Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are tackling
a subject that is going to sound at first blush,
like the driest thing we could possibly choose.
It's something you likely ignored on your way
to work today. Or maybe you're sitting inside
one right now and taking it completely for granted.
We are talking about multifamily residential
housing. It does have a certain bureaucratic
ring to it, doesn't it? Yeah. Multifamily residential.
Yeah, totally. Sounds like a file you'd lose
in a cabinet at the planning department. It really
does. It sounds like zoning code. But as I was,
you know, reading through the stack of research
for this, I realized we aren't really talking
about buildings. We're talking about the history
of how humanity stacks itself. That's a great
way to put it. It's the story of what happens
when we run out of land or when we want to be
close to the action. And we have to figure out
how to live on top of each other without killing
each other. That is the fundamental tension of
urbanization, isn't it? I mean, how do you compress
a population into a small footprint while maintaining
dignity, safety and hygiene? And the answer for
the last 2 ,000 years has been the multifamily
unit in one form or another. So our mission today
is to decode the jargon. We're going to talk
about MDUs, tenements, six -packs, dingbats.
All the good stuff. And really understand the
invisible economics and the history behind these
structures. Because whether you live in a detached
house with a white picket fence or on the 40th
floor of a condo, this ecosystem affects your
taxes, it affects your commute, and it dictates
the vibe of your city. It dictates who can live
in your city, period. It's that fundamental.
Right. So before we get into all the weird architectural
stuff, and trust me, there are some very weird
ones, we need to lay the groundwork. We need
to define terms. Yeah. Because I think a lot
of people, myself included, use words like apartment
and condo interchangeably. But they aren't the
same thing, are they? Not at all. And, you know,
confusing them really obscures what's actually
happening in the housing market. So let's start
with the physical reality versus the legal reality.
Multifamily residential or MDU, which you'll
see in the documents. That's the physical description.
It refers to a classification of housing where
multiple separate housing units are contained
within one building or a complex of buildings.
So that's the hardware, the physical thing you
can touch. Correct. The hardware is multiple
families under one roof. Yeah. Now, this doesn't
just mean skyscrapers. It could be stacked vertically,
which is the classic apartment block we all picture.
Yeah, the tower. Or it could be arranged side
by side, like row houses or townhouses. If the
structure is continuous and shares party walls,
it generally falls under this umbrella. Okay,
so that's the hardware. Then I guess apartment
and condo are the software, the operating system.
That's a good analogy. Yeah. Those terms describe
the legal ownership model. When we say apartment
in the truest sense, particularly in North America,
we're usually describing a rental model. Right.
The building is owned by a single entity, a landlord,
a pension fund, a REIT, and the occupants lease
the space. You pay for the right to stay, but
you own nothing but your furniture. Right. A
condominium or condo is a legal innovation. Physically,
it might look exactly the same as the rental
building next door. Indistinguishable from the
outside. Exactly. But legally. You own the specific
unit you live in, the box of air, so to speak,
and you hold a shared interest in the common
elements. The hallways, the roof, the elevators.
The swimming pool, the gym, all the stuff that
breaks. So if the roof leaks in an apartment
building, I call the landlord. If the roof leaks
in a condo. You and your neighbors all open your
checkbooks. Or more likely, your homeowners association
has a special assessment. That sounds less fun.
It has its pros and cons. But this distinction
matters because it changes how neighborhoods
evolve. A neighborhood of condos has very different
incentives than a neighborhood of rentals. Absolutely.
The owners in a condo building have a long term
stake in the property value. Renters, by definition,
are more transient. And then you have more niche
legal wrappers like co -ops, which we can get
into later, or intentional communities like co
-housing. Right. But the core concept is the
MDU, the physical act of sharing a structure.
And this is where we hit the first major hurdle,
because in many parts of the world and specifically
here in the U .S., if you go to a town hall meeting
and say, I want to build a multifamily unit,
you aren't greeted with open arms. No. You're
usually greeted with pitchforks. Or lawsuits.
That's the more modern version of the pitchfork.
Why? What is the visceral reaction against this?
Usually the argument is it's going to ruin the
neighborhood or it's going to bankrupt the town.
The economic argument is usually the loudest.
