The Bottom-Up Revolution
Most city apartments are designed for roommates, not families with babies. Bobby Fijan, co-founder of The American Housing Corporation, explains how floor plans force parents out of cities — and how to help young families stay in the neighborhoods they love.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. Today, I'm going to be talking with someone who is bringing innovation to the housing development world in a really exciting way. In doing so, he's inviting us all to rethink the narratives around who the city is for.
Before we get going in today's conversation, I have a fun life update to share with you. I recently had to get braces. This is not something that's normal when you're in your mid-30s, I don't think. Maybe it is. I'm still figuring out exactly how to speak with them. So if you hear a slight lisp in this episode and for a few episodes after this one, that's why. I'm not talking with marbles in my mouth, although it might sound like that sometimes, but it means I'll probably talk a little slower, and some words might sound a little funny, but I don't think this will last forever.
On to today's conversation. Bobby Fijan is co-founder of the American Housing Corporation, a venture-backed real estate development company building row homes for families. We've had an opportunity to talk outside of this recording. Bobby is doing some very interesting work, and I'm so excited I can bring him on this episode for a conversation. Bobby, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed our previous conversation. I'm sure I'll enjoy this one even more.
All right. So Bobby, real estate development was not your first career plan. Can you tell that story? How did you pivot? What were you doing before? Tell the story of what that pivot was like. What I'm most curious about is what clicked with you on a personal level about making that change, that decision.
I got married just after college, and my wife was in college. We had met at the University of Pennsylvania, actually, where I was a super senior and she was a freshman. So I think some of the career pivot before meeting her, I just assumed, like a lot of other people who are more math and science based, that I wanted to go to Wall Street or work in finance or something pretty unimaginative.
But being married to an undergraduate in Philadelphia meant I had to figure out something else to do. I remember I was at a party, and I was talking to another friend from school, and he said that he and a few other guys were starting a real estate development company. I thought I could help them out with financial analysis or things like that. It sounded interesting. So we started talking back and forth, and I started doing that a bit.
When I started, my wife actually went on a nursing health trip to Honduras. By the time she came back, which was two weeks later, I told my wife I think I want to do this. So I'd say, on one hand, it was fairly early on in my career. It was basically the first thing I ever did. But it was definitely not what I thought my life plan was going to be. I mean, again, went to college, I thought I would do law school or medical school, something more professional.
But what I fell in love with in real estate within fairly short order was the idea, the blank canvas of it all, that you could build something where there was nothing there, or that you could redeem an existing building. I think the magic of that was there from the very beginning. Sixteen years later, I'd say that still exists. What I try to do and think about—anyway, it's really fun. Those of us who get to work in and around real estate, we have a privilege, whether we're Excel jockeys or whether we lay tile. It's all something really cool.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because I want to ask you—it sounds like you started off on the finance side. But now you're a hands-on builder. You were sitting in one of your actual products not too long ago. Can you tell me how did that happen? How did you go from number crunching to brick laying, so to speak?
Well, I've never laid bricks yet, but never say never. I'd say it was a privilege of working with a company that didn't have any money, so you had to learn to do a lot of different things. So I started the company, and there were three other guys there. Between us, we had pretty limited funds. So when you do that, you just have to learn to do everything.
Although I was the numbers person, I'd say a skill that I had, which I think I have to some degree now, is just wanting things to be right. So I was relatively organized. Going from a numbers person to then becoming the person who was in charge of making sure that our construction budget matched up then basically led me into wanting to make sure that the overall developments themselves went well.
As some people may know, I've written a lot about floor plans and apartment floor plans. That's where the real change happened for me between being hands-on and also doing Excel. Because I would look at things on one side of my brain—looking at how apartments were designed in Excel and how they were supposed to make money—and then also looking at them in real life and saying there's some disconnect between these two different things. My Excel model doesn't fully explain why an apartment is good or why one's bad.
I'm sure anyone who's ever been in an apartment has gone into one that was 800 square feet that was nice and 800 square feet that was really bad. But again, in Excel, they look the same, and that just isn't true in real life. So I'd say that was my foray into that—just looking for managing them.
Can you tell me more about that disconnect you were noticing? Because up until now, I guess what I'm curious about is when did you start to put the pieces together about how those differences affect the person's life or their experience of place?
