Communal laundry are unheard of in France (except in generally communal places like student residences and such).
Note too that here, a landlord doesn’t provide any appliance (except, quite frequently, a fridge). You have to bring your own washing machine or whatever else you might want.
Same here in the Netherlands. I always found it admirable that the system of shared laundry areas exists in the US. It is just a better use of space and material. Of course, about two-third of Dutch households line-dry their laundry.
On a similar vein, I have wondered (and admired) how easily younger people in the US share apartments through the roommate system. Apart from students, that is not common in the Netherlands either. Everybody has their own (albeit small) own apartment or house. Loneliness is more of a problem here.
Well, then maybe someone should start a roommate matching service … although I suppose the average flat there is a single bedroom or what in the US we consider a studio[no actual bedroom, everything tends to be in a single large room with a bathroom, and perhaps a nook for the kitchen]
Roomies are nice if you both are compatible, horrid if you are not. I went through phases of roomie/nonroomie before marriage. It gives you someone that you can hang out with, and talk with, and share the cost and chores of the residence, and if one likes to cook and the other like cleaning up, it can be a match made in heaven =)
We actually have had various roommates living with us, it gave me someone to be here while mrAru was out to sea, living out in the country it seemed like a smart idea. It was sort of a lifesaver the 6 month stretch I had pneumonia fairly seriously.
There are roomie-seeking services, pretty much every flat-search website I’ve used in the last 5 years (France, Spain and the UK) had a section for “shared housing”. But a lot of it is a cultural thing: same as in the US it is seen as “horrid” to live with your parents after graduating HS, in much of Europe it is seen as “horrid” to move from living with roomies you’ve known since birth to moving to living with a bunch of strangers (you do it if you have to do it for college or somesuch, or if you can’t stomach the relatives, but it’s rare otherwise). Better the devil you know and all that. Both my house and the flat I’m renting now are 2B1b: having a flatmate means no guest room. Usually when a flat is shared (in Spain), it is at least a 3B.
Flat sharing in London amongst young professionals (20-35yrs) is the norm, mainly because accommodation is so friggin expensive. People only tend to move out of shared places when they’ve saved enough to buy a place, or to move in with their partner.
Yeah, and in Spain you find it in Madrid, less in Barcelona, Valencia or Bilbao. It still is a minority of the country, even if they happen to be the biggest cities. And often those people have known each other before being roomies, or have been sharing since they college.
My daughter has a fairly nice apartment, and part of the reason she chose it was because it came with a washer and dryer. She pays a lot in rent, but she’s happy with the apartment and the amenities.
Not all laundry should be dried in a machine, and not all laundry needs a lot of drying time. Blue jeans and towels take a long time to dry, even on high heat, for instance, while bras and other support garments shouldn’t be put in a dryer at all. Tshirts usually don’t take terribly long to dry. I have an assortment of dresses made of light to mid weight cotton, and even though they are long and full, they don’t take more than 15 minutes to dry on the “medium” heat setting. If I cared to, I could hang my dresses to dry. Back when I was line drying clothes, if I started hanging a load of regular clothes, I’d quite often hang up the last of the load and then go back to the first and start taking them down in the summer time, because it’s HOT in Texas during the summer and the moisture evaporates in almost no time.
Oh, and aruvqan, you need to look into getting a cool mist humidifier for summer, and a warm mist humidifier for winter.
And the pipes can’t take it.
It isn’t just the cost of the machines. In many older buildings, installing a washer dryer would also mean redoing the plumbing (which was not designed for that kind of load.)
Every flat I’ve ever rented has had its own washing machine. If you rent a place furnished or part furnished here, the white goods are included. It’s pretty rare to find a rental without them. The only time I’ve ever been in a shared laundry room was when I was in halls. And when we bought this flat, it had brand new white goods built into the brand new kitchen. Winner.
When I studied abroad in Japan, I stayed in a dorm that was set up as a series of suites. Each of us had a private bedroom and, for lack of a better word, toilet closet, but had shared areas with three or four other bedrooms, including kitchen and bathroom (in the bath-bath sense). Included in each suite was a washer/dryer combo (although the dryers were either terribly designed or poorly vented–they weren’t so much "dry"ers as "make clothes hot and damp"ers, so we all line-dried most everything.
All the reasons given above. Space is space; extra equipment is extra equipment; private machines sit idle most of the time; machines in private apartments are more of a PITA to fix or perform regular preventative maintenance on; landlords can charge for each load of laundry done in a communal room; etc. etc.
The fact that my current apartment has its own washer and dryer is the main reason I live there. If I were willing to compromise on this issue, I could easily be paying hundreds of dollars less in rent a month. $500 or more less, if I were willing to forego some other ameneties but stay in the same neighborhood.