The Apartment Problem

Are new apartments good?

“I WILL NOT LIVE IN THE POD. I WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS”

A common, oft repeated slogan online (usually though not always conservatives) as an intended rebuke of perceived indignities of modern life. A feeling that the American standard of living, once the envy of the world, is in full retreat. From attainable housing being non-aspirational to the declining quality of consumer goods, to the food we eat. Nearly every facet of modern American life seems to be an assault, a new front in a culture war where everybody finds themselves fighting for their own dignity. Most of these are frankly out of my league, but I have a lot of thoughts on housing, particularly urban housing. Let’s talk about the pod.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a bit of a housing shortage in America. The average rent on an apartment in America has ballooned to over $2K. These averages creep higher still when you move into America’s hottest markets like NYC, San Francisco, etc.. Economists estimate that we’re short millions of housing units in this country, and that unmet demand has us all fighting over what inventory exists. In a partial response to this the YIMBY movement has sprung up, making the argument that severe supply restraints on the amount of housing being built is pushing up rents and property values at the expense of everyday Americans. They’ve been putting in good work to raise awareness in erroneous zoning requirements, design regulations (Shout out Single Stairwell wonks), and frankly fighting against older Americans expectations that nothing in their neighborhood should ever change. They correctly point out that most of the beloved buildings in our cities and neighborhoods could not be built under the modern regulatory environment. These fights are playing out online and in community meetings across America where young people are fighting to build that metaphorical relief valve to bring rents back under control. All a good fight, I’m on board. And yet…I really think a lot of the new apartments that are being built kind of suck.

I understand this probably seems like a minor thing to be on about. However as I sit in my own apartment, built in 1924, I think it’s important to acknowledge, what we build today can have long term consequences for how we live over the long term. Having lived in a few of these older apartments, and having visited a number of high-rise ‘luxury’ apartments in trendier neighborhoods, with all of the bells and whistles and amenities I find my preferences for these older ‘less desirable’ apartments solidified. They often lack central air conditioning, they don’t have in unit laundry, no co-working lounge, etc.. What they lack in some (overrated in my opinion) physical comforts they more than make up for in the way one lives in them day to day. I know I might be losing some of you here, so to expand on what I mean we’re going to need to look at some floor plans….

Before who do that, we gotta get to this apartment we’re looking at. It’s new construction. We’ve gotten through the lobby and gotten off of the elevator. Let’s find our unit.

Eerie, but nearly all apartments we build today have these double loaded corridors to meet fire codes.

Alright, so we’re here to look at (what I think) is a representative (of what we’re currently building) 2 bedroom apartment.

Feel free to scroll back and forth as need be.

You walk into the front door into….’The room’. The singular public room. The combined entry kitchen family room great room. Decades of HGTV and home remodeling content has led us to this. Open floor plans, meant to bring us together and optimize for those nights you entertain friends. Where you can play host without ever leaving eyeshot of your guests. No need to excuse yourself from the conversation to pour drinks, because you aren’t going anywhere, not really. Without missing a conversation beat the whole night you can handle it all. But what about every other day of your life? When you aren’t explicitly hosting company?

Well as this is a 2 bed you presumably live here with somebody, whether you be a couple with a child (Maybe even just a couple with a separate office), maybe somebody with a roommate? Let’s look at where the bedroom doors are. Right off of ‘The room’. Seemingly having a showdown, staring each-other down across that expanse. Maybe I’m going to reveal some of my own neurosis here, but I like to get away from people. I enjoy my down-time where I can really disconnect from people once in awhile. I don’t think that’s uncommon (call me an antisocial freak in the comments if that isn’t the case). I think it’s nearly impossible to even do that in most of these apartments. Not due to a lack of soundproofing between units but the fact that the acoustics of these units are awful. The fact that everything is off ‘the big room’ means you aren’t really getting away from anyone. If you want to sit in one of the bedrooms and read, take a nap, meditate, whatever, but somebody is watching a movie or doing something involved in the kitchen you aren’t escaping that noise. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have a baby or small child in an apartment like this. Getting a kid down for the night isn’t always the easiest task. Assuming you’ve won that battle for the night and your kid is down that ‘one room’ may practically be off limits for the night if your kid is a light sleeper. No settling in with your current binge watch on the couch, the TV is more than likely right next to your kids bedroom door, and given the likelihood that the developer did not spring for a solid core door you’re probably going to risk waking them right back up. Not that this is solely applicable to children. Watching TV loudly while your partner is sleeping because they have to be up early is equally as rude. Maybe this is a problem of being considerate of who you live with, but honestly I think this is just as much a design problem as anything else. A well designed layout should make living with people easier, not a constant exercise in consideration.

