7 ms·

Loud and expensive renovations shattering a formerly quiet block in Manhattan

50 points by hourislate 8y ago

bootsz 8y ago
I live on 80th in the UWS and there is similar construction that's been going on behind my building since I moved in last year. Luckily I'm not home during the week, but they still fire up the jackhammers at 8:00 AM sharp on Saturdays. One time I heard a guy screaming "f-you it's f--ing saturday" out his window at them for like 5 minutes straight. The hammering stopped for a brief instant, then immediately resumed, drowning him out.
whatshisface 8y ago
In most neighborhoods you can't blast loud music 24/7 without getting a visit from the police. Does construction get an exception in New York?
- xivzgrev 8y ago
  No there are usually permitted hrs for construction. In New York City it’s probably 7am.
- dexen 8y ago
  There's a difference in perception between blasting music for fun versus paying people to landscape.
- tashoecraft 8y ago
  It's not 24/7, it's 8am to probably 5/6pm. I had a building go up literally next door for 2 years. We lost two windows in rooms that have no other natural light. It was annoying, but we dealt with it.
jackcarter 8y ago
From a comment on the article: "The normal way to excavate bedrock is dynamite. This would probably not be feasible on this site. But at this rate, from the photo, they are going to be jackhammering for another three years to reach thirty seven and a half feet. I’ve read that in London the Uber rich do these basement pool - theatre complexes all the time under their town houses, but probably digging out dirt. The neighbors should get their council persons involved to pressure DOB to put a blanket prohibition on what is clearly an untenable method of excavation. A Bedrock Amendment: if the site isn’t big or isolated enough for blasting, bedrock is the limit."[0] In London, lavish basements have become trendy[1], but they don't have to deal with bedrock so close to the surface. The Guardian article only mentions the noise once. [0]https://nyti.ms/2D2qPOp#permid=31403929 https://nyti.ms/2D2qPOp#permid=31403929 [1]https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/07/pool-basement-wealth-super-rich-digging-down-london https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/07/pool-basement-...
- joshvm 8y ago
  I recommend listening to Clive James' wonderful Point of View segment from Radio 4 (2009): https://soundcloud.com/pointofview-clivejames/london-underground https://soundcloud.com/pointofview-clivejames/london-undergr... It's only about 10 minutes. Very tongue in cheek, but people really are doing this.
- dharmon 8y ago
  I shudder thinking about the moisture issues you'd have to constantly battle. Basements are bad enough by themselves, but with a pool down there too?!
  - dustindiamond 8y ago
    ERV. Also, keeping it covered, greatly decreases the rate of evaporation.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Three years would be insane for the neighbors. And there is a good chance that the super rich owner will never be there during construction.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    They probably won't be there afterwards, either. Just adding some theoretical value to yet another vacant property in their portfolio.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Fracking has solved the problem. The answer is right-angle drilling, plus the wet diamond-belt saw already used in quarries since 1984. Drill many holes at the boundary, to the desired depth. Right-angle drill to connect the bottoms of the holes. Pull the saw through the holes to cut the sides of the block-columns. Now grab one block-column, lift it with a crane, and use the saw to make horizontal cuts at appropriate intervals to make rock blocks. Ship the blocks upstate, and use them to construct a mausoleum pyramid on your country estate. ~Or send them to your dwarven workshops to make mugs, tables, doors, and thrones.~ A rich of sufficient moxie would also cut new "local bedrock" countertops out of their own basement-quarry and tell all the other riches they know about how great it is to eat off of what used to be the floor of their very own basement, before they cut it out to make two sub-basements. Jackhammering makes gravel. Quarrying makes usable blocks.
helsinki 8y ago
I live in downtown Jersey City and large construction projects essentially have free reign over the physical and mental peace of the neighbors. My apartment would shake with each jackhammer strike for months as soon as 7am hit. It made WFH nearly impossible. I couldn't even take important phone calls during business hours. The construction is still ongoing. On the bright side, my rent isn't increasing any time soon. The real estate barons can do whatever they want around here. In addition to that, the same real estate developer built another unsightly building only feet away from 50% of the residents' only view. Resulting in zero privacy, beauty, and sunlight. Not to mention, a 30% decrease in each owner's property valuation. Fuck Shuster Group.
- mcguire 8y ago
  At least you don't have to deal with NIMBYs.
- apohn 8y ago