It's the one people feel most comfortable saying
out loud. Existing homeowners often believe that
high -density housing will drain local resources.
More kids in the schools, more cars on the roads,
more strain on the police and fire departments.
They see it as a net negative. Yes. They assume
that these new residents will cost the city more
than they pay in taxes. And it feels intuitive,
right? I mean, if I have a house on a quarter
acre lot and next door you build a complex with
20 families on a quarter acre lot, surely those
20 families are going to use 20 times the services.
They might use more services in absolute terms.
That's true. But the per capita math and more
importantly, the per acre math tells a completely
different story. This is the concept of beneficial
fiscal externalities. All right. Walk me through
the math. Because I think most people, myself
included, assume single -family homes are the
gold standard for a city's tax base. That's what
you want, right? Big houses, big property tax
bills. It's actually the opposite in most cases.
Think about infrastructure. Roads, sewer lines,
water pipes, electrical grids, these are linear
assets. You pay for them by the mile, by the
foot. Okay. If you have a street with huge lots
and houses spread far apart, you might have 50
feet. of road, sewer, and water line for just
one taxpaying household. Right. And that one
family has to generate enough tax revenue to
maintain that 50 feet of infrastructure forever.
The repaving, the pipe replacement. Exactly.
Forever. Now take that same 50 feet of road frontage
and put up a four -story apartment building with
eight units. Now you have eight households paying
property taxes to support that same 50 feet of
pipe and asphalt. The infrastructure cost per
person plummets. The revenue per acre for the
city skyrockets. So the single family home is
actually... A luxury item for the city, like
the city is subsidizing that spread out lifestyle.
In many cases, yes. The research from groups
that study municipal finance is pretty clear
on this. Low density suburbs often don't generate
enough tax revenue to cover their own long term
infrastructure replacement costs. So where does
the money come from? They essentially rely on
the high density commercial and residential cores
to subsidize their roads and pipes. The Walmart.
the office park, and the apartment building are
paying to fix the pipes in the leafy suburbs.
That is a massive flip of the script. The person
in the apartment building is actually subsidizing
the person in the big house with the yard. From
a revenue per acre standpoint, absolutely. Multi
-family housing is a cash cow for municipalities.
It allows you to provide services efficiently,
fire, police, garbage collection. It's all cheaper
per household when people are closer together.
Okay, so the economic argument against them is
shaky at best. Very shaky. What about the safety
argument? I feel like this one is deeply ingrained
in pop culture, you know, the towering inferno.
If I live in a box surrounded by other people's
boxes and someone falls asleep with a cigarette,
aren't we all doomed? This is a classic example
of the availability heuristic. We see a dramatic
fire on the news, a huge apartment block ablaze,
and we assume it's the norm. Because it's a memorable
image. Exactly. But if you look at the 2025 Pew
data provided in our source stack, it's a myth.
Modern multifamily buildings are statistically
safer than single -family homes regarding fire.
How is that possible? I can jump out the window
of my house. I can't jump out the window of the
10th floor. True. But in a modern single -family
home, you have very few passive defenses. The
wood frame is flammable. The layout is open.
You have drywall that lasts maybe 20 minutes
in a fire. And you almost never have sprinklers
unless you're very wealthy. Okay. In a modern
multifamily building, the engineering is completely
different. The building codes are incredibly
strict. You have concrete fire separations between
units, so a fire in Unit 402 stays in Unit 402
for hours before spreading. It's compartmentalized.
Exactly. It's designed to contain the fire to
the unit of origin. Plus, you have mandatory
sprinkler systems, pressurized stairwells that
keep smoke out so you can escape, and alarm systems
that automatically dial the fire department.
That's a good point. In a single -family home,
if your smoke detector goes off, it just makes
noise. Right. It wakes you up, hopefully. In
a modern MDU, it summons professional help. The
data shows that the death rate from fires is
significantly lower in these high -density environments.
So our intuition is failing us again. We see
density as danger, but density actually allows
for professional -grade safety systems that you
just can't afford in a private house. Precisely.
