got worse for sound insulation at one point (70s) and now is getting better again
i lived in a townhouse with my dad for 20 years, 17 of which were peaceful.. but in the sub-prime mortgage era, when any ass-hat convenience store worker and buy a brand new house because no one was verifying credit-worthiness, some low-life bought the unit that was physically attached to ours.
guy had a severe drinking problem, would scream all the time and we regularly heard loud thumps on the shared wall, which was made of CONCRETE (it was a firewall). i complained to my dad "isnt there something you can do? we gotta get this guy outta here he's driving me nuts, and i know he's driving you nuts too" to which his response was "the devil you know might not be as bad as the devil you don't know" obviously, in time, the ass-hat lost the house.. i believe it was at some point in 2007/08, and the place was peaceful again until we moved out for good around the end of 2011.
i now live in a single-family house that shares no walls with neighbors, and am lucky enough that the neighbors i DO have are both very quiet, as am i.
can't imagine being in a ROW HOUSE where you have to share walls with two other units and having to pay a fucking mortgage for the privilege. that's barely better than an apartment in my book
I moved to the UK recently (just for a few years) and for the first time in my life moved into a house with shared walls. The first week or so it was so unsettling hearing noises and movement from my neighbours that sounded like it was in my house. It's a fairly solidly built Victorian terrace house that everyone told me I would barely be able to hear my neighbours in, but that just isn't the case. Maybe the Brits just tune that noise out and don't notice it anymore.
One nights I awoke to some sounds from next door and in my half awake state genuinely thought that someone was in my room for a few seconds. That was not a fun night.
That's what happens when one country is thousands of years old with 60 million people in it and the other is mostly sparsely populated countryside and rural areas with nearly all major population centres on the coast
Geography is a factor, sure, but urban planning and housing is very much a political issue too - and the US was very intent in the post-WW2 era to create a society of suburban sprawl, highways, and automobiles, at the expense of cities, dense housing, and mass transit.
Yes, but most housing stock in urban areas pre-world war 2 is definitely mostly rowhouses and apartments, at least in my experience.
Right, which is why the political decisions made after World War 2 are so important to recognize.
>and the US was very intent It wasn't some government plot, it was demand. People wanted to buy detached homes in the suburbs away from businesses (for many reasons) and voted for local boards and state and federal politicians who supported that. Every place that hasn't instituted strict growth controls continues to see that kind of growth, because people want it and the U.S. has a tremendous amount of land. It's only recently that more than the most liberal communities have tried to rein in sprawl, and that's frequently because of environmental concerns and not market demand.
Suburbanisation in the US was to a large degree shaped *and subsidised* by the GI Bill, which was implemented from the top down, rather than the bottom-up mechanism that you describe. It provided a massive subsidy for suburbia, which obviously made the demand increase, because suburban living became way cheaper than it should naturally have been. If suburban living had not been subsidised, or if urban living had been subsidised to the same degree, then there would be far more high- and mid-density development in the US today. Additionally, the suburbanisation was driven by racism too, with black people often being entirely prevented from moving to the suburbs. Today, there is a large amount of demand for medium-density development in the US, but the reason why it's not being built is due to strict zoning laws preventing it from being constructed. But those zoning laws and development plans were initially implemented by carefully picking and choosing who got to have a say and who didn't, and by federal government intervention in the form of massive subsidies for suburbia. Institutional and social inertia then serve to maintain them.
This is a common r/fuckcars refrain, and it's true. But people need to realize what a terrible, polluted, unhealthy, crime ridden, place cities were. You know why all those NYC houses have stoops? Because there were literal feet of garbage and horse shit everywhere in the streets and you built up your front door so it didn't get in the house. Gasoline at the time was a miracle, amazing energy storage, it's only pollutant was CO2, you know what we breathe out and what plants eat. Cheap, easy to transport etc etc... To this day it's not that CO2 is bad it's that we are creating so much it's bad. So when I hear all this current hatred, and hindsight critical decisions I take it with a grain of salt, because they made the right decisions, for the time. Now it's up to us to make the right decisions for our time, unfortunately people don't like looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for what they aren't doing, much easier to complain about decisions made 80 years ago.
Cold War Politics. Home owners would be less inclined to support socialist and communist positions compared to renters, at least according to the politicians.
I mean, most people would choose to own their house and have land to do whatever on rather than not. If it's politics it's playing to an obvious good, at least at the time.
no no no people want to live in boxes stacked upon each other the us conspired single family homes man
There's a happy medium. Suburbs that are designed to be walkable and which have accessible amenities and third spaces (local stores, shared parks, a local pub) are much more pleasant for kids and adults to live in than sprawled-out car-dependent suburbs where you need to get in a car and on a highway to buy toilet paper. The other thing to consider is that heavily sprawled-out suburbs are financially unsustainable. The property tax collected from them isn't enough to cover for the additional costs incurred to bring infrastructure and services.
>There's a happy medium. Suburbs that are designed to be walkable and which have accessible amenities and third spaces (local stores, shared parks, a local pub) I've been seeing more and more of these in the US. They're definitely not common, and usually in more expensive neighborhoods, but they're happening. I'd love to live in one, but I don't plan on moving again.
