In praise of courtyard apartments. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

10 - 12 minutes

Kate and I went to Paris in July with our son and another family and their three kids. We all stayed in an apartment near the Ménilmontant Metro station that turned out to be built around a really adorable courtyard.

Because the courtyard is an enclosed space, people feel comfortable letting their kids roam and play more or less unsupervised. And because it’s right outside your doorstep, the kids can play there while the adults are inside cooking or cleaning or working or whatever it is we adults do — just like a backyard in the suburbs.

But because it’s not a backyard in the suburbs, other people are there, too. Our son doesn’t speak any French, but thanks to the global language of soccer, he got into a pickup game with some random French boys who lived in the building.

The courtyard is nice for adults, too. As you can see in the top photo, it creates a semi-enclosed environment for people to park their bikes, somewhere safely away from thieves but not taking up precious space inside your apartment.

Of course if you prefer a single-family detached house in the suburbs as a lifestyle gestalt, I think this style of apartment still wouldn’t appeal to you. But for people who do feel the pull of walkability and urbanism, this courtyard lifestyle is a great version of it and one that is rarely offered in the United States. To an extent, that’s just a question of markets and style — the idea of raising kids in the city is so against the grain in the United States that I’m not sure anyone even thinks of trying to do family-friendly developments.

But part of the issue is a tedious aspect of public policy: Building codes in the United States and Canada normally require that multi-family dwellings have access to multiple physically separated staircases as a fire safety measure, while European building codes do not. And single staircase architecture is an important part of how these courtyard apartments work.

The workhorse of the modern American apartment building is the double-loaded corridor, which is a long, dark hallway with a staircase near both ends and apartments branching off on both sides. This ensures that, in case of a fire that blocks access to one staircase, everyone could rush over to the staircase on the other side of the hallway and evacuate through that route instead.

One issue with this construction methodology is it doesn’t lend itself to large family-size floor plans. Another is that the hallway takes up a lot of space, raising the per-square-foot costs. A problem that often strikes me walking around D.C. is that the double-loaded corridor is pretty hostile to infill projects because it incentivizes developers to make buildings really large. As long as you need two staircases separated by a long corridor, you really want to make it a loooooong corridor. For a small parcel, building two different means of vertical circulation is a big expense.

But even larger buildings often avoid the double-loaded corridor in Europe. The alternative is what Mike Eliason, who’s been evangelizing on this subject, calls a point access block. His tweet below shows an example from Germany — one big building but no hallways, just three different vertical circulation points, each of which serves a small portion of the overall structure.

That’s how our courtyard building on Rue Oberkampf was structured. There are a bunch of separate entryways, each of which has its own staircase (and mailboxes) and provides access to a small stack of dwellings.

These point access blocks are critical to the success of the project. Because of the way this neighborhood grew up over the decades, for some of the units, the only window is the one facing the interior courtyard — the building butts up against other buildings.

If this building vanished and had to be rebuilt according to American building codes, you’d have to reconfigure it as a long, skinny building in the center of the parcel with setbacks on either side. But with European single-stair construction, you can put the open space in the center of the building and create a friendly courtyard.

And it really is friendly. I emphasized the kids playing part before. But another nice thing about the courtyard lifestyle is that because it’s a somewhat private space, people do things like maintain the lovely plants you see here. You can also see that the kids feel comfortable doing stuff like leaving the soccer balls lying around; you don’t live in fear that your ball or scooter or stroller is going to be stolen.

That’s nice for parents and kids who get to do less fussing about toy storage. But it also means that any kid who wanders out is likely to find a soccer ball to play with.

There’s also a spot sheltered from the elements where people do a kind of community book swap.

And if I understood the sign I read correctly, they have a kind of monthly courtyard potluck for everyone in the building to come hang out. I’ve heard a lot of people on urbanism Twitter speculate that car dependency is a cause of the apparent surge of loneliness in the United States. I’ve been looking into that and haven’t really found much clear information either way. But I do believe this kind of courtyard design promotes a sense of the building as a community, and the single-stair entryways generate sub-communities within the larger community.

