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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. If you do that - it doesn't matter what the source of heating, energy etc. is, and what kind of a car (if any) you drive. Even if it's all coal and fossil-fuel powered - you are order of magnitude more sustainable than people living in suburbs with solar panels, heat pumps and Teslas simply because you waste so much less energy on building and transporting stuff to make living there possible.

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I guess you watch Adam Something, this line is something he repeats a lot and I agree with most of it but as someone who grew up in maisonette block housing (like this https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/44549465930/in/faves-c...), it is not nearly as nice as living in your own house (even a terraced house).

You are at the mercy of your neighbours, shit neighbours, shit time.

It's not a bad thing to make compromises. Yes flats are more energy efficient than detached houses, it's also a less pleasant experience unless you get lucky.

living in a miserable shithole (which is what commie block housing was for me) isn't the future I want

It's a simple trade-off.

Like waiting for luggage in an airport.

Would it be nice to take a step forward and be closer to your luggage and have a better view, yes it would.

Would it be nice if everyone took a step forward. No, it would suck for everyone and be worse overall.

The fact that people can still say "yeah, but if just I do it, then I'd get all the benefits, so it's a good idea" is a failure of our civilization.

I do not fly, I grow food for myself and my community in an allotment, I cycle 95% of my journeys, I am a vegetarian. I believe that I make a better effort than most at reducing my impact on the world.

Apparently this is just not good enough for people like you, I must also consign myself to the misery of living in cramped housing surrounded by inconsiderate arseholes.

It would be easy to take the same whiny tone about cycling, "why do I need to risk my life and get splashed by rainwater etc. when I could just buy a car and drive in comfort" and the answer would be the same, because the more people who cycle, or live in dense, well designed neighbourhoods, the better off we all are. It's something we should encourage, support and build for.

Publicly declaring that cycling was only for poor, suicidal, idiots would not be helpful.

I don't suggest anyone should be forced to cycle or grow their own food, or live in any particular building, but as a society there's a whole bunch of things that we can encourage that make the lives we lead better, even if on an individual basis, it would be considered an imposition.

“A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under which they will never sit.” -Greek Proverb

> It would be easy to take the same whiny tone about cycling

The tone isn't whining, it's indignation.

> Publicly declaring that cycling was only for poor, suicidal, idiots would not be helpful.

Show me where I say that living in a flat is for poor, suicidal idiots.

Yours is the attitude that supports euthanasia, not mine. Yours is the one of nihilism and pessimism of the future of the world.

Stop telling people how to live. Live that way if you want, convince other people it's good, but you cannot bully me into living that way.

Prove to me that you put less of an impact on this world than I do, I seriously doubt that you can.

> I must also consign myself to the misery of living in cramped housing surrounded by inconsiderate arseholes.

Here's a comment from a different reply I made (which you have definitely read and choose to ignore):

> I think living in a flat is great if that's your thing, it's definitely cheaper to heat! But the argument always seems to be this sort of dogmatic "do this if unless you're a shithead who hates the planet" and I just don't think that it's true for everyone, or a healthy approach to enjoying what limited time we have alive.

I'm logging out of HN now, there's only so much disingenuous chat I can take and your comments appear to be that of a wind up than real debate. Take it easy.

> even a terraced house

As someone who has only ever lived in apartments - how is terraced house better, is it because there is no one above you (never heard of the term, but that's what i inferred from googling)?

I live in a terraced house. I own the land on which it is built, I have a tiny garden to the front and a less tiny garden to the rear. No one charges me a maintenance fee. I am free to shop around for energy providers or even change how energy is provided to my house completely by installing solar panels etc. I have free use of my loft, to the extent I could create further living space there if desired. Etc.

None of the above would be true if I owned an apartment.

It's more than your direct neighbours. In a flat/apartment/commie-block everyone is closer together.

In a terraced house there's nobody above you, there's nobody below. There is no echoey hallway with relentless pounding of boots, neighbours across the hall with large soundsystems.

