Could a single-family home ever be more eco-friendly than a small apartment?

Factual Questions
61

But I reiterate my point - a lot of the eco-friendly modifications don’t really have an economic benefit that justifies them purely based on profit. Hence, large apartment (or condo) buildings tend not to include or upgrade to eco-friendly technology. With your own house, if you can afford it and bylaws permit it, go for it.

As for HOA’s, I’ve never understood that aspect of American life. I am not aware of any such creatures in Canadian law that limit your home ownership, except for condo associations and similar joint-ownership setups.

62

I didn’t read properly and missed this before. Apologies.

I think one of the main things is to build up rather than out even with a single family home. I have the impression that single-storey houses are fairly common in the US (from visiting friends there, in LA and Florida, not just from TV). Even just going up one storey would make a difference. Go up to four storeys and it becomes even more viable (if you have disabilities, you can put in a stairlift - uses electricity but not in anywhere near the same way as an elevator).

It means those single family homes can have a large square footage internally, and a decent sized amount of outside space (which helps with, well, tons of things environmentally), without taking up as much space. It means they can be built close together, enabling more public transport and local shopping on foot.

Homes that adjoin at least one other home can benefit from insulation and heat sharing in the same way as apartments do. Sound travelling between the houses is not inevitable; I live in a terrace, with houses adjoining me on each side, and I never hear a single thing at all from them. Not one sound. Some modern houses can be noisy, I’ve been told, but so can some apartments - it’s about how they’re built. My house was built in 1830 (as workers’ cottages, not for the rich), and I’m pretty sure we can build homes at least as well as architects did then, if we want to.

If the argument is about the amount of space taken up by homes, then that helps in the same way as a low-level apartment complex does.

You won’t fit more people into each home, but you can fit more homes into the land area. and get some of the other benefits of apartments. And people would be more willing to live in them than in apartments.

63

It’s an interesting idea, the multi-story single-family home with shared side-walls. Definitely not as common in the US as in London, though my friend in the trendy Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles owns a place like that. First floor is garage + entryway; second floor is living/dining room + kitchen, third floor is 2 bedrooms and a bathroom, fourth floor is kind of a den plus another bathroom. I hated it when I saw it, but that might have had more to do with the ugly modern facade than the multiple tiny floors. I will say, it was a raucous housewarming party with nary a noise complaint from the neighbors. Whereas my bitchass downstairs neighbors in my old apartment constantly complained about my husband and I walking around in socks.

64

The biggest difficulty in a small-footprint-multiple-floors house is that you need a stairwell in every unit, and that eats up footprint on every floor. One alternative is a layout that’s so common here that I took it for granted, until I learned that it was named after the city: the Cleveland Double. It’s a house divided into two single-family living spaces, with one family on the first floor and another on the second. This way, you only need one stairway for two units, instead of one each, and it also means that one of the two units is easy to make handicapped accessible. Usually, the owner lives in one unit, and rents out the other.

65

I’m a little confused about what you mean about needing one stairway for two units instead of one for each - I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a small footprint , multiple floor/unit house with a separate stairway for each unit. These houses, for example have one central stairway and four apartments and these

across the street have a single stairway for two units.

( If a “Cleveland double” is specifically the style with a porch on each story, interior stairs and separate entrances, that might not be so common elsewhere but a single building divided into multiple units with fewer stairways than units is pretty common in most cities I’ve been to in the Northeast)

66

Wait, so your unit would contain multiple stories, but to get from the first floor of your unit to the second floor of your unit, you have to go out into a common space? That seems… awkward.

67

What about single family home under 1000sqft, built 150+ yrs ago. All the materials would have been sourced from within 100 miles?

By the time the fourth or fifth family has lived there, adding nothing new beyond upgraded appliances and paint?

Where does that fall in efficiency compared to a current multiplex where everything was sourced for across the continent?

Doesn’t that count for something efficiency wise?

68

That’s just how row houses are. Frankly that’s the case for any multi-story single-unit home. You need to have your own stairs, full stop. The Cleveland Double is a two-unit building, over-under, so only the 2nd floor unit needs a stair. We’re not talking about multi-story units with additional common area stairs. Most multi-story single-unit homes have their own entrance from street level. Anything else is most likely a single-level in a multi-story building, with the possible exception of some excessively large condo penthouses that may have multiple units combined and an internal stair added, but those are usually elevator buildings anyway.

One layout that eliminates some of the circulation redundancies is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, France. There’s a corridor only every third floor, and the units on each side fit above and to the right, or below and to the left. There’s a small stair in each unit, but it’s in the already open multi-story living space. This layout also benefits cross-ventilation, but it does put some rooms deep in the interior without windows, and all the pinwheeling (which happens in plan too apparently) makes sound and fire isolation more challenging.

Anyway, keep in mind that once you get to buildings with four or more units in the US, you get bumped from the residential building code to the commercial building code, which requires two full means of egress from each unit. That means two stairs and/or or two doors that don’t cross paths. Fire escapes don’t cut it anymore, nor do egress windows in bedrooms.