I think there can be an over-tendency among people who are more finance or math related to turn off their common sense. Because the thing is, of course it matters. Of course not all 800 square foot apartments are good. Of course some are nice and some are bad. Layouts do matter, and light does matter, and aesthetics do make a difference on how people feel, make a difference on how people are willing to pay rent. But for some reason, that doesn't end up translating into the performance models that drive housing.
So I think some of it was just relearning or unlearning some of those basic rules.
Is there a memory or a story where this really clicked for you?
The one that was most influential, I'd say, was my partner and I were with an architect, and we were designing apartments. There was this decision on whether or not you walk through a closet to the bathroom or whether you walk to the side of a closet to get to a bathroom. There's really only one way to do it, or you can do it one of those two different ways.
As we were laying them out, we ended up making the decision like a lot of people make decisions. We said, "Okay, Bobby, do them half the way you like and do them half the way the other guy likes." I guess I'd say it wasn't at that moment, but maybe a few months later, I remember thinking I'm not going to live in all 20 of the apartments that were designed my way, and he's not going to live in all 20 of units his way. But really the way things should be designed is the way that someone else wants to design them.
So the design ends up being too much on what people in the individual room personally prefer rather than what do people want. I think if you just start thinking what do the people who I'm renting to want, you'll just make far better decisions. Again, it sounds silly, but probably less than 5% of apartments are designed with that idea. Most of them are the architect says this, the developer says that, someone else chimes in with this, and you pick one of those three things.
Then you kind of expect everyone to adapt.
That's right. Then they do because that's how it's designed.
That's right. It's almost like our ability to adapt works against us sometimes. It's like maybe, what if we just stopped adapting to bad design?
Yes, that would be good.
Okay, we have so much to talk about. But I would love it if, for our audience, you said you've been doing this for 16 years. Can you give us sort of the montage, the Bobby Fijan montage, of what have you been up to for the past decade and a half? Then we're going to talk about what you're working on now, because you've done some really cool stuff. So tell us what you've been working on.
So for the first half of my career, I worked with a bunch of other great partners on building a local real estate development company in the city of Philadelphia. We did a good number of projects there. We did a historic tax credit conversion. We did some infill apartment buildings built in some TOD, walkable areas near transit. I did some student housing. I built a modular building. So we did a lot of other random stuff.
In a good way, I would say that most local developers have to do a lot of different kinds of projects, just because when you're geographically constrained, you have to be project—I don't want to say agnostic, but a little bit wider on the aperture you could do. So anyway, I feel really lucky that I got to do that. Also, since we were a local development firm, I also had the privilege of getting to do property management and maintenance and leasing and running Excel and raising money—a little bit of everything. So I've worn basically every hat there is to wear within real estate in those first seven, eight years.
Then after that, I've now been involved in the startup and venture-backed world for a little while. I started a venture-backed construction technology company called Tailorbird that works on value-add multifamily renovations. Over the last four years, the product that I've been working on, which led to the launch of the company that I'm involved in now last year, is working on the problem of how do we build housing for very young families?
In the first part of my career, I built apartments. In this next bit, I want to build housing for people who want to maybe move out of apartments, maybe stay in apartments. But to me, the really key thing is I want people who move into cities to be able to stay when they have kids. I think it's just too much of a shame that people sort of treat the city as either something that's to be consumed, or they like the city for a while and they think whenever I have a child, then it's time for me to go.
That might happen for good reasons, either to live near family or jobs can certainly bring you different places. But I think too many people unfortunately end up taking the lesson that these things are very separate. I go to the city for work, and then when I have a kid, then I move somewhere else. I want to build housing for people to have kids and stay.
We're going to talk about that in more depth, which I'm really excited about. You mentioned this earlier, your interest and your fascination with floor plans. At one point in this professional journey you've been on, you realized there was a need for better data to understand what kind of floor plans people actually want. You took the initiative to collect this data. Can you talk about that research project? What did you learn as a result?
A lot of different things in different markets. But in general, I'd say the part that ended up becoming the most data-driven was with the fortunate backing of a few different really good housing advocate groups like Arnold Ventures and a few other academics. I was in partnership with the Institute for Family Studies, and Lyman Stone ended up doing the largest floor plan study in the United States. I don't think anyone's ever done one larger.
