I'm okay with these high rises so I can enjoy the quiet tranquility of rural Spain. Everytime we do stay in an apartment in Spain the lack of sound proofing really stands out. Perhaps even more so because everything is tiled, no carpets.
It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.
Point being that it depends.
Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.
Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.
Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.
In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.
Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.
I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.
The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.
My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.
It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.
One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.
I recently walked about 20 miles back in SF again. It was comparatively pleasant. Road traffic was slower. The materials they use to make the roads reflect less of the sound than here in Nevada. I wasn’t triggered by vehicles or traffic or trucks. I stayed in the Panhandle and could sleep with the bedroom window open.
There’s a way to make heaven or hell in both cities and rural areas.
- They didn't opt for the place, someone else in their family did
- This is where the jobs were
- What matters to them changed over time
- The place changed over time
- A lot of things matter to them, this is just one, and the place delivers on the others
- When they were looking for a place, this was what was available
- etc.
It's a real shame this bias exists in Ireland it really does little to help the housing crisis or the egregious amount of one off housing in rural Ireland does little to help infrastructure connections.
This really poisoned the well in Ireland towards apartment living.
I had one set of neighbors who fell into this range for about a year. I suspect their place was sparse, I could even hear them push their chair out from dining table. I felt happy when they moved out!
What an expression. I love that
Shitty construction hurts.
I have lived/stayed in places in the middle of dense urban areas where you essentially never hear anything (occasionally sirens if the windows are open, that sort of thing), and others where you can tell when your neighbor is stirring tea.
One of the factors is cost, yes, but also age of the building and materials/techniques matter. I suppose it also matters if any of your neighbors are 23 and like powerful stereos - but that holds pretty much anywhere that isn't very rural.
Oh, and in dense urban/busy areas, height matters too. Living on the first 5 floors is far different than say 15+, in terms of how much street noise etc. you will hear with an open window (or even without).
Edit: we lived in two flats for a total of nearly 25 years!
I also suffer from this problem. Is there a name for this?
but in Spain it's as if the buildings are built with zero soundproofing - you hear every single neighbor in the whole building and their tvs, radios, conversations, footsteps... it's maddening, I don't understand it
Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.
Living there you kind of get used to it.
Other than that though...!
That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.
corrected for you :)
I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.
The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...
(I lived in Spain for two years.)
Totally. I think to them it represents and demonstrates liberation, freedom, fun, family and community. Loud means fun to them.
People complaining about noise are seen as serious party-poopers.
Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!
And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D
Definitely agree about Andalusia though
It's not the same having to live in a small town in Castile of <2000 people vs doing that the literal capital of Spain.
Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.
Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.
Is true that Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands care less about proper insulation. The north and center is different.
Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it.
It just happens that big cities, sport events, drinking areas and heavy traffic streets are noisy places. Here and in Australia. If you go where the drunkards join; expect to meet a lot of drunkards. But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.
I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.
In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.
In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.
I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.
But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.
The noise is coming in through the holes made to put plumbing - especially district heating.
In my current apartment the owner wanted to conceal the piping, so he hid it behind an enclosure made out of plaster with a service hatch.
The whole thing is currently a resonance chamber that lets me follow my dowstairs neighbour's conversations.
I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.
Costs less to build, sells for the same money, more profit made.
Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.
I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.
Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.
I don’t mind visiting cities, but I certainly would never live in one.
Cars are loud.[0]
I live in Malmö on the southern edge of Sweden opposite Copenhagen, it's quieter here (pop: 350,000~) than my friends home village in Northamptonshire (Thrapston; pop: 6,239 as of 2011).
This was largely because of the sheer volume of cars on the road, because you essentially have to drive to get anywhere. London is similar, despite not everyone needing a car there is traffic everywhere, you can notice that there's back streets and they tend to be very quiet until there are lots and lots of people, think >200 in a 100sqm area.
Having the ability to escape noise is the most important part of noise management. Cities like London have almost no respite from the noise and thus it can be physically draining for many people to experience it. Including myself.
I lived in a downtown area in a high-rise. 2am in the morning, no cars running but the hummming of all the equipment necessary to operate a city is noise pollution.
Next, light pollution.
Wheels rolling are loud. Also motorbikes. Combustion engines are even louder, and they are also put on bikes.
Disillusioned young pedal-metalling in residential neighborhoods are the f*king worst.
Unfortunately just bought a house in a rush hour high noise area. wife loved in the house, I loved the visible sky, and we both loved the yard/garden. we saw it on a Sunday (very quiet day. :) Now I have a hard time being outside or taking my scope out for observing.
Waiting for a stroke or kidney failure from the high BP.
It is like people who complain about public teansports who are usually the ones actively participating in ruining it for everyone.
Nope, nothing was wrong. That's just how they talk to each other in Spanish. Weird. It also never occurred to me why I didn't notice until whatever age I was, a teenager in high school. It never really occurred to me that they were always 'yelling' while talking to each other until that moment.
There is the possibility that they really were upset and yelling, but my mother didn't often keep things from me (at least not as far as I know). I also noticed the yelling afterwards, so I'm confident that was me simply realizing that's how they talked after years of not noticing.
Unlike North American condos, in France they own their windows and can replace them.
They also built out a “frame” to install noise insulation on top of the shared walls, losing a bit of interior space (and a huge free bonus to the neighbours). Can’t remember if they did the ceiling too.
Unfortunately, no flooring standards are an issue. In my Canadian condo, if you redo the floors, there’s some noise insulating requirement for your choice of flooring as it’s against concrete.
Perhaps row houses are best? Good density, and with a solid concrete wall seperating units to stop sound and fire from spreading?