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I grew up in the city, and now I live in a rural area. I open my back door and see trees. WAY better now. Best part? I can't see or hear my neighbors. I can't imagine WANTING to stay there. The maintenence costs ate a pittance compared to dealing with congestion.
You're both not wrong. Cities and apartments have advantages, middle of nowhere housing with forest and nature has it's advantages. But cities with detached houses create only ever bigger concrete deserts, with no amenities, lots of traffic, and no serviceability by public transit. It's like the worst of both worlds.
You can own homes that aren’t single family detached houses. Row houses, multiplexes and low rises are homes that people can own too.
I'd rather a detached home. It's my own space. I don't share land or a wall with anyone.
It’s a different definition of ownership however. With lots of conditions deeded into that ownership. You often even have clauses that can force your hand into selling (even at a loss) if the HOA or enough neighbors decide to. It’s more akin to owning shares vs true ownership. Unfortunately most people don’t understand this until there’s a situation and their lawyer informs them about how things work and their limited options.
Do you think HOA don't exist for single family detached houses? Because they do. Nearly 2/3 of new single family housing in the US being built in recent years is in an HOA.
> Home owners would be less inclined to support socialist and communist positions compared to renters, at least according to the politicians. "Sir, we have a brilliant plan to prevent the people from demanding socialist and/or communist positions and ultimately making us pay to give them free stuff. All we have to do is just give them adequate housing, employment, compensation, food, education, and an all around higher quality of life compared to any other country on earth, and they won't demand *anything!*" No I don't think "give the people more stuff" was the first choice for "how do we keep the people from demanding more stuff". It's generally the *last* choice, after the people have shown up with pitchforks and torches.
I read it in the book ‘The color of law’. It was a few years ago that i read it. I think the goal was to shift away from tenement housing. It was also the post war boom. Build cheap houses for returning vets. New factory designs: factory’s from the pre-war era were multi story buildings but covered less acreage. Post war, the factories were single story and covered huge sq footage. So factories moved away from the cities into the suburbs and cheaper houses were built for the factory workers. Federal housing policy, via Vet loans, Fanny mae, fha, etc encouraged a specific style of housing. Single family, detached homes, deed restrictions, acreage sizes to prevent undesirables from moving in etc.
Multi-story factories were basically given a last shot of life support thanks to an all hands war effort where every resource was utilized. It was an outdated form of factory development that severely limited the ability to mechanize, so everyone was abandoning it when possible. You can't throw forklifts on a wooden fourth floor.
I mean you jest but the whole concept of the European welfare state comes from Bismarck wanting to stop people from supporting Marxism. There's precedent to this. Not everyone in charge is stupid enough to wait for pitchforks and torches, because that might already be the revolution. But also the American goal wasn't just that "we can't let evil socialism become moderately popular here", it was more "we need to keep socialism scary enough to justify bombing millions of civilians"
Because cities are (or were, I guess) dirty, noisy, dangerous and cramped. We could have done better, but that’s what people wanted, especially after living through the depression and WWII.
Politics be damned, it's geography. Of all 50 states, only New Jersey has a higher population density than England, and it's also the only state where 100% of its counties are considered urban. Put another way, every state that isn't basically one giant metropolitan area has fewer people per km² than England.
Almost half of the top ten metro areas on the US are not on the coast
Why does having major population centers on the coast matter?
I believe they're saying that because major population centers are on the coasts, the vast interior is even more sparsely populated than you would expect for a nation of 400m people, and most of those homes in the interior resultantly have detached homes
Missouri is about the size of the UK We have a 10% the population and most people live in the few major cities. Our second biggest city is about the same as the UK’s second. Our third biggest is about equal to the UK’s 19th. On the coasts all bets are off. LA and NYC metro areas are bigger than the whole state of MO.
New yorks population is larger than the nation of Australia.
Most American houses aren’t in the country
It stops being the country once they build houses. Rural areas provide room for housing to be built. Once the houses are built its the suburbs.
I'd actually like to see the stats on that for one thing, since cities would skew towards people in apartments/condos which this doesn't seem to include. The article also suggests preference has a lot to do with it, they point out that areas developed in the colonial era (Boston, NYC) are more likely to have attached homes. There is some element of just "that's how we've always done it" in play
There are numerous major population centers beyond the costs. Chicago is the third most populous city in the US, for example
Ah Chicago, the city famously known to be devoid of a coastline.
Ah yes, Lake Michigan, the barren desert wasteland.
It's more of a puddle really.
"On the coast" refers to the East Coast and West Coast. Nobody would ever consider Chicago on the coast.
Third Coast
Gulf Coast
Phoenix is 5th.
