Japanese colleague who moved to the West was freaked out over not having her own washer, in the apartment. The communal facility was super-alarming to her, and the concept of going down the street or god forbid turning her clothes over to the laundry/dry cleaner for wash and fold was simply not on the radar. Japanese aquaintances explained that Japanese girls in particular like to wash clothes pretty much every day, will wash their sheets/linens every day, get really nervous if they can’t. My colleague eventually accepted that few city apartments in the West have individual washers so the building basement would have to do. I think she lurks in the basement through the entire wash/dry cycle to make sure no one sees or takes her underwear (to be fair, this may be a very legitimate concern where she’s from . . . .).
IME, you’re about half right. Age of the building seems to be a much bigger factor than how rich or poor an area is.
Having just been through looking for a new apt - and specifically looking for one with a washer/dryer - it does seem like it’s fairly standard for new complexes to supply a washer & dryer in each apartment. Or at least have hookups for a tenant to bring their own.
However, communal washing machines are still really common, and not just in poorer complexes/areas. Older buildings were less likely to have private laundry in each apartment, even if the apartments themselves were really nice & in more wealthy areas. We passed up some huge, gorgeous apartments due to not having our own laundry.
I’d guess that landlords just don’t have an interest in adding laundry to older buildings, since it would likely cost them a lot and they’d have to raise the rent more than people would pay.
I wouldn’t mind this set-up much, being able to reserve blocks of time to do laundry. But I’ve never lived in a building where you could do this, it was always just first come, first served.
Back when we were apartment dwellers, I refused to rent anyplace that didn’t have provisions for my own washer/dryer [I owned a stacked apartment sized unit of my own, all electric 110v.] I will frequently use a drying rack in my living room for lighter fabrics that will dry fairly fast, or for clothing that would otherwise shrink with the heat and agitation of a dryer. The added humidity in the air helps my sinuses not bleed from dryness.
I do have to take the ultra bulky kingsized comforters to a laundromat to wash them in a double or triple load washing machine and dryer though.
These are my points:
- The smaller machines have become common relatively recently.
- Shared laundry rooms are more common in older buildings.
Where there are shared laundry rooms, you’re likely to find them in older buildings and also built at a time when the smaller machines were either not as easily available or not as popular.
To clarify, I don’t reserve blocks of time; the schedule’s pre-set. Like, the #1 unit on each floor gets the laundry room from 5-9 PM on Saturdays, 8 AM-noon on Mondays, and noon-5 on Thursdays. Each apartment gets one morning block, one afternoon block, and one evening block, scattered through the week. I guess they just assume that that’s enough variety of times that everyone will be able to find a time that works for them, or if not, they can ask a neighbor about swapping.
During my many years of apartment dwelling in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, I only had a washer/dryer combo in my own apartment at one place, where I lived for a couple of years. The rest of the time, I used shared laundry facilities. My experience was that garden apartments (3 or 4 floor walkups, no elevator, 2-4 apartments per floor) would have one or two washers and dryers in a basement laundry room for each building. High-rises (elevator buildings) would have much larger facilities in the basement of the building. The high-rise option with multiple washers and dryers had the advantage of allowing you to do ALL of your laundry at once. You could take 4 or 5 loads to the laundry room at one time, load up the washing machines, come back in a half hour and move everything to dryers. It wasn’t always possible to get enough machines to do everything at once, but it wasn’t unusual either. The major disadvantage here was the necessity to hoard coins. I could never have enough quarters back then. And there was the very occasional case of laundry “disappearing.” One time when I returned to get my laundry out of the dryer, I realized that I was missing two T-shirts, both purchased at Star Trek conventions. But then I noticed that another dryer appeared to have two similarly colored items tossing around. I stopped the dryer, pulled out the items, and confirmed that they were indeed mine. I just removed them, re-closed the dryer and started it up again. While I was still folding my laundry, someone came and removed the laundry from that dryer. My T-shirts were visible in my piles of folded laundry. Neither of us ever said a word.
But the garden apartment option was always a major major MAJOR pain in the rear end – especially if you lived on the top floor and were not athletically inclined. There was no way to know in advance if a washer was available. You just had to lug your laundry down the stairs and take your chances. Since there were rarely more than two, it was not at all unusual to find them already in use. At that point, you had the choice of lugging your laundry back UP the stairs and trying again later, or cooling your heels in the laundry room. But these tiny laundry rooms rarely had any seating whatsoever. So unless you were quite certain that the washer was near the end of the spin cycle, you could be waiting for a while – even longer if the person using the machine did not employ a stopwatch or alarm clock to remind them when to return.
Now that I have a single family home, I’m quite pleased to have my very own washer and dryer at my disposal whenever I choose to do laundry – and I don’t even have to hoard coins or keep an eagle eye on my Star Trek T-shirts!
Same story in South African blocks of flats, although usually you have to provide your own washing machine, it being rare to find a flat that comes with one preinstalled.
