6 ms·

Why Can't Walnut Creek Build 3 Bedroom Apartments with a Playground?

56 points by kevinburke 3mo ago

qurren 3mo ago
I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.
- dgeiser13 3mo ago
  In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one. In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.
  - qurren 3mo ago
    I think in the US a home office and a guest room is also usually needed, so 4-5 bedrooms makes total sense. In fact 4-5 bedroom single family houses in the US are extremely common. What I don't understand is why apartments always seem to stop at 2b or 3b.
    - sokoloff 3mo ago
      Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building. The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
    - toast0 3mo ago
      Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either. Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too. It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
    - pandaman 3mo ago
      The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car. Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well. [+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.
- CitrusFruits 3mo ago
  The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    While building codes are different, those are not different enough to explain the difference. I've seen plenty of people try to propose layouts for apartment buildings that would meet the U.S. requirements and be much cheaper, but no one builds them, even though they should be legal. The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
  - throwway120385 3mo ago
    Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.
- sokoloff 3mo ago
  Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units. There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.
- fsckboy 3mo ago
  >rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common Here's a recent story of what happens when Asian family sensibilities move into a typical American neighborhood https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-addition-nimby-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-a... neighbors were upset about this addition, built to house aging parents https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd81a0f4-6442-4203-bc2f-a0d6f7d7d725-SVFAIRFAXHOMEUPDATE.transfer_frame_2324.png https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd...
- jcranmer 3mo ago
  In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.
- saltcured 3mo ago
  I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard. Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter. In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
wolvoleo 3mo ago
I thought it was about the CD-ROMs lol. I had no idea it was a town also.
- jedberg 3mo ago
  The CD ROM people are named after the town. :) It's where they started.
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    The Maxis offices are about two hundred yards from this site!
mikelitoris 3mo ago
“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month. Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.
- soperj 3mo ago
  pretty sure I saw this quote from Elon in like 2015.
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    I remember what feels like forever ago hearing that truck driving is basically solved and there won't be any human truck drivers soon. Yet now more than 10 years later trucks are still driven by humans.
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
    - jcranmer 3mo ago
      > If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation. Oh, in the current market, you can raise obscene amounts of money on pure hype. Look at how much money SpaceX raised on an S-1 prospectus that everyone looked at and went "this is pure fantasy."
- fhdkweig 3mo ago
  I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
nilsbunger 3mo ago
This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of * 2-exit-stairwell requirement * elevator laws * parking laws Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.
- idle_zealot 3mo ago
  2 exit stairs makes sense, so long as one of those can be a fire escape. I think a lot of places banned those though because they're "ugly". Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living. Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
  - sokoloff 3mo ago
    Who gets to be the builder who is allowed to be one of the minority to not have to put an elevator into a building where only a majority must have it?
    - kevinburke 3mo ago
      You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford. Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
  - jedberg 3mo ago
    > Elevator laws make sense It's not the elevator requirement that is the problem, it's that they have to be very big. Can't use the small elevators that fit inside a stairwell for example.
jawns 3mo ago
Definitely a tech entrepreneur's take. It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers). Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on." That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.
- Animats 3mo ago
  It's the single escape stairway thing again. Is there a paid lobby behind this?
  - spankalee 3mo ago
    No, there are people who look at the better and cheaper housing the rest of world has and who want that for us too.
    - Animats 3mo ago
      Most of the world lives in concrete multifamily housing.
- spankalee 3mo ago
  Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
- milkytron 3mo ago
  Exactly my thought. People have been saying that robotaxis and self driving cars will take over in a couple years for at least a decade. It hasn't happened, and not only that, but if the companies making them want to be profitable, they will price out a huge percent of consumers. My guess is that humans will remain the majority operators of vehicles for at least 20 more years, maybe more. That isn't to say we need parking requirements though. We should still get rid of them and let the market determine how much parking we need.
BrenBarn 3mo ago
To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer. They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.
bluGill 3mo ago
You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year. As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.
- kevinburke 3mo ago
  I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment. Finally found one on my fifth try. Here is one of the three bedroom floor plans that they offer. None of the bedrooms have a window https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178334024.jpg https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178...
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    https://www.thepitchia.com/floorplans?Beds=3 https://www.thepitchia.com/floorplans?Beds=3. New building.
    - kevinburke 3mo ago
      Yes - this proves my point - both of those 3 bedroom floor plans are for corner units. They have windows on two sides because they are corner units. In a podium building you only have so many corner units, everything else is 1 or 2 bedroom units. In this particular building that means only 12 units out of 66 https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-branches-out-to-iowa-with-development-of-the-pitch-apartment-complex https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-bra...
tobinfricke 3mo ago
This seems like a specious argument: "Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living." I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
- fhdkweig 3mo ago
  Even then, opening two windows require that the wind is blowing and in the right direction. I purchased a box fan just so I can put it in a window to get more ventilation (and it was to blow out allergens, not temperature control). Best $18 I ever spent. This is someone who is just looking for an excuse to not like the apartment.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Are you suggesting that people in Walnut Creek are being dishonest about not liking specific features about housing because they're against housing in general? I'm shocked! Just utterly shocked, I tell you.
    - kevinburke 3mo ago
      I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT... "there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261913008283 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... " Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778817307636?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...
taurath 3mo ago
Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.
- mocamoca 3mo ago
  In France it is quite common. Cannot say about other countries though.
trhway 3mo ago
Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61 https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61 It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.
- slyall 3mo ago
  Did you read the article. Half the problem is the government regulations ( stairwells, elevators, parking ) that force the developer to build things worse.
TheGRS 3mo ago
I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.
- kevinburke 3mo ago
  I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles. And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.
  - TheGRS 3mo ago
    Builders will love to do it, which is where the code comes from. Long before robotaxi's were even an idea we would see buildings tout "car-lite" lifestyle buildings, aiming for residents using bicycles and public transport. Residents will (correctly IMO) point out that people grab these apartments and bring their cars anyway.
    - kevinburke 3mo ago
      The code is a legal requirement. If the code did not set mandatory minimum widths for parking stalls, builders could still set them at 9 feet wide. The point is that if you are builder who wants to build a 7 foot wide parking stall (or avoid parking stalls altogether and just have the cars park themselves as efficiently as possible) you are not legally allowed to do this.
jlhawn 3mo ago
> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt. I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?
- kevinburke 3mo ago
  My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition. The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
  - jlhawn 3mo ago
    the only thing I can imagine in the near-term are a subset of vehicles in the fleet which have carseats for infants and todlers which stay installed in the vehicle. We also already see vehicles from Volvo which have integrated/convertable booster seats for children 4+ and maybe the entire fleet could have these.
    - derekp7 3mo ago
      Integrated car seats were popular in some minivans and SUVs a number of years ago. Then they fell out of favor. I think it was because safety standards changed faster than the vehicle lifespan.
  - tailscaler2026 3mo ago
    the world today is banning kids from the internet largely to prevent them from talking to strangers online. i think a scenario where the pedophiles can use waymo to snatch up kids from summer camps might encounter some resistance.
turtlebits 3mo ago
Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city? Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.
yen223 3mo ago
Pretty funny that in an article that's 99% about apartments, the top comment here is about cars
jerlam 3mo ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Anyone else expecting this to be about Walnut Creek Software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM

56 points by kevinburke 3mo ago

qurren 3mo ago

I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.

dgeiser13 3mo ago
In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one. In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.
- qurren 3mo ago
  I think in the US a home office and a guest room is also usually needed, so 4-5 bedrooms makes total sense. In fact 4-5 bedroom single family houses in the US are extremely common. What I don't understand is why apartments always seem to stop at 2b or 3b.
  - sokoloff 3mo ago
    Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building. The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
  - toast0 3mo ago
    Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either. Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too. It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
  - pandaman 3mo ago
    The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car. Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well. [+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.
CitrusFruits 3mo ago
The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  While building codes are different, those are not different enough to explain the difference. I've seen plenty of people try to propose layouts for apartment buildings that would meet the U.S. requirements and be much cheaper, but no one builds them, even though they should be legal. The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
- throwway120385 3mo ago
  Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.
sokoloff 3mo ago
Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units. There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.
fsckboy 3mo ago
>rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common Here's a recent story of what happens when Asian family sensibilities move into a typical American neighborhood https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-addition-nimby-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-a... neighbors were upset about this addition, built to house aging parents https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd81a0f4-6442-4203-bc2f-a0d6f7d7d725-SVFAIRFAXHOMEUPDATE.transfer_frame_2324.png https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd...
jcranmer 3mo ago
In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.
saltcured 3mo ago
I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard. Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter. In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.

wolvoleo 3mo ago

I thought it was about the CD-ROMs lol. I had no idea it was a town also.

jedberg 3mo ago
The CD ROM people are named after the town. :) It's where they started.
- kevinburke 3mo ago
  The Maxis offices are about two hundred yards from this site!

mikelitoris 3mo ago

“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month. Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.

soperj 3mo ago
pretty sure I saw this quote from Elon in like 2015.
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  I remember what feels like forever ago hearing that truck driving is basically solved and there won't be any human truck drivers soon. Yet now more than 10 years later trucks are still driven by humans.
- kevinburke 3mo ago
  Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
  - jcranmer 3mo ago
    > If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation. Oh, in the current market, you can raise obscene amounts of money on pure hype. Look at how much money SpaceX raised on an S-1 prospectus that everyone looked at and went "this is pure fantasy."
fhdkweig 3mo ago
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.

nilsbunger 3mo ago

This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of * 2-exit-stairwell requirement * elevator laws * parking laws Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.

idle_zealot 3mo ago
2 exit stairs makes sense, so long as one of those can be a fire escape. I think a lot of places banned those though because they're "ugly". Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living. Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
- sokoloff 3mo ago
  Who gets to be the builder who is allowed to be one of the minority to not have to put an elevator into a building where only a majority must have it?
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford. Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
- jedberg 3mo ago
  > Elevator laws make sense It's not the elevator requirement that is the problem, it's that they have to be very big. Can't use the small elevators that fit inside a stairwell for example.

jawns 3mo ago

Definitely a tech entrepreneur's take. It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers). Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on." That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.