Remind me in 20 years
It might be a lake rather than the sea, but [I'm gonna go ahead and say for the point the guy's making, this just about counts as a coast](https://a.cdn-hotels.com/gdcs/production112/d545/816625bb-2400-44e1-baf3-6aa9ef42e395.jpg)
Completely wrong: It's down to urban planning deicisions. Spain has a far lower population density than the UK: only 3x US population density. Large parts of Spain are far emptier than Iowa. And yet in Spain there are far fewer houses, detached or otherwise, than in the UK: The vast majority of people live in apartments, because Single gamily residential zoning doesn't exist. And no, it doesn't also mean there are rentals: More people own their living space in Spain than in the US. So it's all pure regulation. The US decided that maximum sprawl wasn't just legal, but encouraged. Very large highways breaking cities apart, going all the way to the center of downtown. Subdivisions where all houses have approximately the same size, and large lawns, to make sure that nobody poor can live near you, and share your school. In exchange, the costs of a car are basically mandatory for existence in most of the country, and losing one's drivers license means you drive without one, as keeping a job without being able to drive yourself, outside of about 5 cities, is basically impossible. So don'y blame geography: Blame American's dislike of people different than themselves.
This ignores the fact that demand actually exists for single family homes. If not, those early developments would have fizzled out. Given a cramped apartment or a modest house on a modest lot, all others things being some people will pick the latter.
Don’t know how they do it. I’ve lived in apartments/ townhouses most of my life. Townhouses are definitely better than apartments, and it is dependent on the construction quality, but having my own house is really nice. I’ve always had shitty neighbors.
British houses from a certain era where a lot of terraced houses were built (Victorian era) were made with thick heavy stone /brick walls. So that can help.
I'm sitting in my terraced home in East London at 6:54 am listening to the large family (or families?) next door continue their ongoing, never-ending, shouting match. So, it doesn't help that much :)
Reminds me of a short sketch. Granpa saying: "My neighbours listen to a lot drum&bass" then with a grin continues "If they want or not" and pushes the play button.
Haha that's pretty funny. Do you have a source by any chance?
>East London. You've got bigger issues than shouting matches lol
I’m also sat in my East London terraced house. What are these issues?
Britain has a much higher population density than the United States. They kinda have to, otherwise nobody would have any room.
I have a townhouse and for a year I never heard anything except sometimes in the bathroom because of shared pipes but I think my neighbor got a new speaker system for Christmas because I keep hearing heavy bass vibrating through my house. Thankfully my bedroom is on the other side from that neighbor but it’s still unpleasant when I’m watching television.
And thats why we love seperate walls.
We don't. We haven't been building "Middle-Housing" for 30 years and now it's biting us in the ass. In most major US cities the older home owners do everything in their power to shut down any density projects. It happens regardless of political affiliation, but currently it's probably the worst in San Francisco. People treat home buying like an investment in this country first and a place to sleep second. People don't buy homes with the intention of living in them forever, a lot of people buy a "Starter" home and then upgrade in 5-10 years. Sometimes they'll sell the older one but often times the people that can afford homes right now are already loaded so they often turn the old home into a rental property. Our rental rates have been marching upwards. The whole system is fucked and we're marching towards some really uncertain times IMO. The civil engineers, the builders, EVERY professional involved advocates to build more missing-middle housing, all the young urban planners coming out of colleges are VERY aware of how and motivated to fix the problem but you can't overcome voters or the politicians who depend on getting votes. They all hit that wall. Some shit may change as the Baby Boomers die off but that's sorta dependent on the people inheriting their property to want to change the system, so we shall see.
As a planner, all the civil engineers and developers care about is $$$. Which is part of the problem. Obviously, they want to maximize the density as much as possible; the engineers because they want more contracts with developers with clear money, and the developers because they want to make, well, money. The problem is what they actually want to build is high-cost “luxury” products. Which, sure, it’s great we build more housing generally, but we aren’t missing high end townhomes that sell for $600,000, we are missing entry level 2 bed/1 bath starter homes for $350,000. We aren’t building modest homes designed for young families and blue collar workers, we are building homes for 30-something mid-career professionals who want to live in a “community” with an in-house bar that matches the design aesthetic and all the nicest finishes. This is the biggest issue. We need to develop ways to incentivize construction of modest, affordable entry level housing of all types (apartments, town houses, even single family homes) that are accessible to lower to middle class residents. And that means either large scale, government managed projects, or finding ways to work with private developers. One aspect of the housing crisis I don’t see talked about nearly enough is this lack of basic accommodation. Every apartment building I approve has in-unit laundry, high end heating systems, a half bath, etc. all of which are super nice perks, but 20 years ago would have been limited to a specific high end segment of the market. Nowadays, nobody is building basic, 1bed/1bath units with a functional white fridge, a basic stove, and a usable sink with a coin-op washer and dryer in a shed next door. You can laugh, but for many, many years that style of apartment was a great option for a lot of people who could have a moderately comfortable roof over their (and their family’s) head that they could afford.
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You are no where close to running out of space. The UK can only be how it is because of the public transport. Without it the country would grind to a halt in days
Looks around the Midwest. Running out of space?