We are scared of the stranger's negligence. But
we forget about the engineering that mitigates
it. We trust our own habits more than we trust
concrete and sprinklers. That makes sense. Okay,
let's pivot to history. Because looking at some
of these modern buildings, specifically the ones
popping up in every American city right now,
you'd think stacking people was a new idea. But
this goes back way, way before the elevator,
doesn't it? Oh, long before. As long as there
have been cities with limited walls, there have
been apartments. If we look at ancient Rome,
the vast majority of the population, maybe 90%,
lived in apartment blocks called insuli. Insuli.
That means islands, right? Yes. They were islands
of humanity in the urban sea. And these weren't
small. They were routinely six or seven stories
high. Some even went higher before they were
regulated. Six stories in ancient Rome without
steel. Without modern concrete, that sounds terrifying.
It was. It absolutely was. They were built of
timber and mud brick, often by speculative landlords,
Crassus was famous for this, who wanted to maximize
rent by cutting corners on construction. The
slumlords of the ancient world. Exactly. They
were prone to collapse and fire. The poet Juvenal
wrote about how you couldn't sleep in Rome for
fear of either a fire starting below you or your
neighbor's building collapsing onto yours. And
I'm imagining the walk up to the sixth floor,
no elevator, carrying your water, probably smelling
your neighbor's cooking and everything else.
It was a tough life. And the social hierarchy
was vertical. The lower floors, the piano nobile.
were for the wealthier tenants. Why? You didn't
have to climb as far, the apartments were larger,
and in case of fire, you could get out. The higher
you went, the smaller the rooms got, the shabbier
the construction and the poorer the tenant. So
it's the exact opposite of the modern penthouse.
The best address was on the first floor, not
the top. The penthouse used to be the cheap seat.
It's the invention of the elevator that completely
inverted that dynamic. That's fascinating. And
this isn't just a Roman thing. Not at all. We
see this pattern globally. Look at Shibam in
Yemen. I saw photos of this. It looks like a
mirage. It's literally skyscrapers made of mud.
They call it the Manhattan of the desert. These
are adobe towers. Some are 500 years old, reaching
7, 8, even 11 stories high. How do they not just
dissolve in the rain? The mud brick is constantly
maintained. They re -plaster the exteriors. But
here, the density wasn't just about space. It
was about defense. By building vertical and clustering
together, the city became a fortress wall against
Bedouin raids. So the apartment building is also
a castle. In a sense. And you see other examples.
The malice houses in Madrid or the Casbah in
Algiers. Humanity has always found ways to stack
up when horizontal expansion wasn't an option.
So if this is such a natural human adaptation
to city life. Why is it illegal to build it in
so much of the United States? And I don't use
the word illegal lightly. In many cities on the
majority of the residential land, you literally
cannot build anything other than a detached Singh
family home. This brings us to the weaponization
of zoning. We have to be clear based on the historical
sources. Zoning didn't start purely as a way
to separate factories from homes, which is. the
benevolent explanation you learn in school. That's
the story, right? We don't want a loud, smoky
factory next to where our kids play. And that
was part of it. But in the U .S. context, early
zoning and the ban on multifamily housing were
explicitly designed to segregate. The sources
are pretty blunt about this. It wasn't just about
character in an architectural sense. No. In the
early 20th century, you couldn't legally say
we don't want African -Americans or immigrants
in this neighborhood. The Supreme Court struck
down racial zoning in 1917. OK. So cities and
developers needed a new tool. You could say we
don't want apartment buildings in this neighborhood.
And since racial minorities and lower income
workers were the primary residents of apartment
buildings, the ban on the structure. became a
proxy for a ban on the people. It's a proxy war.
You ban the building type to ban the demographic
you associate with it. Correct. And the legal
language was barely coded. People would argue
in court that apartment buildings brought parasites
into a neighborhood. It was a way to maintain
class and racial homogeneity without ever mentioning
race. And we are still living with that legacy.
Deeply. It's known as exclusionary zoning. It
requires large lot sizes, deep setbacks, bans
anything that shares a wall. It artificially
inflates the cost of housing to ensure only a
certain economic class can even get a foot in
the door. And there was a note in the research
connecting this to labor markets. It frames zoning
as a form of labor regulation. Can you explain
that? Yeah, this is a more modern economic take
on it. Think about a booming city like San Francisco
or New York or Boston. There are high paying
jobs there. But if you ban new multifamily housing,
you artificially cap the number of people who
can live there. You create a housing shortage.
