Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.

This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!

The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.

Oh, I like SFHs too, but my new-build home in London was sound-proofed to the gills. I ran into the neighbours at the lifts one day and they apologized for their kids shrieking "they've been awful this weekend, I'm sorry". I hadn't heard a thing. I could hear the river boats and everything with my window open (faced the Thames) but I never heard a peep out of a neighbour.

American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.

You can’t soundproof open Windows. I lived in an insanely soundproof building. You could hear nothing if everyone had their windows closed.

I like fresh air. So did my neighbor with the shrieking parrot.

You could get some of that in a SFH too. It'll be quieter due to the distance though.

Of course. But having done multiple iterations of both, I will never, ever share walls again. With neighbors I can plant a hedge or close the facing windows. It’s not even close.

I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment.

A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.

Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.

I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing.

Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.

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