“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.

Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.

Definitely a tech entrepreneur's take.

It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).

Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."

That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.

You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year.

As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.

This seems like a specious argument:

"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."

I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.

> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt.

I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?

To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer.

They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.

I thought it was about the CD-ROMs lol.

I had no idea it was a town also.

I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.

Anyone else expecting this to be about Walnut Creek Software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM

Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city?

Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.

Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61

It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.

Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.

This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of

* 2-exit-stairwell requirement

* elevator laws

* parking laws

Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.

Pretty funny that in an article that's 99% about apartments, the top comment here is about cars

I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.

I moved to California from Nebraska, so I'm well familiar with what you're talking about. And while that's true, it overlooks a few things:

* My salary:housing ratio is better in California than in Nebraska. I have to work fewer hours each month to pay for my home here than I use to, for roughly similar niceness.

* What is spendy is services, like paying someone to do work on the house. Those workers make more here, too.

* On a side note, anything you buy from a national retailer costs the same in both places. An iPhone or a minivan both cost $X whether you live in CA or IA, so I only have to work about 1/4th the amount of time to buy a new phone here as I use to.

Yes, the cost of living is a lot higher here. Especially for those in tech, in my experience the pay difference far outweighs the cost difference, even including housing.

And it takes 15 minutes in a car to go anywhere.

I disagree on HVAC: i have proper ventilation on both ends of my apartment, if it's under 75 my apartment never gets uncomfortable with windows open on both ends, and i grew up with 69F Des Moines houses.

And in Des Moines, you HAVE to drive, you HAVE to have parking at home, everyone owns a car, there is no alternative way of living.

Where i live now, i have a car, i still live in an apartment, i can walk to the train or the bus or the grocery store or the bar, and i still use my car sometimes, but if i couldn't, i wouldn't really be missing out.

That to me is the problem: places where kids have no room to explore or play, where people's livelihoods are attached to their ability to maintain a car, where people on foot are treated as second class. That's definitely most of my experience in Iowa suburbs

I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.

Finally found one on my fifth try. Here is one of the three bedroom floor plans that they offer. None of the bedrooms have a window https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178...

The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.

I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.

Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.

In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.

In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one.

In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.

>rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common

Here's a recent story of what happens when Asian family sensibilities move into a typical American neighborhood

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-a...

neighbors were upset about this addition, built to house aging parents

https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd...

Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units.

There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.

In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.