You create a massive housing shortage. This means
a teacher, a firefighter, a barista, a nurse.
All essential workers simply cannot afford to
live anywhere near where they work. You are effectively
regulating the labor market by physically walling
off the workforce for the jobs. Which destroys
the local economy in the long run, right? Because
if the barista has to commute two hours, eventually
there are no baristas. Or the price of coffee
goes up to $15 to cover the wage premium needed
to get someone to commute that far. It creates
a brittle, expensive, and inequitable economy.
Wow. Okay, I want to step away from the politics
for a second and go on a bit of a world tour.
Yeah. Because one thing I loved about this research
is seeing how different cultures solve this stacking
problem. It seems like the form the building
takes depends entirely on what problem they are
trying to solve. It's a mix of problem solving
and cultural values. Geography, economy, history,
and ideology all shape the building. It's architectural
DNA. Let's start with the problem of extreme
lack of space. That has to be Hong Kong. The
densest place on earth, yeah. In Hong Kong, you
see the evolution of the stack in real time.
Historically, you had the Tong Lao. Describe
that for me. What does it look and feel like?
The Tong Lao is a type of shop house. It's usually
low rise, maybe three to five stories. No elevator,
no garage. The ground floor is a shop, a restaurant,
a hardware store, a tailor. And the family lives
above it, often in very cramped conditions. So
it's mixed use by default. Completely. It creates
a very vibrant, chaotic street life because the
living and the commerce are fused together. The
buildings are narrow, deep, and they often have
these illegal balconies and additions hanging
off them. But those are disappearing, right?
I read that. They're being demolished rapidly.
In the search material, they mention the ones
near the old Kai Tok airport. Those buildings
had to be short because planes were flying right
over the rooftops. It was famous for it. You
could practically see what people were watching
on TV. Pretty much. Now that the airport moved,
those height limits are gone, and developers
are tearing down entire blocks of tonglos to
build towers. And that leads to the toothpick
apartment, which is such a great evocative name.
It really is. Imagine a building footprint that
is tiny. Maybe the size is just one of those
old tonglos, but they extruded upward 20 or 30
stories. So it looks like a needle. A needle
sticking out of the urban fabric. It stands tall
and skinny, surrounded by the shorter, older
buildings. Usually is one apartment per floor
to maximize window access on the tiny lot. Which
sounds luxurious, private elevator lobby, but
also incredibly isolating and probably expensive.
And often claustrophobic. You're surrounded by
other towers. But it solves the problem. How
do you add density when you only have a postage
stamp of land? You go up drastically. Now let's
look at a different problem. The blur of work
and life. We see this in South Korea with the
office tell. The office tell, a portmanteau of
office and hotel, is fascinating because it addresses
the intense work culture of Seoul. These are
units designed to be legal for both residential
and commercial use. So I could run my business
out of it during the day and sleep there at night.
That's the idea. You might have a desk and a
meeting table in the same room as your bed and
kitchenette. The furniture is often convertible.
The bed folds into the wall to become a couch.
It's the ultimate working -from -home setup,
but built into the architecture from the start.
Removes the friction of the commute entirely.
It's for the young professional who practically
lives at work anyway. It acknowledges the reality
of the modern economy in a way that Western zoning,
which strictly separates home and office, often
doesn't. Let's move over to India. I was intrigued
by the term Vatara in Karnataka. Yeah, the Vatara
is interesting. It's specific to urban areas
in that state. Think of it as a two -story complex
with homes arranged in a row. It's similar to
a low -rise apartment complex, but with a very
particular local style. It's a step up from a
shared tenement, but more communal than a detached
house. So it's a kind of middle -density solution.
Exactly. It's that missing middle housing that
a lot of urbanists in the West are trying to
bring back. Moving to Europe, we see a housing
type born from pure ideology, the Eastern Bloc.
The Plattenbau. Just saying the word feels heavy.
Plattenbau. You mean slab building or panel building?
You see these in East Germany and the panel lock
in Czechia and Slovakia. These are the massive
gray concrete towers built during the communist
era. They get a bad rap. We usually use them
as shorthand for dystopia in movies. Aesthetically,
they are stark. There's no denying that. But
we have to give them credit. They solved a massive
housing crisis after World War II. Cities were
rubble. So it was a practical solution. It was
industrial efficiency applied to the home. They
used prefabricated concrete panels manufactured
in factories and assembled on -site, like, giant
Lego sets. The goal wasn't individuality or beauty.
