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I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isola

I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment. A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality. Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.

kixiQu 5y ago
I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing. Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.