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Repeating my post from below:

I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.

Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.

I think you're getting downvoted here or at least misunderstood because in America, suburban apartments are usually very nice in their own regard. So people don't see them as downgrades unless you actually need the space of a full house (eg. For raising a family)

There is also a cultural difference. While at Oxford, the family that I stayed with had a garden. British people love their gardens. It wasn't much of a garden, but it was in Oxford, and it was their little piece of barely green soil.

Americans have their land of course. I have my own equivalent garden. The difference is scarcity. I can travel a continent and still buy a garden relatively cheap. The UK? Not so much.

>It wasn't much of a garden, but it was in Oxford, and it was their little piece of barely green soil.

I'm not sure about this "barely green" thing. Haven't been to Oxford, but I've visited Cambridge, and the gardens there are magnificently green.

Green is relative. Florida has much more greenery that Oxford. Plus, these owners ran a house of protection for Africans that survived their village being slaughtered. They had a bit more pressing things to worry about than making a great garden.

Possibly.

I think the misunderstanding comes from making a comparison that I obviously haven't attempted to, and that no reasonable person would (basically, a strawman).

I can't see how a suburban apartment can be as nice as a suburban house unless you're making a cost argument.

Yes, perhaps an apartment at price X is better than a house at price X. (Perhaps at price X a house doesn't even exist).

The point is that someone who already owns a decent home doesn't have to make that decision, and that describes huge swathes of the city. The financial decision is for newcomers who are attempting to push these people out (or push them in to inferior conditions).

If you have a 4 bedroom semi in Zone 4 London then I cannot see an equivalent apartment. It doesn't even make sense to me. No apartment block on the same street could be nicer.

Only if you compared it with, say, some skyscraper in the City does it make sense to even talk about it, and that's a complete lifestyle change.

As he said, some suburban appartments in the US look more like hotels (and $500/month HOA on top of your rent).

In the UK (and most of Europe) the suburban apartment is most akin to a concrete box.

Saying it’s suburban housing, or detached homes is a pure straw man argument as people can move from a suburban home to an apartment in the city very easily.

If you can sell a house, move to an apartment and net X00,000 $ that’s very attractive. So price difference are really part of the equation.

Also, people might prefer a detached home for ~30 years when having kids, but their is a constant stream of people exiting that life stage. How and where to downsize is a real question people deal with daily.

This depends entirely on the city and culture. A lot of European cities don't follow the modern you describe at all.

If I decide to buy a place, my preference would be a small, functional, well lit, very well designed place in a dense urban center with good public transit.

>24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages.

Sounds like the most insignificant of concerns.

>A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry.

A community of people that rarely interact the way neighbors in nearby homes do.

>There will tend to be more options for healthy foods

Assuming these people regularly eat outside, which automatically lowers the health factor of their food compared to home cooked.

It's completely unsupported to say that people in apartments socialize less than people in houses, and likely opposite the truth. Neigbors pas each other constantly, and can visit easily regardless of weather. Children have more peers to play with.

Cities have more options for groceries and grocery delivery.

>It's completely unsupported to say that people in apartments socialize less than people in houses, and likely opposite the truth.

I've never seen apartment residents socialize more than suburban neighbors anywhere I lived or visited.

I don't have numbers, but the isolation of apartment living in cities is a common trope in movies and literature, and a constant complaint of people moving to cities or going away from them.

I've never understood this complaint. Do these people not have hobbies? Just use Google and Facebook and you'll find a group or ten of kindred spirits to join.

They also have jobs and families and city commutes and other such stuff. It's also easy to see someone with a common interest during some 1-2 hour weekly session, and only that.

In the end, the closed door few common areas of apartment buildings (not talking about expensive condos with shared pools and stuff), means people see each other and interact less than some neighbors in a rural/suburban neighborhood.

> > 24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages.

> Sounds like the most insignificant of concerns.

If you're away from home any significant portion of the time, this can be really useful. An Amazon Prime membership, for instance, becomes less useful if 1) you don't know that you're going to be home at a certain time every single day and 2) your packages are likely to disappear if you don't collect them in a timely manner.

I completely agreed with you until I had kids and then the opposite was true. I don’t think either option is good or bad- just different trade offs.

I grew up in a sort of building style you don't see in America. High rise flats built around a courtyard/park. Lots of room for kids to play in, lots of built-in friends of all ages groups for the kids, flats big enough for families (shared rooms for younger kids is fine). Honestly, if those existed in America I could think of nothing better to raise children in.

The did/do exist as "projects", and developed a horrible reputation in the US for other reasons and there was a backlash against them.

Interesting, so that style was practised mostly in social housing projects? I could see how that could lead to problems especially with drug crime and guns and whatnot. About the worst thing that ever happened where I grew up was a foul on the basketball court.

Yes I believe housing projects were the first/main use of that style here. I know I have an instinctive negative reaction to them (mainly though from TV shows focusing on the horrors of projects).

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing. I live in America too, now, but I haven’t ever actually seen the projects and the ones in The Wire aren’t quite what I was thinking of. Those look ugly and run down.

The most famous implementation of the social housing "towers in the park" model - the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago - has been torn down. One of the many problems with the project was (in my opinion) that the tower:park proportions were way off, giving the complex an inhuman scale. I blame the influence of Le Corbusier, who does not seem to have ever met a human aesthetic instinct he did not try to subvert.

The mid-rise courtyard+playground styles I see in central and northern Europe today, on the other hand, are pretty much ideal for family life. Just enough density to support a walkable daily life with lots of serendipitous social encounters, eyes on the street, a view on the kids playing with enough proximity to intervene if something goes wrong, and the opportunity for first-floor private garden space and aesthetic personalization throughout.

You can blame the architect if you want, the aesthetic was certainly...austere. But I find a different argument far more compelling. The city politicians knew exactly what they were doing in housing large swaths of the urban poor in a small section of the city.

Not only that they used those projects as a way to punish independent political adversaries in the city government. Everyone who originally conceived of the programs tried to build mixed density communities spread throughout the city that were only partially social housing, but racism & power politics prevented that.

Then the city doubled down & didn’t provide services appropriate for the number of people now densely packed in one place.

The book “Blueprint for Disaster” outlines the history of this very well.

Agree. I certainly don't think the architecture was the primary cause of the dysfunction at RTH, but rather a visible symptom of Chicago's ill-considered, politicized, and often malevolent housing policy.

> A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you

Societywide, that's a huge bug, not a feature, but suburbs have the same problem, and cities mitigate it by having all classes cllose together in public.