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Comment by hamper653 | Hacker News Reader

> yards, large homes, greater privacy than apartments provide

Really? You don’t even have hedges around your yards.

Fences are more common than hedges here. I’m failing to understand how any shared wall apartment tops a single family home in terms of privacy.

The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.

The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor.

Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we all have garages but nobody parks their cars in them. Cars wind up parked in front of the garage or on the street, garage winds up being filled with storage junk.

> The walls are thick

They're often quite thin. See all the comments complaining about being able to hear their neighbor take a piss.

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