I lived in multi-family homes most of my life, ranging from duplexes to a 13-story tall condo complex in South Korea. I am writing this sentence in a duplex where I am temporarily cat-sitting for a friend. I will eventually return to the apartment I rent.
Changing the zoning code to allow for more multi-families is one of the first concepts you learn in urban planning schools and workshops. The reality is more complicated since in multi-family homes, you have to deal with more social conflicts and impacts like noise than in single-family homes.
I had one particularly difficult experience with apartment noise that it got me reading into the building code and studying building science. I ended up building a miniature model of a recommended soundproofing assembly for apartments, which shows how mad I was.
I will write more articles on this topic as I go, but to start, I am putting here the following Facebook post I wrote in October of 2023. I am not editing the post but putting it as I originally wrote it. I later learned that we might not be running out of construction-quality sand as some people claimed.
One of the current trends in urban planning is to promote “Missing Middle Housing” (https://missingmiddlehousing.com/), a housing that is somewhere between single-family homes and dense multi-family apartments such as duplexes and live-work buildings (commercial on first floor and residences above). I used to also casually advocate for missing middle housing until having had a lot of negative experiences living in them such as social conflicts (the guy who screams at you for having different political views happens to live in your complex), smoking fumes, water damage from upstairs, and most important for me, noise, which is an ongoing issue.
Considering the high price and maintenance burdens of single-family homes compared to what many of us make, smaller and denser multi-family homes can be practical options, but their hardware (the architecture) and the software (the bylaws and rental agreements) must be very well-built to minimize physical issues and social friction. As people age, well-built multi-family homes can make more sense rather than large single-family homes where people are isolated IF the multi-family homes provide the right type of social and maintenance support. That is a big “if” since I think many multi-family homes suffer from poor-quality construction and limited bylaws or rental agreements that do not bring people together under a common purpose.
Another challenge for missing middle housing, besides the need for better hardware and software, is that many of us are not really well-equipped to get along with other people in denser environments. As we go through dramatic changes in our environment and economy, e.g. climate change, running out of resources (we are running out of construction-quality sand, seriously), collapsing pensions, etc., there likely will be significant changes to our housing patterns as well. A possible trend is that either happily or unhappily, people will convert more and more single-family homes into multi-family homes and people will start demanding more multi-family construction. Whether we can do that while minimizing conflict or even better, improving community connections, is going to be a hot topic moving forward.