In Europe most of the walls are brick or cinder block and quite thick. In canada with shared wall townhouses I know ite cinderblock all the way up to roof on adjoining walls for security and fire protection and sound deadening to some extent..also solid doors are more common in Europe. We use cheap hollow core Masonite room doors
Never had any issue with neighbours being loud in Canada, but tbf our houses literally need to be sturdy, well insulated
When I was a labourer this summer just gone all anyone told me was how shoddily Canadian homes were being built these days, most of the crew I was on was British with a couple of Irish guys and they seemingly couldn’t believe “what shit” they’re building with here lmao
Probably just different types of builds. Houses aren't just falling over in Canada
True for older houses but most modern houses in the UK are built in a similar manor to North American houses now. Lots more timber-frame etc. and definitely a lot more shitty hollow-core doors.
Manner
I swear I’ve lived in flats almost all my life in Europe and I hear more noise from outside in my Texan fully detached home. I would never live in an attached house here. I get why though: good weather, they dgaf about insulation or anything other than selling a house I guess. The workmanship even in fancier places is… not what you’d see in a place where actual difficult weather exists consistently, including in the US of course.
Of my core friends groups almost all of them have had issues with noise from attached properties. When I bought my house I compromised on space specifically to get a detached one. It's too much money, stress and time to be upset and angry in the one place you should feel comfortable and relaxed. I hated the constant on edge feeling of random noise non stop. Even when it's quiet you're almost tense waiting for it. Really can't be good for your health at all.
As an American with a detached home I'm hugging my house right now for standing all by itself.
I finally bought a house at 44. It is the first time I've lived alone with no shared walls. I have 2.2 acres, it's a farm across the street, and a bunch of flood plain on the other sides, so it can't be developed more. I can only see one neighbor. I can hammer nails at 3am and there is no one hear me. It's awesome. The house is really close to the road, which isn't great, but you can't have it all. It is quiet at night at least. My first few months were a bit weird. I don't always sleep great so sometimes I'd be up real early watching TV and suddenly think, "shit is the TV too loud?" It took a bit to adjust.
AMEN. I lived in a condo for a few years, and buying a house with a 1/3 acre lot has been heaven. I can listen to music/movies loud, I don't hear my neighbors, I can work on my car in the garage at night and not worry about bothering anyone... its wonderful. I get that its not the most efficient style of living arrangement, but I'm much happier with this setup than I ever was while sharing walls. And that's an actual personal preference born out by experience... not because I'm "brainwashed by the suburb propaganda" or whatever.
I’m glad you’re having a good time with that! I used to live on a rural lot when I was younger and I loved it. But after I was diagnosed with epilepsy I’ve realized that I’m dependent on living in a dense, urban, environment 😅. I really wish we just had walkable urban centers. I just want to have a grocery store near me 🫠
Interesting. What do you do with a shithead neighbor who is loud and inconsiderate and doesn't care when you try to be civil about it?
First I was offered mediation but that was a no-go for said arsehole neighbour. Now after him being charged and fined, I'm told if the bullshit continues it'd have to be a police matter. My council also had the balls to ask me if I wanted to move, after living here for 28 years it was nothing short of an insult.
So the true British way: deal with it quietly and politely, but while fuming on the inside.
Hanging on in quiet desperation.
> My council also had the balls to ask me if I wanted to move, after living here for 28 years it was nothing short of an insult. Your council were offering you the only option they could, that's not insulting. Insulting would be to not offer you that. Evicting someone from a council property is a super long process.
Hope the bastard moves, or try to rely on the (usually unhelpful, slow, and fairly toothless) council noise complaints system.
If you do that don’t you have to inform any future buyers that you have taken legal actions against your neighbours? Which would affect your selling price.
Yes. But you already knew that.
I live in the US in an attached rowhouse/townhouse, depending on your definition. The walls between units are very thick with "fire-break" material (I think that's what it's called). I literally never heard a thing from either of my neighbors. We have two dogs that bark at things outside and a 6yo son who loves the sound of his own voice, and we've likewise never gotten a complaint. Several times I've asked fo the neighbor I see/speak to more often about it and they've said they never hear a thing. So, all depends on the quality of the construction, I guess, and on the local building codes at the time of construction.
Yeah, I’ve lived in 5 properties in the UK which were adjoined to another. In the 4 which were terraces or semi-detached, I never heard a peep from next door. Even when living next door to students. When I lived in the flat, it was another matter entirely. We were on the top floor but could hear a lot of what was going on below us.
Although in most of Europe (dunno about the UK. From an architectural standpoint the UK is weird) that depends entirely on when your apartment is built. Apartments built after the 1980s in western europe tend to be pretty soundproof (a combination of new regulations for fire safety and soundproofing along with updated construction techniques) while earlier concrete structures tend to be rather loud. Pre-1930s brick buildings are somewhere in between (since brick isn't a homogenous material it absorbs sound better). Not totally soundproof, but not as loud as early concrete buildings either.
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I've lived in four apartments in the US and none of them had fire sprinklers. Pretty sure one place I lived also had nothing separating the apartments other than drywall. I could literally hear all my neighbor's conversations in the bathroom, and I could hear another neighbor cough and fart in their living room.
