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Comment by Teckla | Hacker News Reader

high density apartments

Light sleeper here.

Apartments are a nonstarter for a lot of people, due to poor soundproofing.

Unless and until soundproofing gets better -- and I mean a LOT better -- apartments will never be practical for a nontrivial percentage of the population, as much as we might otherwise prefer them.

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I don't get it. If my neighbours didn't renovate their apartments by drilling holes or hammering on the walls I wouldn't even know that other people besides me live in the same building. Sound proofing isn't going to stop walls from vibrating. Just suck it up. 2 days of noise a year isn't a nonstarter.

> Unless and until soundproofing gets better -- and I mean a LOT better -- apartments will never be practical for a nontrivial percentage of the population, as much as we might otherwise prefer them.

Most likely never going to happen, at least not in the US where apartment buildings are basically wooden matchboxes. I grew up in the well-known gray communist concrete blocks in Eastern Europe and I never heard my upstairs neighbors peeing until I moved to the USA.

Soundproofing doesn't need to get better. Buildings just need to be built with it. (Annoyingly, retrofitting internal dampening appears to be very difficult, which is a problem)

Then you're not in an urban area anyway, which is the place where high density apartments are needed.

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