Even assuming you’re a family of heavy sleepers and you’re comfortable having just one kid is this an apartment that you can realistically envision living in comfortably for 18+ years? I imagine not frankly. Unless you happen to live in a particularly un-neurotic household I find that hard to believe. It’s not uncommon for people to leave the city for the suburbs citing ‘needing space’ as a key reason. Self described urbanists are usually pretty quick to dismiss this, as if other aspects of the urban lifestyle don’t more than make up for smaller homes. I’m less certain of that personally. The median home in America has over doubled in size from when my parents were born. Americans are a consumer society, we like to acquire things, and to spread out. We’re an aspirational people with aspirational tastes. And apartments by and large today are anything but aspirational.

Let’s take a look at how 2 bedroom apartments were designed in the past. Below is a floor-plan of a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment from 1929.

It’s obviously larger. Coming in at 1.5K square feet to the previous apartments ~1K square feet. While new single family houses have been ballooning in size apartments have shrunk, starting during the Great Depression, and then seemingly never recovered.

On the floor-plan itself. You’ll notice it has a Foyer, creating a neutral space between the Living Room, the Dining Room, and the Bedroom ‘Wing’. Is a Foyer a waste of space? To a developer trying to squeeze as many apartments into a floor-plate as possible I’m sure it is. To me? I’m going to say no, and frankly I’m not even going to bother defending it. It’s nice to not walk directly into a room. To have a landing zone, a place to hang up my coat, or my guests coats. A place to welcome people in, and a place to have a long winded midwestern goodbye.

One of the big strengths of these old floorpans is that strict separation of public and private spaces. The bedrooms and the bathroom are off their own hallway. Originally when built in 1929 it likely even had a door to close that hallway off. Adding additional acoustic separation between public and private wings of the apartment. Going back to the idea needing to have a quiet break to yourself or simply not having to worry about bothering the other occupants of the apartment this is huge. You can host an entire dinner part and still put the kid(s) down early without having to worry too much about keeping them up.

In his book ‘Housing By Lifestyle’ James W. Wentling lays out the theory of the ‘Five Component Areas’, (You did read the recommended reading list that came with the sims, right?) and while he was largely writing about suburban single family homes I think the concepts are near universal and actually do have applications in smart multifamily design. The components are as follows

• 1. Community Component

• 2. Privacy Component

• 3. Ceremonial Component

• 4. Functional Component

• 5. Outdoor Component

The community component are simply the areas where you do all of your living, the ‘public’ rooms of a house that are used day to day. Your Living room (Wentling actually said family room, however I’m not expecting apartments to have a separate LR/FR, I’m being reasonable) and your (presumed) eat-in kitchen. This is where the families mix, mingle and most of day to day life occurs. While the Privacy Component are the areas of retreat from the rest of the household. Bedrooms obviously, but also offices, dens, libraries, rooms that one can generally expect to find peace and quiet away from everyone. I’d argue the first ‘modern’ floor-plan doesn’t really have a privacy component. A door alone does not privacy make in any practical sense.

Most interesting of all of the components is the Ceremonial Component. Wentling classifies these as the ‘formal’ rooms in a house. If you’ve ever been in a prototypical suburban house built past the 90’s it’s usually the formal living room, the formal dining room in the front of a house, usually linked together with a foyer, sometimes with a dramatic staircase. Kate Wagner, the critic behind McMansion Hell calls these the “Lawyer Foyer”. These are rooms infrequently used but play a very important function in receiving and entertaining guests. They’re the backdrop for Holiday gatherings, special commemorations and other various parties. Usually decorated a bit more formally then the community component rooms of the house in part to set them apart as special, and enhancing any event happening in them as such. New build apartments simply do not have ceremonial spaces. Where would one have a Thanksgiving dinner with extended family in a modern combined kitchen LR/DR apartment? I’m not saying it isn’t done, and I by no means want to imply events held in rooms like that are any less meaningful. However I do think one setting is frankly more aspirational than the other, and that modern apartment design by and large doesn’t have the physical room for some of these more formal social scripts is something worth noting. Especially if they’re ever going to compete with a suburban single family home for the median American, which cities and apartment developers should have as a goal.

