A lot of buyers want a single-family home though. It kind of sucks to have neighbors on the other side of the walls and ceiling, especially if the construction didn't include really good soundproofing.
Townhouses can be as good as detached or even significantly better (due to no windows in between) if built "correctly" (good thick brick/concrete party wall in between both houses or can be awful just as you fear if they were built shoddily all at once with nothing but thin framed drywall. Buyers who only insist on detached due to noise would be well served to carefully consider rowhouses, but inspecting them closely for this.
Rowhouses are a really, really good sweet spot for affordable yet private as long as they have the good noise eliminating party wall, so I would support the government just mandating them being built this way (it doesn't cost that much more, but over time by driving out bad rowhouses, it would improve their reputation).
Rowhouses enable a density similar to apartment buildings while allowing privacy quiet, ownership of a yard and roof deck, the ability to tear down and build any way you like, and pretty much all the accoutrements of suburban living but just a little smaller. It's great to own the land under your feet and have no one below or above you.
This is especially true in the US where fire code make it practically impossible to build a 4 bedroom unit which families will want. (it is legal, but if you try to design one you discover the code forces a lot of space that you can't do anything useful with and so it isn't possible)
I've been wondering why we don't see many 4-bedroom, house-sized (~2000sqft+) apartment units. It seems to me that many who balk at attached units do so because of space concerns more than proximity. Can you give more details on this?
There have to be two stairways in every apartment buileing. That in turn forces a hall down the middle. Every bedroom needs to have a window. Both of the above are written in the blood of those who died in fires.
the result of the above is four bedroom apartments have too much space with no purpose. Try to draw any apartment and you will quickly see.
> There have to be two stairways in every apartment buileing.
Since you're talking about this you probably know this already, but Europe largely does not follow this rule, and doesn't really suffer from horrible fires.
Oh, okay. I thought it would be something more esoteric. Youtuber About Here has done a few videos mentioning the two-stairway rule, but he explains it as being mostly a barrier to multi-story multi-family buildings being built on SFH-sized lots. In any case, he posits that fire mitigation strategies developed since the code came into effect (mandated sprinkler systems, fire breaks, etc.) make it unnecessary. There's also the notion that fire escape infrastructure doesn't need to be a whole other stairwell. It's one thing I hope to see change in the future.
Meh. Often dark, so many stairs, the ones that take advantage of verticality often don't do so to increase unit count, but unit size (and price) instead. Though, I guess what I'm thinking of is essentially horizontal townhouses. Something cool would be 4-6 story buildings with units that have command of at least 3 exterior walls, and a portion of each unit that's over the neighbor, under the neighbor, and a full 2 stories.
You get used to the stairs. They're good for you. That little extra workout everyday increases the floor of how lazy your lazy days can be. Huge cardiovascular benefit, especially for the laziest.
Mine isn't dark. Pick good ones. "X is bad because the bad Xs are bad" is not an argument. Demand good Xs then.
Horizontal suffers from (1) far less freedom. You can never tear your house down and build a different one. You can't build an addition in your yard. You can't build on an extra story or turn your roof into a balcony (2) Far harder to abate noise
Stairs: it's not just going up and down them (with groceries, furniture, if you forgot something in another room). It's the space they take up. You're rationalizing.
Most are dark. It's a simple matter of the design, if you're not an end unit. If units are to be a solution to housing issues, someone has to live in the "bad" ones. If you're making new units, might as as well build ones without townhouses' weaknesses.
You can't tear down a single townhouse, they're structurally-reliant on their neighbors; you can't build on extra stories, that's also a structural issue and might break HOA rules. These hypothetical horizontal units can have yard space. Noise abatement is the same.
You're ignoring the main issue: getting people out of SFH, because they take up too much space. The point is to keep as many aspects of SFH as possible. SFH have access to light from at least 3 sides, so you have to have that. They tend to have only 2 flights of stairs for ~2000 sqft units; having 3 or more is often a dealbreaker. However, many SFH have detached garages; detached storage/private yard space is probably fine. So, I think this is a solution. If townhomes were the correct answer, they'd be more successful, and not just what people are settling for because they can't afford SFH.
The question is, can we, as a country, afford "a lot of buyers" wanting a single-family home, as far as construction costs, infrastructure costs, replacements costs, transportation costs, etc. go? A lot (most?) of suburban sprawl was financed. A lot (most?) of it reaches varying degrees of insolvency over time. Maybe it's a luxury we can only afford if we cut back in other areas. Maybe a lot of the deficiencies we see in society are caused in part by how much money we shovel into the expensive version of this basic need that was chose.
I think something is seriously wrong if "we as a country" is a relevant unit of analysis w/r/t specific individuals and organizations making specific decisions in relation to local contexts.
Whether the construction costs, infrastructure costs, financing costs, etc. are affordable and worth paying is a matter that properly should only be answered by the specific individuals and organizations involved, with aggregated metrics only being relevant to analyzing results. If considerations involving those costs are directly involving people outside the local context, something is seriously broken.
All of these costs should ultimately be the responsibility of the home buyer, directly or indirectly.
Nope. We are a society by virtue of the specific relationships we negotiate with each other as individuals, at all levels of formality and scale. We don't "live in" a society construed as some separate entity.
And there is no meaningful social context that encompasses everyone, everywhere without regard for the specifics of their individual circumstances. Trying to approach complex social questions by using a Katamari-Damacy-style blob of everything rolled together as your unit of analysis is a sure-fire way of making those questions incomprehensible and intractable.
Will note that while not an issue as much today, any 'old timer' might remember that you generally couldn't 'blast the stereo' (when mom and dad left the house) unless you were in a single family home.