Of course you can still have bad neighbours in terraced housing street, but it requires less luck, and you can knock around and ask about how it is to live in the area before you buy the house. Trying to do the same when buying a flat is much more difficult. It's doable but you're treated like a weirdo

I have a front and a back garden, my own dedicated place to park my car. The rooms that directly join my neighbours house are the staircase and the master bedroom, so places people are usually quiet, the living areas then have a barrier that helps to minimise noise. Compare this to my mate who lives in a flat and his living room backs onto their neighbours bedroom, and vice-versa.

Flats don't have to be designed badly, but in my experience they usually do not prioritise mitigating noise pollution.

I think living in a flat is great if that's your thing, it's definitely cheaper to heat! But the argument always seems to be this sort of dogmatic "do this if unless you're a shithead who hates the planet" and I just don't think that it's true for everyone, or a healthy approach to enjoying what limited time we have alive.

> I think living in a flat is great if that's your thing, it's definitely cheaper to heat!

Nothing else is a realistic option 'round here unless I want to live in a village (which doesn't necessarily mean far away, maybe 20 minute ride by car to the city, but there isn't much there and your first neighbour might well keep animals). Barely anyone I know lives in a house.

> it's definitely cheaper to heat!

There is nothing cheap about heating heating here, lol. Fortunately, it's not that cold most of the year. But no one heats their homes properly, so you are still leaking heat in all directions even in an apartment.

> But the argument always seems to be this sort of dogmatic "do this if unless you're a shithead who hates the planet" and I just don't think that it's true for everyone, or a healthy approach to enjoying what limited time we have alive.

I don't pretend to do it "for the planet" (and would gladly live in a house), but that's a valid argument, if a little hyperbolic. I don't think it makes anyone a bad person but that doesn't lessen negative effects. Especially the effect of housing scarcity - you've basically taken entire column of Earth for yourself in a (presumably) desirable location, where that same column could have housed 20x people if it was a highrise.

Failure of civilisation here is not having sound-proof apartments. If I could play drums or blast karaoke at full volume in mine at 3 in the morning I couldn't care less that it was not a house.

It's not really a choice is it? Space is at a premium. Sixty percent of the world population lives in cities.

I live in a 70 square metre appartement and its large enough for me.

I lived half my life in a detached house in countryside in Poland, then I moved to several big cities and lived in modern and communist-era commie-blocks. There are positives and negatives. I don't have problems with neighbors, but then I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. My wife had some problems sleeping when neighbors had a party at night, but that's still a pretty minor and rare inconvenience. On the other hand everything we might need is a 15 minutes walk or less, we barely need to drive a car. The air quality is much better in the winter, you don't need to mow the lawn or shuffle the snow. I wouldn't want to go back.

No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude.

People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).

It's order of magnitude, easily.

For example - if you live in a commie-block - you don't need and often you don't have the option to own multiple cars per family. Often you don't own a car at all. Parking space is at premium and walking/public transport solves most of your transporting needs anyway.

So that's the difference between producing 1.75 cars per family vs let's say 0.75 in the city. And then driving let's say 5000 km per year vs let's say 30 000 km per year. And changing these cars every 3 years vs every 6 years.

Heating is another thing. Surface area of my block is maybe 4 times the surface area of a detached house. But it houses 16 times more people.

But that's nitpicking. The big thing is infrastructure.

How many km of roads, cables, pipes, etc do you need per 1 detached house vs 1 flat in a commie block? How much concrete and steel do you use for that? How much energy is spent building and maintaining that infrastructure over the years?

My 4-stories commie block houses 16 families in a plot that would be roughly equivalent to a plot where 1 detached house would stand in the countryside. And it's pretty low-density as far as city planning goes. You could easily make it much denser. There's a small park and a playground in that plot of land.

