Not only building new homes is unnecessarily complicated and expensive, single family homes are an incredible waste of space and money, had the US and it's big cities invested in apartment buildings with better amenities or forced developers to build shared neighborhood amenities Americans in general wouldn't be so incredibly against it.
It's insane to me that my hometown of 1M people in Brazil has more tall apartment buildings than Philadelphia, with incredibly better amenities.
This is a really good point. I don't understand the obsession with single family homes.
We own a single family home and it kind of make me feel bad. We rarely use our yard, it is just maintenance for no good reason. Inside the house, we have also so much useless space, just costing money to heat or cool it.
> It's insane to me that my hometown of 1M people in Brazil has more tall apartment buildings than Philadelphia, with incredibly better amenities.
Would you mind sharing what the amenities are that you are referring to--both the in-building and neighborhood amenities? In the US I've seen gyms, swimming pools, shared hosting spaces, and some child-friendly spaces, to name a few.
Pools, BBQs, gyms, playgrounds, multi sports courts, party rooms, stores and restaurants.
In PHL unless you’re paying big money in a new or refurbished building in center city (and there aren’t that many) you’re out of luck.
Doesn’t help that schools also suck and are heavily segregated, which ended up forcing us to move to the suburbs into a single family home to raise our kids as we knew we wouldn’t have enough money to send them to private schools and didn’t want them on the public system there.
Just to add on to this, a number of older buildings in my city in Canada (say late 1960s to mid 1970s construction) even had woodworking shops as common amenities! Today there are pet washing stations, EV chargers, outdoor rooftop patios, movie theatres, etc. It’s incredible.
Not owning the apartment seems to be a very US thing, I owned two apartments in Brazil and had a small construction business that built small apartment buildings and it was almost all sold to owners.
eh, they are called condos or co-ops when they are owned by the occupant in the states. I think they're the same thing, though interested if there is some distinction I'm missing
TIL. I don't think we have different names for them in portuguese, it's just apartments, for some reason full apartment buildings for rental aren't really a thing in Brazil, don't think I've seen many of them there.
A place to live is a base of the hierarchy of needs, but giving away $2000 to someone else for a place to live vs. putting $2000 a month into your own assets is not a red herring.
Developers want equity because it is financial security and passive income for them. Regular Joes want it so they don't pay rent in perpetuity; that they may have a place to live in old age without working, among other reasons.
All my friend's parents that didn't own their homes are completely fucked now that they're old, retired and their pensions didn't keep up with inflation. If you don't own the place you live you're just a rent hike away from the streets.
It's insane to me that my hometown of 1M people in Brazil has more tall apartment buildings than Philadelphia, with incredibly better amenities.