This is the sort of housing project that you'd fully expect to find in Tokyo. Seven homes built on a small urban lot measuring only 11 feet wide by 93 feet deep. But in this case, it's not Tokyo; it's Chinatown, Philadelphia, where a residual lot that was created when the sunken Vine Street Expressway was carved through the middle of the city in the 1950s.
Designed by Philadelphia-based Interface Studio Architects (ISA), the project contains 7 levels of livable space. What's interesting, though, is that from a building code perspective this is still a 4-story building. There are two mezzanine levels that don't get counted (and that create some great double-height spaces). This also seems to be what allowed them to get away with a single egress stair in the middle of the building.
The other technique that was used to maximum density is facade projections. Philadelphia's zoning code allows for projections up to 3 feet in the horizontal dimension. And if you look at the above plans, you'll see that these were used to "top up" or extend the site's 11 foot width to 14 feet, when it made sense to do so from a programming standpoint. The result is some very livable spaces.
I am endlessly fascinated by these sorts of projects because they demand creativity and because you ultimately end up unlocking something that the market had been overlooking. Here is an example of a small leftover urban parcel that was previously used as surface parking for two cars. Now it's seven beautiful homes.
Photos/drawings: ISA
When we build next to transit, we often call this transit-oriented development.
What’s interesting about this moniker is that it implies we’re doing something a little special — something out of the ordinary. And I guess that makes sense because, in many cities, it is often out of the ordinary.
That’s why you don’t hear people at real estate conferences saying, “check out this new cutting edge car-oriented development that our firm is developing.” That doesn’t need to be specified.
But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how special transit-oriented development really is; it’s basically just urban development. Meaning, you put density on top of and next to transit stations and then more people take transit. That’s how this works.
On that note, here is an interesting study from the School of Cities that looked at Toronto’s transit network and how the populations around each station have changed (or not changed) between 1996 and 2021 (census data).
If you look at the various transit lines, you’ll see that, in some cases, like downtown, we have added a lot of new transit-oriented development. This is good. Populations increased.
But in many/most other cases, populations remained flat; or worse, they declined. This is a serious problem, and it shows how land use restrictions are forcing us to underutilize our existing transit assets.
Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking about transit-oriented development as something special, and instead remind ourselves that this is standard operating procedure. It’s just what you do next to transit.
Thanks to Sam Kulendran for sharing the above study with me.
This evening in French class we discussed a Parisian apartment type called the chambre de bonne. The direct translation is "maid's room", and it's exactly what it sounds like. A small one-room apartment that is found on the top floor of bourgeoisie apartment buildings. Indeed, nearly one-third of Paris' entire supply of chambres de bonne are in the wealthy 16th arrondissement.
Their original function was to house servants. The reason they were on the penthouse floor is because, when they emerged in Paris in the 1830s, the elevator hadn't yet been invented. And so this was the least desirable floor. The people staying in these rooms typically worked for the people living on the lowest floors in the same building. That's where you wanted to be. Fewer stairs.
Fast forward to today, and it is estimated that Paris has somewhere around 114,000 chambres be bonne (also known as chambres de service). They are also occupied by a broad cross section of different people:
But it means living small. The smallest allowable size for an apartment in Paris is 9 m2 (area) or 20 m3 (volume). Meaning, even if the surface area is under the 9 m2 threshold, it might still be able to pass as livable if the ceilings are tall enough. But under these figures, and the place can't be rented. And supposedly, about half of Paris' chambres de bonne do not meet these minimum thresholds.
These requirements are immediately interesting to me -- not only because they're much smaller than what we allow in Toronto -- but because most people don't think of real estate in terms of volumes. Ceiling heights, yes. But when have you ever seen or measured the volume of an apartment? It's clearly appropriate in this instance given that many of these apartments sit under sloping rooflines.
But the most interesting question, I think, is whether this housing type is functionally obsolete. On the one hand, Paris is an expensive city, and these apartments represent what is likely the most affordable housing option. Go on YouTube and you'll find lots of students giving tours of their compact room-apartments. On the other hand, census data shows that occupancy within his housing type has been steadily declining since at least the 1960s:
Based on these figures from 2011, only about 17,300 chambres de bonne are occupied as a principal residence. This doesn't seem like a lot for a big city like Paris. (It's around 1.25% of its entire housing supply based on my rough math.) The rest of these apartments appear to be vacant, ineligible for renting, or serving as a secondary space for owners in the same building.
This represents an ~85% vacancy rate, which begs the question: Is there something more productive that Paris could be doing with all of this under-utilized penthouse space? Though perhaps it's helpful to start with: would you live in 9 square meters or 97 square feet? This is smaller than the minimum size of a parking space in Toronto.
Photo by Matt Boitor on Unsplash; Charts: Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme
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