Apartment Buildings

Apartment building is a general term used to describe a variety of multifamily dwelling types. Ranging from small to large, modest to luxurious, apartment buildings contain suites of rooms which include all the basic functions necessary for domestic life. As American urban populations grew dramatically in the 19th century, demand for housing skyrocketed. Lack of widespread, affordable transit meant that more and more people were concentrated in a limited area. This drove land costs up, and made single-family housing less and less financially feasible. All different kinds of apartment buildings were designed and built to accommodate the surge in population in the available urban space.

Aside from the physical differences between the apartment building and its counterpart, the single-family dwelling, residential tenure has played another, significant role in differentiating between the two in American society. While either may be owned or rented, it is generally true that apartment dwellers rent and house occupants own or purchase. A longstanding cultural and public policy bias favoring ownership over tenancy has combined with a similarly constructed predisposition for freestanding houses over multistory apartments. The result is that, despite the popularity and sometimes luxurious conditions of apartment living, this residential choice has long suffered second-class status in the United States.

Though apartment buildings began to appear in growing European cities during the 1500s, they date from much earlier. Multistory insulae were common in Rome during antiquity, as that city and others grew much faster in population than in area. After centuries of urban depopulation, places such as Paris and Berlin gradually became characterized by concentrations of large and elaborate apartment structures, home to elite and middle-class urbanites—although less distinguished buildings occupied by laborers were quite common. In Europe, a civic culture evolved wherein the need for residential density combined with the prestige of living near the center city to make urban apartment buildings perfectly respectable shelter for all social classes. This contrasted sharply with the distinctly subordinate position for downtown apartment living in the United States.

Apartments came to North American cities later, for a number of reasons. Dispersed settlement patterns kept most urban land relatively affordable until later in the 19th century, when an increasing convergence of social and economic forces significantly altered the housing market. Immigration, migration, and industrialization were nothing new, yet by the 1800s these factors interacted at a higher order of magnitude, dramatically driving up many cities' populations. Still, affordable, transitenabling, largescale decentralization was not yet viable. All of this resulted in a constantly expanding demand for shelter within the same amount of space. Smaller houses on smaller lots offered one solution for increasing density, but this was nowhere near sufficient in the largest cities.

New York City—Manhattan—showed these urban symptoms in highest relief, since its boundaries were fixed on all sides by water. Poor immigrants and American laborers packed into the first multiple dwellings, tenements, beginning in the 1830s. By the 1850s it was apparent that middle-income households would not be able to afford a row house or detached residence for much longer. And, while multifamily housing already existed for the poor, this idea of sharing a structure with other households offended “proper” sensibilities about family domesticity. The skyrocketing costs of land and housing trumped the social question, however. Apartment buildings were built and filled at an astonishing pace. As other U.S. cities grew and the Yankee experiment with socalled French flats proved economically feasible (if culturally suspect), apartment buildings began appearing in many places, like Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

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