Decorative open space is important for making cities livable but uh… lawns ain’t it.
Also nice to have space between your neighbors for privacy and mental health
This doesn’t require single family housing on giant lots. Just well built buildings with proper insulation and sound proofing. I used to think apartments were just noisy until my partner and I moved into our current place. I live on the top floor of a 2 building, 6 unit complex of loft apartments cascading down the side of a hill. The buildings had to be built to withstand the extremely strong winds from the bay, and as such they’re solid as fuck.
Despite our downstairs being tile floor our neighbors have told us they haven’t heard any noise from us at all. My partner and I started being less concerned about noise and began playing somewhat loud music frequently and yell to each other across the unit. Despite this our downstairs neighbors still haven’t heard a peep from us. For a while I genuinely thought our neighbors were just trying to be nice as everyone in our complex is super friendly and gets along well.
One day our neighbor in the adjacent building was woodworking in his garage. Normally the noise wouldn’t bother me, but I was focused on something so I shut the window facing the courtyard which made me realize just how soundproof this giant concrete building is, both between units and to the outside world. I couldn’t hear our neighbors saw unless I opened the curtains and tried to hear it, otherwise it might as well have been very faint background noise. I really wish buildings like this were the norm for apartments because they provide all the privacy of a single family home with all the benefits of apartment buildings.
That’s great.
Might say almost all the benefits. Or all the benefits that are reasonable given we have to share our planet with others.
Like, it’s too great of a privilege to be able to park an emission-spewing cage in a garage and walk directly into a first floor kitchen to load the fridge with groceries. (Plus stairs are healthy anyway. Not referring to disabled folks or special circumstances of course.) I can’t say it’s not a benefit of a single family home, but easy to argue it’s an unjust enrichment for any one able-bodied person at the expense of others and the environment.
Glad you found such amazing and comparatively equitable housing 😃
Edit: remembered many town homes can offer easy grocery loading with their first-floor kitchens! Then you’re just missing a handful of windows on one or both sides. Big apartments should def be much more of a reasonable option, still, for a given footprint.
I mean, if you want to be privileged not to use stairs, once the housing gets dense enough they start putting in elevators…
True!
Thanks! The whole street we live on are similar units and they’re genuinely awesome. Everyone has balconies for plants, and if you want to chill in some grass there are great parks within a 10 minute walk. They would definitely pose a problem for the less able bodied, but the hills of San Francisco aren’t very friendly either. Our unit is one of the two at ground level so groceries aren’t a problem, but we don’t have a car so grocery trips are frequent and small anyway (we also run a HelloFresh discount scheme). Highly recommend giant concrete buildings. They’re a little industrial looking but damn are they great.
We lived in a townhome before actually and it was pretty good as well, but the sound proofing just wasn’t there unfortunately. Not awful but nothing compared to our current place.
This is when we find out rent is $4000/month
Places like this are only expensive in the first place because everyone builds single family homes that use up tons of space. Then we run out of land and the price of everything skyrockets and only then do cities start building vertical. This is largely the problem with affordable housing in the US, but we can’t have property values go down because real estate has become an alternative stock market I guess.
Issue is, these US-style lawns are often mandated in ways they disallow most other things, unless you want hefty fines.
I’m in Europe, and at least I can have little flowers within the grass, can plant any trees as long as they won’t damage any buildings or cables, and otherwise I can customize my own garden. I could even plant vegetables if the dogs didn’t stamp it, and wouldn’t be so cheap and readily available in the supermarket it doesn’t worth to look after them (once I did grew chili in pots since they’re more scarce in the supermarket).
nah this is just modern isolationist propaganda, people have lived without “privacy” for millions of years and were clearly happier for it.
People nowadays think they want privacy, when in fact they’ve just been robbed of closeness to others during their childhood and never learned to deal with having other people close to them. Like for fuck’s sake in the US it’s completely normal to put infants in a completely separate room! It’s inhumane!
Humans are profoundly social animals and thrive when surrounded by others, we are literally living in an officially recognized loneliness epidemic that is harming our physical and mental health.
Yeah I think a lot of that is true but I grew up in apartments and never want to go back to that, luckily we were able to split a house with my wife’s parents so we still share a wall but it’s with family and that is definitely better than random people, plus having some space where you can grow some plants or let your dogs run around is amazing. I wish my and my friends would have gotten together and bought a big pie e of land where we built our homes on and lived together I think that would be really cool
Nor is advocating getting rid of gardens.
Lawns are a result of setback requirements imposed because people were building structures right up to and sometimes over the street.
Yeah, a garden is better than a lawn but most people don’t have the time or care to maintain that. Much easier to just have a mono “crop” that can be relatively easily managed.
Easily managed???
If that were the goal it’d be clover and moss. No mow lawns are the easiest to manage.
Grasses are a huge pain, and simply there because British aristocracy had a hard on for them and we never questioned if it was smart.
I said more easily. It’s relative. Also, clover and moss are super location/climate specific. What grows natively in Detroit is going to be much different than Miami or reno or jersey city.
I lived in Jersey City for maybe a decade. I think the only two native plants are those trees that smell like cum, and fire hydrants.
aww cmon you don’t like the cum tree everybody loves the cum tree
Some bastard planted those trees all over my city.
Every spring smells like the aftermath of a pride parade.
Especially because British aristocracy was living in Britain, a pretty rainy place, which helps immensely in cultivating grass
Depends on your location and what type of grass you utilize. I for one live in the central plains and have native buffalo grass in the front yard.
I don’t have to water it, I mow it down about twice a year, and buffalo grass flowers which is great for my leaf cutter bees.
Grass isn’t inherently a problem, the problem is most people only plant grass that isn’t native to their locality. Something like buffalo grass is arguably more beneficial to the environment than planting a garden that requires more nutrients and water than the local environment can provide.
I always wondered that grass had to be natural to somewhere
All the “normal” lawn grasses in the US are native to Europe or Asia.
It’s basically the only thing keeping the top soil in any great plains region from blowing away. Buffalo grass in particular is super important at controlling erosion, their roots go down several feet compared to the few inches turf grass provides.
We need more multifamily homes, but I sincerely think that green spaces are super important, not only for the environment, but for the community as well. There’s no reason people who live in multifamily units shouldn’t have access to green spaces or gardens.
We need more multifamily homes, but I sincerely think that green spaces are super important, not only for the environment, but for the community as well. There’s no reason people who live in multifamily units shouldn’t have access to green spaces or gardens.
Agreed, they just should be public spaces, instead of everyone having their individual lawn that they don’t know how to utilise in the best way.
Lawns are a result of setback requirements imposed because people were building structures right up to and sometimes over the street.
And that’s a problem because…?
Height clearance for emergency vehicles (“over the road”), utility servicing, having space to actually have a fire hydrant is important, fire breaks, etc
All that stuff should be accommodated for in the public right-of-way (which includes more than the paved part of the street itself, and usually ends somewhere in the vicinity of the outside edge of the sidewalk). It still doesn’t persuade me that we need setbacks in the private property beyond that.
Exactly, setbacks are classic NIMBY (NIMFY?) bullshit.
How can you build anything without a permit? Man, America is weird AF…
I was about to say golf courses, but then I realized that people actually use golf courses to play golf, which is more then the average lawn is used for.
Hey that’s not true…. Lawns get used all the time for… err…… proving to neighbouring households that the Lawn Owner is rich enough to grow something useless there? Idk tbh
I have a small lot (0.2 acres) with a small lawn, my kids play on it all of the time. It’s the only reason I haven’t gotten rid of it all and replaced it with native species.
When I was a kid, we used our lawn, our friends lawns, and neighbor’s lawns constantly. After school, we would be out there playing games like tag, red light, football, Frisbee, or some other excuse for running around outside, until we gad to go on and have dinner and then work on homework.
Having those yards kept us kids sane, and probably our parents too, as we had places to burn off energy, and get out of their hair for awhile.
If there isn’t anywhere else to play but your own lawn, then your area has inadequate infrastructure. There should be multiple parks within a short, safe walk along with other things for kids to do that don’t require everyone having their own dedicated lawns.
I have 7 acres and I rotate my goats around the entire property to eat. I Don’t have to buy hay or mow it’s great.
Golf. Especially driving ranges.
On the grand scheme of things not that bad in comparison to parking and lawns
Yeah it’s large and can be quite wasteful but not that bad
Eh I like to take the George Carlin approach to golf courses they’re large swaths of land that take a lot of chemicals, and water to maintain by cheap labor hidden just far enough away so rich fucks can hit a tiny white ball with a metal stick into a plastic cup.
I’ll agree that overall golf courses aren’t the source of the problems, but they’re the distillation of how our society is structured to how so many resources and exploited labor go into maintaining the wealthy’s way of life.
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few hundred dollars compared like near $0-$100 for a lot of sports with free courts/fields at parks (basketball, volleyball, soccer, and flag football are like $20 for a whole group to be able to play for as long as a ball lasts, sports like baseball and tennis require individuals to have some equipment but far less than golf costs), that’s still kinda a lot, especially as a basic cost to enter. OTOH… I have more than one bike and I spent nearly $3K on one solely for hobby use when I was making roughly minimum wage, so its far from elitist.
