The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Apartment living: disadvantages only
A while ago I made an interactive version of the population density map on Observable, and I noticed something.
The average density of the city centre is between 10,000 and 20,000 per km², depending on where you draw the line. In a European city that would be moderately dense. A neighbourhood with that density would have 3 to 4-storey terraced housing and some walk-up apartments.
However nobody associates the city centre with townhouses. It is those big apartment blocks. This is because much of the people are concentrated in a few blocks, some with densities of well over 100,000/km².
Crowding
100,000 is properly crowded. There are good reasons why people in smaller cities don’t crowd together like that.
Most obviously you have a lack of space. Most apartments have no private outdoor space. Think about the difference that makes during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Nuisance from other people is magnified and multiplied. A party into the small hours keeps hundreds of people awake, rather than dozens. Just turning on the television may keep your neighbour awake. Parents are not free to let their children play around. The prospect of complaints is this constant nagging stress in the background.
And there are many others. Parking is expensive, a significant disadvantage in a city where most parts are unreachable without car. If not managed properly traffic will be much worse than in suburbs.
What about the buildings themselves. Building high-rises is more expensive than low rises. Maintenance is complicated because so many households with different financial situations are tied together *2.
It is worse
This is Auckland, which is, um…
Special.
That full size motorway gantry is still there, 10 years after the council supposedly had a masterplan to sanitize these streets. As soon as you move into an apartment, this council puts you in the slum bucket. Streets are used for one thing — moving cars, and tough luck if you need them for something else.
Apartments are by themselves not liveable homes *3. For that you need the surrounding spaces. The streets and parks and playgrounds, and businesses around you.
And… one word — no.
Throwing the advantages away
So why would you put up with all of this? What does it buy you?
The answer you often hear is convenience, and living in a more interesting neighbourhood.
Once upon a time, having more people move in made a city better. Restaurants and shops have more potential customers that may walk in. So more businesses, and especially those serving niches, become viable. This makes it a more interesting place for people to live. And more convenient, with everyday things like supermarkets often available literally around the corner.
Now go back to the map. All those lightly populated blocks are blocks where you don’t have many potential customers as a business. If you look at a 5 minute walk radius, that high density is not actually there. The relevant metric here is the much lower average density.
And these advantages are even further neutralised by our generally shitty street design. If your streets are designed as liminal spaces *4, people will not hang around, and this has a chilling effect on businesses. For example, despite the population density there are not that many businesses on Nelson Street.
So this is living in the city centre in a nutshell. All the disadvantages of crowded living, and none of the advantages.
SA1 (formerly known as mesh blocks) are chosen to have a population of a few 100’s of people. This gets… interesting over here, since some buildings have that sort of population. It appears some of the area units here indeed cover only 1 or 2 buildings.
This maintenance, by and large we just don’t do it. Large apartment blocks have notoriously short lifespans. Because the units cannot be maintained independently from each other, often the building eventually deteriorates into a proper slum.
Yeah, yeah, first world problems. But first world is exactly what this is. There is no reason, ever, in a country as prosperous as New Zealand, to leave a heavily populated area behind like that. Quite contrary, keeping it this shitty, i.e. maintaining big roadways, is expensive.
Liminal spaces (video) are a common game design element, games like Bioshock and Half Life spring to mind. At least they intended to give you this uncomfortable visceral reaction.
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