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As for bathrooms in modern US inner city apartments, I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates. For th

• DraftDodger67 7y ago
  Don't forget US houses being much lower in latitude - allowing savings in insulation, and generally thinner and lighter construction. New York is further south than Rome.
• pfdietz 7y ago
  Interestingly, new US apartment buildings are now predominantly wood frame as well. This is a recent change due to intricacies of fire codes and the politics behind them.
  • packet_nerd 7y ago
    They use wood construction because of fire codes? How does that work?
    • treis 7y ago
      They use wood because it's cheaper. They're allowed to use wood due to relatively recent code changes. Google 5 over 1 construction for more details.
    • rsynnott 7y ago
      It's wood, Jim, but not as we know it. The 'wood' used in tall buildings is a heavily processed product that is indeed pretty fire-resistant.
    • unwind 7y ago
      Just guessing here, but it could be that fire codes used to forbid wood, but then something changed (lobbying, whatever) making wood acceptable. Then construction changed to use wood (again) since it's cheaper than the fire-proof materials.
    • pfdietz 7y ago
      See this story for interesting details. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-america-s-new-apartment-buildings-all-look-the-same https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri...
  • rsync 7y ago
    "Interestingly, new US apartment buildings are now predominantly wood frame as well. This is a recent change due to intricacies of fire codes and the politics behind them." Wooden "stick-built" structures are also highly resilient in earthquakes and are, generally speaking, the best and most cost-effective way to build seismically safe buildings in earthquake zones. I, personally, was always aesthetically offended by "American" 2x4 stick-built construction, as we generally understand it, but it is indeed the case that wooden studs properly sheathed with plywood "shear panels" (and tied to the foundation, etc.) are tremendously strong at a relatively very low cost. I believe this scales up to at least 4 story mutli-unit structures ...
    • emodendroket 7y ago
      The downside is it's quite flammable. There are a comparatively high number of these going up in construction, before mitigation measures such as sprinklers are in place, in particular.
      • rsync 7y ago
        Well, the exterior need not be wood - and in places like California wine country, should not be. A steel roof, concrete ("hardi") siding, and "WUI" vents with relatively fine pores, when employed properly, can make the building exterior quite fire resistant, regardless of the flammability of the interior framing. That being said, I do have steel sprinkler lines running onto the roof ...
  • Pxtl 7y ago
    This is also good for climate change. Concrete is filthy, carbon-wise. Probably the ideal built-form, sustainability-wise, would be something like Paris or Milan, but made of wood. Like a 5-8 storey streetwall of wooden multi-unit homes (whether apartments or stacked townhomes or whatever), dense-enough that it can be serviced with higher-order transit but no so dense that concrete construction is required for the buildings.
• mindthegap 7y ago
  > in an area half the size of the US. Is that so? Europe seems to have slightly more than 10 million square kilometers in area and the US slightly less than that. Europe is certainly more fragmented, but looking at thetruesize.com, one can use a better area preserving map projection and it seems that Europe has more space. (I still agree with your points in general though.)
  • misja111 7y ago
    OP was referring to the EU. If it would be about Europe, then the population would be 740 million.
    • mindthegap 7y ago
      Fair point, I somehow misread this as Europe.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    It depends on your definition of "Europe" - the EU is indeed quite a bit smaller than the United States, but the continent of Europe is, as you have noticed, slightly larger in area than the United States. I can still remember pointing this out to someone on HN who stated that Europe would fit inside Texas.
    • earthboundkid 7y ago
      To be fair, Texans believe the rest of the US would fit inside Texas.
  • flexie 7y ago
    The EU (with 500 million people) is around half the size of the US. Europe including the land outside of the EU is much larger, as it includes vast areas in the former Soviet Union as well as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Serbia and a few other small nations.
    • mindthegap 7y ago
• nicoburns 7y ago
  > I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates. In Europe (at least in the UK) it's common for houses/apartments to be shared by many flatmates regardless of the number of bathrooms. 4 seems to be roughly the upper limit on 1 bathroom. 5 bedroom places almost always have 2. And many houses with only 1 bathroom will have a second small toilet-only room.
• ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  - White flight: Europe never had an exodus from city centers comparable to the US. Umm, not sure where you got your info but white flight is present in any major Western European city, they just have much better PR about it. After the 2015 influx of migrants I noticed the segregation even more through some neighborhoods. Once the migrants were settled in one neighborhood, the natives with means quickly moved out to greener pastures making more room for the new guests and the cycle repeated itself. Whenever I was renting in the expensive districts in Germany I mostly heard German/English spoken on the streets vs. when I was renting in the cheap districts I mostly heard Turkish/Arabic/various Eastern European languages on the streets/shops/doctor's offices and my German friends would ask why I chose to live in a "bad" neighborhood. Answer: because I don't care about the nationality of my neighbors, I live where it suits me the best. But I get their way of thinking, we are social creatures and we are still driven by tribalism so most people don't want to live/socialize with strangers from vastly different cultures regardless of what lengths someone goes to convince them otherwise. This is universal for humans and not something country specific.
  • et2o 7y ago
    This is interesting. Do you have any particular notable examples?