Animats 3mo ago
It's the single escape stairway thing again. Is there a paid lobby behind this?
- spankalee 3mo ago
  No, there are people who look at the better and cheaper housing the rest of world has and who want that for us too.
  - Animats 3mo ago
    Most of the world lives in concrete multifamily housing.
spankalee 3mo ago
Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
milkytron 3mo ago
Exactly my thought. People have been saying that robotaxis and self driving cars will take over in a couple years for at least a decade. It hasn't happened, and not only that, but if the companies making them want to be profitable, they will price out a huge percent of consumers. My guess is that humans will remain the majority operators of vehicles for at least 20 more years, maybe more. That isn't to say we need parking requirements though. We should still get rid of them and let the market determine how much parking we need.

BrenBarn 3mo ago

To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer. They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.

bluGill 3mo ago

You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year. As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.

kevinburke 3mo ago
I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment. Finally found one on my fifth try. Here is one of the three bedroom floor plans that they offer. None of the bedrooms have a window https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178334024.jpg https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178...
- bluGill 3mo ago
  https://www.thepitchia.com/floorplans?Beds=3 https://www.thepitchia.com/floorplans?Beds=3. New building.
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    Yes - this proves my point - both of those 3 bedroom floor plans are for corner units. They have windows on two sides because they are corner units. In a podium building you only have so many corner units, everything else is 1 or 2 bedroom units. In this particular building that means only 12 units out of 66 https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-branches-out-to-iowa-with-development-of-the-pitch-apartment-complex https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-bra...

tobinfricke 3mo ago

This seems like a specious argument: "Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living." I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.

fhdkweig 3mo ago
Even then, opening two windows require that the wind is blowing and in the right direction. I purchased a box fan just so I can put it in a window to get more ventilation (and it was to blow out allergens, not temperature control). Best $18 I ever spent. This is someone who is just looking for an excuse to not like the apartment.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Are you suggesting that people in Walnut Creek are being dishonest about not liking specific features about housing because they're against housing in general? I'm shocked! Just utterly shocked, I tell you.
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT... "there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261913008283 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... " Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778817307636?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...

taurath 3mo ago

Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.

mocamoca 3mo ago
In France it is quite common. Cannot say about other countries though.

trhway 3mo ago

Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61 https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61 It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.

slyall 3mo ago
Did you read the article. Half the problem is the government regulations ( stairwells, elevators, parking ) that force the developer to build things worse.

TheGRS 3mo ago

I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.

kevinburke 3mo ago
I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles. And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.
- TheGRS 3mo ago
  Builders will love to do it, which is where the code comes from. Long before robotaxi's were even an idea we would see buildings tout "car-lite" lifestyle buildings, aiming for residents using bicycles and public transport. Residents will (correctly IMO) point out that people grab these apartments and bring their cars anyway.
  - kevinburke 3mo ago
    The code is a legal requirement. If the code did not set mandatory minimum widths for parking stalls, builders could still set them at 9 feet wide. The point is that if you are builder who wants to build a 7 foot wide parking stall (or avoid parking stalls altogether and just have the cars park themselves as efficiently as possible) you are not legally allowed to do this.

jlhawn 3mo ago

> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt. I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?

kevinburke 3mo ago
My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition. The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
- jlhawn 3mo ago
  the only thing I can imagine in the near-term are a subset of vehicles in the fleet which have carseats for infants and todlers which stay installed in the vehicle. We also already see vehicles from Volvo which have integrated/convertable booster seats for children 4+ and maybe the entire fleet could have these.
  - derekp7 3mo ago
    Integrated car seats were popular in some minivans and SUVs a number of years ago. Then they fell out of favor. I think it was because safety standards changed faster than the vehicle lifespan.
- tailscaler2026 3mo ago
  the world today is banning kids from the internet largely to prevent them from talking to strangers online. i think a scenario where the pedophiles can use waymo to snatch up kids from summer camps might encounter some resistance.

turtlebits 3mo ago

Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city? Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.

yen223 3mo ago

Pretty funny that in an article that's 99% about apartments, the top comment here is about cars

jerlam 3mo ago

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ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Anyone else expecting this to be about Walnut Creek Software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM