Why America's New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same | Hacker News Reader

Why America's New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same

bloomberg.com

43 pointshyperrail12 comments

Almost every example photo provided in the article are a) reasonably good looking buildings and b) distinct looking in some ways. Not every building needs to be a landmark icon. Most properties, like most homes, are just a part of a much larger fabric, and the 4-6 story 'stick and concrete' structures are extremely effective. I am building one of these now, and it is an absolute sweet spot for most of America for construction cost, building codes, density, and schedule. Any taller and we get into high rise building codes and costs sky rocket. Lower density is hard to make a real estate play due to land costs in areas you want to place apartments. Wood is super cheap, renewable, and easy as a building material. Most urbanizing US cities could use another 10,000 apartment units like this to support revitalization of the urban cores across America.

What you see a lot of low-rise apartments in Australia using is prefabricated frames and trusses and either autoclaved aerated concrete or polystyrene cladding.

Because of the light weight you see all sorts of modern designs using colourful sunhoods and blades to make the buildings more distinctive.

Really good observations. I wish you had a blog or a podcast discussing your progress on the construction. This subject fascinates me.

> A four-story Texas doughnut can get 50 or 60 apartments onto an acre of land, while the most aggressively engineered West Coast stick-and-concrete hybrid (two-story podiums are allowed now, along with other variations) can get almost 200.

Sounds like we should be building more of these in our cities to increase the housing supply.

I wish they’d build them here (Berlin)!

Germany is noutriously slow to build, and as a result there are stark housing shortages in the big cities. Partially it’s due to the German affinity to bureaucracy but otherwise the local quality of construction is actually high (and therefor buildings take a long time to build).

However with rapidly growing urban areas that already experience housing shortages and soaring rents & purchase prices there is no other solution than to dramatically and swiftly increase supply.

From my little bit of investigation into rents in German cities, it seems like they're downright cheap compared to American cities now.

That's just because they started from a much lower base 10 years ago, there has been massive relative increases.

Also rents are controlled[1] so it can be a bit deceptive - they are cheap but if you go to a viewing for one of those units you will find yourself as one of 50-100 applicants. And if you want to buy your own flat those prices are not controlled.

Additionally, remember that salaries are a lot lower than in the US, and that at least in Berlin there have been ~10% YoY rise in real estate prices for 10 years now & even those (mostly-controlled) rents have increased 6-7% YoY every year for a decade.

[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20180214/controversial-rent-control-...

Sure, many have similar look and feel and interior appointment, but I fail to see how this is worse than apartment and condo buildings in Japan, SKorea, China, Taiwan, etc with their penchant for exterior decorative tiles of different kinds but generally quite interchangeable. Also they look better than the low to mid rise abominations from the 60s and 70s.

Figures that New Jersey (home of the perpetual NIMBY and corresponding high housing prices) would be leading the charge against these buildings.

Looking at the photos, it appears that Texas is well represented (and not in a good way). My fear is that in 20 years, these buildings will be a stain on the landscape, as many owners will not spend a dime on aesthetic upgrades.

The article says the method traces to 1830s Chicago, but interestingly modern day Chicago doesn't look like that.

Farther down, it mentions that the 1871 Chicago Fire resulted in a wood-construction ban "still partly in place".

Britannica notes that "The [1871] slums became kindling for the downtown conflagration, where even the supposedly fireproof stone and brick buildings exploded in flames as the destruction swept northward."

https://www.britannica.com/event/Chicago-fire-of-1871

Reply on news.ycombinator.com