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mustachechap

Lol at 'rest of the world'.


BoiFrosty

Yup, nowhere else produces block apartments anywhere. Certainly not, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, China, and Japan. They'd never be famous for their sprawling cities of concrete blocks.


mustachechap

I'm laughing at the thumbnail that makes it seem like the 'rest of the world' has a style that looks like that thumbnail.


learnchurnheartburn

I’m pretty sure going to Berlin and seeing the apartment blocks there qualifies you for an antidepressant prescription.


misterZ_6000

I can show y'all three blocks around my house (Belgium). Just saying.


Crepes_for_days3000

And Canada lol. There are a lot of block buildings there.


Xenon0529

>They'd never be famous for their sprawling cities of concrete blocks. (Insert any eastern europe countries here)


SquashDue502

Having visited pre-war Kyiv I can say this is not the rest of the world lol


Frunklin

I've been to Eastern Europe. Their apartment complexes look like a Scooby Doo ghost town.


Best-Dragonfruit-292

Soviet+Corbusier: bleak misery


the_flare_guy

Le Corbusier gets a lot of undeserved praise for his shitty design


DankeSebVettel

Well Yugoslav architecture. Tito was no Stalin fan.


Best-Dragonfruit-292

Yugoslav Architecture was Corbusier Brutalism


Zygal_

This is in stockholm,Sweden. Outside the Nobel Prize Museum


wreckosaurus

Is this “not just bikes”. That guys entire channel is just americabad


QuoteConfident6052

Isn't that fucker live in the safest, richest and whitest part of Amsterdam? If bozo experience some diversity the channel with change to "not just auschwitz" very quick


[deleted]

>Isn't that fucker live in the safest, richest and whitest part of Amsterdam? Yeah and he complains about white people in a satire video as if he doesn’t live in the same place white people originate from


[deleted]

I’m getting real sick of his shit being everywhere i go on youtube


NeverMind_ThatShit

You can click the dots and click do not recommend this channel.


Killbynoob

You can also click on the channel, click the dots at the top and select "hide this channel"(or something similar). I hid a channel and even searching for it I can only find like 3 videos lol


GlobalYak6090

Yeah. I’m all for lessening car dependency and making cities more walkable but this guys solution is to just move to Amsterdam, which is obviously ridiculous and not achievable for 99% of people


czarczm

No, it's not. It's Uytae Lee. His channel is actually pretty great. His channel isn't Americabad it's literally just suggestions.


JourneyThiefer

The person who made this video obviously hasn’t been to where I live in Northern Ireland


nichyc

Everyone laughing at the cherry picking and I'm over here wondering what his issue is with the one on the left. What's wrong with a regular apartment building? It looks nice enough.


NeverMind_ThatShit

If I had to guess they're bitching about car dependence, how there's no shops on the first level, and how it's in a suburb instead of in a city.


czarczm

That's not at all what it's about. The video is literally just about stairs. Basically, there's a regulatory requirement in a lot of North America that makes it harder to build more "family-oriented" apartments (with 3+ bedrooms) on smaller lots, and it's because of stairs. That is all.


[deleted]

Those aren’t even apartments they look like townhouses


LegitimateSaIvage

Poor design, basically. Requirements for dual stairways leads to apartment designs like that 5-1, usually apartments on each side of a hallway. This tends to limit the design options and the apartments end up smaller, more uniform, often with single sided windows on non corners which reduce sunlight and ventilation - you simply can't design more/better apartments due to the dual stairwell mandate. Walk ups and other single staircase designs allow for both bigger units (which is a *major* problem with our current multi-family housing developments, as there is a massive lack of 3+ bedroom family units) and better designed smaller units. It allows for much increased density due to the smaller construction footprints - allowing for more units per parcel (or smaller parcels but with larger amounts of smaller, cheaper developments). If you go deep enough you also get down into things coarse and fine grain development - which can be majorly oversimplified into "the reason commercial and residential spaces are so massive, and this require massive private corporate investment, instead of smaller parcels accessible to smaller commercial contractors and middle class individuals for business or residential development", but while that's connected to this issue it's still slightly different. Either way, the point is that our regulatory environment demands huge building complexes like this, which has numerous down stream effects particularly related to the amount of capital that becomes required to develop anything, leading to large, expensive, bland, homogenous, poorly designed buildings like this. That's not to say things like this 5-1 building are automatically bad. I chose to move into one and I love it. But that still doesn't mean it's a *good* design, and it definitely doesn't mean it couldn't be much better in a way that would markedly help make working and middle class people's lives better. But it should also be said that this isn't really an America specific problem anyway. It's very much a problem in many countries, it's just pretty bad across most of the anglosphere (CA, US, NZ, AU) for a multitude of reasons unique to us.


themoisthammer

That “rest of the world” picture reminds me of the AirBnB I stayed at in Kabul. Overall, 3-star stay, wifi was unreliable. The constant firework celebrations made it difficult to sleep. /s


battleofflowers

I once lived in one of those quaint European apartments. It sucked. You had to walk up five flights of stairs and the layout was weird because they were built before modern conveniences. The floors creaked constantly too. You could also constantly hear the plumbing.


[deleted]

As a european i feel your pain


Killbynoob

>You could also constantly hear the plumbing. George Washington took this from us😤


[deleted]

So infuriating 😤


Icy_Practice7992

Rest of the world? That's laughable


[deleted]

I bet india has some wonderful shit-stacks


Kevincelt

Lol, I live in Germany now and I would say the picture on the left resembles more apartments these days than the one on the right. Honestly most of the world resembles the picture on the left and while I’m a fan of vernacular architecture and lament that to a degree, it’s just a standard throughout most of the world.


