It’s like a suburban tract home developer with a case of brain worms tried to build townhomes based solely on a verbal description he got from space alien visiting Brooklyn for the first time, relayed over a cell phone with one bar of reception.
I’ve lived in several 1-toilet apartments in my life and am now a firm believer that all 1-toilet tenants have a god-given right to access to a backup toilet (such as in a laundry room or rec room on the apartment complex’s campus)
a toilet is a VERY unfun thing to not have a backup of and suddenly it’s not working
I love that Americans would still rather have crappy rectangles of lawn that they never use for anything than build up to the edge of the plot and have more rooms. Those plots are probably slightly bigger than that of my three bedroom terrace house.
Honestly not a bad deal if you live alone. Make an offer for 130k and settle for 145k then get approved for a loan with APR around 5% and you could be making monthly payments under 600 USD for 20 years. That’s a lot lower than rent, I’ll tell you that, and you can get your equity back at the end when you move.
Only issue is the loan term, variable property value, and if you’re actually buying the land or just the abode.
dunno how it works in the US, but in sweden there are like 3-4 ways it can be done, and fwiw renting here generally comes with the right to continue renting however long you like thanks to very strict renters’ rights laws.
I know two of the ways to own an apartment is either straight up owning the actual apartment itself (with some asterisks obviously because it’s part of a building), and the most common form is to own the right to live there (and pay maintenance costs, which is why i find it pointless to own) and sell it on.
i mean you do realize that owning housing comes with maintenance costs, right? why would i spend money i probably don’t actually have to buy a house when an apartment would have about the same rent as the maintenance costs (and the ability to just move if the apartment is flooded or whatever)?
The second car in the bottom driveway is partly in the road. This first cat is either partly in a garage, or missing. The driveways are so close that there is no street parking. I have concerns about buses (think school, not public transit) and garbage day.
What is amazing is that people would rather live like this, and have four feet of grass between them and their neighbors, than in a place twice as big with a shared wall…
To each their own. I do hear all sorts of sounds coming from my neighbors in my apartment. From moaning to phone alarm vibrating, sounds of various objects hitting each other, even arguing sometimes.
Not to mention some people open their doors and windows when cooking, allegedly for the draft to get in and get the smell out of the kitchen (don't know why they do this, just open your damn window and that's it). And when the air goes the opposite way, the hallway of the building is a mix of various smells of whatever they cook.
Oh, by the way, did I mention I need to take the elevator to reliably reach my apartment?
here in sweden we do this amazing thing called “actually building things solidly”, our apartment blocks are largely solid concrete and the only thing i hear from my neighbours is when their kids drop what i can only assume to be anvils onto the floor, which results in a faint thunk.
these apartment buildings are part of the million programme back in the 60’s, where we churned out tons and tons of standardized high density housing eras much like your commie blocks.
So it’s not a problem of being cheap or communist, it’s a problem with effective execution.
And fwiw communist housing tends to generally be one of the better places to live, provided it’s not that one fucked up place in russia where it’s just highrises in a sea of parking lots.
The bedroom is obviously upstairs and would have an adjacent bathroom. Assuming they have guests, the builders have put in a downstairs bathroom for them.
It just highlights how absurdly much space cars take up compared to people. Residents could have 25% more room to live if they didn’t have to dedicate the space to car parking. (That parking is likely required by law as a minimum parking requirement in the zoning code, by the way, so it’s entirely possible the person who ends up living there might not even actually want it.)
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