Yes and these buildings are awful to live in. Paper mache boxes with no sound isolation. If you are going to live in an apartment in the US, it's very important to live in a tower, even on a low floor, and not a mid-rise, because extreme engineering and exotic materials (relative to US construction norms) are necessary to make multifamily living tolerable.
The exotic materials and construction required for a skyscraper are due to a need for massive strength:weight ratios, and are a separate consideration from sound insulation. A desire to use less material overall (and therefore need to support less weight) will naturally drive a skyscraper to have as little of this material as it can get away with, which means poor sound insulation is the default. Naturally, low buildings will also skimp on sound insulation because nothing's cheaper than nothing, but this is why you need regulation and building codes that take sound insulation into account.
Yeah, but they make shorter buildings out of steel and masonry, too. Next time you're apartment hunting, you can call ahead and ask whether the building is lumber construction, if you're not sure.
I’m pretty familiar with the “luxury apartment” offerings in the Bay Area and they’re pretty much all steel towers or wood 5-over-1s. I’m told 5 stories is the standard because that’s what you can make out of wood; an extra story or three isn’t worth it with the shift to more expensive materials.
Some of the steel towers have their cheaper apartments in wood podiums; have to be careful.
I live in a 10-story condo. 9 or 10 stories seems about the lowest not to be made out of wood. Even these are very rare compared to <=5 or >=15.
That seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
It seems intuitive to me that just because mid-rises are likely to be built using the cheapest materials that satisfy building codes doesn't mean it's impossible to build them with better sound isolation and other amenities that improve living there.
So can you provide some reason why mid-rises must be that way, as opposed to the Almighty Market just failing, as it usually does, to provide anything other than the cheapest least-common-denominator solution?
As I understand it, buildings don’t pencil out with more expensive materials until they are also much taller.
Insofar as people want to correct the Almighty Market on housing, they ban mid rises entirely. I don’t think there’s a political constituency for “apartments, but good” and supply is way too constrained for developers to care. Maybe we could at least get some kind of testing/disclosure of acoustic properties since it’s so hard to tell on a tour.