The last components are the Functional Component, think closets, laundry rooms and garages. Then lastly the Outside Component, which I’ll just defer to as ‘the walkable neighborhood outside of your apartment’. Though my friend Alicia Pederson has her own answer to that in a return to courtyard urbanism that’s worth reading about.

I’ll be the first to admit that a framework designed to commentate on 1990’s suburban houses applied to apartments might run up against some limits. My big solution there is to enmesh the Public Components and the Ceremonial Components (except maybe for the largest most elaborate floor-plans). A Living Room, a Dining Room, Kitchen, and even a modest foyer while having the bedrooms being separated from the public spaces is really more than enough. Those are flexible enough to both suit the ceremonial needs of a home while giving everybody some extra breathing room in their day to day. A dining room can easily become a conference room for zoom calls or a place for kids to spread out and do their homework. If it’s completely not financially viable for that many walls I’d even settle for a big open-concept apartment as long as the bedrooms are separated to give some public/private separation as a minimum enhancement.

The ‘abundance’ crowd promises us cheap housing if we simply build our way out of our shortage. However looking at the broader American public, and families especially I’m not sure that modern apartments are nearly nice enough to entice them into cities. If you want to appeal to them apartments need to actually compete with houses on something other than proximity to amenities. Home matters, to Americans especially. Modern apartment design probably reads as austerity to most suburbanites (and even many urbanites who want families) and for good reason.

I used floorpans from two bedroom apartments because that seems to be the biggest mass market apartments are going these days. 3 beds are rare and 4 bedrooms seem absent except from the highest end condominium designs. Both of the prior designs exhibited above are from ‘larger’ elevator buildings. This was not always the standard however. As another point of comparison and to further jog your imagination below is a 5 bedroom apartment design from a 3-unit walkup building. From 1919.

First off it’s huge. Over 3K square feet, meaning it’s even larger than the typical new build single family home. The bedrooms are neatly separated from the public areas, and additionally there are two ‘den’ type rooms. Allowing additional uses and space for retreat other than bedrooms. Two of the bedrooms are quite small by conventional standards, but are perfect for small children, office space or even a flex/guest room. Obviously there are scales to this, between a nicer than we build today two bedroom apartment and full suburban home sized apartment exhibited above.

I myself think we kind of perfected the middle class apartment in the 6-flats that were built here in Chicago during the 1910’s-30’s. Usually consisting of six three bedroom units, with a central shared front staircase, and additional ‘back’ exterior staircases off the kitchen. Usually with a living room in the front, a dining room off the kitchen and a sunroom up in front of the living room (sometimes with an additional enclosed back porch off the rear). These were (and remain) popular because they live like houses. They give room to spread out, retreat, and can retain space for important events. Below is the floorpan of a pretty typical walk-up unit from 1925.

I saw an advertisement for these in some 1920’s Chicago Tribune ad refer to these then new apartments as ‘stacked bungalows’, allowing for all of the convenience of a house with all of the benefits of life in a ‘premier neighborhood’ at a reasonable cost. I’m under no illusion that these can be built at scale to be cheap. At the time these were built for the professional and upper middle classes. It’s only due to a century of depreciation that many middle (and in some neighborhoods lower middle class) families inhabit apartments like this in Chicago. Even this may be a fluke in time however, because we simply do not build housing like this at all today. More and more these spacious older units are attracting bidding wars from wealthier people buying ‘down’ in order to get the space and good locations. It’s a rational move given the quality of new build apartments/condos. New construction is almost always marketed towards those wealthier demographics, and I think it’s worth asking why those classes today are expected to accept so much less than their counterparts a century ago would have expected when it comes to new urban construction. And it’s a pertinent question if you assume housing filters down, which I think you can argue it has.

I don’t blame developers for the quality of new apartments being delivered. I think they’re doing the best they can given the cost of materials, labor and a regulatory environment giving them boxes that need to be checked. All of that combines to make it hard to build in a way that pencils even with what is being delivered today. I don’t have all of the answers. I’m a hobbyist, if I can call myself that, with an interest in urbanism, development and urban life. My point in writing this is not to shame developers or architects who I’m sure are doing their best. What I intend with this piece is to paint a clearer end goal for American urbanists and developers to keep in the back of their minds. I’m thrilled to see a lot of the progress happening in American cities that may make it easier for us to build housing again. However just building more housing isn’t enough. It has to be high quality housing. It has to be housing that people can imagine real aspirational American life scripts being fulfilled in. The status quo of new build apartment design simply won’t do. Don’t try and sell me Austerity while calling it Abundance.