Yeah these 5 over 1s really ruin the neighborhood character of my suburban strip mall state highway hell.
Leave them as derelict auto body warehouses tyvm.
I thought the idea of the post was the pictured buildings are far too small and we need much larger apartment buildings.
A desire for single-family homes (protecting suburb character) or no change (leave the warehouses) would be something else entirely.
Did I miss something?
The people who post this meme often do not want for-profit housing development of any kind.
I've seen these around my area. In theory, it's great: replace strip malls with medium/high density housing and walkable retail.
In practice, the units are always high-end condos or expensive apartments, with nothing but nation-wide franchise shops in the retail space. And they come with a colossal parking deck in the rear since you're likely car commuting at these prices. It's neither for local business, or to create a walkable community, or to help with affordable housing. If anything, it's purpose built to be attractive for people looking to downsize from a detached home.
Well, they’re building three in one go in my urban area. And they’re fucking up my neighborhood. The whole neighborhood is lower rise buildings and prewar apartment buildings, so they have character. And then they knocked down a grocery store to put up these three ungodly ass warts.
They did a bunch of them near where I used to live. The problem with these (and really all unplanned high density housing) is that while their intent is to create walkable communities (a great idea in itself), they ignore the reality that most people are going to commute to a job, and they create the nastiest traffic bottlenecks ever. They're not bad when they're located next to a major highway with preplanned egress/ingress, but many of these halfwit developers will plop them with an entrance exit on an already busy 4 lane road and wonder why everything is all wacko.
People who think you can solve the housing crisis without removing or greatly diminishing landlords, house flipping, investors, and people profiting off of a necessary and inherently limited necessity, do not understand economics.
I got a coworker who started flipping houses. Went all in and just finished posting her third house for sale. They got a second(third?) job to can pay the mortgages/loans until they sell. It's been 4 months and they've dropped the price to be competitive. I think they’re gonna lose money after all this is said and done. Which couldn't happen to a more deserving person. They're the reason bosses are cracking down on us for every single thing. They aren't sleeping and keep fucking up. Fuck these leaches
[stares directly into the camera]
Yes.
Replace all single family homes with mixed use commie blocks. Send your strongest cops, they won't be enough.
These aren't commie blocks, and they usually aren't replacing single family homes. They're most problematic when replacing older multi unit buildings, because they're taking low income housing and replacing it with housing only upper income people can afford (plus a couple low income units to say that they're trying). And they get tax breaks to do this gentrification, after years of neglecting the upkeep on the older buildings it's replacing.
Okay, I can get on board with saying fuck gentrification. But we need to be building a hell of a lot more of these than yet another shitty tract of single family homes just a few minutes' drive from the stroad to take you to big box mart.
You're not wrong. And to add to that the stupid building codes that lead to the type of small 500 sq ft condo unit with only one wall with windows and no air circulation. This article covers that well.
But all these condos, not only are they not human-sized and lack air cicrulation, most of them are fitted with luxury features to up the price beyond what regular folks can pay and don't leave any room for social housing.
There should be a law for mandatory social housing in these constructions.
Replace all single family homes with mixed use commie blocks. Send your strongest cops, they won’t be enough.
Do you want Judge Dredd? Because that's how you get Judge Dredd
tbh, their funtion isn't all that objectionable. Mixed use buildings are cool and good, actually. But the fact that they're made of cardboard and duct tape, look like ass, and are signifiers of gentrification are what suck about them.
As an example, large Japanese cities go extremely hard on mixed use buildings and are very livable despite their crazy density.
Permanently Deleted
What’s wrong with five over ones?
But the short answer is that they're hugely reliant on fossil fuels, both in construction and in the way they dedicate an enormous amount of space to car parking. They're also not particularly well-built, which means you end up knocking them down and rebuilding every twenty years or so. A more traditional design of steel and concrete could last 50-100 years, but would cost more upfront to build (and builder hate that). Finally, there's the financialization of 5-over-1s, which ties their existence/maintenance to the fickle lending markets and can create exploding rents during periods of high lending costs.
They're definitely better-ish than traditional ticky-tacky ranch style homes or detached houses. But they don't make good permanent housing, because they're shoddily constructed. And they don't bring down the cost of living, because they're so heavily pegged to the current lending rates. And they really don't help with climate change, despite giving the superficial appearance of dense urban development we'd assume would reduce reliance on cars and encourage biking/walking/mass transit.
The overpriced luxury apartments of today are the shitty apartments of tomorrow
They’re also the shitty apartments of today. The actual good apartments are the older buildings with character and actual walls, not these fuckin paper thing barriers they pretend are walls in the newer buildings. And they just got no fuckin soul. And they knocked down a grocery store to build some in my neighborhood. Motherfuckers.
"luxury" just means new. Who is building "basic" apartments anymore.
They built some near my workplace and theyre charging 3k for a studio apartment
Absolutely insane
I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.
Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who's inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.
tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you're at it.
5 over 1 are rookie numbers. I want high towers, 30 floor minimum. Entire towns per block. Comercial, office space and residential on each one. I want the grocery store, the doctor office and a metro station on the same building I live.
I also loved the game SimTower
You want the megablocks from Dredd or Cyberpunk 2077.
I don't even necessarily disagree with you, but, well, there it is.
Its funny to play one of those games and shake my head, thinking, "Damn they were too optimistic."
More like The Plataform actually.
People are replying to you like this is a pie in the sky fantasy, but actually this is an accurate description of Tokyo.
I live in the bay area, and wish we had more mixed zone housing. But then I see it in action in other cities and see they end up crazy expensive. So I'm not sure if it helps anything at all. Does anyone know of this actually helps or hurts?
My gut tells me they're expensive because they offer a set of benefits that otherwise similar units don't. Until they become more the norm than a stand out, they'll probably be more expensive. I've 0 data, again just what my gut says.
Be careful, you might make a neoliberal cry with this one
I live across street from one of these where a restaurant used to be. I don't know enough to love or hate the idea of these buildings, but this one's a damn eyesore. The siding panels are various shades of pale grayish blue, with fucking CAUTION VEST YELLOW panels randomly sprinkled in. It's just this big plain box with tiny-ass windows and the worst color combination I've ever seen.
The bottom one is not a five over one.
Nor is the top one
You sure? Looks like a double-height faux 2nd.