In New York City, I never had an apartment with any laundry facilities of any kind. I had to go to the laundromat. Same in Argentina (although I was living in cheap apartments).
I lived in Northern Virginia and had the exact same set-up. However, I would go down the stairs without my clothes and check to see if the machines were occupied, and then sprint up to my apartment and grab my clothes before someone else came.
I’ve seen that a lot in dorms, too. Often an entire dorm building will have one single laundry room. What really doesn’t make sense, though, was that they’d always have the same number of washers and dryers, even though the dryers take about twice as long, so you could usually find a washing machine, but would invariably have to wait for a dryer.
EDIT:
That’s just begging to be taken out of context.
In Peru never.
It’s a good way to get the laundry room to yourself.
I’ve only lived in one place with washer/dryers in the building. The rest of the places I lived in I had to go to the laundromat.
I still go sometimes as my current place only has two washers and two dryers for 40+ apartments. So lots of times it’s better to take them to the laundromat if you have many loads as you can do them all at once
What I do is take my money and washing powder to the laundry room. If the washer is free I just put the money and soap in. Then I start it up. Then I run and get my clothes. By the time I get back the washer is half full and I put my clothes in
In my part of China, many people do not have laundry machines at all- everything is hand washed and line dried. The upwardly mobile do have small home washing machines, but I’ve never seen a home dryer.
I’ve never seen a rental with the actual machines provided by the landlord. One of my prior apartments had the hookups for them, but I would have had to provide my own machines. That was fine, there was a laundromat across the street - close enough that I could see my building from the back side of the laundromat parking lot. This complex wasn’t super-recent, I think it was built in the early 80s. This was in an area I’d describe as on the upper end of working class.
The apartment before that had only a horribly undersized communal laundry room, I found it much easier to grab a book and drive 10 minutes to the closest laundromat, and stay there while the wash was going. Granted, that place was geared toward students, and it seemed everyone wanted to do their laundry on Sunday.
I currently rent a house, the landlord did not provide a washer or dryer here. The previous tenants (friends of mine) were buying a place and got new appliances to go in it, so I got the pair I have now free. So now I’m spoiled and could never go back to having to haul my laundry anywhere to do a wash.
In Poland there is one washer for many families in an apartment building. They have a schedule posted, so you know when you have access to it. You might have Fridays from 12-4 and Tuesdays from 8-12.
If you have read any of the Wallander detective stories set in Sweden you will have noticed that the Kurt lives in an apartment block that has a communal laundry room. As mentioned above, he has to book a specific time to use this facility. Because of his hectic and chaotic lifestyle he is always missing these bookings, and ends up with no clean clothes to go to work in.
Yeah, that’s about the way it is. I can’t even think of a block of flats, be it condos or rentals, without a communal laundry room and commercial laundromats are non-existent. The woman I sometimes share a bed with lives in a newly built building where the larger flats have their own washing equipment, but many residents prefer to use the common room as there is more space there.
Older apartment buildings in Norway certainly have communal laundry rooms. I lived in an eight-unit block for about three years; all the apartments shared a single washer in the basement, which was powered by way of a coin-operated electrical meter. Finding time to use it generally wasn’t a problem, as none of the units had more than two people living in it and most had only one. My husband and I lived on the first floor and could just open our apartment door and listen closely - if we didn’t hear any noise, the machine was available. There was no dryer, but there was a large clothes hoist outside, and communal lines up in the loft, if you didn’t want to use a rack in your own apartment. These were small, older apartments, and had no space for a washer anywhere.
Later we moved to a row house in a suburban development. We had a laundry room in the basement, but until we had saved up enough for our own washer and dryer, we used the communal laundry room. Here you had to sign up for your turn to use the washer (again, no dryer), and if you forgot your turn or couldn’t make it, tough luck - the sign-up book was filled up every week. I was pregnant at that point and a washer very quickly moved to the top of the priority list - I couldn’t imagine doing that with a newborn’s laundry on top of it all. Even though the row houses had laundry rooms in the basement, and the apartments had space and a hook-up for a washer in the bathroom, clearly many families chose to use the communal facilities.
Not-quite-so-old apartments tend to have space and facilities for a washer in the bathroom. Newer units are increasingly leaving space for a dryer, as well, although venting is a problem so most people have to use a condenser dryer. The communal clotheslines outside and in the loft are still common, however.
In Spain the idea of a “collective laundry room” needs to be explained sloooooowly. People have seen them in movies, but we kind of jumped from handwashing in collective laundries that were for several blocks / a laundry area for the whole village, to each having his own washing machine. Laundromats are uncommon, but more understandable than this notion of having to leave your flat to go do laundry, then having to “go out” again to move the laundry to the dryer, then again to go get the dry clothing. College dorms don’t usually have laundry facilities, flats are big enough to have their own kitchen and washer and whatnot; the washer is often in the kitchen or in the minibalcony attached to it. Washer-dryers are starting to be sold, but other than in “collective housing” (hotels, hospitals, prisons), in the humid Northern seaboard or in households with twin babies, they’re not very popular.