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Comment by mtberatwork | Hacker News Reader

How 'modern' are we talking about? In the mid to late '00s I lived in a new, wood apartment building and the noise was unbearable. You could hear doors slamming from below and people walking around above you.

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GP poster lives in Switzerland. US construction quality is weak, and building code would be nice to have. It may come as a surprise to those who have never been to the States to see just how awful housing in America is, on the contrary, those in America who have never been to Europe will be surprised to see how nice a multifamily building can be when it's properly constructed.

This one is emblematic of US construction: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Lake-Whitney-Cliff-House-M...

What?? Surely you can come up with a better example than a house built on a collapsing cliff that was intentionally burned down.

Edit: your comment would be more helpful if it referenced improved construction techniques and materials that are commonly used in Europe that haven't been adopted in the US.

The point is that even at that price point it's still wood frame and sheetrock. It's just fancier finishings, but nothing like the anhydrite floor with soundproofing layer that decouples the floor from the rest of the building that someone further up had mentioned.

Spent a month last year in Spain and didn't see anything special about their construction. I'll resist making ludicrous generalizations though.

Spain is Spain. It's closer culturally to Romania than to Switzerland.

It depends a lot on where you are. Warm parts of the US will build houses with 2x4s and uninsulated interior walls+floors. In the northern US the exterior and even sometimes interior walls are 2x6 and have high quality insulation in the walls, floors and ceilings, plus nowadays there's quite a thick layer of foam on the outside. The extra strength and rigidity does a ton of work attenuating noise from other parts of the house, and the walls are much harder to transmit sound through.

The house was build in 2013, thickly isolated, following the Minergie P standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minergie

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