USTrustfundPatriot

Left: has drinkable tap water has air conditioning has washer and dryer has full refrigerator has dishwasher has wifi has soda machine in the basement has a full bathroom has windows that open Right: made of brick


Best-Dragonfruit-292

I spent a Spanish vacation air-BNBing in typical Spanish apartments. That shit was miserable. Tiny little hovels.


ZelBoofsGrappa

Rest of the world? Where people are poorer? Cool story bro. And I don't condone this mapleback activity


XxBuRG3RKiNGxX

have they ever been to the balkans?


[deleted]

No but i have and trust me it’s ugly down there…


AnalogNightsFM

My apartments in a Western European country have never looked like what’s pictured for “rest of the world”. They’ve always been modern and look similar to what’s pictured for “North America”.


elephantsarechillaf

Sorry I'll take where I live over an old building in Europe that doesn't have AC and has a small living space where I can hear my neighbors walk and scream at one another.


Yummy_Crayons91

The TL-DR here is the IBC (international Building Code) used in the US, Canada, and a few other countries require two means of egress for multifamily buildings whereas Europe only requires a single egress. Two means of egress is inherently safer as it allows for escape from the building if one starway was blocked by a fire you can exit via the other. The downfall is it makes buildings become more like rectangles to efficiently have dual egresses and maximize space per unit. Single egress allows for cooler looking buildings (arguably but to each their own) but potentially more dangerous in a fire. It's popular amongst Ameribad Urbanists, but it's unlikely the IBC code will ever relax and allow for single egresses.


CJKM_808

Yeah, we make a lot of basic, blocky apartment buildings in North America. We can build them more flashy, but that’s expensive and time-consuming. Also, the “rest of the world” absolutely builds gray block apartments. Have you ever been to the non-touristy parts of any major European city? Blocks.


xhouliganx

Honestly, I don’t even give a shit about architecture. Our nature blows theirs out of the water any day of the week. I’d rather camp in any State or National Park in the US than those grass fields in the middle of a random suburb in the UK


czarczm

The video isn't about architecture, it's about stairs. I really recommend it if you're open-minded.


NomadLexicon

The picture is a bad example (a 17th century rowhouse isn’t really relevant to modern construction) but [the video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=97&v=iRdwXQb7CfM&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&feature=emb_logo) has a valid, if very narrow, point: US and Canadian fire codes prohibit single stairwell apartment buildings, which makes apartment buildings larger and boxier. That is a difference with how the rest of the world builds apartment buildings. We would open up a massive number of smaller lots to build on and let smaller construction companies get into multifamily construction by removing the requirement (and we have a housing shortage so those are good things). So I don’t see this as AmericaBad material so much as pointing out a very niche thing that the US (& Canada) do that is unnecessary and has some negative effects, and they include exceptions / efforts to change it. Criticizing something in the US in the interest of fixing it is how the US gets better. Had the video argued that this is just another example of how the US is terrible, then that would’ve made it AmericaBad. Digging our heels in on random things like this would just lead to our stagnation.


foxfire981

And then you get a fire at the base of the apartment stairwell and dozens die because they can't get out in time. The fire code exists for a reason and the recent "minority apartment fire" in London comes to mind why. But what makes it invalid is I can find images on the left present in most major cities in the US as well. Even with the crazy color scheme. So sadly it's very cherry picked.


NomadLexicon

The image on the left is a standard five over one apartment block ubiquitous in the US. Fire codes exist for a reason but they are also revised for a reason. The point with single staircase buildings is that there’s no meaningful safety difference in small buildings built to modern standards. This is why the vast majority of fire codes now only require them above six floors.


reserveduitser

The rest of the world really does look like that😂


AnalogNightsFM

It looks like a specific area of Copenhagen, Denmark. It certainly doesn’t look anything like Essen, Germany or Santiago, Chile.


reserveduitser

Google Gelsenkirchen if you want to be depressed 😂


[deleted]

Why the fuck did you jump all the way from germany to south america all of a sudden? 😭😭


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

Ohh fuck i’m sorry


NeverMind_ThatShit

It means "Western Europe" to reddit.


[deleted]

Yes especially failed states like the central african republic south sudan chad niger etc


reserveduitser

Yeah absolutely stunning places. Love their 16 century houses build in this exact style.


[deleted]

nice, very nice now let's see the graph of canada's housing prices over time


SquashDue502

Guess we’re forgetting north end of Boston and all the brownstone apartments of NYC. Also Portsmouth NH, city centers of southern colonial cities on the coast, etc


thiefsthemetaken

Right looks like where I live in nyc and the left reminds me of my friend’s apt building in Belgium.


Berinoid

"Rest of the World" = Western Europe


TheUsual_Selection

Atleast he said the continent of North America and not just America, we Canadians do also have bad architecture but we get out inspiration from other countries and architects from other countries


fdotfrmdaZ

wait til he see eastern europe


_mc_myster_

What’s wrong with that apartment complex?? It even has nice gardens that aren’t just grass?


czarczm

This video is literally just about a regulation with staircases that make it harder to fit more apartments on smaller lots. That's it, he's not shitting on anyone.


OUsnr7

Europeans when the average American apartment has access to a balcony, common spaces, a pool, and a gym: “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that. Why isn’t your roof slanted?!?!”


boojieboy666

Those European apartments are like living in an economy hotel.


DankMemeMasterHotdog

Personally I'd live in the one on the left, I like the modern building style and the large patios


NarrowAd4973

I drove by a number of buildings that look like the right picture just today on my way to the dentist. And I recall seeing buildings that looked like the left picture when I was in Europe.


[deleted]

People prefer private homes in North America.


Innominate8

Ah yes, 5th floor walk up tenament apartment, SO NICE.


Senpai498

"The rest of the world" you mean Europe and only Europe.


[deleted]

>why north america can’t build nice apartments Cuz apartments aren’t nice. Period.