Basically we were trying to study, do people who want to have children have different desires for the kinds of floor plans? I'd say this stemmed from the intuitive observation that our current one- and two-bedroom apartments were all laid out in the same way. As we were talking about before, I feel like we should reject the way that apartments are laid out. But the necessary effect that it has on people, which our study found, was that when people did not have an extra room in which to place a baby, they were less willing to want to have a kid if it meant that you had to move.
The positive way of putting that is within a certain space—within even a 750 or 1,100 square foot apartment—if you had an extra room, whether it was for an office or for a baby, you were much more likely to be willing to have a child. I certainly don't want to force anyone to have kids, but I think it's just objectively a good thing that people should be able to have a child.
I think there's that famous quote, "First we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us." When I think about that as floor plans, I think floor plans have shaped a lot of different people into thinking I have a certain kind of life stage in this building, and then when I go somewhere else, then I'll have a different kind of life stage. Thinking broadly—and I know Strong Towns does a really good job of advocating for this—I think that's where the missing middle typology is really jumping that kind of life stage. It should not be the case that people think apartments are for this, single-family is for that. It needs to be a lot more overlap between those different kinds of demographics.
I think you should have your first kid in an apartment or be able to. Then if you have to move out again somewhere else or different part of the city or different building, that's natural, that happens. But it shouldn't be quite so stark.
Housing for the—yeah, it's almost like when you look at the world around us, they forgot what it's like to be human. Sometimes I think about even having small kids, like toddlers. Has anyone actually thought about a floor plan that's appropriate for having a toddler or the building materials for having a toddler? Sometimes it just—I'm not saying obviously there's a limit to how much you can do, but sometimes it does feel like the housing world has gotten frozen in a certain way of looking at the human experience of life. It's forced us into these really small, narrow boxes where it's like life is a lot more expansive and fluid and nuanced than this, but our housing doesn't usually reflect that.
It doesn't. I think the housing has been designed—and again, I don't think anyone has set out to say, "I hate children." But again, I would just tell anyone, go look at the floor plan of a two-bedroom apartment. They're quite large in any normal building. They'll be 1,000 to 1,200 square feet, which is as large as what a starter home was back in the not even that long ago.
But the defining feature that United States apartments have at that size is you'll have two equal-sized bedrooms that both have walk-in closets, that both have an ensuite bathroom. I don't know a single parent in the world who thinks that that's a good way to allocate square footage. No one thinks their room should be the same size as their child's. Maybe if they share a room or something, but it's just not the right way to lay out square footage.
So then when you have these bedroom suites that get larger, what gets smaller? The living room—the place where family life would occur. So I would just challenge anyone to go look at an apartment floor plan, and what you will see is it's basically just an SRO. Apartments are designed for roommates. That's the easier way to say it.
Again, that can be really smart. That makes sense in a lot of markets where people do want to split things. But it particularly hurts anyone who I think wants to have a kid. What it means is you have to spend for more square footage than you need. So when a family needs to go to a two-bedroom or a three-bedroom, now suddenly you're paying for an extra 600 square feet, which pushes you out of your neighborhood or pushes you out of New York into a different city or somewhere else like that.
To me, it should not be the case. You need those in-between small-sized rooms, which—last rant—is how apartments used to be built a long time ago. Again, if you look at New York, the old prewar buildings have much more appropriately sized bedrooms within the secondary sizes. They don't all have walk-in closets, but anyway.
Because a lot of this—I'm not an architect, so I never think about floor plans. I think I experience place much more intuitively. But I think it's really interesting what you're helping us think about, what you're helping us see.
But I want to know the story, Bobby. Do you have a memory of when this clicked for you and you're like, "This is my thing. This is the problem I want to solve"? Tell me that story. What was going on in your life? What were you noticing? How did that translate into what you're doing now?
I mean, like every good story, it's what happened to me personally, and it involved when I had kids. So I would say one of the very first projects that I got to work on was a historic conversion. So it was an old office building. One of the things that happens when you do a conversion is you can't pick your floor plans because the floor plate's already set. You have to work within the existing space, and you end up with these really strange units.