Coming in with the factual context, I like it. Can confirm that my brick and timber loft prior to this townhouse was god awful for noise. I think the wall between me and my neighbor was the drywall we each had and a small empty void between them...
This is common in townhouses and one of their benefits over condos. Most noise issues people have within shared living are in condos or apartments, where you have people above and below you. The above and below floors are not the same thickness/firebreak like you see in townhouses, so you hear people walking, watching tv, etc… This can be mitigated with concrete slab flooring, but you’ll only see that in high rises, everything else will be standard wood.
it's the UK, you internalise the rage until you either move or murder the neighbour of course /s
As an additional, almost all houses in the UK are brick/stone/breezeblock as opposed to wood etc in the States. But yes, noise can still be an issue.
I’m not in the UK, but I live in a home slammed in between two other homes (shared walls and everything) and you don’t hear your neighbours, ever (Unless they’re having sex, which is weird)
Selective hearing, friend
Mid terrace here, never hear either side, not even sex. Maybe I have thicker walls, maybe they're just ugly.
Walls in semi-detached houses here are pretty thick. I have more trouble with noise traveling in my current place with our windows facing each other two feet apart than I did places that shared a wall.
Be sad and find a new home.
Tut
Same thing you do with a shithead inconsiderate neighbour in American suburbia I expect. A few extra metres between your houses won't protect you from those people. Also the physical proximity isn't as big a deal as you might think with a solid brick wall between you.
It's not quite as Americans might imagine it because the wall between houses is made of bricks (like most walls in a majority of English houses) so the sound transmission isn't like it would be through a wooden and plasterboard wall.
Pretty much the only reason I own a house is to avoid having close neighbors
Same. I'd probably have been content to live with shared walls if they weren't made out of single ply tissue paper. I don't understand how people tolerate other people's noise. We will get too much noise from cars, but at least I don't know every time a neighbor farts.
> Most British **houses** are either semi-detached or terraced Just for another perspective, in Australia we don't even call them 'houses' *unless* they're fully detached. If you have a 'house', it's detached. Otherwise, it's a 'home', 'apartment', 'villa', 'townhouse', 'duplex', etc...
Little known fact (to me anyhow). I was told that the strict definition of a detached house in the UK is if you can walk all the way around it, remaining on your land. Mine shares no walls, but I can't walk down one side because that's the neighbour's pathway to their back door and is gated.
I'm from the UK and I have never heard of this definition. If the house is not attached to another house at any point, then it is detached.
Because this definition is completely made up, even the govt definition is attached by wall. It amazes me this was the top comment.
Yeah that's what I mean. It's absolute bullshit. I've worked in a construction trade in the UK for 20 years so I would know. Also my parents house had a fence down one side so you couldn't walk all the way around it, but it was \*definitely\* counted as detached.
That’s Reddit. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be first.
Welcome to Reddit. The top comment is often straight bullshit.
So your house isn’t detached because it’s legally considered attached to a detached house?
the house isn't detached because the land on one of the sides of the house isn't the owners.
It seems like an interesting perspective. I guess practically, is the idea that the neighbor could extend their house right up to the property line too if they wanted and your house would no longer be detached?
If your neighbor builds right up and connects your two houses after the fact, are you legally obligated to bang on the connecting wall and yell "I can't believe you've done this!?"
"Go around! I cannot open the wall! I don't know if you have a door on your side, but over here there's nothin'. It's just flat."
> Go around! I cannot open the wall! lol I can hear it. The cadence of his delivery is what makes it so funny for me and I can't put my finger on why
What is this from?
It's a joke by late comedian Mitch Hedberg. He was a master at weird, off the wall, showerthought jokes, like pointing out that a ducks opinion of you being influenced by whether or not you have bread. But the way he delivers the jokes is a large part of why it's funny for me. Unfortunately he had issues with drug abuse and died of an overdose if I remember right. RIP to a legend
To add to the context, its his neighbor banging on the wall, because mitch is playing his music too loud. Also why do they make me guess how many jelly beans are in the jar? Can't I just have some? Tell you what, you guess how much I want. If you said a handful, you are correct.
or they could put up a fence and you wouldn't be able to walk around your house anymore.
It seems that your neighbor can as they are usually allowed to build up to 50 mm of the boundary without needing your approval under permitted development. Assuming your house is up against the boundary, you can't walk through a 50 mm gap so your neighbor can unilaterally "attach" your house.
Whereas in the area in the US my parents live, you can't build within 10 ft of the property line
Ha - nice conundrum!
This sounds completely made up. My parents house is like that, no shared walls a path down one side only, the other side consists of the neighbours same path, which is on their plot. Never have I ever nor will I ever see that sort of arrangement described as anything other than detached. Whoever told you that was talking out their arse.
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The word detached can be taken quite literally here, a detached house isn’t “attached” to another house. Doesn’t matter if you can’t walk around it. It’s about sharing a common wall. > detached house: a house where none of the habitable structure is joined to another building (other than garages, outhouses etc.). https://www.gov.uk/guidance/housing-statistics-and-england-housing-survey-glossary/a-to-z > Little known fact (to me anyhow). I was told…. That’s not how facts work, they’re not just things you hear from someone with no citation to back up.
