Can we have a family friendly high rise?

The case for not-so-gentle density

I grew up in a tall apartment building, which is unusual. Most Americans prefer to raise their families in single-family homes, and even in a traditionally urbanist city like DC, it’s rare to see middle class families with kids choosing to live in big apartments.

As an adult, I live with my family in a row house on a block of row houses, and while there are other families here, we’re all a bit eccentric by American standards for being in the city at all. I personally have always liked apartment living, but none of the apartment buildings in our neighborhood offer suitably large units for an affluent American family. There is also a theory I have read on the internet that the tall building typology is per se bad for families, based on the statistical observation that countries with a larger share of people living in high rises have very low fertility rates. I’m not sure that I buy this theory. What the data shows, essentially, is that fertility rates are low in East Asia and also East Asian countries have high-rise apartment buildings. There’s too much that’s distinctive about Korea/Japan/Taiwan/Singapore relative to Europe and the Anglosphere to make a definitive proclamation about causal relationships.

That said, two things are definitely true:

• The perception in the United States is that high-rise buildings are generally unsuitable for families.

• The reality in the United States is that the high-rise buildings that are built generally have floor plans that are not appealing to families — the builders do not think that serving this market makes sense.

I think that this is too bad.

In principle, a tall apartment building functions as a kind of urban village in which a medium-sized number of people have shared space. Most urban parents I know would like their “big kid” children to be able to roam a bit from the family nest and interact with other kids, without being dependent on parental chauffeurs or at risk of menacing traffic. It’s nice for children to have places to go outside and play, but also nice for kids to go somewhere that they will reliably encounter other children — ideally more or less the same children over and over again, kids with whom they can forge real relationships.

This is more or less the vibe in the courtyard apartments of Paris and other historic European cities. And most people, I think, have the intuition that the mid-rise structures of pre-automobile European cities are more aesthetically pleasing than modern high rises.

My son playing with new friends in a Paris courtyard.

I share that intuition, but it’s also the case that these are structures of a particular moment in world history. They don’t have parking, they don’t meet American accessibility standards, and most of all, the individual apartments would be considered too small by most families in the US. If you built something like this brand new from scratch, families with kids wouldn’t live in the units. If you built a building like this with units that are large enough to appeal to middle class American families, the density would be too low to support a walkable retail ecology and the neighborhood would be unappealing. We need something different: a modern high-rise for families.

The possibilities of a courtyard tower

Alon Levy wrote a post years ago called “Kowloon Walled City in My Backyard.”