Why New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same

It’s Sunday, October twenty-fifth. There’s a good chance you walked past one of these buildings this week. It’s about six stories tall, with shops at street level, a grid of windows above, panels in gray or beige, and a gym and courtyard inside. It’s not a high-rise, but it’s tall enough to tower over the houses next to it, and it goes up along main streets and train stations in almost every fast-growing American city, including [a street you actually pass].

Architects call it a five-over-one: five floors of wood-frame apartments on one floor of concrete. The reason they all look alike comes down to a building code rule about how tall ordinary wood buildings can be, and what developers do to squeeze every legal inch out of it.

Start with what a developer actually wants, because it isn't a nice building. It's units per dollar. Land in a city costs what it costs, and you can't negotiate with it. So the only way to make the numbers work is to spread that land cost across as many apartments as you can legally fit on the lot.

Height is how you do that. More floors, more units, cheaper per unit.

And height is exactly what the code takes away, because wood burns.

So the code says a residential building framed in wood can go five stories. Not six. Five is the ceiling. Above that you're into steel and concrete, and steel and concrete cost so much more that most apartment projects stop making sense.

Then someone found the seam. If you put a concrete podium underneath, the code treats the top and the bottom as two separate buildings. The podium is one building. The five wood floors above it are another. Put them together and you've got a six-story building that's legally five stories sitting on one.

That's the five over one. The concrete base is where the parking goes, or the lobby, or the storefronts. Everything above it is apartments.

Once you're building that shape, everything else follows.

The wood above the podium is cheap, goes up fast, and weighs very little, so the foundation underneath doesn't have to be as strong. The units are laid out the same way every time because a different layout doesn't earn more rent. The windows land where the structure allows them, which is why they're always in the same rhythm.

The look of the building is the shape of the spreadsheet. Same height limit, same material, same financing, same insurance. In every city with the same code, you get the same building, and that's why Denver and Charlotte and your city all built the same thing at the same time.

I think that's fine, mostly. A city full of buildings people can afford is in better shape than a city of beautiful buildings nobody can. The five over one is what it looks like when someone finally works out how to put a hundred apartments near a train station without losing money. You can hate the look and still want more of it.

But there's a cost, and it isn't the aesthetics.

A wood frame is at its most dangerous before it's finished. Once the drywall is up and the sprinklers are live, a fire stays in one unit. Before that, it's a stack of kiln-dried lumber with nothing in it to stop a flame.

On the night of March sixteenth, 2017, in Raleigh, North Carolina, a five-story apartment building called the Metropolitan was in exactly that state. Framing done, drywall not. A block long and half a block wide, about two hundred and seventy-four thousand square feet of wood.

It caught fire a little after ten at night. By the time it was over, thirty-two fire companies and about a hundred and thirty firefighters had spent three and a half hours getting it under control, and the building was gone. Embers carried across the street and damaged other buildings.

The building had been inspected that Monday. The fire chief said it was completely compliant with permit regulations. Nobody had done anything wrong. It burned because of what it was made of and where it was in the process.

That's the trade the code is making. Not a hidden one, and not a scandal. Just the price of cheap buildings: five floors of wood, allowed to be built fast and cheap, with a window of months when it's a very large pile of fuel.

One more thing, because it changes how permanent this looks.

In 2021 the code was rewritten to let mass timber — engineered wood, glued into big panels — go much higher. Depending on how much fire protection you add, you can now build twelve stories out of it, or eighteen. Eighteen stories and two hundred and seventy feet, which would have been unthinkable when the five-story limit was written.

So the rule that made your city look like this is already gone on paper. What hasn't changed is the money. Most buildings using the new rules are still landing between six and twelve stories, because that's where the math works and because a tall timber building needs a level of fire protection that eats the savings.

Which means the five over one probably isn't forever. It's just what the cheapest building looks like right now, under a code that's being rewritten underneath it.

So the next time you walk past one of these, look at the ground floor. If it's concrete and everything above it is wood, you're looking at the exact line where the code stops allowing one thing and starts allowing another.

That line is on every new block in America. You just have to know it's there.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.