So that's ~1/16th the infrastructure to service the same number of people compared to the countryside. And building the infrastructure is cheap compared to maintaining it for decades. The real unsustainable part of suburbia is maintaining all the extra infrastructure that low population density housing requires.

If anything - 1 order of magnitude was an underestimate.

I‘m baffled that you in all seriousness think that it‘s a good idea to live like that. It‘s less resource consumption, ok (for now at least). What about all the downsides to humans? Constant noise. Being exposed to people all the time. Pollution (by that I mean trash on the streets)? What about the pandemic? People had serious mental health issues during that time, that lived in places like you describe, because their appartements were tiny and they weren‘t allowed to go out.

I don‘t know man, to me you describe a real dystopian future. Just because it‘s a solution, doesn‘t mean it‘s the best/right solution.

Sounds like you’ve never lived in a block of flats before. There’s nothing dystopian about apartment blocks.

For us theirs is no constant noise. The flats have excellent sounds insulation between them so you can’t hear neighbours, and height means there’s zero road noise, or noise from people outside. Our flat is substantially quieter than any detached house I’ve ever stayed in, except perhaps houses deep in the English countryside where there isn’t another human for miles.

There’s also very little pollution. High density house means high density tax revenue, so the local authority is substantially better funded than any rural authority, meaning our roads are clean and free of litter and rubbish, and in excellent mechanical condition because the local authority operates an aggressive maintenance schedule.

For space, we have miles of car free paths and parks, which can all be reach without crossing a main road. It’s substantially easier to walk our dog off lead here than it is in suburbia, where you’re stuck to tiny pavements and the constant fear of a speeding driver.

Every time I stay in the country side I feel trapped, unable to go anywhere without getting in car. I can’t just put a coat on, go outside, and just walk somewhere pleasant, get a coffee, sit in a park, walk along the river, do some quick shopping, or grab transit to visit a friend. Instead the countryside forces me get in a car to go anywhere, something I would rather not do, and certainly not something I consider freedom.

Fun fact - nights in the countryside were louder than in the city. Dogs are barking whenever anything moves near them and then for 15 minutes a wave of barking goes through the village.

Meanwhile in the cities if you don't happen to live near a big multi-lane road - it's basically silent.

Also - what kind of a city has trash on the streets?

> I don‘t know man, to me you describe a real dystopian future.

It's hilarious to hear that I and almost everyone I know have been living in a dystopia our whole lives.

I didn't follow the car replacement schedule line. Why would a suburbanite replace cars every three years vs six for a block dweller? Both of those seem extremely short to me.

If you don't use a car much you don't need to replace it as often?

Looking at heating: There are still (admittedly fewer each year) people heating with coal, often with district heating. This results in approx. 1kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of heat (with losses due to the distribution) (gas heating is 200g per kWh).

The german electric grid has a carbon intensity of approx. 500g per kWh. If you supplement this with a local solar installation that (let's just say) halves the carbon intensity and have a great heat pump setup with a COP of 5 it results in 50g per kWh. This means you can heat 20 times the amount of the worst-case commie-block dweller with coal district heating before it gets even. And even though commie blocks aren't bad, I'd expect modern houses to have much better insulation (at least in Germany) than original commie blocks (worst [reasonable] case, remember).

In cities there is generally less infrastructure per person, but even though there are less road, cable, pipe kms per person, the ones are bigger and/or more heavily used, needing more maintenance and more frequent replacements.

In Germany public infrastructure accounts for 800kg of CO2 per person, while heating and warm water account for 2.2t of CO2. Public infrastructure is important, but so large to matter so much (and remember, this includes things like public service and military that isn't effected by your living style).

Electricity consumption at 0.5t and food at 1.7t are not that different for urban vs rural areas. Other consumption at 3.4t is hard to classify.

