The Death of the Small Apartment Building
Big apartment buildings are going up at a record pace in the U.S., but little ones are ever rarer. That’s a problem.
Upward. Onward?
Photographer: Yana Paskova/Bloomberg
Developers in the U.S. built 358,000 units of new multifamily housing in 2017. That’s less than half the number of single-family homes built last year, but the gap between the two has narrowed a lot over the past decade. And while the current pace of single-family housing construction is still way below its pre-housing-crash norm, those 358,000 multifamily units were the most built in a year since 1989.
This generally seems like a healthy development, given that household sizes in the U.S. have been shrinking and housing shortages are most acute in and around big cities where multifamily is often the only realistic option to meet demand. But here’s another interesting bit of data from the annual Characteristics of New Housing data released by the Census Bureau last week: The new multifamily units that are going up are concentrated in bigger and bigger buildings.