The problem in the Netherlands is that land is expensive. A 40 square meter tiny house in Almere was for sale at €200.000, while a nearby 3 bedroom family house was for sale at €220.000. They both had a garden but the family house was a row home. They both used about the same amount of land.
Houses are cheap enough that the price difference between a tiny house and a regular house is negligible when you add the price of land onto it. And the fact that a tiny house sometimes needs more land because it's detached.
Also, if you really care about the environment and population, live in an apartment building. It is better for the environment, because you share each others heating. You can have scale advantages when you do solar on the shared roof. You don't use as much land because you can go up in the air, which means more people can live in a popular area.
American apartments often don’t share heat very well, each unit is heavily insulated from each other and it’s not using piped hot water from a central heating plant like in Europe and Asia. Still probably a bit more efficient overall.
Despite heavy insulation, quite a bit of heat still migrates upward in new apartments and condos. Your neighbors are also nearly perfect insulation compared to your exterior walls too :P
I’m currently in a top floor apartment actually and we quickly hit outside temperatures in the winter if we don’t run the heater. This is Seattle where heat is mostly electric, radiators would probably be very different.
How new is the building? Are the exterior walls properly insulated and sealed?
My friends in a 3 year old building in Ballard have had to open their windows through the last few weeks, and they're only near the top floor. Another friend of mine had a similar experience in Mill Creek when on the top floor.
2000 something in downtown Bellevue. We also have a very high ceiling, the sealing seems to be good enough that heat from adjacent apartments doesn’t seep into ours.
This sounds like the air sealing in your unit isn't very good, as your unit shouldn't fall back to exterior temperature very quickly unless the insulation is insufficent or the air sealing is poor. Nevermind that insulation between you and othet units won't stop heat migration, just slows it down.
FYI electric heat is common in older apartments and condos, but many of the newer buildings I've seen go up in Seattle are using natural gas.
Houses are cheap enough that the price difference between a tiny house and a regular house is negligible when you add the price of land onto it. And the fact that a tiny house sometimes needs more land because it's detached.
Also, if you really care about the environment and population, live in an apartment building. It is better for the environment, because you share each others heating. You can have scale advantages when you do solar on the shared roof. You don't use as much land because you can go up in the air, which means more people can live in a popular area.