The semi-autonomous and interdependent relationship between state, class and market explains certain trends in the development of the apartment. This section considers the negative influence of the rise of public housing in the form of apartment blocks, the often overlooked public costs of cities, the apartment’s natural home, and ways that income and wealth have continued to develop apartments with charac-teristic class distinctions.
Social housing apartments
Early on in industrialisation, various governments, charitable bodies and reformers set up model projects or programs involving direct intervention in the market because the speculative commercial building and real estate industries failed to supply sufficient affordable and appropriate houses for those on lower incomes. As direct providers of housing in the twentieth century, governments focused on large construction projects, specifically apartment towers. The apartment tower and skyscraper relied on the inventions of a safety brake for lifts and steel load-bearing skeleton frames because weighty and costlier lower storeys had supported light higher storeys in earlier ‘tall’ buildings.30 Such building was not only expensive in terms of project management
but also required massive injections of finance. The cost of public or social housing from a neoliberal, anti-welfare-state point of view – and social criticisms of the many ‘brutalist’, impersonal and depressive inter-ventions – led to a withdrawal of direct state intervention later in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, apartment living per se was scarred with such negative associations.
The public cost of cities
Only massive public investments in water supply, sewerage systems and street cleaning limited infectious disease, contagions and other ill health in cities. In the US, NYC was a leader in state provisioning, starting with a quality water system in 1842. Sewerage followed, along with the cleaning of streets dirtied by horse and other animal excrement, and business waste.31 Postal, radio, telephonic, Internet and other information and communications services were all easier, less costly and potentially more remunerative to establish in higher density urban areas with maximum potential users. In a similar way trains, underground rail and electrified streetcars (trams) and, more recently, sky/monorails have intercon-nected urban areas. The capitalist state supported such developments and relocation to urban apartments to service the needs of capital. At the same time capital city councils have benefited from charging visitors for access, say to parking for cars, and from state taxes that flow from poorer peripheral areas to the centre, with its headquarters of financial and commercial powerhouses. When operating costs and benefits of urban apartments are tallied up there needs to be a line (or two) accounting for the costs of such state-funded or subsidised amenities and facilities.
The apartment and class
Especially as Paris’s population increased by 50 per cent in the second half of the nineteenth century, and working-class housing was disturbed by the reconstruction (the ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris), modest, typically two-roomed working-class attached dwellings were disparaged as family-unfriendly.32 Yet, a recent study of court files and literature suggests that, in fact, the conviviality of apartments in well-populated areas facilitated surveillance of vulnerable children and meant that assistance was readily available when abuse was imminent.33 Yet movements against multi-unit dwellings proliferated worldwide,
including the US National Housing Association, which was established in 1909.34
These essentially middle-class movements denigrating apartments assisted socialists and liberals to make minimal reforms to apartment building codes and standards. Yet the anti-apartment lobbies idealised suburban houses and lots in the process. Still, apartments had their middle-class promoters who appreciated their economic and environ-mental benefits: referring in 1912 to Winnipeg and Edmonton, J. Pender West advocated apartment living for its cheaper communal heating, proximity to work, shops and other services, and assistance in snow clearance, so Canadians could better adapt to, or endure, their long winters.35
If, initially, the effect of the market on the form of housing for workers was decisive, urban historian Lewis Mumford points out another com-plementary effect, as early as the latter part of the nineteenth century, on the apartments of the middle classes. It was, he says, the ‘unpremed-itated revenge’ of workers that – under ‘the applications of capitalist standards’ – middle-class apartments would shrink and lose decorative and amenity qualities even while remaining superior to working-class housing.36 Yet the penthouse remains proof that the rich escaped such restraint. Furthermore, as urban apartment living has become more attractive, stock is bifurcating into larger and smaller ‘micro’ apartments.
Indeed, Redway has argued that planners advocating medium and high-density apartment living need to be more concerned with the growth in sheer size of city apartments. In the context of the average Australian householder’s quota of space trebling, from an adequate 31sq m in 1933 to 91sq m in 2007 – just as houses grew 70 per cent (or more than 100sq m) between 1973 and 2007 – it is salutary to find that, in 2007, even new medium-density townhouses and low-rise apartments averaged 154sq m and high-density apartments 137sq m. In fact, during 2003–2004, two-thirds of high-density dwellings built in Australia had three or more bedrooms with at least two bathrooms. Redway stated that Australian building construction company AV Jennings would favour national policies for greater sustainability features in homes and costs could be offset by reductions in dwelling size.37 Although the average size of new apartments had fallen to circa 130sq m in 2011, analysts suggest that the growth in micro-apartments (discussed below) is likely to have skewed the result.38
The city was a centripetal force throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the wealthy once had a secondary city apartment to complement a main rural residence in earlier centuries, they tended more towards a city residence and country holiday houses in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, many rich people have – or have access to – several apartments scattered across the world in global cities.
Serviced and other apartments catering for visiting business people and professional advisers, those involved on cultural or government projects or professional development (say conferences) and tourists, all represent a distinct real estate niche interlocked with similar accommodation in similar ‘global cities’. The effect in such cities is a two-tier real estate market with the international market of overseas buyers forcing up prices that local nationals, typically, struggle to afford.