Who actually likes their upstairs neighbor?

I have yet to meet anyone who lives in an apartment/multi-family home who actually likes their upstairs neighbor.  More often than not this is not the fault of the upstairs neighbor, but the building designer/builder, without sufficient accoustic insulation it becomes that much more likely that we will hear our neighbor's music and footsteps.  While the "simple" solution would be to simply increase the amount of insulation between floors modern alternatives should also be considered.

A)  Build true mixed use buildings where you alternate floors between office space and residential capacity.  By alternating the use case of floors you add additional accoustic insulation that is valuable to developers.  During the day time the majority of the residential units are likely to be minimally occupied and act as a sound barrier between office floors.  At night the reverse would be true, the office floors would be mostly empty and the residents of the alternative floors would benefit from there being a full layer of unused volume above and below.

B)  Vertical farming, while less immediately profitable (heck you'd probably need a big tax incentive), way cooler sounding.  Similar in approach to idea A) above you could insulate apartments by having small 'half floor' grow rooms filled with plants.  These small spaces would again deaden sound while providing volume for crops to be grown.  These vertical growth volumes would not necessarily need to be only half a floor in height (I just think it would be cute, it also might help to limit the cost of building the structure as you don't need to build as many floors)

To make the grow floors work with the limited height and to minimize the complexity of the overall system engineers could take advantage of the shelf moving robots that are used in industrial warehouses (similar to what you would see in an Amazon fulfillment center)

The long term goal would be a smart system where the vertical farm not only was used to produce residential food calories but was used to filter the water and air of a building.  For cleaning up air most people would be pretty happy to know that their air is being "naturally filtered" (well if not most people at least yuppies).  Now waste water filtering would be another story, people aren't as comfortable with the idea of food being grown in their waste.  Worst case scenario the plants used to filter waste water could be used as a feedstock for some other organism, or maybe some other clever use like making mycelium into packaging and insulative materials

Here are some articles that I read while looking into writing this

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-vertical-farm  

gives some great background on vertical farmland development, one big detail is that the Island of Manhatten under ideal circumstances could produce about 2% of its food calories if every roof was turned into farm land.  If alternatively you had specialized buildings used for crop growth (about 200) you would be able to produce enough calories for all of the island, assuming a vegetarian diet.  Personally I like the idea of this mixed approach to building design as it give residents that sweet sweet sound protection (that being said I acknowledge that there might be some design requirements that make mixing vertical farming and other building needs undesirable)

The mycelium article 

https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=126288  

Basically you grow mushrooms from waste materials and use that to package items, instead of using foam.

Energy Audits for Rental Properties

This idea is on the vaguer end of the spectrum (shocking for a guy like me), the vagueness stems from not having a deep enough concept of how policies are rated, anyway enough of me covering my ass.

One of the challenges I have had while being a renter in the Greater Boston area, is the lack of information when it comes to energy costs.  As someone who likes to at least pretend that they care about the environment, I wish that when I looked at an apartment there was a fact sheet that included a rough grading of how energy efficient the apartment was.  Ideally, for me, this grade would focus on a few critical factors, how much energy does it take to heat or cool a given square footage, how much energy transferred between the home and the outside world (basically how good is the insulation), and what are the base line electricity demands of the appliances in the home (read how efficient is the apartment's refrigerator/ other appliances that came with the place).  Something like these variables would be translated into a letter grade, if the letter grade is too low the property owner would be required to invest in energy efficiency improvements.

Implementation would be challenging to say the least, in cities with a large volume of rental properties, doing the assessments could get rather costly.  To help pay for inspections, utility companies could work with the community to promote analysis, in this way all parties can win, the utility can minimize energy used by residencies, land lords would have a way to promote their properties, and renters would be able to factor in energy costs with their decision to rent a particular property.  Ideally these assessments would occur on a regular cycle, the length of said cycle is hard to know, my personal starting suggestion would be something like this, no property can have gone for more than 10 years with out an inspection, if said property is found to have been rented to individuals there would be legal consequences for the property owner.  Preferably every 5 years there would be an assessment, this should ensure that upkeep doesn't fall too far behind.