It was equality in speed. Everyone gets a unit.
Everyone gets central heat. Everyone gets a roof.
Exactly. And interestingly, today... Many of
these are being renovated and are actually quite
popular. They're structurally sound. The apartments
are surprisingly spacious. And the green spaces
between the buildings, which were part of the
original master plan, are now mature parks. So
time has been kind to them in a way. In some
ways, yes. The stigma is fading for a new generation
that just sees them as affordable housing with
good transit links. Let's jump across the channel
to the UK. Here, the problem wasn't so much ideology.
It was the industrial squeeze. The sheer number
of people flooding into cities for factory work
created some really specific and sometimes grim
housing types. The UK has a very rich taxonomy
of multifamily housing. It's fascinating. You
have the bedsit, which is iconic. The bedsit
feels like the setting of every sad British song
from the 1980s. It is the bottom rung of the
ladder, a bedsitting room. You take a large Victorian
house and chop it up. You get one room that serves
as your bedroom, living room, and often has a
little kitchenette, a hot plate, and a mini fridge
in the corner. But, and here's the friction point,
you share the bathroom down the hall with five
other strangers. That lack of private plumbing
is the defining feature. It's what makes it a
bedsit and not a studio. And it's why they are
disappearing, right? It is. Tenancy reform since
the 80s and rising property prices have pushed
landlords to squeeze tiny, often windowless bathrooms
into the units to create self -contained studios.
The shared bathroom bed sit is becoming a relic.
But then you have something really clever like
the Tyneside Flat in northeast England. I love
the Tyneside Flat. It's architecturally brilliant.
It solves the social problem. How do you give
people density without making them feel like
they live in an ant farm? How does it work? From
the street, it looks like a standard terraced
house. What Americans would call a row house.
Two stories high. But it's actually two separate
flats, one on the ground floor, one on top. Okay,
that's a duplex. We have those. Ah, but here's
the genius. There is no shared lobby. You have
two front doors on the street, side by side.
Wait, really? So even if I live upstairs, I have
my own front door opening to the sidewalk? Yes.
You open your door and immediately go up a private
staircase that runs behind the ground floor flat's
front rooms. It preserves the illusion of owning
the house. You don't have to awkwardly nod at
your neighbor in a communal hallway. It maintains
that British sense of privacy within a dense
structure. That's amazing. I wish we had more
of that here. Me too. And then the sources mention
the clothes in Glasgow and the court in Liverpool.
These sound much grimmer. They were. These are
from the peak of the Industrial Revolution, 1800
to 1870. The close in Glasgow refers to these
high -density tenements, three or four stories,
built around a cul -de -sac or a shared courtyard.
Cramped. Very. And the court was even worse.
In places like Liverpool and Leeds, these were
back -to -back terrace houses built around a
short, dead -end alley. No through -ventilation,
shared water pumps, overflowing privies. They
were incubators for disease. So we see both the
ingenuity and the desperation of industrial housing.
It's the full spectrum. Okay, let's bring it
back to North America. We have some incredibly
strange mutations of multifamily housing. But
before we get to the weird stuff, we need to
talk about the baseline. We need to talk about
the row house. The row house, or townhouse, is
the ancestor of most American urban density.
It's the side -by -side stack. Is there a difference
between a row house, a townhouse, and a brownstone?
Or is this just real estate marketing? It's mostly
marketing and geography at this point. Structurally,
they are the same. Narrow, multi -story houses
sharing sidewalls. Brownstone is just a New York
City -specific term for a row house clad in Triassic
sandstone from New Jersey. So it's about the
facade material. Exactly. And townhouse historically
meant a rich family's city residence as opposed
to their country house. But now developers use
it to make new -build row houses sound fancy.
Okay, so that's the standard. But in New England,
they took the concept of stacking and created
something unique. Enter the triple -decker. The
triple -decker is legendary in Massachusetts
and Rhode Island. It's essentially a detached
timber frame house. But it has three identical
sprawling apartments stacked one on top of the
other, usually with big porches on the front.