My wife and I had moved into this building—our company did the project, and then we had to sell it because we had some investors who wanted us to sell the building. So you sell the building, but my wife and I really wanted to keep living there because it was just special to us. So we moved into the building, and then we ended up having all three of our kids there. We had our first two.
I'd say the thing that I realized is, one, that was a fairly small unit. It was about just over 1,200 square feet. It was a three-bedroom, two-bath, and had a very, very, very small third bedroom. I'd say the story that started as an anecdote and then kept going over and over again is we moved to that building because of my connection to it and because it was four blocks away from our church. But what we inevitably ended up experiencing a lot was we'd have a lot of friends who would either come over or we would meet, and they would say something like, "We love your apartment. I wish there were three-bedrooms in the area. We're either thinking about having kids or about to have kids. There's nothing available, so we're going to move."
I'd say that experience, combined with how hard my wife ended up working to start a mom's group and then to start a preschool again at our church, or to start a place where everyone would meet at the playground at the same time—realizing, from a business perspective, okay, there's a lot of people who want this. The product doesn't exist because the product doesn't exist, you can't really prove the demand for it.
So that to me was the real foundational thing of where the disconnect started growing. I want to work on this problem because it just ought to exist, and that it doesn't exist just causes a lot of really sad consequences down the road. People don't get to stay at their churches longer or the YMCA or whatever group they're part of. These communal ties end up getting short-changed, and you can only stay in areas if you're fabulously wealthy.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I saw that living in New York City for sure. It almost kind of—this mindset kind of takes over, and no one really knows it. It's not like an evil plot, but it's just a very like, "Well, we all know that we're all going to move soon, eventually." It becomes the norm where we all expect to move or expect someone to move. It really does affect your ability to build community in any sense because you just expect everyone to move.
Yeah, yeah. I think that's absolutely—I think where it gets really unfortunate is, again, to that expectation. It doesn't make you a bad person, but when you have the expectation that you're going to move, then you just invest less. Because, well, I'm going to be somewhere else in the summer. I'll go to this different place. If I don't move this year, I'll move next year. So you're just less likely to either volunteer or less likely to care about things in the future. You're having a good time, and again, this isn't judging anyone else. It's more just people's attitudes towards the city.
I think even if you just thought you could stay, then you're just going to be much more likely to find those deeper ties.
So some people would say, "Ah, this is why we have the suburbs. People can move out to the suburbs. This is not really a problem." Bobby, how do you push back on that? How do you say no? It sounds like you're saying, though, you have to solve—not to this actual person that I've created in my head, but you look at it differently. You say no, the suburbs are not a solution. This is a problem that—I don't know how you would phrase that, but you have this different narrative in your head where rather than us expecting that people move out of the city when they're ready to have kids, you're saying we should make the city a place where they can begin that life stage, even if they don't stay there forever.
It's not like you're saying they should be able to have five to seven kids, but getting started—that should be a life stage that is seen as feasible to some degree in a city. How do you push back on the "this is not really a problem, this is why we have the suburbs" kind of mentality, kindly but forcefully?
I would say that's how I think about it. So I think the part where I think I can most definitely set aside is the suburbs might be the place where many or most people move to due to space or due to being closer to family or whatever. But where I think I feel like I'm on the strongest ground, most inarguably, is babies are small. People should be able to have a baby in the city.
That to me is the easiest one. Okay, great. Maybe the schools aren't quite right, or maybe you want to live close to your mom or cousins or different things. When kids get older, fair. But if a couple is in the city, you should be able to have your first baby there. That's it. I have not found anyone who pushes back against that when I phrase it as, "You should be able to have a baby."
Also—and I think it's even more important—I don't think you necessarily even need to have a baby in order for that decision to happen. I'm sure both of us know lots of different couples who have decided to have a baby, and then it just doesn't happen for a long time for whatever reason. But you're not going to have a baby, generally, until you've decided that you're willing to start trying to have a baby. That, I think, is where our floor plans and the overall community around us really ends up inhibiting that.
I want people to be open to having a baby, and I hope that some of them do, God willing. Then I hope that some more of them stay. Anyone who has little kids, whether you're raising them in the suburbs or the city, knows that you need to be able to raise kids around other people who also have children. It's incredibly hard to do it by yourself.
So to me, one of the really good things about the city, or a well-functioning city, is proximity to people. Proximity to other people who have children is a good thing. But when proximity to people where no one has children, that's a lot harder.