  Living in Downtown Jersey City (2 years ago) was the noisiest and most rage inducing experience of my life. I also made the stupid decision of living close to Marin and Columbus, and experienced sirens at all hours. Those included cops who could seemed to turn on their sirens to go through the red light at that intersection and turn it off as soon as they got through. Sirens + all day construction noise was just torture. Jersey City cured me of my desire to ever live in NYC. Parts of NYC are quieter, but there's always noise. The suburbs might be boring, but at least I can WFH without going crazy.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I get to hear jake brakes at literally any time of day (nearby paper mill runs 24/7), hourly freight trains (see paper mill) and police sirens slightly less often (in case the paper mill didn't tip you off that I don't live somewhere that's highly gentrified). I'm not gonna feel bad about rich people that have to listen to heavy machinery during business hours no matter what day of the week it is. I'd be more sympathetic if the constant noise was before 7am or after 9pm but the fact of the mater is that it's not so I'm not.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  I felt sorry for them until I got to the part where it said it was the best neighborhood in the city. If that's the case, then I'm sure they can all afford to sue the crap out of the people who are causing this, and they've got plenty of problems that have cost actual money to bring to court already.
  - jshaqaw 8y ago
    The Upper West Side was once a place for middle class intellectuals and artists. These neighbors are not necessarily rich and you need a legal violation to sue. Nothing in this article alleges that the construction is illegal - just very annoying.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  A violinist and a professor of philosophy are unlikely to fall under the category of rich people.
  - bklyn11201 8y ago
    If you earn $120k a year but happened to invest $100k in a brownstone or apartment many years ago that is now worth $3-5mm, you're rich!
    - mcguire 8y ago
      If you earn $120k/year, you're in the ~80th percentile in NYC and are making a bit over 2x the median income. https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Household-Income https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Househo...
fastball 8y ago
This is the cost of living in a city. Anything else is NIMBYism, and NIMBYism kills progress.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > This is the cost of living in a city. No, it's not. In Europe, construction and related noise is regulated. This shit would not fly here for long.
  - ovi256 8y ago
    Here in real-world Europe, I have 2 construction sites within 20m of my building applying the same rules. Jackhammer allowed between 8am-7pm, 6 days a week. They stop one hour for siesta time at the nearby kindergarten on weekdays. How else do you think cities got built in the first place ?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - amedvednikov 8y ago
    I live in the Netherlands, and I had the same problem. Construction would start at 7am every Mo-Fr, and my entire building would be shaking.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Where in Europe? In the UK we have regulations relating to start and finish times but it sounds like this is the case here, too.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- yardie 8y ago
  This is not NIMBYism at all as it has nothing to do with new construction. This is more like a HOA problem; a neighbor who paves their garden, paints in garish colors, or decides to run a car repair garage on their porch. None of this rises to planning but it is slightly annoying. The pools will get built and they'll move on to the next reason to complain.
xivzgrev 8y ago
TLDR: property owner renovating extensively. Neighbors don’t like noise. Not sure how this is a news story except it’s happening in New York City.
- assblaster 8y ago
  "Only on weekends and the holidays of the politically potent — Christmas and Rosh Hashana, for example, but not Martin Luther King’s Birthday — does it cease." Why does the author feel obligated to inject race into this story? The author could have said Labor Day instead (which would have been ironic).
  - mcguire 8y ago
    MLK's birthday is a federal holiday---government offices and banks are closed. Most commercial enterprises don't take it off, though.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Real estate is inherently a race issue in that our country was built upon a system that denied blacks the right to own land for the better part of our history and has continued to make ownership difficult through higher interest rates and other schemes. Even our esteemed President worked to ensure blacks weren’t given access to real estate in NYC. Issues like this get press time in the paper of record over other actual issues that impact people who aren’t privileged.
  - drharby 8y ago
    Well assblaster2, i think this reporter is what we call a race baiter
- mcguire 8y ago
  It's not happening in San Francisco?
- milemi 8y ago
  It’s in the Metro section of the New York Times.
rboyd 8y ago
Had a Chicago landlord that rented me top floor on a brownstone and promptly started construction refacing the entire brick facade. Construction workers wake up pretty early.
