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Comment by J_Shelby_J | Hacker News Reader

I live in a modern mid-rise in Dallas.

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.

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The problem is that while the shape of single-family home suburbs are meticulously controlled (e.g. minimum width between each house, minimum width from the street to your home), the world of apartments are conversely very lightly regulated. California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard. I live in a multi-family unit where the HOA meticulously controls R-value of the units and puts up a huge process/review phase when changing any flooring material, but the end result is that unless kids are screaming at the top of their lungs we hear nothing. We've held karaoke parties past midnight and our neighbors have heard nothing (we've asked.)

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.

> California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard.

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.

Renters are generally much less likely to vote and so their issues get less attention.

I think this is very similar to how city council members generally never ride bicycles, so they don't care about bike-safety issues.

Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.

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.

A lot of units use 1/2 inch or in many cases less. Upgrading to 5/8" makes a big difference, and installing another 1/2" on top of that gives impressive noise dampening via additional mass. As does fiberglass insulation, and filling gaps around the edges. If you don't have to meet firewall code for certain walls, you can go a lot thinner and noise reduction goes down dramatically. We had an apartment that was converted from condos and noise dampening was significant. Noise was a major consideration (closely after neighborhood) when doing selection.

There's often not much insulation requirement between units because the entire building envelope is what carries the main insulation, so it's builder's choice if they want to noise insulate above and beyond the firewall requirements.

The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.

Just a tip for anyone dealing with noise in a multi-tenant situation. Get yourself a white noise machine. It's a life changer. I thought I was going to murder my neighbor with his own leaf blower until I got it.

I find that a thunderstorm soundtrack hides external noise better than white noise. It also seems psychologically more relaxing, but YMMV

I just discovered the white noise generator in iOS/macOS. It's in Accessibility settings under Audio Visual. It's been a gamechanger for me.

I envy anyone this works for. For me, white noise is just even more noise.

The most important thing is that it be 'non looping'. I hated white noise until I ponied up for a machine that generated non looping white noise. My mind would automatically latch on to any repetition.

I viewed an apartment recently that had quadruple pane windows! The aparment faced a noisy freeway. They worked quite well.

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