I would say my wife and I were the first people—I mean, we got married younger, but we were the first people in our sort of cohort of friends who had a child. I would say that first year was incredibly lonely because there are a lot of different things you can't do. You just can't do happy hour at six because that's bedtime. You're up at 5:30 because, again, that's wake-up time. The only coffee shop open at seven is Dunkin' Donuts, and it's not as cool.
So there's all these different things that become complicated. When there are other people who have children, or when you've been there long enough you figure out how to navigate that—this restaurant has crayons, this one will serve you butter noodles—you can figure out those different things. But they become harder to do.
That's good. Yes, when I lived in New York City, I think it's cool, but they kind of became this point where I was like, this is getting a little out of control, y'all. Sort of the indulgence culture, if that makes sense. I don't know if you saw that in Philly, but sort of like—maybe this is going to be a little bit of a rant, but I think what you're getting at is not just what you're making possible for an individual consumer, this tenant who wants to start a family.
I think what you're actually getting at is kind of pushing on our whole picture of what is the city for and who is the city for. I love living in New York City, and I worked as a nanny sometimes, so I got to be around kids and I got to see the whole family life in the city thing. So I've seen both sides. But sometimes it definitely felt like, because the culture of New York was not baby—maybe it almost felt like a lot of energy was getting spent on perpetuating a life stage or a pattern of life that can't last forever.
It was sort of like forever young, forever ordering takeout and forever going out. It's like that doesn't last forever. So it almost feels like cities are at their best when they're able to accommodate the wide variety of life stages rather than getting stuck at the hoodies and burgers at two in the morning because I was up playing video games all night kind of stage. It's like that doesn't last forever. It's making things possible for a particular person, but it's also allowing our cities to become more balanced, actual normal places.
More human places. Yeah, more human places. I think, yes, of course, there is a social critique of that. Maybe because I write online a bunch or other different things, I try to put the positive spin on it, even though the observation is absolutely true. I guess I'd say without judging anyone's particular decisions—because you never know why. There's a lot of people who aren't married who desire to be married, and there are people who are married and want to have kids who don't. There's all these different level things.
But one thing that I do think is sad about the city is when there just aren't children around. People just end up subconsciously getting the idea of, "Oh, there aren't kids here." Proactively, though, I think the best way to convince people to have kids is when kids just are around. If you go out to brunch and there are kids there, you figure, "Well, I guess it's possible."
Again, contrary to that—it's also not true either. Now New York is interesting in that I think it does make sense for different neighborhoods to have different life stages. People move from Manhattan to the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side at different stages. I think not every neighborhood is necessarily going to have the exact same age demographic overall. Jackson Heights is a wonderful neighborhood, in the same way that parts of Brooklyn are wonderful too, and also different life stages. Lower East Side also.
But what I think is a real shame is when there's none. There are now huge numbers of neighborhoods, and in particular neighborhoods where we're building new product, where there are no children. I mean, I think this is not an anti-dog thing, but I would say the ratio of dogs to children is what I find sad. If you have a dog, you can fit a baby in your apartment too. Dogs are actually a lot of work.
Dogs are bigger than the baby.
Assuming you're a reasonably good dog owner who takes care of it, it means you're going to take them to the park every day. It means you're going to go on longer walks at least once a week. I mean, again, a baby is a different category because it is a person and they just cannot be left alone for nine hours like some dogs can. But I think the point remains—there should be more. There should just be more, and it is good for the city.
There's a lot more things as a single person you'll tolerate. When the sidewalks aren't maintained, when you push a stroller, you really notice it. When you're just walking, you don't in the same way. Or things like being street-smart or public safety. I mean, again, you're in New York—how many times you notice the fact that the elevators either don't work or they're being hogged by someone who probably shouldn't be there? When it's just you, you're fine, you take the stairs. When you're a mom with a stroller, a lot harder.
So I think that lack of experience—anyway, cities should be designed, I think cities should be designed for babies. That's what they should be. They should be designed for babies, and then, similar to the sort of fitting in, young people can fit in. That's what I think—design cities for families, and then the city is still mostly going to be young.
