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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Noise is what turns me off from high rise residential buildings. When you watch the construction, many don’t event have concrete walls between apartments on the same floor, and I am ready to guess the concrete floors are as thin as required to keep the weight of the structure down. Add to that all-glass external walls, and I only heard stories from friends who live there that you hear everything your neighbours do, particularly walking on wooden floor.

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Call me crazy but when I rent a condo, I try google street maps and go back in history and if I am lucky I get to see the construction phase. That will give an idea about how thick the concrete and the overall structure is. Another way is to look at the balconies. The floor will be as thick as balconies. The walls are a hit or miss. But if you knock on them and press your ears you can get some idea. Apartments near to a garbage chute or elevator will be noisy if not properly soundproofed.

I feel like this is why we're on HN for :P

Where do you find the button for viewing the history of street view? Is it on the normal street view interface, or do you have to use an additional service/hackery?

Top left corner, the box with the address of the place you're looking at. Its bottom line is a clock icon and "Street View". Click on it and you get a slider with the available pictures. Place the slide on a date and click the thumbnail image to update the main view.

If there is no clock icon, there is no history for that location.

This sounds like utter nonsense.

I've lived in several high rises here in NYC and 99% of the difference in the quiet ones is not stuff that you'd see from street view.

Things like sound deadening underlayment and wall insulation, floorplans designed so that quieter rooms like a bedroom aren't next to louder ones like a living room.

I know HN is full of experts and their field but this is a stretch past stretches. No idea what kind if Rain Man engineer could tell you how quiet an apartment will be from street views.

The way you tell if a place is quiet is the reviews mostly. People like privacy, one of the easiest complaints to find is "feel like I hear everything my neighbors do"

That's a neat idea! Although the last three places I've lived have been over eighty years old. I guess when you get that far back in time, you can usually assume that the building is pretty darn solid.

I’ve lived in high-rise buildings in Seattle where the walls were effectively soundproof. Your neighbors could be as loud as they wanted to be and you never heard them. It took some heavy crashes on the floors above for you to hear the dull thud. Quality of construction matters a lot. Making apartment buildings highly insulated sound-wise is old science, not magic.

Soundproofing eats a lot into square metres. It's one of the biggest luxury in highrises.

Even dry walls can be made virtually sound proof. If you look at the pdf below (it's in German) on page 49, you can see that noise reduction of almost 80dB is possible. This is impressive. For reference, a very simple drywall has a noise reduction of roughly 45dB.

https://www.knauf.de/wmv/?id=1112 (link updated, thanks for pointing this out)

> file:///C:/Users/jansan/Downloads/metallstaenderwaende_w11_20_04_ger.pdf

I literally just now spent some time explaining to a colleague, why the file "does not open for me".

You pasted a path to a local file in your computer.

It happened like this: Clicked on the google search result, file opened in browser, blindly copied the link from address bar. Thanks and sorry.

Just in case you're still looking for the file - here it is on a public webserver: https://innenausbau-steiner.at/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/me...

Maybe it's a case of different construction standards in different countries?

In Australia, I used to have an apartment in Eureka Tower:

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

The windows there were double glazed (good for heat and noise insulation), and I guess the walls were fairly thick as noise from neighbours was never a problem.

The only significant problem, and specific to that building, was the designers massively underspec-ed the cooling. So on summer days (29C -> ~44C) the air conditioning throughout the whole tower was completely useless. Sweltering hot. :(

I don't think it's purely a location-based thing. Not that long ago, Australia 108 became Melbourne's tallest building after surpassing the Eureka Tower in height. The residents there complained of walls that creak and crack like what you'd hear in a ship (which the 432 Park residents are also complaining about).

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/residents-of-mel...

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/incorrect-constr...

Oh, that's interesting.

Somewhat related to that, when I was checking out apartments in the various CBD buildings, only the Eureka Tower ones seemed to have been built with any kind of quality or attention to detail.

Eg Surface finish of paint jobs was well done (even in non-obvious areas), gaps where surfaces join were consistent, and that kind of thing.

You could really tell it was done by people who gave a shit. Or at least, when looking at other places (Freshwater Place stands out), those ones were all clearly done by people who didn't. :/

So, the reports of problems due to potentially incorrect construction techniques in those buildings don't really surprise me.

Depends on the apartment and when it was built - you can do good or bad noise insulation.

Live in a condo and never hear anyone on my floor, and once a month maybe? Sorta hear someone above me. Windows closed I head nothing from outside

I live in Europe and decided to buy an apartment from a building that has been constructed in 1936. Brick walls are about 2ft thick, no issues with the neighbor noise. Still happy with my choice.

I think it's the same everywhere. Construction companies optimize everything to make more profit. Hundred years ago, at least here, apartment buildings were constructed mainly by people that had become wealthy. They directly hired builders and monitored the quality. Many times reserved the biggest apartment for themselves.

I live in America in an apartment building that was destined to become condos (in American terms, a purchasable apartment) just before the 2008 market crash. Due to the market crash and subsequent changes in mortgage requirements for condos, it became rentable apartments instead. It was built in 1913. It has brick walls that range from 2-3' thick, and I almost never hear my neighbors except through my front door. If I could own it, I would!

I completely agree. The very old buildings in Montreal are soundproof. But the new “optimized” condos coming up have thin concrete floors(the bare minimum code) and the common walls are also soundproofed to the bare minimum code I think STC 50 if I remember.

Concrete floors with multiple thin layers of foam embedded in the concrete end up stronger and lighter than concrete without foam, and are way better at sound insulation. The downside is it's logistically harder to arrange everything in the mould.

When someone figures out a process to do it without so much labor, it'll become standard practice, because it'll save concrete and weight.

Can’t know this by looking at it from the outside. A renter or even a buyer gets so little time to analyze what’s underneath the flooring or inside the common walls. I do not know if one can request the materials and blueprint of a condo before buying it.

Won't the foam deteriorate over time, possibly faster than the concrete ?

Yes, but it doesn't matter. The foam really acts as a spacer to convert a single block of concrete into two blocks separated by a few millimeters.

As soon as the concrete is set into place, the foam has done its job and can degrade all it likes.

Interesting! But what holds these blocks at the separation once the foam is no longer load bearing ? Some external bracing ?

Typically the foam is only in the middle of the concrete slab, so there are still a few inches of attachment all around all the edges with contact. There is rebar in those edges too.

Interesting, do that's how it works - thanks for the explanation! :)

Agreed, live on the 37th floor of a 45 floor building - it's not exactly high by these standards, but still decently high. Never hear side neighbours, every now and then I hear something quiet from upstairs.

I used to rent here, the owner was selling, so we bought it instead of moving.

The noise, the lack of ventilation design, and if it isn't "bomb" like use of the trash chute it's someone tossing a bag in that gets caught and blocks it.

They may as well be gilded jail cells. Worse, because everyone's stuck as a renter, there's inherently no true sense of community or consideration to neighbors.

The tower only has one apartment per floor, so at least that's one thing they don't need to worry about.

I don't know where your friends lived, but I've lived in quite a few high rises (most recently 3 in seattle, built 2015, '17, '19) and the thing that draws me back to them is how I can NEVER hear my neighbors. The '19 has an awful lot of street noise, but the 17 was so silent it was incredible (and has the biggest windows).

I think it's more typical for apartments.. I've only rented a concrete condo once (in Vancouver), and I distinctly remember getting out of the elevator and feeling like I just walked into a heavy metal concert, then getting into my unit next door to the source and hearing... nothing. It was pretty amazing. But the apartments at the same price point had no noise isolation.

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