Why did this specific form take off there? It
was the immigrant dream machine. You, an Irish
or Italian or Polish factory worker in the late
19th century, save up money. You buy a plot of
land and build a triple -ducker. Okay. You live
in the middle floor. You rent the top floor to
a cousin or another family from your village
to help pay the mortgage. And maybe your aging
parents live on the bottom floor so they don't
have to climb stairs. It's an intergenerational
wealth -building tool. Exactly. It allowed working
class families to become landlords and build
equity. It's a tragedy that so many towns banned
them in the 20th century, calling them fire traps
and tenements. Which brings us to the six pack,
which sounds like beer, but I'm guessing it's
not. In the New England definition, a six pack
is just two triple deckers pushed together, sharing
a central party wall. Six units, one building.
Simple. But wait, the notes say if I go to Australia
and asked for a six pack, I get something totally
different. You do. In Australia, a six -pack
refers to those ubiquitous, usually pretty ugly
brick apartment blocks from the 1960s and 70s.
Usually two or three stories, a walk -up, very
generic styling. They might have four, six, or
eight apartments. They are the vanilla of Australian
housing. I love how language morphs like that.
Okay, moving to Chicago. The four plus one. This
sounds like a math problem. It's a loophole problem.
Yeah. In the 1960s and 70s, Chicago zoning had
height limits for wood frame buildings and also
had parking requirements. Developers figured
out that if they raised the first floor up half
a level, they could tuck a parking garage underneath.
So the building's on stilts? Kind of. You have
a concrete or masonry base. That's the parking,
the plus one. Then you put four stories of cheap
wood frame apartments on top of it. And let me
guess, the lobby is just a weird staircase down
to the parking garage. It's usually an awkward
half -flight of stairs up to the first floor.
They are aesthetically challenged. They've been
called the ugliest buildings in Chicago. But
they provided a ton of affordable housing on
the north side at the time. And speaking of aesthetically
challenged, we have to talk about Los Angeles
and the dingbat. Ah, the dingbat. An icon of
mid -century L .A., it is the direct result of
the car taking over the city. Describe a dingbat
for the listener who hasn't seen one. Okay. It's
a two - or three -story boxy building, usually
covered in stucco. The entire ground floor frontage
is just carport. You pull your car right in under
the overhanging apartment. It makes the building
look like it's on skinny legs. It's a soft story
building, right, which is a problem in earthquakes.
A huge problem. They're being retrofitted now.
But the key feature is that the parking is front
and center. It's not hidden. The building worships
the car. And they always have those fantastic
names on the front, right? The starbursts and
decorative flourishes. Yes. That's where the
name Dingbat comes from. Those little decorative
blacks. And the cursive script on the facade.
The Capri. The Tahitian. The Royal Palms. They
tried to evoke a bit of Hollywood glamour for
what was essentially a cheap wooden box above
a parking spot. I love them. They have so much
character. But they are being replaced, aren't
they, by the new king of American multifamily
housing, the OnePlus 5? If you live in any growing
American city today, you have seen these. You
might be complaining about one being built down
the street right now. They're everywhere. They
all look the same. Why do they all look the same?
It's like this Lego block style with different
colored panels. It's the building code. It's
pure economics driven by the international building
code. We call them five over ones. Break down
that structure for me. Sure. The one on the bottom
is a concrete podium that's a fireproof construction
type. It usually holds the retail on the ground
floor or the parking garage. On top of that podium,
you are allowed by code to stack five stories
of wood frame construction. Wood. Five stories
of wood sounds flimsy. It's engineered wood trusses,
oriented strand board. And crucially, it's allowed
because of modern sprinkler technology. The codes
change to say, OK, you can build this tall with
wood if you sprinkle the heck out of it. Wood
is cheap. Concrete and steel are expensive. So
developers maximize the wood. And that's why
they are everywhere. It's the financial sweet
spot of maximum rent for minimum construction
costs. Exactly. It's the triple -decker of the
21st century just on a massive corporate scale.
And then there's the garlo, which I just love
as a portmanteau. Garage and bungalow. How is
that different from a garage apartment? A garage
apartment is a living unit over the garage. A
garlo has the apartment and the garage at the
same level. It's a very specific, compact design.
