Why America Can't Build the Missing Middle Housing We Want
New housing is being built in the U.S., but it’s often not the housing anyone wants built. Although many people are against the single-family sprawl of the past, they’re also not pleased with the behemoth apartment blocks being put up in urban areas.
It’s like exchanging one evil for another. These apartments might offer a considerable number of units to the pool of housing, but at the same time, lack the community and street engagement we want.
I’ve been in a few of them, and they’re strange - almost liminal - places. Winding labyrinthine hallways and confusing layouts make them more akin to apartment fortresses, not community touchstones.
Many people wonder what happened to the kind of middle apartment housing cities used to build, such as the four- to eight-story brick apartment, or European style row apartments. The answer, it seems, might be a combination of preference, profitability, and technical requirements.
One hindrance to building smaller apartment buildings, believe it or not, is stairwell regulations. Apartments of a certain size in the U.S. are typically required to have two stairwells, making it almost impossible to build the type of row apartments that we associate with mid-size apartment buildings in Europe and beyond.
The YouTube channel About Here made a good video about this:
Having only one staircase allows you to build these standalone, skinnier buildings that many people love, whether they’re in New York City or Stockholm. They’re more accessible and open to the street, allowing you to easily jump out for a quick bite or a loaf of bread.
The general rule is that apartments above 2 or 3 stories in the U.S. and Canada now have to have two staircases, which takes up too much space in the building’s floorspace to make sense for apartment layouts. As a result, we get these mega-apartments instead.
We can’t ignore that profitability isn’t a factor, though. Maximizing the amount of apartments that can put on a lot is a central consideration of American developers, and these mega block apartments have a bigger payout.
Add in the cost of development and the time it takes to get projects approved by regulatory bodies, and what we get are these giant mid-rise apartments that cover a whole city block.
Change is happening in some cities, though. Austin City Council just approved an amendment that allows buildings up to five stories to have a single stairwell.
Similar amendments in places like Seattle and Knoxville have increased the allowable height of single stairwell buildings to six stories, ideally to take addvantage of small infill lots that could be easily built on with smaller, more vertical apartments. How much of these will actually be built? We’ll have to wait and see.
These single stairwell developments will be a great solution for infill lots, and allow for quicker developments on lots that are ready to go, instead of having to wait on the purchase and approval of multiple lots for development.
What do you think? Will we see more of the small, infill apartment buildings that are so common in Europe? Or are there other things holding these types of developments back in the U.S.?