I’m not saying it’s totally accessible. I’m just saying it hasn’t been a rich/elitists game for some 20 year now.
Exactly
I know plenty of people who golf on the weekends who make our state’s minimum wage
Or hell going down to the local driving range is pretty fun as well and something I do on occasion
Not sure about the US, but here in Australia many golf courses are built on flood plains where regular development would not be permitted. Still not nearly as beneficial as native bushland would be, but not as much of a “waste of space” as many tend to believe.
All my homies hate roundup
(My homies are not the state of Missouri)
I mean, that’s true in any case.
Name a more wasteful use of land
Golf course.
I think there are more green desert lawn than golf courses in most places. But golf course is, of course, very wasteful and unnecessary
At least it gets used for something, unlike most people’s front yards. Hell even some people’s backyards I see and it looks like they never use it.
Speak for yourself! Personally I like to wear my boxers and sit on my lawn chair in my front yard while I whittle a stick to a sharp point so I can poke my broke down, rusted out, station wagon. Also every Saturday I get out there in the front and just rev the shit out of my engine at like 6AM. Gotta keep those property values down somehow ya know?
Yes, lawns are wasteful.
But there’s also water quality and flooding issues associated with using all available land for building.
Grass and dirt absorb water. Rooftops and concrete don’t. 1-inch of rain on an acre of grass will be absorbed. Replace that grass with impervious cover and you’ve got an extra 27,000 gallons of water, or about 2 swimming pool’s worth of runoff.
Grass has an extremely low runoff coefficient. The water absorption is almost on par with impervious surfaces. This is because the root system of most turf/gras systems is only a few inches deep. On the other hand native grasses, fescues, and trees are excellent for water infiltration! Rain gardens are also good choices as they promote pollinators. I’m a landscape architect --happy to answer any questions.
Errata: meant to say high runoff coefficient --not low.
It really depends on the specific grass and underlying soils, as you say.
I’m the guy at the City making landscape architects and civil engineers comply with drainage and water quality regulations.
We live off the tears of developers.
Planner I’m guessing? Are you the one I’m fighting the minimum parking requirements for each project? 🥲
Planning yes. But we fight over impervious cover over the aquifer recharge zone and building retaining walls in in conservation and drainage easements.
And setbacks. Good god we fight over setbacks.
Im going to look up rain gardens right now, sounds awesome
Low runoff coefficient means more absorption and less runoff, even sod typically has a C of around 0.3, as opposed to the 0.95 of concrete.
I agree more natural landscaping is better!
Good catch. Still, very low infiltration compared to native grasses. I have the papers on it parked somewhere.
My backyard slopes towards the house and during heavy rains the cellar floods which, okay, it’s a cellar with limestone block walls, it’s not supposed to be waterproof, but… is there anything I can do to make this happen less often?
Yes. There’s several possible approaches to redirecting storm water: You could build a french drain or you could regrade the slopes to redirect the flow around the house. I don’t want to give too specific recommendations because I don’t have a survey or am familiar with the exact conditions of your lot. I don’t think infiltration is an option in your case though. The goal is to get the water away.
Thanks. I figured regrading was best but I haven’t gotten around to it. It’s been less of a problem since we started putting up raised garden beds but I thought, hey, might as well ask.
No problem any other Qs feel free to pm!
That’s what public parks and other green spaces are for.
the only good lawn is a flood management lawn, there’s two notable ones in my town and they literally turn into marshes when it’s been raining a lot or the water level is high, and without them entire areas would flood.
Sububs have way more impervious surface per-capita than dense urban areas do.
It’s worse when you tear down farmland and forests for suburbs.
Build our cities with sufficient storm sewers and public parks that can double as bioswales and fuck the lawn loving burbs.
i, too, advocate a more hobbit-like lifestyle.
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My eighth of an acre is entirely clover, dandelions, and weeds. Eventually, I’ll get around to planting some vegetables, but my thumb is whatever the opposite of green is. I’ve started by trying to grow some herbs this spring, half of which are already dead.
Living with no HOA that forces grass on me FTW.
Can’t do much about having a car though. No public transportation anywhere near and work is twenty miles away. Believe me, I’d much much rather not drive.
Tbh, my favorite kind of gardening is the kind that thrives on neglect. I love making ecosystems that thrive on their own, without my constant input. There’s just something beautiful about seeing life thrive on its own.
Plant a bunch of trees, put down some mulch. Walk away for a year, with no worries. Once a year, add mulch. Enjoy providing habitat for birds and small mammals, plus the shade and privacy, for zero maintenance.
Look up mini-forest, micro-forest, tiny-forest, research. Crazy how a few trees changes a landscape for animals.