I feel like we could be having the same conversation about seniors, right? Because something similar, right? I think that's—it's almost the way we've approached transit in our country. We're driving work for a small portion of the population between a certain age range, and then if you're not there, how do you get around? I feel like there's something similar going on with housing or with just how we think about things. It's like, well, the way we're approaching this, it's kind of excluding so many people that we really need here.
But let's get back to what you're working on. So tell us what you're working on now. Let's talk about your row houses, row homes. How do you refer to them? Tell us all about it. What has it been like getting this product out there? Where are you building? I'm just curious what that's been like, actually going from idea to implementation.
Well, we're still in the first initial implementation part. So I would say it has been a lot of work and a lot of fun. The product that we're building is—we're building—I like to use the word row homes, partly because I think town houses—the difference between town houses, town homes, row houses, row homes is either no difference, no technical difference, or all the difference.
I use row home because being from Philadelphia, being from the Northeast, I think it's just a nice sounding word. I think it makes clear a type of housing that we have not been building for a long time, which my company is hopefully bringing back. That is, within nearly every East Coast city, you had small homes that are attached that were built for working and middle-class families. Then as different things grew, some of those neighborhoods ended up becoming fabulously expensive. Brooklyn Heights was not a wealthy neighborhood, and now it is.
But what I think one of the things that makes Brooklyn Heights good is, obviously, the urbanism street design is nice, but also they are just well-built, beautiful masonry attached homes. People now are willing to spend $12 million on them. But that to me is the housing type that's missing. So that's what we're building.
We are building that through something called—we're taking a panelized approach to that so that we can build walls that are thicker, that are more energy efficient, that have no sound transfer between them. Because I think that is where the drop in quality is really felt in attached housing—when you can hear neighbors through the walls. It's just not as pleasant.
Oh, that's funny you mentioned that, because I remember when I was pregnant with my first, my husband and I were thinking about moving. I was like, "Oh, there's these cool apartment buildings right by the river here in Waco where we are." I was like, "I could take a walk." Technically I could bike ride along the river. He was like, "No, no, no, no. People are going to hear the baby screaming. You don't want that." I was like, "What? It's not that big of a deal." Now that you're saying this, I totally get it. Yes, it is a thing. It is very important.
It is. So that's what we're building. We're building row homes of that typology. The other part that I think is really important is the other feature—where these row homes are built is they are always built with smaller bedrooms, especially for kids. They're also built with fewer bathrooms.
So we are building 1,200 to 1,600 square foot attached row homes that are three- and four-bedrooms, where there's one larger bedroom for parents and then much smaller bedrooms for kids when they're little. So that type is just right for—again, apartments are built for people who are 22 to 34 who are single or couples. I want to build housing that's for people who are 28 to 38 who are having or about to have their first kid or two. That's who we're trying to build for.
What markets are you building in right now? Maybe you can tell a little bit about the company you've started to do this as well.
It's called the American Housing Corporation. I have a few other really smart co-founders on that too who are more on the engineering side. So I'm on the real estate side, but together we have the vision of pairing together a slightly different method of building homes so that it makes that a little bit easier to build. But mostly it's about solving the problem of we have lost the ability to build on small lots well. So that's what we're focused on. We're using what's called prefab panelized technology to build infill homes.
I'd say the markets that we're building in are every market in the United States that's infill. So rather than being focused on one market per se, we're going to be focused on sub-neighborhoods of, God willing, every city. As of right now, we have projects in pre-development in Austin and then one in New Mexico. We're looking at a few in some other western states.
So by the end of the year, we'll have projects that are built in at least two states, maybe three. But the idea is to be able to—I'd say anywhere where someone could build an apartment building, I want to build row homes next door.
That's so cool. Can you tell me a little bit more about the thought process behind that infill approach? Why does that matter to you? How does that affect how the project gets done? You can take that wherever you want, whether that's from the zoning side or the finance side. I'm just curious—when you say not only are we going to focus on this type of consumer, this type of product, but in terms of where we place it, we're also going to focus on infill. I would love you to rip on any of that. I'd just love to hear more about how that came about.
Well, I'd say it all ties together. It all flows from what I said before about I want people to be able to stay. So what I'd say—something that you will observe if, again, if you go and look at where people are building new apartment buildings, you'll often see them go up, and next door there'll be some smaller lots where someone didn't really build anything because it just wasn't large enough to fit a large building.
