Why America's New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same

These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They're usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks. They really are everywhere, I discovered on a cross-country drive last fall, and they're going up fast. In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises. ... The number of floors and the presence of a podium varies; the key unifying element, it turns out, is under the skin. They're almost always made of softwood two-by-fours, or "stick," in construction parlance, that have been nailed together in frames like those in suburban tract houses. ... In the U.S., stick framing appears to have become the default construction method for apartment complexes as well. The big reason is that it costs much less--I heard estimates from 20 percent to 40 percent less--than building with concrete, steel, or masonry. ... There's ... lots to like about building with wood, which, as long as the trees are replanted and allowed to grow to maturity, is now generally accounted to be a net consumer of carbon dioxide. Wood's green credentials have helped spur a recent worldwide push for more construction with "mass timber"--softwood lumber glued together and compressed into thick beams, columns, and panels. ... There haven't been many [major] fires in completed stick mid-rises, but the buildings have proved highly flammable before the sprinklers and walls go in. Dozens of major fires have broken out at mid-rise construction sites over the past five years. Of the 13 U.S. blazes that resulted in damages of $20 million or more in 2017, according to the National Fire Protection Association, six were at wood-frame apartment buildings under construction. ... Glenn Corbett, a former firefighter who teaches fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, took me on a tour of some of New Jersey's "toothpick towers," as he calls them, pointing out places that fire engines can't reach and things that could go wrong as the buildings age. "You're reintroducing these conflagration hazards to urban environments," he says. "We're intentionally putting problems in every community in the country, problems that generations of firefighters that haven't even been born yet are going to have to deal with."