I want to go inside the walls now. We've talked
about the exterior shapes and the zoning, but
the way these units are laid out inside dictates
how we actually live. And some of these layouts
are wild. The interior geography is just as important
as the zoning map. It dictates privacy and family
life. Let's start with the railroad apartment.
This is a classic New York tenement thing. Right.
Think about a long, narrow building lot. To fit
as many people as possible, they didn't waste
any space on hallways. So how do you get from
room to room? You walk through the other rooms.
The front door opens into the living room, which
has a doorway into a bedroom. which has a doorway
into the next bedroom, which opens into the kitchen
in the back. That is a privacy nightmare. If
I'm in the middle bedroom and I need a glass
of water at night, I have to walk through your
bedroom. Precisely. It was designed for large
families where that kind of Western middle -class
privacy wasn't a priority or an option. It forces
a very specific communal type of living. And
it's called a railroad apartment because the
rooms are linked like train cars. Exactly. Then
you have the basic single room solution. Studio,
efficiency, bachelor apartment. Are these all
the same thing? More or less. The terminology
is regional. Studio or efficiency is common in
the U .S. Studio flat in the U .K. Bachelor or
bachelorette is very common in Canada and South
Africa. And now we have the micro apartment.
Which is just the modern, sometimes glamorized
version of the single room dwelling. But even
smaller, often under 300 square feet. with very
clever built -in furniture to make it functional.
And what about lofts? People love a good loft
conversion. A true loft is a specific thing.
It's not just any apartment with high ceilings.
Technically, it means you're utilizing the vertical
space between the structural floors of a former
factory or warehouse. So you're living in the
space where... machines used to be. Right. And
often you'll see the original cast iron columns
supporting the structure, not the original load
-bearing walls. It's a very distinct industrial
aesthetic. Now let's talk about the bottom of
the market again. We mentioned the bedsit, but
in the U .S. we had the SRO, single room occupancy.
The SRO is the most misunderstood and I think
tragically lost form of urban housing. These
were essentially hotels for permanent residents.
What did you get for your rent? You rented a
room. You had a bed, a dresser, and maybe a sink
in the corner. You shared a bathroom and maybe
a communal kitchen down the hall. This used to
be how the working poor or elderly people on
fixed incomes or young men just arriving in the
city survived. It was the absolute bottom rung
of the housing ladder. If you had very little
money, you could still afford an SRO. It kept
you off the street. It was safe and private,
if not spacious. So what happened? Why are they
basically gone? We regulated them out of existence.
In the mid -20th century, cities started passing
laws saying every legal housing unit must have
a private bathroom and a private kitchen. Which
sounds benevolent. Everyone deserves their own
kitchen. It sounds great, but it raised the minimum
cost of housing dramatically. If you force a
developer to put a kitchen and bath in every
single unit, the rent doubles or triples. We
effectively made cheap housing illegal. We sawed
off the bottom rung of the ladder. We sawed it
off and now we wonder why homelessness has exploded
in so many cities. That is a heavy realization.
By demanding higher standards, we actually hurt
the people we were trying to protect. It's a
classic case of unintended consequences in housing
policy. We replace cheap private rooms with either
expensive apartments or congregate shelters.
And then you have the rooming house, which is
slightly different. Yes. A rooming house is typically
a larger house where four or more bedrooms are
rented out individually. The tenancy is short
term, often week to week. It's a different legal
classification from an apartment building. And
in the Indian subcontinent, there's the mess.
A mess or a boarding house there is interesting.
You get a single bedroom. Shared facilities,
but it often includes meals and sometimes even
a maid service. The very common setup for students
or young professionals moving to a new city.
On the complete flip side of the ownership spectrum,
we have the co -op. I feel like this is a New
York obsession. The board, the interview. It
sounds terrifying. The housing cooperative is
a fascinating legal beast. In a co -op, you do
not own your apartment. You don't get a deed.
Wait, I pay a million dollars for a place on
the Upper West Side and I don't own it. No. The
building itself is owned by a non -profit corporation.
When you buy an apartment, you're actually buying
shares in that corporation. So I'm a shareholder.