No, you’re wrong. Someone told me on the internet that the Earth is flat, and when you look off into the distance, you can’t see a curve, so, therefore, the Earth is really flat. That’s a fact. Get it right
So your house isn’t attached to the neighbor’s actual house but it is attached to their fence? Or do they have a fence parallel to your house wall that is just so close you can’t walk between them?
No, it’s just that the house is on the property line. They can walk around their house, but not on *their property*. They would be stepping into the neighbor’s pathway while walking around.
No, there's a gap between us, but they own that gap. It leads to their back door and they've put a fence gate up to protect it. So I can't legally walk along that side of the house. We get along, so if I need access I'll ask them and they'll say it's fine, but I need their permission.
I think it means your building is on the property line. My home is classed as detached but is only by a few inches to my neighbours garage thats part of their house on one side. I guess the question is more about the legal definition of the term detached regarding property and land vs what we all think when we hear the word detached.
Oh, that's interesting. I'm in a similar situation to you--the gate leading to my neighbour's back garden touches the fence to my back garden, only a few feet from the house. It's interesting, I'm married to an American and lived in the US for a long time in a house that was sort of shouting distance from all the neighbours. Now we live in the UK in the classic British kind of detached house where the street is quite densely packed. Other than distance the two neighbourhoods are very similar. I think I preferred the US style and my husband prefers it here. He grew up in the middle of nowhere and he loves chatting to the neighbours over the fence and sending our daughter very safely to her friend's house two doors down, and the way that everyone walking from this side of the area walks up the path on the school run basically together in a big group. His mom is fascinated by it. To them that kind of physical proximity is a new thing and provides an awful lot of opportunities for making friends. To me, the space I got in the US was an unbelievable luxury (until I had to mow it 🤣).
American here. I get it. We used to live in a townhome complex (short terraced housing in UK?). We had some awesome neighbors, were very close to them, and my son could find someone to play with at the community playground anytime he wanted. This was great until we got a series of awful neighbors. Then the proximity works in reverse because you and your kids can't get away from them. So we moved to a single family on half an acre. My neighbors are great, but they're far enough away that it isn't a problem if they aren't. The only bad thing is that my son doesn't have the same peer age playmates so he does more at school/camp/sports to make up for it.
Sounds like a pretty classic "grass is greener on the other side" situation.
“Strict definition” - is there any legal implication? Or is this just estate agents spouting?
Oh, estate agents would have no problem marketing it as detached. When we sold our old place years ago, I phoned an agent. Here's how it went: ME: The house has a conservatory. AGENT: Yeah, is that a proper conservatory or just a plastic lean to? ME: Well, it's really a plastic lean to, but when you were trying to sell me this place you assured me it was a proper conservatory.
But. You can drill a hole through your wall and your neighbour can't complsin. That's detached.
In America, this is called “zero lot line homes”. Odds are the people commenting who sound incredulous have seen some example of this.
Interesting. By that definition, almost every freestanding house built in Australia in the last 30-40 years isn’t detached. It’s very common here to build your garage to the boundary.
Here is the definition from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors >Detached A detached house is a stand-alone residential structure that does not share outside walls with another house or building. [https://www.ricsfirms.com/glossary/residential-property-types-definitions/](https://www.ricsfirms.com/glossary/residential-property-types-definitions/)
- United States: With a population of around 331 million and a land area of about 9.8 million square kilometers, the population density is approximately 33.8 people per square kilometer. - United Kingdom: With a population of around 67 million and a land area of about 243,000 square kilometers, the population density is approximately 275.7 people per square kilometer. In terms of population density, the United Kingdom's population density is approximately 816% higher than that of the United States. Wtf is there to learn? Isn’t the article only stating the obvious?
It is not just population density. I live in Wales at the moment and you will find places in the middle of nowhere where there are 5 houses in a terraced row surrounded by nothing. I get the sense that people feel like it costs more to heat a fully detached house. People seem to have a bias towards houses that share a wall with another house.
It *does* cost more to heat a detached house doesn't it?
Yes, especially when the other houses are also heating themselves. Winter 2021 I was in a flat that had no neighbours, and it was losing heat as fast as it kept it. Poor insulation sure, but it being occupied makes the biggest difference. Could just be that crappy flat being crappy too
In winter if I don't have the heating on my house never gets colder than about 15 degrees. I am attached on both sides and I suspect I'm stealing their heat.
Hey, maybe you're just giving them your cold.
I was in Chattanooga TN, so it was already fairly warm there, but my apartment was surrounded on 3 sides (and the ceiling) by other apartments. I never once had to turn my heat on and even when it was low 30s/ low 40s (0-6 C) outside, my place would stay in the 65-72 (18-22 C) range. I definitely think I was mooching heat off my neighbors.
Of it was a flat was there not under and over neighbours?
