this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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I work in municipal develpment.
The thing with developers is that they build that density, but over ALL of the land. Apartments kill more trees and create more impervious cover than any other type of housing.
Our city requires parkland dedication for development. Single-family developments build public parks and preserve trees wherever possible. Apartments just pay a fee in lieu for tree mitigation and parkland dedication and improvements because they absolutely will not have a millimeter of land not dedicated to housing.
That sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be fixed by making it not legal to do that lol
It's not a problem inherent to apartments, it's a problem with lack of regulation in your area.
But more importantly, if that many people need housing, it's better to put them in apartments than single family houses. Less nature will get destroyed. What are we gonna do, not give them housing?
The point of the graphics is 100 homes vs 100 homes. If you say "well, in the second picture developers would just keep building" then you're comparing 100 homes to like 1000 homes. It makes no sense.
Identifying the solution can be a lot different than actually implementing that solution.
Trying to get laws that are beneficial to people versus businesses is difficult to do in the US.
Aren't those regulation issues? What's stopping the municipality (or whoever is in charge) to mandate a maximum of say 70% of the land to be built on? Or buying back land to preserve its natural state? Developers will work ruthlessly whether they are building individual or communal housing. At the end of it, i think it may just come down to greed and greasing the right pockets.
Is this per-acre, per-person, or per-unit?
Per acre doesn't make a lot of sense, comparison-wise, because people have to live somewhere. It seems more logical to compare on a per capita basis than anything else, in terms of the number of people who will on average live in those units.
People like ignoring per-capita analysis because it would force them to rethink the sustainability of their own lifestyle. There is absolutely nothing sustainable about every single person living in ultra low-density, car-dependent sprawl.
If you refuse to build dense communities to house people, they'll just build sprawl elsewhere, and more forest and farmland will be destroyed for it, more cars will clog up the streets because of it, and more neighborhoods will have to be demolished to build freeways because of it.
What's the comparison with 100 single family homes vs. 100 apartment units?
I'd argue that 100 houses and 1 playground is much more destructive to the land than 1 building with 100 apartments and no playground. Single family homes still have a massive amount of impervious ground cover ranging from their roofs, driveways and patios.
Its also not an inherrent problem to the denser developments themselves but moreso an issue its legal to pay a fine to get out of a building standard. The city could just refuse any development that fails to meet their public park and tree goals.
Multifamily development requires large buildings and parking lots that are fundamentally incompatible with low impervious cover and tree preservation.
Attached garages are what allow single-family homes to be so efficient when it comes to impervious cover. The cars are parked inside the building, with living space above and around it within a door of the parking space. It's extremely compact, and with proper minimum setbacks in the code you eliminate a lot of pavement.
The average apartment requires 2.2 parking spaces. The average house requires 2.5. Multiply that out by 100 units and you've got 220 versus 250, but by having garages the driveways can be shortened to only 2 have room for 2 spaces. Now you've got 4 spaces' worth of parking for the impervious cover of 2, so the parking requirements for single-family are more than twice as efficient while being lower in absolute terms.
A parking space requires about 100 square feet of IC, so for a 100-unit complex you're looking at 22,000 square feet of IC just for the parking spaces. Plus another 1500 for ADA spaces. Throw in drive aisles (which due to emergency vehicle access are just as wide as a SF road) and that number more than doubles. Also put in fire lanes, hammerheads/turnarounds, etc and you're quickly looking at 150,000 square feet of pavement just for the parking lot, plus the extra road lanes and decel lanes required to support its traffic impact.
The thing about SF roads is that they serve multiple purposes. They provide access to the site, as well as emergency vehicle access, fire lanes, etc. They also can do storm water detention under the roads to limit the required off-site detention, so they don't have to clear-cut as large of an area for detention and water-quality facility as an apartment complex does.
So the road, drive aisle, emergency access, fire lane, storm sewer, and more can all be combined in a lower-density area in a manner that combines to decrease the per capita environmental impact.
There's no additional ADA requirements because every parking space has open space on at least 1 side and they're all close enough to the houses that reserving empty parking spaces for ADA isn't required. And half the parking spaces are inside the house. And the occupancy rate of SF houses is half-again higher than an apartment, but with fewer drivers per capita (higher percentage of multiple-child households in SF).
You can't just look at building sizes and get the full picture of a development's impact.
I don't know what houses you see that have garages but don't have driveways long enough to park on. The drive up area of a multiunit can also allow emergency service access, often allowing full access to the perimeter of the building by using the sidewalks or lawns during emergencies.
As for stormwater it is very rare that it is detained underground or underneath the road, most developments have storm sewers that lead to a stormwater retention or detention pond and in some cases the sewers directly lead into creeks, lakes or empty land.