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Comment by Varriount | Hacker News Reader

This matches a number of the new apartment complexes in my area - no walking trails, amenities, or anything else accessible from the complex itself. Often you can't actually go to _anywhere_ from the complex, as the roads from it don't even have sidewalks.

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Another thing I've noticed is that older apartment complexes have more amenities than newer ones, albeit often unused / in disrepair.

New apartment complex? Maybe a pool. Co-located commercial gym if you're fancy.

Old apartment complex? Pool. Tennis and basketball courts. Rentable shared social pavilion. Parks and green space.

"but that's space we could be putting more apartments! who cares if they need a car to get anywhere, we rent more parking spaces that way." - apartment manager somewhere, probably

Flip the script a little if you really want to understand this. Play the role of a developer and go do some rudimentary math on what you can afford to build at what risk. Use ChatGPT to help you with the parts you don't understand.

There's no moustache twirling. Location is the number one thing people want. If amenities made the cut and could be done, they'd be done. But after parking minimums, setbacks, and massing requirements you lose a lot of sq. ft., every bit of which you need to make the money work.

Try it with a well-known locality since the laws for those are public enough to be scraped.

And yet the commercial property developers in my town (a state capital) are perennially among the richest people in the town, and are all best friends with the planning commissioners that supposedly oversee them (as in regularly on Facebook at social and school events and hanging out and vacationing together).

You make it sound like they're barely scraping by and so the reason there's no amenities is that the local planners give them no option but to use every square foot for "maximizing value".

I think they’ve got pretty big margins actually.

Its the opposite from the old/new developments I see.

Old apartment complex: A pool, a small gym, maybe some clubhouse one can rent. Maybe a dilapidated basketball court that last saw fresh paint in the 90s.

New apartment complex: A pool, a large gym, multiple clubhouse/lounge spaces, golf simulators, dog wash stations, dog parks/runs, multiple grilling/picnic areas, maybe even racquet ball courts, etc.

What city has racquet ball courts in new-build apartment complexes? I've only ever seen them in ~1980s builds.

I've seen them in DFW. I can't remember which complexes had them, but some built since post-2000 for sure and I thought post-2010 for a few.

I haven't been apartment hunting in a few years and so many new complexes go up around me all the time.

I could see it in DFW, both because it's a large indoor (air-conditioned) space and because of the surfeit of land to develop.

I'd definitely seen them disappear in denser, geo-limited cities.

Which is a shame... one of my favorite workouts! And a nice general-purpose court for other things too.

Depends where in the country, but in a huge number of places in the US we still have a housing shortage that's been occurring for decades now and extremely high costs. We need millions more units to catch up.

Yeah, so in my view, these sorts of developments became common in the 90s and 00s. The kids who grew up in them are going to have trouble socializing and not being lonely because to them, sitting at home all day is normal. They couldn't do anything else as kids. They had to remain inside. Unless mom or dad could drive them some place, they had no where to go.

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