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LANDLORDS COWER IN FEAR OF MAOTRAIN
"that train pic is too powerful lmao" - u/Cadende
I grew up in a city of mostly rowhomes and I love them. Plan on buying one one day.
You still get walk-ability, sense of community and good population density (not as good as a high-rise but still good), but also more privacy, and the space is more conducive to raising a family than an apartment. Also they're cute as fuck and people can paint them different colors and have cool little gardens on their porches and stuff.
I love rowhomes. Every neighborhood with rowhomes feels like a real place where real people live. It’s the right trade off between density and livability, especially for families with kids. Commodified housing is still the main problem, but in terms of urban design, it doesn’t get much better.
Rent is 99k a month and your first born. Also planting in the garden is a lease violation
As I said, commodified housing is the main problem.
Kinda surprised by the number of people in here who seem to be objecting to this on the grounds of like, some minor inconvenience they might have which realistically is going to apply to pretty much anything that's not like a detached single family home. Like what do you want? Suburbia but make it communist and good somehow?
Row home appreciation picture:
Montréal has a fair amount of these and they're pretty cool. Also variations of this ofc, like sometimes it's not fully connected, but in groupings of four units with little passageways between the buildings, or they might have little yards or be 3 units tall, really depends on the area.
Love me some good row houses
They're really run to drunkly bike through, which I did a lot in my 20s
I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and it was full of gorgeous row houses with beautiful architecture. No wonder that city is full of nimby psychos.
strong agree. honestly alot of the lefty urbanite types here don't realize you can make very pleasant areas with multi-family units and attached single family units that provide walkable ammenities and don't have to force people to live in 600 sq ft.
Or that you're allowed to put embellishments on buildings and not everything has to be brutalism or corporate-bauhaus
They’re alright. Used to live in an area with them, some friends lived in them. The long narrow floor plan makes it feel like you’re just living in a hallway. I guess they don’t have to be that narrow, though.
Living in a 12' wide rowhouse atm, I def think the sweet spot is 16-20' wide, 50-80' deep, and 3 stories with a partially finished basement.
The problem is that is a pretty big house. Thats 5500 sq ft on the high end and a little under 3k on the low end. You definitely need to house more than one or two people in them.
When focussing on housing people seem to forget the proper mix of living, shopping, working, recreation, public transport.
Denser housing is nice if you have all your primary living needs nearby.
Rowhouse blocks with a comprehensive network of bike trails and bike lanes, with corner lots dedicated to ground level commercial, and every couple blocks you take the block of grid out and put a park in, with a metro station within a mile, attached to the bike network.
corner lots dedicated to ground level commercial
Yeah corner stores are great. Get beer and a sandwich.
Note they don't all need to be convenience stores and restaraunts. Put in small grocers, doctors, dentists, hairdressers, tool and regular libraries, schools. If you make the corner plots big enough I can put apartments on top rather than another house.
Love Edwardian terrace districts. Unfortunately they've gentrified pretty fast everywhere in the world.
I think there's a difference between the vintage homes in the photo above and the, frankly, kind of crappy townhouses they're building now.
Portland has what they call an "Urban Growth Boundary", beyond that point, the city can't expand. So the way you build more housing is you tear out a single family home, and build these:
https://cdn.listingphotos.sierrastatic.com/pics2x/v1693008795/53/53_23042487_01.jpg
So now, you have a structure that's just as crappy as apartments, with no parking, and a bonus of being unaffordable. These are $850K per unit.
I think a lot of urbanists in general forget to leave room for nuance and material conditions in general. Not everything has to be a blocky apartment (even though I quite like those provided the walls are soundproofed and they're tenant-owned.
Row houses, townhouses, and cottage courts are great.
I don't see the point. I used to live in one. It's a less space efficient appartment. You can just build those bigger.
it's only less space efficient if you don't give away rooms to people who can't afford rent 
Just curious, because this actually seems like it starts leaning in that direction, but has anyone ever combined the concepts of population dense dwellings with things like gardening space? Like a high rise where every unit has an outdoor area large enough to do real gardening but also space enough inside for a family of four to live in? Or does that become cost-prohibitive really quickly?
Alterlaa is a public housing complex in Austria with a shape that allows for several floors to grow plants on their balconies.
This still falls short of a backyard you'd get with many rowhomes, though. But Alterlaa follows the towers-in-the-park philosophy of urban planning so there's plenty of outdoor space for families. In a traditional, pre-industrial-style city you'd just have more parks and car-free streets with lots of vegetation. For dense and modern cities, Singapore is working on blending modern urbanism with nature.
Alterlaa
Did the Neon Genesis Evangelion artists use this building as reference material?
Habitat 67 is another building designed for this sort of thing. The idea was high density but with gardens and a sense of community, and designed around mass-produceable modules that could be configured in a customized way. A lot of people dislike the look because the modular fabrication method used a lot of concrete, but I still think it's a neat idea, both the original concept and the actual implementation which was trimmed down for budget reasons.
It was intended to produce cost-effective public housing, but since all we have is the prototype that was built for a world fair, there's a fair bit of history and novelty involved that means the units are fairly expensive these days iirc.
We have them here, but they tend be developer focused (middle to upper middle class, whatever that means). There are some older publicly owned town houses though
Do you like that they are so low or that they are connected?
In the Netherlands you have concepts which sometimes are bars/rows and sometimes aren't (more free) often with similar heights (or slightly more). If you set them correctly then you can get an increase in access of backyard spaces which are semi public, you get a slight increase in felt privacy (as axis of views are not directly into the windows of your neighbors and alike) and such things.
Not a direct fit of what I mean: https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:dbc49d82-bbfb-4d50-8908-2c860bba0e10/datastream/OBJ
when they're connected, there's less surface area exposed to the elements, improving the thermal efficiency and reducing heating/cooling costs for all the occupants.
My mom lived in a suburban development, my dad in a row home in the city.
I loved that row home. Before their divorce we were in a more rural area, we moved while I was still a kid and couldn't drive, so having so many things close by was amazing. Walk to the store, restaurants, many more friends. There were busses all the time. Even when I could drive I didn't need to, or it was a short drive anyway.
Strong agree from me.
Even my mom's suburban home was at least close to nature and abandoned industrial buildings, but not having that at the least would have made it completely awful, and I know many of most developments don't. Still no sidewalk to anything outside of it though
I grew up in a rowhouse, I want to build rowhouses, and I hope to retire in some sort of rowhouse.
They're the best.
Is this another term for terraced houses, or is there a difference that I'm not informed enough about architecture to know about?
