Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (because of one rule)
Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (because of one rule)
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Staircases are not the real reason why North American apartments are different. Minimum parking requirements are the real reason.
That makes more sense. My condo building in the US is a hundred years old and looks similar to the "rest of the world" buildings. It has 8 units, 4 floors, and 2 staircases. It's not a difficult design to fit an extra staircase into a walkup.
I used to live on the upper floor of a two-story "garden apartment" (which is a uniquely North American style of building that was popular around the '50s-'70s, as far as I can tell) that was designed basically like groups of adjacent quad-plexes. I had a front door from my living room to an interior staircase that opened out onto the complex's courtyard, as well as a back door from my kitchen to an exterior metal staircases that went directly to the parking lot. There were no common hallways and each unit had windows on two sides (the front and back).
In terms of the staircases, at least, the design was very efficient.
The only limiting factor stopping them from building more stories on top with the same design (other than that tenants would start wanting an elevator) is the fact that the site basically maxed out the area available for a surface parking lot. Building more stories would've required also building a parking deck in order to meet zoning requirements, even though the parking it already had was never more than half-full.
UK here: we have some council flats like this and a lot of more traditional houses have been converted to a very similar set up with an upstairs and a downstairs flat, the only difference being that the staircase is inside.
Agreed, this theory is way off the mark. Buildings in the U.S. require parking lots, except in highly dense areas served by mass transit. Strange that this video would ignore the most infamous problem the U.S. faces.
Buildings here in Germany also require parking lots. Usually the cities or municipalities have their own regulations, the rate can vary quite a bit between cities. No idea how many compared to the US.