Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Soundproofing can be extremely useful, but it's also expensive and unavailable for most tenants. Because it involves construction work, quality soundproofing can't happen without the consent of the landlord.

I think a lot of people are overlooking a solution that would improve quality of life: Make it easier to punish noisy people.

Even when I've lived near busy streets like Van Ness, most of my annoyances have come from inside the building, not outside. It's amazing how much grief a careless neighbor can inflict on the dozens around them. All it takes is a subwoofer and a taste for bass. Even if multiple neighbors complain, there's little that can be done. In my case, most of the neighbors –including myself– gave up and moved. Had the laws been more reasonable, the only one moving would be the cause of the nuisance.

View on HN

Yup. Another thing is that many older NYC apartment buildings are built with paper thin walls/floors, which obviously has no easy fix. Another issue, especially for people who are just "passing through" the city is a lack of concern for others since they aren't around long. My current building, for example, has people moving in an out every 4-6 months. Hard for many to care when they view their apartment as a glorified hotel room.

The choices in these cases are passive-aggressive notes in the lobby, or direct confrontation at 3AM when the bass is pumping, which is what it usually comes down to, unfortunately.

Don't most renters have to sign a year lease?

Yup. Doesn't seem to stop people. They just take the security deposit hit and move on.

Older buildings, at least those built prior to WWII, are specifically sought out because they don't have paper thin walls and floors. They generally have plaster interior walls, thick poured concrete floors, and triple layer masonry exterior walls. Postwar buildings on the other hand tend to have gypsum (sheetrock) interior walls, thinner reinforced concrete floors acoustically bound to the frame, and thinner exterior walls. Newer windows are much quieter, but that's something that can be updated fairly easily.

The worst buildings were probably built from the end of WWII to the early 1970s. Stuyvesant Town apartments, for example, are terribly noisy.

The buildings I've lived in were built in: 1910 (Lower East Side), 1920 (Yorkville), 1915 (Kensington), 1928 (Brighton Beach), and 1910 (Upper East Side), and all of them were awfully thin. Maybe we have different definitions of paper thin, but I have always been able to hear my neighbors: walking, talking, playing music, taking a shower, or watching TV.

Interesting. Do you know if any/all of them had plaster walls? Maybe they had all been gut renovated at some point?

No clue at all.

Until I was 15 I lived in a house in Brooklyn on a residential but busy street close to a major commercial intersection. To this day I actually find external city sounds soothing - ambient traffic sounds, even police and fire engine sirens.

But for a good part of my adult life I lived in apartment buildings. Except where I was lucky (for example, living for a year in a top-floor Chicago apartment sharing a wall with an absentee neighbor), I've had many problems with inside-building noises due to other residents. I know well the subwoofer-bass problem, the sounds of a television traveling from the ceiling or floor, the sounds of footsteps and chairs scraping across the floor above. All horrible. But external city noises have mostly not been a problem.

Everyone has to make noise sometimes, and it's not just distasteful bass. Good luck succeeding in a noise complaint about a crying infant. I'd rather make it illegal to build paper-thin walls.

True. But it's much harder to block a low-frequency sound like a thumping bass, than a high-frequency sound like a crying infant. Thicker walls etc. would take care of the sound from crying infants, but can it ever get rid of a thumping bass? Harsher punishments might be necessary for low-frequency sounds.

There's gotta be a way to isolate the subwoofer from the floor to at least reduce it. My dream apartment would have 60dB+ of isolation above 60Hz, but that would probably be prohibitively expensive and bulky if the walls weren't already concrete.

> if the walls weren't already concrete.

And that’s when you make concrete walls mandatory.

Considering that multiple complaints from multiple neighbors couldn't stop one guy from blasting music, I think current laws (at least in SF) err too much on the side of non-punishment.

> I'd rather make it illegal to build paper-thin walls.

Let's say you manage to pass a law forcing all new construction to have excellent soundproofing. That won't fix the problem for a century. Buildings last a really long time. Heck, tons of old buildings still have asbestos or lead paint. I seriously doubt their soundproofing is going to be fixed before those. Punishing noisy people is the only solution that works with our existing infrastructure.

If sound isolation became a feature that people wanted, with the initial push provided by building codes, then apartments could compete on isolation and both noisy and noise-sensitive individuals would move there. Then landlords would start providing more isolation to attract tenants.

Of course, that's moot if supply is artificially restricted to the point where renters have no choice where to live, but not all cities have that problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com