69

“Embodied energy” is definitely a thing. LEED certification takes it into account, giving extra points to existing buildings and reused materials. At some point however, if it’s leaky and poorly insulated, requires a lot of artificial light, and is out in the country requiring a car trip to do anything, then the benefit of the embodied energy is quickly used up. It can only get you so far, just like anything else.

It all depends on just what “efficiency” you’re talking about too. For transportation efficiency, then the older locally-sourced materials are probably better. They could have been shipped by coal-burning smoke-belching steam trains, or just floated down a canal pulled by a horse, cut from the trees in the woods around the house, or dug out of the ground. It’s hard to say. Some 19th century bricks were made with very polluting processes and some weren’t. Wood may have been old-growth, and metal for pipes and wires wasn’t always sourced in the best way.

An advantage to modern building materials is that they can be made from virtual garbage. Sawdust, wood chips, and glue makes floor and wall sheathing, cabinet boxes, and even finished doors and other surface laminates. Instead of burning limestone to make plaster, drywall is just a slurry of ground up rock pressed between paper pulp. Roof shingles are a mix of fiberglass, asphalt binder, and granulated sand instead of wood, slate, or tile which require cutting down trees, digging mines, and firing clay. Etcetera etcetera. They may require more energy/work in the production process, but less in the harvesting and extraction process.

So from a standpoint of resource use and intensity, the modern materials win out to some extent by using less virgin material, otherwise they’d be more expensive than the alternatives. However, they require sizable industrial facilities, so there aren’t small local producers, and they require lengthy shipping. These materials are also generally not reusable or recyclable, even if they are more durable. What can you do with old pex piping, vinyl siding, plywood, particle board cabinets, hollow-core doors, and fiberglass shingles other than throw them in the trash? Granted, aside from copper piping in older houses that has some value, it’s just as likely to be galvanized steel or even lead, and there’s not a lot you can do with the old rotted out wood siding with 10 layers of lead paint, the short subfloor boards full of nails, thin old cabinets that have been beaten to hell, same for the other doors and old roofing that’s worn out.

70

Yes, you’re going to need at least one stairwell per multi-story unit regardless of the footprint, but that’s a larger proportion of footprint in a small-footprint unit.

71

No, the building is multiple stories but each unit is on a single floor. You go through a common area to get from your apartment to the shared front door.

72

I think there must be done miscommunication here. Single family homes on multiple storeys will have interrnal stairs, yes. Assistant buildings with apartments on each floor will have one or two sets of stairs, depending on height. Apartment blocks where the apartments are multi-storey and there are more than one of them per storey would have interrnal stairways as well as the communal external stairway (and there are lots of flats like that in the UK - they’re called maisonettes), but I didn’t think anyone was talking about those.

73

I’ve rented most of my life and never seen it as “low class”.

I currently own my condo unit but I often just refer to it as an apartment.

I agree with the distinction between condo and apartment. I just do not know that many really care enough to distinguish (doubtless some do).

74

I suspect we live in different places

75

And another negative phenomenon of the automobile on cities was the introduction of the “urban freeway”. The introduction of elevated or sunken highways to get in and around the city. They typically cut through a neighborhood (usually less affluent), driving down property value and creating a physical barrier isolating one part of the city from another. I-93 in Boston was a good example. It was this ugly elevated freeway that effectively cut off the waterfront from the rest of Downtown Boston. Ultimately it was removed by the “Big Dig”. The elevated highway was moved underground and replaced with parks and a surface boulevard.

76

FWIW Phoenix has installed a light rail system in the city. It is not very extensive yet but, IIRC, a politician, at the behest of lobbyists, tried to kill it from expanding. Phoenix citizens voted to keep it by a good margin and expand it.

The Phoenix metro area is certainly car centric. Their mass transit is terrible. But they are starting to get around to it so, better late than never.

https://phoenix.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/67636730_m.jpg

77

I think a lot of cities nowadays are realizing the virtue of LRT (if not big enough for subway). The key point is giving them an isolated right of way. Often they either bypass traffic lights or can go over or under intersections, or like Calgary and Minneapolis, use crossing gates to pre-empt local traffic. Streetcars typically go no faster than city traffic, plus more frequnt stops than LRT and stop with traffic.

The point would be that cities built for cars still have the problem that downtown land is valuable, so parking becomes (a) a hassle and (b) expensive - thus encouraging urban sprawl, where businesses locate to the suburbs, put in extensive free parking lots, and build one floor (cheaper) and wider - making the land used even greater area. .

To get people to come back downtown, it is better to have a quick and accessible means to get there that does not involved paid parking. But then you either need extensive coverage of the suburbs, or many suburban park-and-ride facilities.

To my mind, nothing beats the convenience of a good subway system - I got from the WTC site to Yankee stadium in 20 minutes during rush hour. Meanwhile, going from the Cloisters (almost as far) to the south end of Central Park by bus one time took almost an hour.

A hazard of making the streetcar tracks also a drive lane is seen in Toronto, where the South Spadina streetcar dives under the road to turn around at the subway station. They apparently had to put crossing gates at the tunnel after one too many cars, not fully aware it seems, tried to drive into the tunnel.