I definitely miss the birds at the last place I lived. There was a delightful married cardinal couple, various and sundry doves, and the occasional crow.
Now I’ve got a couple stray cats battling over the territory, neither of which is quite sure what to make of me.
I’ve also got possum bro. He just kinda hangs out and gives me a nod every once in a while.
Killing off the grass is how I finally got my garden started. The native plants could deal with the grass sucking up all the water it could. The garden plants couldn’t. Take a rototiller to your lawn, if you know about rainfall plains and patterns to create a reservoir for your garden plants. Grass and clover will absolutely steal all the water from all the other plants.
These grass lawns always looks awful. 1 color, 0 personality and no variety.
More plants are always better. Also even better plant a fucking tree.
The HOA would never allow such nonsense like trees and actual plant life!
I don’t care if it’s grass or trees, at the end of the day it’s wasted space that could be more house. I lived in a suburb growing up and we literally never did anything on the front yard, yet it was like a third of our property.
People should be allowed to own land and own homes with yards
They should equally be allowed to own homes without yards. But exclusionary zoning, minimum setback, and maximum lot coverage laws don’t allow that.
Exactly. People love to treat it as “a war on cars/lawns/etc.”, but it’s really a war on everybody who doesn’t want to be legally mandated to have those. All we’re asking for is to end the legal mandates (zoning, parking minimums, setback requirements, etc.) and for those who wish to partake in those wasteful luxuries to pay their true price without public subsidy.
Meanwhile rural areas exists what effect would turning a necessity for them into a luxury?
If that’s what you want, the place for that is the country side. But for those of us who want to live with amenities, this shit has got to stop.
There’s plenty of land that isn’t in a city. Go get it.
And everyone else should be free from subsidising it 1
sure, and people should also be guaranteed a right to housing, now which one do you prioritize?
Just implement a Japanese solution
Yeah, sure, people also have the right to fly private jet, but that doesn’t mean it is a “good” decision.
Unrelated to the actual topic, but is anyone else starting to find this “my brother in Christ” meme really irritating? I ain’t your brother, and I don’t give a fuck about your Christ.
Nah I love it. That’s the bit, using it so nonchalantly sort of diminishes the expression. I don’t think anyone using the meme gives a fuck about a Christ either
Yes!!! It was funny the first time I read it in 2019, kind of. Since then it’s not been slightly funny but has gotten pretty irritating to me.
Would you prefer they go back to using the n-word instead?
Edit: maybe the downvote was because you don’t know:
From https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-brother-in-christ :
My Brother in Christ is a recaption meme trend using “my brother in Christ” as a slang term put on top of words, most often replacing the N-word, in other meme captions to enhance the original meaning by adding a flair of polite Christianity for humorous effect.
Edit: fixed link.
Without context this is extremely funny though
“I don’t like this expression”
“OH YEAH? Then I’m gonna go back to using the N-word”
I didn’t say I was gonna do it! I don’t use either expression.
Colon is breaking your link, btw. Thanks for sharing, though, that was interesting.
Huh, today I learned. Thanks grue.
Go away, batin’!
It’s just a phrase. Like “how are you” as a greeting. Nobody who say how are you wants to know how you are or gives a shit about any answer other than “fine thanks! how are you”. Just treat MBIC the same way, maybe invent your own responses, my sister in Buddha?
I don’t ever use it, but I love it.
do you also get angry when people say “thank christ” or “jesus that was close”?
Chef’s kiss on this perfectly executed meme
I cropped everything underneath “my brother in christ”, that much was perfect imo.
Warning, too nerdy
Did you crop everything underneath it… or above it 🤔
Cropped out above, cropped “in” below - is that how the term’s used, or is it ambiguous, time to search.
… OK I think often people would say “I cropped everything above my brother in Christ”. I knew what you meant but thanks for the educational journey.
Hahah I just had that thought before I clicked this notification.
I’ve got 4 cars on my drive way and have run out of room. I do have a large patch of grass next to it, I could probably fit 6 cars there.
Do I purchase and store more vehicles on my grass or purchase more land to store my cars on, so I can protect my lawn?
Giant parking lots and big box stores?
people burning fossil fuels to eviscerate co2 absorbing plants twice a week
“My impact on climate is minimal”
Scotland has a cumulative moorland the size of Jamaica (That’s artifical, not natural peat moor) Thats pretty much kept as desolate scrubland just so a few rich people can hunt deer and pheasants without any inconveniences like something for the animals to hide behind. I did a rough calculation and it works out to about one square kilometer per person per single hunting trip being put asside for the entire year.
![[meme] Lawns and car storage — name a more wasteful use of land](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c6a93d55-ab0b-4275-bd92-43931e7b7d77.jpeg){kind=link}