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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the obvious solution be to make the apartments airtight, so as to avoid everything from smoke to cooking smells to whatever bothering your neighbors?

Isn't second-hand (passive smoking) shown to not increase cancer[0]? Really trying to understand this "we don't like something so we will ban it for everyone!" thing.

Isn't your home supposed to be sacred? Sovereign? Aren't the YIMBY people always telling me that apartments are just as good as Single Family Homes and only people who hate the planet want to live in SFH?

[0]: No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/105/24/1844/2517805

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Making apartments airtight has other serious disadvantages: CO2 builds up and literally makes you worse at thinking; diseases spread more easily; air quality plummets due to VOCs. Humans need fresh air.

And it's not as easy to make an actually impermeable apartment as you'd think it is. Pretty much every material we build with allows some amount of air and particles to pass through.

> Isn't second-hand (passive smoking) shown to not increase cancer[0]?

That study takes one position on secondhand smoke and lung cancer, but lots of other studies have found that it does cause serious health problems, including but not limited to lung cancer: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/health.html

I would assume the cost of making all existing apartments that well insulated (and actively ventilated to compensate), not just from the outside but from each other, is prohibitive. Raising standards for new construction sounds nice from a QoL and energy efficiency standpoint, but I’m not sure if the upfront costs or technical feasibility are there.

And from your link - “Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer”. I think that’s still more than enough to make one person’s smoke their (wall-sharing) neighbor’s business.

That article reads a lot like a press release. It also includes things like:

> The only category of exposure that showed a trend toward increased risk was living in the same house with a smoker for 30 years or more. In that group, the hazard ratio for developing lung cancer was 1.61, but the confidence interval included 1.00, making the finding of only borderline statistical significance.

"Well, it could cause a 61% increase in cancer cases, but our error bars are so wide that there's really no way of knowing, so it's probably fine."

The obvious solution is to let people pick if they want to rent/buy in a smoking complex.

Presumably if this is so popular it has democratic assent, it would create a market advantage and through the free market most everyone gets what they want.

It appears what's happened is some people picked apartment complexes with no contract banning smoking, then had a sad face about their choice.

Ah yes, the invisible cigarette

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