That's really the foundational problem. If you could exist without bugging or being bugged by the neighbors dense housing would be so much more appealing

We can't live in an apartment because it will always have bad insulation. We should all live in single unit housing with... checks the quality of insulation in your average 1970s ranch house oh shit, oh fuck.

Also, gotta say, love to live in a street level neighborhood Cul-de-sac with that one guy revving his motorbike at 3am. Single pane glass, noisy neighbors, and god help you during July 4th or Jan 1st when someone gets ahold of fireworks.

But for some reason, we completely forget about this shit when we talk about apartments. Like the suburbs - particularly the corners near intersections or school yards or big churches or highway on-ramps - aren't routinely noisy af.

The thing is, you can't really engineer against anti-social behavior. For every better made apartment you will find that there is an even bigger anti-social idiot who still manages to make life hell for their neighbors.

I'm pretty blessed with my mostly boomer neighbors (🤞) who don't make a peep after 10PM, but my girlfriend has had some shitty neighbors even though her apartment is pretty well made. Sound insulation between apartments is no match for cigarette and marijuana smoke wafting in from the balcony below any time you want to open the window to air out, or if, heavens forbid, you want to sleep with the window open in the summer, nor does it help much if they are partying and speaking loudly on their balcony until 4AM on weekdays. And then I'm not even getting into how they're treating shared spaces.

The proximity makes everything so much worse than it would be with a house, at some point only adding distance helps.

My favorite is a few hundred meters of trees with a fence and stone walls

this is a solved problem

LOL no, it's a solved problem where you are

for a while now i've maintained that commie blocks (at least over here) are some of the best places to live, and i have to conclude that the only reason people think most other areas are at all appealing is because they have simply never actually been in the commie block areas.

It's like how my dad had never once even considered the notion of riding a bike, then one day i convinced him to buy an e-bike and since that day he has driven a car.. literally 3 times, i think. Once you actually consider the merits of it it's so obviously better.