this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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I work in municipal develpment.
The thing with developers is that they build that density, but over ALL of the land. Apartments kill more trees and create more impervious cover than any other type of housing.
Our city requires parkland dedication for development. Single-family developments build public parks and preserve trees wherever possible. Apartments just pay a fee in lieu for tree mitigation and parkland dedication and improvements because they absolutely will not have a millimeter of land not dedicated to housing.
That sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be fixed by making it not legal to do that lol
It's not a problem inherent to apartments, it's a problem with lack of regulation in your area.
But more importantly, if that many people need housing, it's better to put them in apartments than single family houses. Less nature will get destroyed. What are we gonna do, not give them housing?
The point of the graphics is 100 homes vs 100 homes. If you say "well, in the second picture developers would just keep building" then you're comparing 100 homes to like 1000 homes. It makes no sense.
Identifying the solution can be a lot different than actually implementing that solution.
Trying to get laws that are beneficial to people versus businesses is difficult to do in the US.
Is this per-acre, per-person, or per-unit?
Per acre doesn't make a lot of sense, comparison-wise, because people have to live somewhere. It seems more logical to compare on a per capita basis than anything else, in terms of the number of people who will on average live in those units.
People like ignoring per-capita analysis because it would force them to rethink the sustainability of their own lifestyle. There is absolutely nothing sustainable about every single person living in ultra low-density, car-dependent sprawl.
If you refuse to build dense communities to house people, they'll just build sprawl elsewhere, and more forest and farmland will be destroyed for it, more cars will clog up the streets because of it, and more neighborhoods will have to be demolished to build freeways because of it.
Typical apartment density still results in a higher per-capita impact. Yeah - that home lot may take up a lot of space, but it'll be maybe 20-30% impervious cover. So you get triple the density with an apartment, but once you account for the parking (no garages inside the apartments), the higher percentage of impervious cover, and the lack of parkland dedication for the neighborhood you actually have more impervious cover per capita for multifamily than single-family.
And that's not even touching the extra traffic mitigation in the road network required to accommodate a dense development. Traffic isn't spread out, so more infrastructure has to be built everywhere to accommodate the choke points created by apartments. You throw in a 400-unit apartment complex you have to add another lane to the road, plus decel and turn lanes at the site. You add 400 single-family homes along that same road and it isn't a problem because you don't have the stress-point on the network created by having hundreds of cars using the same access point. When your peak-hour trips for a site get over about 100, you're gonna cause a lot of traffic.
The solution we've implemented with single-family to make it less impactful is a super strict tree ordinance. Any trees removed have to be double, triple, or even quadruple-mitigated (depending on tree size) and we additionally charge $500/inch for tree removal. We make it so fucking expensive to bulldoze nature they have to build around it.
If they "accidentally" kill a tree, they have to pay quadruple the fee, mitigate on-site, and development in the critical root zone of an improperly-removed tree is permanently prohibited. We've had million-dollar pieces of land made worthless when they tried to get around the rules.
Single-family builds around the trees and incorporates them into the neighborhoods. Multifamily just pays the mitigation fees and passes the bill to the residents.
Of course, not everywhere has the space for single-family. But if you've got the space, single-family can be way less-disruptive to the local environment than multifamily.
Triple the density sounds quite low. A five over one is going to be more like 6x or more the density.
It sounds like most of the rest of that is parking minimums and car-dependant roads. The last apartment I lived in just had on-street parking because it was in a walkable neighborhood and a couple min from the subway. I don't know how many people living there even owned a car.
The reality is that in most of the US a car is a hard requirement. Building apartments without parking means nobody will live there. You can't solve the parking problem without first addressing the need for cars. The US is sprea out enough that installing enough public transit to remove the need for a car would be the largest civil project in history.
You do both incrementally and simultaneously. Yes, this is a terrible idea in the middle of exurban sprawl. Don't build them there.
The people most likely to move into these buildings are the people best served by existing transit. If you're able to bike, train or bus to work, you're more likely to get one of those units than if you drive 120 miles to work.
A number of cities already have decent to ok transit networks. So you make it so expansions to those networks result in transit-oriented development, and upzone existing walksheds of your transit to transform them into pleasant walkable mixed-use areas if they aren't already. You improve things over time and people who prefer walkable, bikeable urbanism will move in.
Simultaneously simply isn't realistic. A developer isn't gonna drop 40 million dollars on a TOD complex without the transit being in place. Otherwise they're throwing away the money when the transit project falls through (which 90% do).
What's the comparison with 100 single family homes vs. 100 apartment units?
I'd argue that 100 houses and 1 playground is much more destructive to the land than 1 building with 100 apartments and no playground. Single family homes still have a massive amount of impervious ground cover ranging from their roofs, driveways and patios.
Its also not an inherrent problem to the denser developments themselves but moreso an issue its legal to pay a fine to get out of a building standard. The city could just refuse any development that fails to meet their public park and tree goals.
Multifamily development requires large buildings and parking lots that are fundamentally incompatible with low impervious cover and tree preservation.
Attached garages are what allow single-family homes to be so efficient when it comes to impervious cover. The cars are parked inside the building, with living space above and around it within a door of the parking space. It's extremely compact, and with proper minimum setbacks in the code you eliminate a lot of pavement.
The average apartment requires 2.2 parking spaces. The average house requires 2.5. Multiply that out by 100 units and you've got 220 versus 250, but by having garages the driveways can be shortened to only 2 have room for 2 spaces. Now you've got 4 spaces' worth of parking for the impervious cover of 2, so the parking requirements for single-family are more than twice as efficient while being lower in absolute terms.
A parking space requires about 100 square feet of IC, so for a 100-unit complex you're looking at 22,000 square feet of IC just for the parking spaces. Plus another 1500 for ADA spaces. Throw in drive aisles (which due to emergency vehicle access are just as wide as a SF road) and that number more than doubles. Also put in fire lanes, hammerheads/turnarounds, etc and you're quickly looking at 150,000 square feet of pavement just for the parking lot, plus the extra road lanes and decel lanes required to support its traffic impact.
The thing about SF roads is that they serve multiple purposes. They provide access to the site, as well as emergency vehicle access, fire lanes, etc. They also can do storm water detention under the roads to limit the required off-site detention, so they don't have to clear-cut as large of an area for detention and water-quality facility as an apartment complex does.
So the road, drive aisle, emergency access, fire lane, storm sewer, and more can all be combined in a lower-density area in a manner that combines to decrease the per capita environmental impact.
There's no additional ADA requirements because every parking space has open space on at least 1 side and they're all close enough to the houses that reserving empty parking spaces for ADA isn't required. And half the parking spaces are inside the house. And the occupancy rate of SF houses is half-again higher than an apartment, but with fewer drivers per capita (higher percentage of multiple-child households in SF).
You can't just look at building sizes and get the full picture of a development's impact.
I don't know what houses you see that have garages but don't have driveways long enough to park on. The drive up area of a multiunit can also allow emergency service access, often allowing full access to the perimeter of the building by using the sidewalks or lawns during emergencies.
As for stormwater it is very rare that it is detained underground or underneath the road, most developments have storm sewers that lead to a stormwater retention or detention pond and in some cases the sewers directly lead into creeks, lakes or empty land.