Again, other people have identified the missing middle problem of that type, whether it's the townhouse or the six-flat or the duplex or whatever that is. Where I'm confident these things have overlap is it's not just complicated to build that type—that type is the type that would particularly serve a family.
So I'd say the reason why I want to build near new apartment buildings is because I view those as lots of customers. Anyone who lives in a building for a long time and likes that area—I think they want to stay, but they wouldn't necessarily want to stay in that building. They want something that's a little bit different as their family ages.
So while I would like apartment buildings to be slightly family-friendlier, and I think that it is possible to have a baby there, I think most people want to move into a different kind of housing situation. I think that the attached row house is a very common one in cities, at least in America anyway. So I think it's one that we're used to, and that's why I want to build that one in those locations for those kinds of people.
Some people are going to, again, change jobs, move from Nashville to Phoenix or Los Angeles or Seattle or wherever. But some of them will say, "I really like it here. I want to stay."
That's something you said in our intro chat where you're seeing a lot of people aren't having kids because it's really hard for them to think about losing their whole community. Because if you think about, you have a lot of people who moved to a big city or some kind of city for school, then they got a job, then they got married, and then they found a church or a sports league or yoga or whatever they found. They've built this little village for themselves.
Now they're ready to move on to the next life stage, which is having kids, and they have to think about possibly moving because they can't stay. That means undoing all of that supportive networking that they've been doing for over a decade probably. Can you talk on that?
I could barely describe it better than how you did. Again, that to me is the part I think is a real shame. I also think it's why it's not useful to tsk-tsk people for not having kids, because I think it is even just a cost thing. If you really look at it on the one hand and say, "Huh, the consequences of having a baby are to lose the ties of everything that I've built over eight years, whether that's a small group, whether that's people you play basketball with every week, whatever that is"—it's that, or it's have a child and move somewhere else.
I don't think it's that unreasonable for you to say, "This is a lot to give up." You're not just saying, "I hate children" or "I want to consume." You're choosing something really positive and good. So again, I do think it's going to be the case that a lot of people will have a baby and say, "Man, this is really hard. I really need to be closer to my mom." Good reasons to do that. But when it's all in just this one category, it's just a lot to give up.
I think that's where the over-emphasis on just the cost or the price of housing doesn't quite capture it all of why people move to different areas or why people don't have children. Because, again, everyone who lives in the city is already used to making it work with smaller space. They've all learned how to make the galley kitchen that didn't really work or that's got a small stove that isn't quite as reliable as something else. They're okay with those things.
Anyway, the community part is, to me, the strongest thing that I want to keep. It's what housing is not just—I love floor plans, but it's really about enabling you to build a community in a certain location, whether that's school friends, gym, whatever it is. It's not just consuming an individual thing.
I'd say the best part about finding a neighborhood coffee shop isn't that they make good coffee. It's if you go there all the time, then you get to meet everybody. That's the fun part of being a regular somewhere—not that the mocha is that good. I mean, it is good, but it's that you get to know all the people who just regularly have the same schedule as you. That's human, and that is also what the city does uniquely well. The city has that serendipity really well.
I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask you—making cities, and I know that people listening to us are going to be like, "Oh, you guys are talking about big cities. Most of us don't live in big cities, so take it with a grain of salt."
But when you're thinking about the typical American neighborhood, it's basically housing only, right? So what you're talking about with making—widening our view of who the city is for to include kids—that also means getting away from this model of housing-only development, right? Thinking about, well, okay, so this family is going to have kids. It's very likely one adult will stay home with them. Okay, let's think about what they need to feel like they're thriving at life.
Has it ever crossed your mind that what they might need is easy, quick, on-foot access to see other people? Because I think you're solving the housing part of this, but can you speak to the other ways we can be rethinking what's normal about the neighborhood to make this really possible? I think the housing-only development pattern—we have got to rethink that.
What do you think it will take to make complete neighborhoods the norm, neighborhoods with a park, small shops, coffee shop, playground, whatever, so that it's a holistic little ecosystem and not just one product, one piece of our life pattern?