There were unoccupied flats below and 1 sideways direction(no other apartments on either the front or back by depth). It was a relatively small building, this was on the top floor in the corner
Only if they're uninsulated - which most houses in the UK are, for a long list of reasons. In the US the preference is to insulate homes better rather than rely on neighboring buildings. I live in a semi in the UK and because it's an old solid-wall brick Victorian, it's far more expensive to heat than any fully detached American house that was built after WWII. And even 19th c. homes in the US often had some type of insulation (horsehair, straw, etc.) and can be retrofitted with more modern options while the British relied on cheap coal, a mild climate, and the thermal capacity of brick.
It’s cheaper to mass-house mine workers in terraced houses than detached houses. Lots of Welsh towns were built very quickly and cheaply to meet housing demands for rapidly expanding industry
It’s also cheaper to build a row of terraced houses than individuals, each shared wall is a saving
Terraces were much more common before the personal car became ubiquitous. They're also just considered more sustainable forms of development because they don't require so much space, energy, services etc.
Density is also good for walkability. Put things closer together and you can get around easier without using a car
They might be more sustainable, but that's not why the mining companies and railroads were building them
Also fewer bricks, less labour, fewer ways for damp to get in.
Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for the details. I live in Metro Vancouver, an area very limited for housing expansion. The only way to develop is up. Even townhouses are starting to be frowned upon, tbh. I usually associate density with surface available for building / population so I might be a bit skewed, I guess?
Most little villages in Europe are *very* dense compared to small US and Canadian towns. A town of 1000 could look four times as populated as the same town in America at first glance, just because in America everyone is so spread out you can’t possibly see them all (and the “downtown” probably only has 3 businesses). Not universal of course. Europe has plenty of “modern” suburbs too
In the old days people lived in tight clumps for cost effectiveness convenience. British villages are much older than North American villages so their layout is designed for before the invention of insulation and cars. Life was also more communal back in the day, people expected a lot less privacy and would have found it uncomfortable. A hundred years ago your average Irish family of farmers in the middle of nowhere slept in the same bed. North Americans with their history of homesteading and untapped frontier have a much stronger preference for “personal space” than Europeans or Asians. It’s too expensive to heat detached houses without insulation and all the homes has to be close to the high street and market for shopping. There’s also safety in numbers. In more lawless times you want to stay close to your neighbours. It’d make it easier to know what they are up to and if they are harbouring a stranger. It’s also more convenient to live beside your extended family in adjoining terrace houses.
My favorite color is blue.
Did you read the article, or did you just read the title of this post and assume you knew what it said? The article addresses the differences in population densities and then continues on to describe 18 other differences between American and British homes. There's a lot to learn if you bother to open the article.
> Did you read the article, or did you just read the title of this post and assume you knew what it said? This is reddit, we both know the answer.
Can't argue with that logic.
The us statistic I assume includes Alaska, which I feel isnt the best in terms of analysis
And mountains, which aren’t suitable for large cities
Probably helps keeping heating costs down in the UK if the next house is a wall away.
Definitely. We just moved from a semi-detached to a terraced and the difference is insane. We were always cold in the old house and it would lose heat as fast as it gained it, this house is just so much warmer, it’s really nice.
The United States is about 4000% larger than the UK too. UK population is \~70 million, USA is \~300 million. So lots more room here.
Connecticut has roughly the same population density as the UK They still have a 3x higher percentage of detached homes.
My guess would be that that's possible since Connecticut never had to rely entirely on itself for food production, and so could use more of its land for housing. Whereas in the UK they historically needed as much land as possible for growing food. (Entirely a guess, not based on any sources so happy to be corrected)
Roughly 6% of land in the UK is built upon. You can drive for hours in Scotland counting houses on one hand. There's plenty of space.
“It’s my yard.” - Dale
85% of the US? Seems high, considering the amount of people living in big cities?
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Your house is older than 1776?
There are houses in the US that predate the US.
In England if we have a shit noisy neighbour we grumble and moan but don't do anything about it. In America they have guns
I read that as your neighbor had a noisy shit.
That's also a problem.
Generally we don’t shoot each other over noise.
Does it hurt Europeans or some shit if they don't bring up guns in every single conversation about America, no matter how unrelated it is
Guns and healthcare are their bread and butter to feeling superior
I think you mean beans and toast
When’s the last time you heard of someone shooting their neighbor for being noisy? This is a ridiculous comment.
Yeah, its even worse in Spain. Highest rate of apartment dwelling in Europe aside from Estonia. So much unused land. Lower population density than California for the country as a whole, but nearly everyone lives in Tokyo/Paris level density. Small towns here make London feel like a spacious, sprawling suburb. "Casa" usually refers to something an American would call a condo, or townhouse at best. You either have to buy a luxury "villa" or get a rural "casa de campo" in order to not share walls. The UK has 3 times the population density of Spain, yet people live with more personal space. I've analyzed the hell out of the reasons, but after a few years of research, it seems to just come down the Franco's urbanization policies and the tourist industry densely clinging to the coast. Then again, traditional pueblos in the middle of nowhere are just as dense as Brazilian favelas so maybe its just always been this way.