To underscore the specific value of the courtyard, I think it’s useful to contrast it with my Washington, D.C. neighborhood, which, though highly walkable, has a totally different structure. A typical block near where I live consists of a mass of narrow 3.5-story row houses, each of which faces out onto the street. Behind each townhouse is a small backyard, a bit of off-street parking (required by law), and then an alley that runs through the middle of the block.

Kids can play in those small yards, but they don’t naturally encounter each other. This design doesn’t encourage casual conversation between adults or lend itself to community events. Here, two families are enjoying an outdoor dinner together, but they’ll inevitably say hi to passing neighbors. Meanwhile, a little girl who may or may not be related is playing on her tricycle.

Of course the parking piece of this is extremely important. In D.C., a new multi-family building would need to have one parking space for every two units in most cases, though in some areas you could do one for every three units. That doesn’t mean you can’t build a courtyard, but it means in a practical sense you have a pretty overwhelming incentive to use open space for car parking.

My sense is that most residents of this apartment don’t own cars (after all, you’d have to pay to park them somewhere), but it was by no means car-free. You were even allowed to drive your car into the courtyard to load or unload, which I saw some families doing in advance of their Bastille Day trips. But you definitely couldn’t park a car in the courtyard, and bicycles are small enough that there’s plenty of room for them to share space with people.

Of course, one important issue is that maybe this American fire safety rule is really good, and legalizing European-style, single-stair buildings would get a lot of people killed. I’ve become a little disillusioned with data and evidence as tools of persuasion, and generally prefer to discuss this single staircase issue with people in informal terms. For example, have you ever stayed in a European apartment and worried about your personal fire safety? If you heard that a friend was going to Rome on vacation and planning to stay in an Airbnb, would you ask him if it was a building with a double-loaded corridor? If your kid was studying abroad in Europe, would building code safety be anywhere on your list of concerns?

It just seems to me that in practice, Americans are plenty comfortable with single-stair buildings. A little bit to the west of my home in D.C., there are several older apartment buildings that were constructed before the era of the double-loaded corridor, and I’ve never heard anyone propose demolishing them for safety reasons.

For the record, though, in the most recent FEMA data we could find (which admittedly is pretty old), the U.S. had a higher fire death rate than France and other Western European countries.

Part of the issue is that the double-loaded corridor’s fire safety merits are actually a bit ambiguous. Compared to a point access block, you are less likely to end up in a situation where your route to a safe means of egress is impeded, but you’re likely to be further away from a staircase, which has its own problems. There are also, of course, multiple dimensions to fire safety, including choice of materials and the use of sprinklers. We could, at a minimum, allow architects and engineers to choose one of several paths to fire safety. Or we could emulate the countries that allow single-staircase buildings up to the height of the big ladders they carry on fire trucks so you could use that as a rescue option. But it’s also worth noting that house fires in general have receded as a problem thanks to diminished rates of smoking and will probably further recede as more people switch to induction cooktops.

On some level, though, you can’t really deny that things could always be safer with even more requirements — it is a question of tradeoffs. This is why I return to the intuitive point: everyone has some notions and stereotypes about Europe, and I just don’t think anyone particularly believes that midrise European apartment buildings are death traps.

It occurred to me while thinking about this that my college dorm was also constructed in a broadly similar way to the Parisian courtyard apartment — a single building composed of multiple point access blocks for vertical circulation. And of course a college dorm is a great locus for community. You hang out with your friends, you say “hi” to casual acquaintances, you chit-chat, it’s nice. There is such a thing as too much privacy; it’s nice to have shared spaces.

Jared Kushner and Vivek Ramaswamy also lived in this dorm, and while I won’t be voting to put either of those guys in charge of the country, maybe if the fates hand that to us, they’ll advocate for the kinds of policy changes that would make it feasible to build new structures like this one.