Back in the summer, I wrote about the seemingly sudden ubiquity of the “5-over-1” building—those stick-frame buildings with colorful and busy exteriors, often with some retail in the bottom, topping out at five or six stories overall but often taking up a whole block. Depending on the ornamentation, they can be garish or rather elegant, but they are a little odd looking in general.

I wrote a bit in that piece about what they are and why they exist, but I mostly thought through the frequently raised question of “who lives in these buildings?” Which usually means “I can’t imagine anyone wants to live in these buildings!”

Most people just rent what exists and what they can afford, which in many cases is going to be one of these. “Want” isn’t always what it’s about. But that’s not to say that they aren’t convenient and desirable, either. They are, for many people. So who are those people?

I focused on young, middle- or upper-middle-class people like myself in the original piece:

I grew up in Flemington, New Jersey, outside town in a house on a large lot. I went to college in an expensive little town (not Princeton, maybe fortunately). Then I ended up moving down to Maryland for grad school, getting married, and moving to Northern Virginia where my wife and I bought a condo from 1972, and recently a house.

Now, what if after college I’d gotten a job in a pharma company or any number of other white-collar jobs in New Jersey, or maybe some job in New York City or a place like Jersey City? And what if I hadn’t gotten married or had a serious relationship until my late 20s? And what if, as is natural for someone out of school and with a real job, I wanted a place to live other than my old room in my parents’ house? (I think they would want that too.)

There has been very little new housing construction that is not single-family or townhomes in most of these communities—in Flemington or Clinton, or any number of similar places throughout central Jersey. And houses are sort of inherently family housing, unless a bunch of roommates informally split them.

One-bedroom apartments are for singles and maybe for young couples without kids yet. But the apartments that are available in these places are frequently older buildings that predate the mass downzonings of the 1970s. These are walk-ups or garden apartments. No front desk, no security, no gym, no pool, no lobby with a fireplace and nice seating, not necessarily an on-site or even local landlord.

These newer buildings, on the other hand, meet the standard you expect or grew up with as a middle-class young adult. Most of your neighbors will be other people like you. And renting—like a mortgage without a down payment—allows you to enjoy that standard for a few years while you save and see where your life takes you. So that explains “Why not a house?”

In this alternate version of my life, I’d probably be living in one these buildings. It’s kind of nice to be around people all the time but to have absolute privacy whenever you want it. It’s also kind of nice having mostly young neighbors who aren’t going to ask questions or probe about your personal business. I kind of feel like your next-door neighbor with whom you share a property line in a subdivision, and who may or may not be an HOA vigilante, is more likely to be a problem than your next-unit neighbor in a new apartment building. The stakes are lower, anyway.

I hear this sentiment, though, that this is basically bad—that it encourages young people in a kind of extended adolescence; that it encourages a lifestyle of casual dating and sex over marriage and children, etc. Maybe this is the online-conservative equivalent of some of the online-lefty stuff I argue with sometimes, but it’s definitely a strain of thought you’ll encounter.

I’m thinking, for example, of an old blog post by the Christian writer Alan Jacobs, which I can no longer find. He was writing about why it’s so important for so many young people to get out of their parents’ house, instead of, say, living in an accessory unit. And he supposed at least some of it had to do with sex. That is, who wants to bring back girls or guys for the night with their own parents next door?

If I recall, he was sort of asking, how much of our housing and land-use and settlement-pattern talk is really sort of obliquely about sex, and about the assumption that absolute autonomy is an unalloyed good? If we had less casual sex and married earlier, how differently would we talk about these other issues? Would we live more multigenerationally? Do conservative morals actually reinforce the community that progressive urbanists want?

I think that’s interesting. There may be something to it. I don’t think it’s a basis for public policy, though. We’re not talking about giving people things, and we’re not talking about entitlements that can maybe breed laziness. We’re talking about loosening the market and permitting private actors to build and sell things that the market will bear.

A lot of people, I think, see permitting the market to provide what people want as the moral, if not quite the economic, equivalent of encouraging people in lifestyle choices they should not be making or giving people a handout. I think a lot of people would feel that providing nice housing for single people is a little bit suspect or questionable or undesirable, even if they wouldn’t think of putting it this way, or even if they don’t know why they have this instinct. I get the sense that this is one of the subtexts in our housing debates. I want you to think through this with me. Leave a comment.

But it isn’t just young people—which is one of the reasons why it’s counterproductive to frame all of this stuff around a subset of highly educated, relatively affluent Millennials. The comments and reactions to my original piece made this point very well.

You know who else lives a building that has good security, 24/7 staffing, elevators, simple one-story floorplans, and (usually) located close, often within walking distance, to lots of amenities and retail? Old folks. People who are healthy enough to live alone but need to downsize. People who don’t want to be isolated in old age. Maybe especially people who live alone.

Now, if these buildings are permitted in existing towns, like my hometown, suddenly you can sell your suburban (or old-town) house and move one or two miles away to a new apartment. If they’re not allowed, however, then a change in life status requires a change of neighborhood. Too often the argument is over whether we should “bring in” “new” people, whether we’re “overcrowded,” etc.

What about the “oldcomers”? The kids moving out of their parents’ houses? The elderly folks getting a smaller place? Having a range of prices and floorplans within a community enhances that community by making it accessible to the same people in different stages of life.

A community with only one kind of housing is not a community. It’s a snapshot, extended artificially by an over-regulated land-use regime.

So here are a few of the interesting comments I received that illuminate this question of who lives in these buildings:

I live in suburban Dallas where these 5 over 1’s seem to multiply like rabbits. I was helping out on a city council campaign a couple of years ago, and these buildings were a hot campaign topic. Along the lines of what you mention…we have enough, no way “they” can fill all these units, the traffic, the schools et.Al. One of the things I did as campaign work was spend an afternoon calling the management offices of these complexes to find out what their occupancy rates were. Every single one of them was at 95% or more, several had waiting lists (particularly for 2 bed units, which local ordinance limits to no more than 35% of total units for each project). People are definitely living in them! Who? Young professionals who can’t even begin to fathom affording our average home price that is well north of $500,000. Empty nesters who are tired of maintaining (or can no longer afford the taxes and insurance) that half million dollar house, but still want to be close to grandkids. People who have been relocated here by an employer but can’t find a house to buy because our inventory is so far below demand. Single parents and young families wanting access to good schools.

And:

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, which no doubt has some similar characteristics to your slice of Virginia ... a lot of upwardly mobile young people come to the Madison opportunity for the economic opportunity and living amenities. We have state government, city government, a big university, plus two small colleges, two very large and fast-growing tech companies with a national signature, and a shit-ton of small, local biotech and similar companies. Plus Madison is gorgeous and there's a decent amount going on (not like Chicago of course, but we have a little bit of culture.) All of this supports in-migration of a ton of young people.

Some of the youngsters moving in have kids or dogs and so they prefer to buy houses ... sometimes in my neighborhood of 1960's houses. But most of them are filling up the insane number of new 5-over-1s. These buildings are going up, en masse, in places that make no danged sense to long-time Madison inhabitants, including far, far outlying Madison and the suburbs. But there's nowhere else to put them, without knocking down other stuff.

I also received a very interesting email from someone describing his elderly relative moving into one of these buildings—along with a few of her elderly friends! Once you need assisted living it doesn’t work anymore, but isn’t that nice? I never really thought about that.

The first round of comments on this subject was very interesting. Tell me more.

Related Reading:

About That Avocado Toast

Do Not Re-Enter?

The COVID Neutron Bomb

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