ben7799 8y ago
The funny thing about NYC residents complaining about this kind of thing is if they lived anywhere else for a while and came back then the normal background noise level of the city without construction would seem so loud as to seem unbearable. It's all just an example of the crazy weird microcosm that NYC is.. everyone living in a bubble of insanity and unable to tell.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I actually rather like visiting Manhattan but a few days is about my limit. Even for people who find ordinary city living quite tolerable, Manhattan takes things up a few notches compared to most places. I lived in Manhattan one summer for an intern position when in grad school (admittedly in a dirtier/more dangerous city than it is today) and pretty much decided I couldn't live there no matter how much money I was offered.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Yeah, I visited NYC last year for a week, and it was so much fun, but I would never ever want to actually live there. I could've done with spending a second week there, though. Admittedly, I had a bit of a skewed experience on my trip: I was in Manhattan during the day but spent my nights staying with my cousin and her family in Westchester. This meant I didn't get to spend nearly as much time in the city as I wanted to (which is why I wish I had a second week there), but it also limited my exposure to noise and prevented me from getting sick of it.
- dade_ 8y ago
  After a weeklong trip to NYC, I was walking home from the airport thinking how quiet downtown Toronto is and then I started to laugh when I realized that I was walking past a construction crew jackhammering the sidewalk. I guess I just tuned it out.
- CPLX 8y ago
  I mean it’s all relative right. Perhaps if the rest of the country stopped living their lives entirely within strip malls and parking lots for a few years you’d notice how insane that is.
crazygringo 8y ago
Construction noise is part of large city life. I live in NYC and you just deal with it. It sucks, but it's limited to business hours so it doesn't affect your evenings or sleep or weekends. I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others? Is it that bedrock excavation is unusual and should be outlawed? Is it that there are quieter excavation methods that should be legally enforced? Is it that some board gave approval when they shouldn't have and there was corruption or incompetence? The article doesn't say, so I don't get what this is actually about.
- wycy 8y ago
  The article was written because the noise is annoying to other rich people. You're not supposed to do that to the rich.
  - cosmie 8y ago
    > But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment) The article was written because the noise is annoying to the journalist that wrote it.
  - ddorian43 8y ago
    If the rich cant live good, who will ? What will poor people look up to and work hard to become ?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  > I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others? The author lives there.
papermill 8y ago
Welcome to NYC. There is construction every other block. And that's not even considering things like the 2nd Ave line construction which creates noise pollution for years on end. Is this news because wealthy people are affected? I wonder how things would be if NYC allowed construction once every 3 years?
amyjess 8y ago
This is (one of several reasons) why I have no desire to ever live in a city. This is one the nice neighborhoods, and it's riddled with unbearable noise. I am very happy in my noise-free suburb.
- waah_waah24 8y ago
  congrats?
akgerber 8y ago
Tokyo, unlike NYC, seems to have noise regulations for construction, apparently enforced by a decibel meter mounted to the construction site: https://i.imgur.com/aOOBrIS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aOOBrIS.jpg https://www.env.go.jp/en/laws/air/noise/ap.html https://www.env.go.jp/en/laws/air/noise/ap.html That probably has something to do with the healthier relationship there between the population & new construction.
- plopz 8y ago
  Is Japan's relationship with new construction healthy? From what I understand houses in Japan are like cars in the west, they depreciate over time. When someone buys an old house they knock it down and build a new one. I can see some value in that, since the houses can be more customized to the owner as opposed to builder basic beige that we get here. But it also means houses aren't built to last which I find kind of sad.
srmatto 8y ago
This is happening or happened in London as well. This is a short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIpWAd9SoD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIpWAd9SoD4
pastor_elm 8y ago
There is loud, obnoxious development going on throughout NYC 24/7. I'm supposed to care only if it's bothering a well off broadway director on the Upper West Side?
lwhalen 8y ago
Welcome to city-living. If you want peace and quiet, move to the suburbs or the countryside. Spend some of the bajillions you'd save in housing on getting a solid ISP link out to your home, and help your new neighbors get wired up to the 'net while you're at it.

50 points by hourislate 8y ago

I live on 80th in the UWS and there is similar construction that's been going on behind my building since I moved in last year. Luckily I'm not home during the week, but they still fire up the jackhammers at 8:00 AM sharp on Saturdays. One time I heard a guy screaming "f-you it's f--ing saturday" out his window at them for like 5 minutes straight. The hammering stopped for a brief instant, then immediately resumed, drowning him out.

whatshisface 8y ago

In most neighborhoods you can't blast loud music 24/7 without getting a visit from the police. Does construction get an exception in New York?

xivzgrev 8y ago
No there are usually permitted hrs for construction. In New York City it’s probably 7am.
dexen 8y ago
There's a difference in perception between blasting music for fun versus paying people to landscape.
tashoecraft 8y ago
It's not 24/7, it's 8am to probably 5/6pm. I had a building go up literally next door for 2 years. We lost two windows in rooms that have no other natural light. It was annoying, but we dealt with it.

jackcarter 8y ago

From a comment on the article: "The normal way to excavate bedrock is dynamite. This would probably not be feasible on this site. But at this rate, from the photo, they are going to be jackhammering for another three years to reach thirty seven and a half feet. I’ve read that in London the Uber rich do these basement pool - theatre complexes all the time under their town houses, but probably digging out dirt. The neighbors should get their council persons involved to pressure DOB to put a blanket prohibition on what is clearly an untenable method of excavation. A Bedrock Amendment: if the site isn’t big or isolated enough for blasting, bedrock is the limit."[0] In London, lavish basements have become trendy[1], but they don't have to deal with bedrock so close to the surface. The Guardian article only mentions the noise once. [0]https://nyti.ms/2D2qPOp#permid=31403929 https://nyti.ms/2D2qPOp#permid=31403929 [1]https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/07/pool-basement-wealth-super-rich-digging-down-london https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/07/pool-basement-...

joshvm 8y ago
I recommend listening to Clive James' wonderful Point of View segment from Radio 4 (2009): https://soundcloud.com/pointofview-clivejames/london-underground https://soundcloud.com/pointofview-clivejames/london-undergr... It's only about 10 minutes. Very tongue in cheek, but people really are doing this.
dharmon 8y ago
I shudder thinking about the moisture issues you'd have to constantly battle. Basements are bad enough by themselves, but with a pool down there too?!
- dustindiamond 8y ago
  ERV. Also, keeping it covered, greatly decreases the rate of evaporation.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Three years would be insane for the neighbors. And there is a good chance that the super rich owner will never be there during construction.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  They probably won't be there afterwards, either. Just adding some theoretical value to yet another vacant property in their portfolio.
logfromblammo 8y ago
Fracking has solved the problem. The answer is right-angle drilling, plus the wet diamond-belt saw already used in quarries since 1984. Drill many holes at the boundary, to the desired depth. Right-angle drill to connect the bottoms of the holes. Pull the saw through the holes to cut the sides of the block-columns. Now grab one block-column, lift it with a crane, and use the saw to make horizontal cuts at appropriate intervals to make rock blocks. Ship the blocks upstate, and use them to construct a mausoleum pyramid on your country estate. ~Or send them to your dwarven workshops to make mugs, tables, doors, and thrones.~ A rich of sufficient moxie would also cut new "local bedrock" countertops out of their own basement-quarry and tell all the other riches they know about how great it is to eat off of what used to be the floor of their very own basement, before they cut it out to make two sub-basements. Jackhammering makes gravel. Quarrying makes usable blocks.

helsinki 8y ago

I live in downtown Jersey City and large construction projects essentially have free reign over the physical and mental peace of the neighbors. My apartment would shake with each jackhammer strike for months as soon as 7am hit. It made WFH nearly impossible. I couldn't even take important phone calls during business hours. The construction is still ongoing. On the bright side, my rent isn't increasing any time soon. The real estate barons can do whatever they want around here. In addition to that, the same real estate developer built another unsightly building only feet away from 50% of the residents' only view. Resulting in zero privacy, beauty, and sunlight. Not to mention, a 30% decrease in each owner's property valuation. Fuck Shuster Group.