You're a shareholder, and your shares come with
a proprietary lease, which gives you the right
to occupy a specific unit. The number of shares
you own corresponds to the size and desirability
of your apartment. So I'm a business partner
with my neighbors, and my lease is just a perk
of being a shareholder. Exactly. And because
you are buying into a business partnership, the
current shareholders, the board, get to decide
if they want you as a partner. That's why they
can reject you for seemingly no reason. If you
go bankrupt or stop paying your monthly maintenance
fees, the neighbors have to cover your share
to keep the boiler running and pay the building's
mortgage. So they are financially terrified of
bad tenants. So the interviews are incredibly
intrusive. They want to know your financials,
your social life, your dog's temperament. In
Australia, this model corresponds to something
called company title, which is much less common
now. It's a gated community where the gate is
a board of directors with a calculator. That's
a perfect way to describe it. And then finally,
we have co -housing. This is the hippie cousin
of the co -op. This is where you have a private
home but share a big kitchen and do laundry together.
It's an intentional community. The architecture
is designed to force interaction. The homes are
usually clustered around a common green space.
The cars are parked on the periphery, so you
have to walk through the common courtyard to
get to your front door. You're forced to see
your neighbors. Right. And you have a common
house where residents are expected to help cook
dinner for the whole community a few nights a
week. It's social engineering through architecture,
trying to recreate the village. It works for
some people. It's a powerful antidote to loneliness.
For others, it's a nightmare of committees and
chore wheels. I can just imagine the arguments
about whose turn it is to clean the common house
kitchen. It definitely takes a specific personality
type to thrive in that environment. One last
category to clarify because the terms get so
jumbled. Row houses, townhouses, and terraces.
The great tomato -to -motto of housing. So row
house in the U .S. is the same as a terraced
house in the U .K.? Essentially, yes. The concept
is three or more houses built in a row sharing
party walls on either side. And then there's
the back -to -back house. That's a specific and
now very rare type of terraced house from the
Industrial Revolution. Not only do they share
walls on the sides, they also share a wall at
the rear with another house. So you only have
windows on one side. Yes. No through breeze,
very little light. They were notoriously unhealthy
and were banned for a long time. And the Q -type,
that sounds modern. Very. It's a late 20th century
UK townhouse design. They're arranged in blocks
of four, with each house forming a corner of
the block. It's a space -efficient way to give
everyone a corner unit. And finally, semi -detached,
just to be clear. One building, two separate
houses side by side, sharing a single central
wall. A duplex, essentially. We have covered
a massive amount of ground here. We've gone from
the mud skyscrapers of Yemen to the fireproof
concrete of modern America. We've seen how zoning
can be used as a weapon and how tax codes make
apartments the financial heroes of the city.
It really reframes the way you look at a skyline,
doesn't it? Or even just a simple three -story
brick building on a side street. It does. So
if we have to distill this down, if the listener
takes one thing away from this deep dive, what
should it be? I think it's this. We need to stop
viewing multifamily housing as a problem to be
managed or a threat to our neighborhoods. The
history shows us that density is a tool. It's
an adaptation. A human adaptation. Right. It's
the most efficient and often the most vibrant
and creative way for humans to inhabit a planet
with limited space. The resistance to it is often
based on myths and prejudices that are hundreds
of years old. And the economic reality that these
buildings often subsidize the suburbs is something
that really needs to be part of the conversation
at every single town council meeting. Absolutely.
The beneficial fiscal externality. isn't just
jargon. It's the money that paves your roads
and funds your library. So here's my final provocative
thought for you, the listener. The next time
you're walking your dog or driving to work, look
at the buildings around you. Don't just see an
apartment complex and tune it out. Look closer.
Ask yourself, is that a dingbat? Is that a four
plus one? Is it a toothpick trying to break through?
Try to spot the history in the architecture.
What economic forces, what building codes, what
cultural values made that building look the way
it does? And think about the invisible lines,
the zoning maps that decided why that building
stops right there and why the block next to it,
filled with single family homes, looks completely
different. Think about who was allowed to live
there and who was excluded. By the very design
of the neighborhood. Because whether we are in
a Roman insulae or a shiny new OnePlus 5, we
are all just trying to figure out how to live
together in the stack. And hopefully with good
plumbing, unlike the Romans. Hopefully. Thanks
for diving deep with us. We'll see you next time.