I think the biggest one is school because that's—I'd say the most important things within, whether you want to call it 15-minute city or something else, are the things within the walk radius that you have are the things that you do the most commonly. It's like before you have kids, when you have kids, when you have kids really little, where we're going to meet community—that's going to be the playground, the splash pad, the coffee shop.
When your kids are a little bit older, it's going to be can you walk to school or can you not? If you can't walk to school, then you're getting in the SUV pickup line for 30 minutes. That's whether you drive 10 minutes or whether you drive 20 minutes, you're in that line a long time, whether that's for preschool or elementary school. Those become pretty dissociative.
So what I think needs to change is, well, you have to have density in order for mixed-use to work. Which is why I like to think of my product going in near apartment buildings because what apartments have is a lot of people. So I'd say a coffee shop in the middle of a suburban neighborhood just wouldn't work.
What works in a suburban neighborhood is things like a community neighborhood pool that works in the summer really well. I've been in plenty of places where all the kids ride their bikes, they all go and spend and stay at the pool for 10 hours a day, and that becomes incredibly useful. But you need more people for certain kinds of things to occur.
I would say that my idea for how density in cities works—it's a definition that's meant to be expansive enough to include suburbs in that. I think that some parts of suburbs ought to be slightly denser because, again, I don't know any parent of elementary school children who doesn't wish that their kids could walk themselves to and from school. Everybody wants that.
So what does that mean? It means you need small neighborhood schools that are close to your house or a playground. So to me, is that's what I really want to happen.
That's really helpful. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the density side because you're totally right, and that is critical. I'll keep thinking on this. This is what I think about when I'm not nursing or chasing my toddler.
Bobby, this has been awesome. I feel like we could easily talk for a whole other 45 minutes. But you've mentioned Philly a lot, but you're actually based in Austin now, which is not far from me in Waco. So the last question for the show—tell us a little bit about where you live, maybe your neighborhood. What do you enjoy about it? What are a couple places you'd recommend people check out if they come to visit?
We moved from Philadelphia to Texas because my wife has six sisters and three brothers, and they all live in Texas, and they are now all married. So I would say the thing that I love the most about Texas truly is being around my in-laws and being around all the different cousins. My kids are—I'd say I partly say it with the caveat to say I miss and love our neighborhood in Philadelphia. There are features about it that are just unlike anything that really exists in Texas, in any part of Texas.
I mean, Philly's awesome. It's just such a great—
Philly is absolutely wonderful. Our neighborhood in Washington Square West, hands down, I think one of the best, most affordable places to have kids. We lived across the street from a playground and also a splash pad. We lived four blocks away from our elementary school. So anyway, the city is really good.
So this isn't just me trying to put out to my wife that I wish we moved back or something else like that. I can miss and see the advantage of both things. Texas is—we get to spend a lot of time in East Texas, and my son has now joined Boy Scouts, so I get to do those kinds of things with him. He's turned into an outdoorsman. I love that part of it. I love being around family.
Okay, so let's go back to your old neighborhood. Do you have a favorite coffee shop or favorite—what were some of your favorite places in Philly?
So again, the thing that—when you live in a true city, in a city that has actual density, something like the coffee shop would have been great in that I could give you four different answers in Philadelphia for which specific coffee shop had a different thing, whether you liked a mocha or whether you liked flat whites or whether you liked an iced coffee. I'm not a matcha person, so I don't know the answer to that one.
But I would say my favorite coffee shop in Philadelphia is a place called Rival Brothers. I'm also biased because I like both the people who started it. But you get to know them when you move around. Jonathan and Damian are great. Anyone who's in Philadelphia should go to Rival Brothers. We still get their beans delivered every month, partly to support them, partly because they are the best.
The other part that I would say for people who are in Philadelphia and elsewhere—what I again miss and love about Philadelphia is that when my wife and I did our weekly date night, we could just walk. That's just so much nicer. Going out to eat—getting in the car and driving out to eat just is a lot less fun, even if the meal is just as good. There's just something neat about walking back.
Dating in a non-walkable city, totally different.
Sure. Yeah.
Bobby, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking with me and sharing what you're working on.
Thank you, Tiffany. I really enjoyed this.
And to our listeners, thank you for listening to another episode. We will put links in the show notes so you can learn more about what Bobby is working on. Don't forget that if there's someone in your town who you think we should have on the show, please nominate them using the form that we link to as well. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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