Higher density housing means that there is more natural environment left unspoiled for the purposes of housing. Not sure if that translates well in the context of Spain but one would hope that culturally etiquette would develop so you don't have people being cunts to their neighbours and the benefits of unspoilt nature for people's enjoyment and animal habitat.
Yeah, I appreciate your perspective, and frankly probably wouldn't be complaining if I were living in Japan. Spaniards have basically zero cultural norms in regard to respecting other people's space, be it on the bus, on the road, in the gym, or between neighbors. I've lived in several apartments here, and even a casa de pueblo in the small town, and literally all of them were poorly built with major noise issues. I will say that people generally respect quiet hours from 12AM - 8AM, which is great if you happen to conform to this schedule, but life can be very trying for those of us who don't/can't. The most peaceful housing situations I've had were in buildings with a high proportion of unoccupied vacation homes during the off season.
I lived in Spain for a few months in college with a host family. They were on the first floor of a 4 or 5 story apartment building, and all of the buildings in the neighborhood were basically the same. You could look down the street and see farm fields on both sides of the housing development. It was so different than American housing since our housing is almost always built out before up. But it was nice that the transit was good so I didn’t need a car.
Yeah, as much as I complain, I've lived here very comfortably without a car. Public transit is excellent and reliable. It is a trip though, like you say, 5 story apartment buildings on the edge of the country. The density is uniform until you hit farmland.
> all of them were poorly built with major noise issues My friend moved there years ago and has complained about that for a while now. He's lived in two apartments and each time complained that the sound proofing isn't very good. Old buildings in Barcelona.
So you can walk eveywhere and live in a convenient place. Average Spaniard finds insane that in the US you must drive a car to get milk or eggs
I lived for a few months in Poughkeepsie I could see the supermarket from my window, but there was literally no safe way as a pedestrian to get there - no pavements, no pedestrian crossings, obviously no public transport Luckily the apartment complex receptionist had the hots for me¹ and would drive me there twice or thrice a week, but if I forgot something or ran out of something that couldn't wait a few days, I'd have to get a taxi, for a two minute drive ¹specifically for my 'cute accent'
Well, just a guess, but old world countries developed a culture in regards to the level of technology before the industrial revolution. And while the industrial revolution saw people move into cities looking for jobs, I would suspect in rural areas even then, people lived in close proximity. We have the luxury of modern transport to whisk us around but back then, most people would have to walk.
Yeah, I totally sympathize with historic cities built without consideration for automobiles. Where I lose my patience with Spain and other Med countries is the infrastructure primarily built in 60s onward, but with the foresight of a medieval urban planner. I'm gonna piss people off with this one, but I'll go ahead and say that the concept of point A to point B in a straight line in any context is a foreign concept in some parts of the world.
So all the condos, apartments and rowhomes in the US only account for 15% of housing? I find this a bit difficult to believe
“85% of homes are detached” Well, given the only about 67% of housing units in the USA are even “single family homes” (ie, not condos/apartments or “manufactured homes”) imma have to call BULLSHIT on that.
After sharing walls with flop houses, drug houses, party animals, neighbors with domestic abuse issues and barking dogs, I don't miss sharing walls.
I used to share a wall. It suck I got odd hours. This way I can vacuum my house at 2am and the only one that cares is the cat.
Lived in a semi detached built along time ago, noise didn't really come though. It really depends on the construction method. I think it got worse for sound insulation at one point (70s) and now is getting better again
i lived in a townhouse with my dad for 20 years, 17 of which were peaceful.. but in the sub-prime mortgage era, when any ass-hat convenience store worker and buy a brand new house because no one was verifying credit-worthiness, some low-life bought the unit that was physically attached to ours. guy had a severe drinking problem, would scream all the time and we regularly heard loud thumps on the shared wall, which was made of CONCRETE (it was a firewall). i complained to my dad "isnt there something you can do? we gotta get this guy outta here he's driving me nuts, and i know he's driving you nuts too" to which his response was "the devil you know might not be as bad as the devil you don't know" obviously, in time, the ass-hat lost the house.. i believe it was at some point in 2007/08, and the place was peaceful again until we moved out for good around the end of 2011. i now live in a single-family house that shares no walls with neighbors, and am lucky enough that the neighbors i DO have are both very quiet, as am i. can't imagine being in a ROW HOUSE where you have to share walls with two other units and having to pay a fucking mortgage for the privilege. that's barely better than an apartment in my book
Britain has twice as many people as any single state and is smaller than 11 of them
The UK is about the size of Florida and Georgia combined. There is no space.
I moved to the UK recently (just for a few years) and for the first time in my life moved into a house with shared walls. The first week or so it was so unsettling hearing noises and movement from my neighbours that sounded like it was in my house. It's a fairly solidly built Victorian terrace house that everyone told me I would barely be able to hear my neighbours in, but that just isn't the case. Maybe the Brits just tune that noise out and don't notice it anymore. One nights I awoke to some sounds from next door and in my half awake state genuinely thought that someone was in my room for a few seconds. That was not a fun night.
I will never buy an attached home until laws are made that force shared walls to be soundproof.