Looking at the statistics in Germany (http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Ergebnis..., page 48) people living in metropolis drive roughly half as much as people living in very rural regions. This is significant, but hardly an order of magnitude. Just because you live in a metropolis doesn't mean you live in a commie block, but I find it hard to imagine it gets down 1/6th. Even people without a car (not only not owning one, but not having access to one) in a metropolis drive 1/7th of people in very rural areas (but commie blocks are certainly not without cars). So this is hardly an order of magnitude.

A car replacement rate of every 3 years also sounds very high to me (ignoring company cars, but that doesn't change in either case), I think 5-6 years at least is more likely for suburbs and maybe a bit higher for commie-block dwellers but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same.

This was only looking at CO2 (since it's easy to find numbers) and it's undoubtedly true that on average living in dense housing is more sustainable than suburban sprawl or even rural living. But an order of magnitude is huge and much harder to reach.

And since energy usage & emissions are heavily shaped by factors beyond "how dense do you live", it's harder to speak beyond the average. Someone living in the commie block that flies once a year from germany to new york and back produces more CO2 emissions from these two flights alone (~2.5t) than the average german with his mobility (~2.2t).

> The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas.

But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly. If the goal is to pack as many people as possible in high-rises, where's the fun in living?

What is the end goal? Pack 100 billion people in high rises? What for?

I'm sorry but just thanks but no thanks.

P.S: this email sent you over 2 Gbp/s fiber to the home, from a rural area, seaside, seaview , surrounded by vineyards and fields of vegetables, while there's smoke coming out of the chimney. You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink. No neighbors close by and yet the neighbors all know each others.

What's not sustainable is places which are producing neither food nor drink nor trees.

> But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly.

Is it though?

I grew up in the countryside, in a detached house in a middle class family. There were no kids my age nearby. My grandma (which was taking care of us after school) was overprotective and didn't let us go play outside. Which meant we sat in the living room for 3 hours waiting for our parents to go back home. There were 2 TV channels, no computer, no smartphone, no internet. I've read literally every book our village library had, including romance books.

Compare that to the childhood my cousins had in a medium-sized city. They had dozens of friends in 100 meter radius. They had a playground 50 meters from their home and they spent most of their free time playing with their friends outside cause it was safe and there were things to do. My step sister was doing historical reenactment, my step brother was making RC planes in a nearby club. The only pastime people were doing outside in my village was drinking cheap wine on a bus-stop or fishing. Sorry, we had a basketball field as well. Until it was destroyed to make space for a new church parking.

What I did in free time was reading books and eventually programming once I got a computer.

When we all went to a middle school to the big city - they had public transport going every 30 minutes to her home. I had 1.5 hour between waking up and arriving at school which means I was waking up before 06:00. It was still dark most of the year. When I was going back it was already dark again half of the year. So no point going outside. Unless you like walking through a village where everybody sits inside and it's dark and dogs are barking at you from behind the fences. So relaxing.

BTW the last bus back was around 20:30, which means no middle school parties for us.

When I went to the university I started living in the big city and that's when my social life started. I could actually do things with people my age besides taking classes.

I returned after university for a short period. I commuted again for about half a year. I had almost no free time if you discount the commute. Wake up, it's dark, go to work, work, go back, it's dark again. Go to sleep or do sth in your house. Talk about soul-crushing.

I went back to the city and bought a flat there. I changed a job a few times, moved to another city then went back. All that time I never had to commute longer than 30 minutes one way. And most of that time I commuted by walking for 20 minutes through a park.

Now I work remotely, so I guess I could do that from the countryside. But still, I prefer living in a block cause it's much less dumb maintenance work. I haven't had to shuffle coal for over a decade. Or snow. Or to rake leaves. Instead I walk about 7 km per day for the last 2 years to keep in shape and listen to audiobooks and podcasts.

And BTW this is how the ugly soul-crushing commie-blocks look like:

https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/23/f5/5ed8b60e6c25b_o_la...

https://www.lut.esn.pl/sites/default/files/filaretow-wawoz08...

> You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink.

That place is perfectly fine without people like us. In fact suburbanization is interfering with agriculture there.

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