    • simonsarris 7y ago
      The area around the Hbf in Munich, Gare du Nord in Paris, etc.
  • amyjess 7y ago
    White flight in the US also wasn't about people leaving the city centers for the suburbs; it was about people leaving suburbs for other suburbs. The postwar flight to more distant suburbs was due to WW2 veterans suddenly having way more wealth than they had pre-WW2 (i.e. during the Great Depression) and deciding they wanted an upgrade from living in a cramped, dirty, noisy city, with the meteoric rise of the automobile and marketing campaigns by developers helping out a lot as well. This flight was almost exclusively white, but it wasn't motivated by a desire to get away from black people, andd the only reason black people didn't join them was because of systematic racism gatekeeping them out of the new developments. Restrictive deed covenants imposed by developers, banks refusing to do businesses with people whose addresses are in black communities (most commonly known as redlining), and just plain old institutional poverty kept black people out of something that all Americans wanted to participate in. Also keep in mind that suburbs weren't nonexistent pre-WW2 either; these old suburbs were transit-oriented and are now referred to as "streetcar suburbs". Pretty much every city in the US has a number of inner suburbs, just outside the central business district, that consist of single-family homes on an oblong grid of streets with alleyways and the occasional arterial (which originally contained a streetcar line) dividing the neighborhood (if anyone reading this has no idea what I'm talking about, let me know and I'll post Google Maps links). What was different about postwar suburbs is that they were much farther away from the city center and were car-centric in their design. White flight was a later phenomenon that resulted from the civil rights movement dismantling a lot of racist institutions, causing white people to freak out and leave the suburbs they moved to following WW2 for other suburbs. Restrictive deed covenants and redlining were banned, black people finally being able to both move into any neighborhood and access mortgages, so of course they moved out to the suburbs. And then the white people fled. This is why much of the original postwar suburbs are now considered "the ghetto" (for example, Wynnewood was built as Dallas's version of Levittown, the whitest postwar suburb you could imagine, but is now majority black and Hispanic, and the name of the larger part of town it's located in, Oak Cliff, is almost used as a slur by racist white people). Black people moved in, racist white people moved out. Exploitative race-baiting real-estate agents even deliberately encouraged this phenomenon to buy low and sell high, a practice known as "block busting", which is now also banned. The agents would buy up a house in a white neighborhood and both sell it to a black person and send agents provocateur to talk to all the existing residents and stoke fears of black people moving in en masse. They would even hire black people to push baby carriages throughout the neighborhood! And so all the white people would sell their houses and move away ASAP, and because they decided they wanted to get out right now, they sold cheap. And the block busters bought up the houses and turned around and sold them at exorbitant prices to black people wanting to move to the suburbs for the first time. In Chicago, for example, block busting was so widespread that which suburbs were considered "white" and which suburbs were considered "black" would change every few months, as people would play racial musical chairs to a beat set by unethical salesmen. Interestingly enough, many cities are now at a point where things have settled into a new mix: inner-ring suburbs are often very diverse, while the exurbs are extremely white. As PoC move farther out, white people build entirely new neighborhoods even farther out. My own experience in Dallas is that as the exurbs grow even farther and farther away from the city, more and more neighborhoods in the inner suburbs are becoming Chinatowns and Koreatowns (and as someone who lives in the inner suburbs and has diverse taste in food, I welcome this phenomenon).
• elteto 7y ago
  > American houses are made of wood... Well, this depends on _where_ the house is built. Building codes vary wildly across the US. You won't find a new house in South Florida built out of wood. In Texas you will find a lot of new houses with internal wooden frames, but the outside walls are made of solid brick, I think this is called "brick veneer".
  • xyzzyz 7y ago
    > You won't find a new house in South Florida built out of wood. Interesting, what do they build them from? > In Texas you will find a lot of new houses with internal wooden frames, but the outside walls are made of solid brick, I think this is called "brick veneer". Brick veneer is just a decoration. It’s not structural in any way. There is usually an inch wide gap between the veneer and the actual wall for drying purposes.
    • elteto 7y ago
      In South Florida external walls are typically concrete, and roofs use ceramic roof tiles. I think roof frames are made of wood. Interesting note on the brick veneer. Even if they are not structural I think they are more durable than other types of siding.
      • xyzzyz 7y ago
        What kind of concrete construction are they using? Straight up reinforced concrete? Or something like ICFs? Or maybe mortar joined cinder blocks? Do you maybe have some links I could read up about that? As for brick veneer, I dunno really about its durability. It definitely is less susceptible to decay than traditional wood siding, but I don’t think it’s any better than cement fiber cladding, or other modern non-wood materials. Additionally, if anything goes wrong with it, I think it’s much harder to fix it in a seamless way, unlike other most types of siding, where you can just repaint them after repair. I have it on half of my house, and I can’t say I’m a huge fan.
        • Jamwinner 7y ago
• rsynnott 7y ago
  I think car culture is probably the biggest one. In practice, there's plenty of space to build the sort of ultra-diffuse Mcmansion-y suburbs popular in the US in some European countries, but it's just less popular as a lifestyle compromise.