mcguire 8y ago
At least you don't have to deal with NIMBYs.
apohn 8y ago
Living in Downtown Jersey City (2 years ago) was the noisiest and most rage inducing experience of my life. I also made the stupid decision of living close to Marin and Columbus, and experienced sirens at all hours. Those included cops who could seemed to turn on their sirens to go through the red light at that intersection and turn it off as soon as they got through. Sirens + all day construction noise was just torture. Jersey City cured me of my desire to ever live in NYC. Parts of NYC are quieter, but there's always noise. The suburbs might be boring, but at least I can WFH without going crazy.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

I get to hear jake brakes at literally any time of day (nearby paper mill runs 24/7), hourly freight trains (see paper mill) and police sirens slightly less often (in case the paper mill didn't tip you off that I don't live somewhere that's highly gentrified). I'm not gonna feel bad about rich people that have to listen to heavy machinery during business hours no matter what day of the week it is. I'd be more sympathetic if the constant noise was before 7am or after 9pm but the fact of the mater is that it's not so I'm not.

wccrawford 8y ago
I felt sorry for them until I got to the part where it said it was the best neighborhood in the city. If that's the case, then I'm sure they can all afford to sue the crap out of the people who are causing this, and they've got plenty of problems that have cost actual money to bring to court already.
- jshaqaw 8y ago
  The Upper West Side was once a place for middle class intellectuals and artists. These neighbors are not necessarily rich and you need a legal violation to sue. Nothing in this article alleges that the construction is illegal - just very annoying.
tallanvor 8y ago
A violinist and a professor of philosophy are unlikely to fall under the category of rich people.
- bklyn11201 8y ago
  If you earn $120k a year but happened to invest $100k in a brownstone or apartment many years ago that is now worth $3-5mm, you're rich!
  - mcguire 8y ago
    If you earn $120k/year, you're in the ~80th percentile in NYC and are making a bit over 2x the median income. https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Household-Income https://statisticalatlas.com/place/New-York/New-York/Househo...

fastball 8y ago

This is the cost of living in a city. Anything else is NIMBYism, and NIMBYism kills progress.

mschuster91 8y ago
> This is the cost of living in a city. No, it's not. In Europe, construction and related noise is regulated. This shit would not fly here for long.
- ovi256 8y ago
  Here in real-world Europe, I have 2 construction sites within 20m of my building applying the same rules. Jackhammer allowed between 8am-7pm, 6 days a week. They stop one hour for siesta time at the nearby kindergarten on weekdays. How else do you think cities got built in the first place ?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- amedvednikov 8y ago
  I live in the Netherlands, and I had the same problem. Construction would start at 7am every Mo-Fr, and my entire building would be shaking.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Where in Europe? In the UK we have regulations relating to start and finish times but it sounds like this is the case here, too.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
yardie 8y ago
This is not NIMBYism at all as it has nothing to do with new construction. This is more like a HOA problem; a neighbor who paves their garden, paints in garish colors, or decides to run a car repair garage on their porch. None of this rises to planning but it is slightly annoying. The pools will get built and they'll move on to the next reason to complain.

xivzgrev 8y ago

TLDR: property owner renovating extensively. Neighbors don’t like noise. Not sure how this is a news story except it’s happening in New York City.

assblaster 8y ago
"Only on weekends and the holidays of the politically potent — Christmas and Rosh Hashana, for example, but not Martin Luther King’s Birthday — does it cease." Why does the author feel obligated to inject race into this story? The author could have said Labor Day instead (which would have been ironic).
- mcguire 8y ago
  MLK's birthday is a federal holiday---government offices and banks are closed. Most commercial enterprises don't take it off, though.
- ada1981 8y ago
  Real estate is inherently a race issue in that our country was built upon a system that denied blacks the right to own land for the better part of our history and has continued to make ownership difficult through higher interest rates and other schemes. Even our esteemed President worked to ensure blacks weren’t given access to real estate in NYC. Issues like this get press time in the paper of record over other actual issues that impact people who aren’t privileged.
- drharby 8y ago
  Well assblaster2, i think this reporter is what we call a race baiter
mcguire 8y ago
It's not happening in San Francisco?
milemi 8y ago
It’s in the Metro section of the New York Times.

rboyd 8y ago

Had a Chicago landlord that rented me top floor on a brownstone and promptly started construction refacing the entire brick facade. Construction workers wake up pretty early.

ben7799 8y ago

The funny thing about NYC residents complaining about this kind of thing is if they lived anywhere else for a while and came back then the normal background noise level of the city without construction would seem so loud as to seem unbearable. It's all just an example of the crazy weird microcosm that NYC is.. everyone living in a bubble of insanity and unable to tell.

ghaff 8y ago
I actually rather like visiting Manhattan but a few days is about my limit. Even for people who find ordinary city living quite tolerable, Manhattan takes things up a few notches compared to most places. I lived in Manhattan one summer for an intern position when in grad school (admittedly in a dirtier/more dangerous city than it is today) and pretty much decided I couldn't live there no matter how much money I was offered.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Yeah, I visited NYC last year for a week, and it was so much fun, but I would never ever want to actually live there. I could've done with spending a second week there, though. Admittedly, I had a bit of a skewed experience on my trip: I was in Manhattan during the day but spent my nights staying with my cousin and her family in Westchester. This meant I didn't get to spend nearly as much time in the city as I wanted to (which is why I wish I had a second week there), but it also limited my exposure to noise and prevented me from getting sick of it.
dade_ 8y ago
After a weeklong trip to NYC, I was walking home from the airport thinking how quiet downtown Toronto is and then I started to laugh when I realized that I was walking past a construction crew jackhammering the sidewalk. I guess I just tuned it out.
CPLX 8y ago
I mean it’s all relative right. Perhaps if the rest of the country stopped living their lives entirely within strip malls and parking lots for a few years you’d notice how insane that is.

crazygringo 8y ago

Construction noise is part of large city life. I live in NYC and you just deal with it. It sucks, but it's limited to business hours so it doesn't affect your evenings or sleep or weekends. I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others? Is it that bedrock excavation is unusual and should be outlawed? Is it that there are quieter excavation methods that should be legally enforced? Is it that some board gave approval when they shouldn't have and there was corruption or incompetence? The article doesn't say, so I don't get what this is actually about.

wycy 8y ago
The article was written because the noise is annoying to other rich people. You're not supposed to do that to the rich.
- cosmie 8y ago
  > But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment) The article was written because the noise is annoying to the journalist that wrote it.
- ddorian43 8y ago
  If the rich cant live good, who will ? What will poor people look up to and work hard to become ?
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
> I'm not clear what makes this one construction site newsworthy over the 100's of others? The author lives there.

papermill 8y ago

Welcome to NYC. There is construction every other block. And that's not even considering things like the 2nd Ave line construction which creates noise pollution for years on end. Is this news because wealthy people are affected? I wonder how things would be if NYC allowed construction once every 3 years?

amyjess 8y ago

This is (one of several reasons) why I have no desire to ever live in a city. This is one the nice neighborhoods, and it's riddled with unbearable noise. I am very happy in my noise-free suburb.

waah_waah24 8y ago
congrats?

akgerber 8y ago

Tokyo, unlike NYC, seems to have noise regulations for construction, apparently enforced by a decibel meter mounted to the construction site: https://i.imgur.com/aOOBrIS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aOOBrIS.jpg https://www.env.go.jp/en/laws/air/noise/ap.html https://www.env.go.jp/en/laws/air/noise/ap.html That probably has something to do with the healthier relationship there between the population & new construction.

plopz 8y ago
Is Japan's relationship with new construction healthy? From what I understand houses in Japan are like cars in the west, they depreciate over time. When someone buys an old house they knock it down and build a new one. I can see some value in that, since the houses can be more customized to the owner as opposed to builder basic beige that we get here. But it also means houses aren't built to last which I find kind of sad.

srmatto 8y ago

This is happening or happened in London as well. This is a short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIpWAd9SoD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIpWAd9SoD4

pastor_elm 8y ago

There is loud, obnoxious development going on throughout NYC 24/7. I'm supposed to care only if it's bothering a well off broadway director on the Upper West Side?

lwhalen 8y ago

Welcome to city-living. If you want peace and quiet, move to the suburbs or the countryside. Spend some of the bajillions you'd save in housing on getting a solid ISP link out to your home, and help your new neighbors get wired up to the 'net while you're at it.