These places have slab floors, and jackhammering sucks, but that isn't the end of the discussion. They typically have really high ceilings, so false floors aren't impossible. Clever architecting can group plumbing-required rooms together. Also, if we're talking about low-income, alternative housing for singles and couples, is a janitor-included shared bathroom down the hall even a problem? Many of the old hotels that are used for this purpose also have this.
Beyond walls, there's entire rooms, provided your client wants a lot of identical factory-finished rooms small enough to transport. Doesn't really work for your average private housing client who wants big open plan areas to add their own decoration to, but it's ideal for chain hotels and student/social apartments. That's where the construction speedup is more noticeable because the unit fitouts can take place in parallel to site prep and foundation works, and where you also get economies of scale and better QA from fitting lots of copies of the same bathroom on a production line.
(1) It might be expensive to add a lot of extra plumbing, but is it really more expensive than the revenue your building isn't generating as office space? (I imagine this will vary a lot from one building and owner to the next).
(2) It's possible to have housing with shared bathrooms and kitchens. HN commenters sometimes ask "Yeah, but who wants to live in a place with a shared bathroom?" The answer: someone whose current housing is even worse, or nonexistent. Sleeping in a clean, safe bedroom with a door that locks but having to go down the hall to pee is a big improvement over sleeping on the street.
You don't need a dinning room. That's a luxury feature.
It is possible to share bathrooms if you build housing more like school dooms or single room occupancy.
Sounds as comfortable as living with two teenagers in a house with single bathroom. You have to optimize around it and use clever tricks that shouldn't be documented.
On the contrary, I'd argue most people who would need this are just far better off moving to a single story residence.
I live with an 87 year old, and every dang thing except clear open floor is a big risk. We don't need contraptions, we just needed a first floor accessible bathroom.
The bathroom situation is even harder to fix, since even if you could find a bunch of tenants willing to share a bathroom across the floor (and you won't) you have to spend a lot of $$ to retrofit showers into the living space.
In some places like NY, it may be due to building regulations. It's harder to get a bathroom installed in a floor as opposed to an extra bedroom. You can only have bathrooms in a certain # of floors
Sounds reasonable ... I've been to some pre-WW2 city houses where the toilet and shower were directly next to the kitchen. Just running one set of pipes sounds like a good explanation for that.
If you're talking low-income housing, it could be closer to a dormitory setup. Common bathrooms and kitchens, etc. This used to be common in low-income urban rental property, and still is in some parts of the world.
Building Codes are words on paper. They can be changed more easily than physical buildings.
I think the main challenge with modular bathrooms integrated into an otherwise traditional build is that you're plonking a finished unit into a rough-and ready site that has no pipes or wiring to connect to yet and people running round laying bricks and lifting in beams... which feels a little premature. You're not going to fit one through the doors of your average existing building either, and the economics of hiring a large crane just for the upstairs bathroom rather than the entire build probably make less sense
It's a bit different when the modules are part of a hotel/apartment block that's entirely built using a modular system. That's common enough in city centre hotels and motels where they're a single full-sized room and nobody can tell the difference.
This is actually a thing in Japan. A number of real estate companies manage “share houses” where 10-20 people each get a ~9sqm room, with shared living space, kitchen, bathroom, etc.
While I’ve never lived in one, the few times I’ve seen inside, they’ve been in incredibly clean. People I know who’ve lived in these places generally have nothing but good things to say about them. They’re often not cheap, though. From what I’ve seen, they’re usually in central locations, and priced more than a similarly sized room with your own kitchen/bathroom out in the suburbs.
One per floor, plus one, makes a lot of sense to me.
I don’t think having multiple “full bathrooms” is so important, but “half bath” ie. a toilet and sink takes up very little space, and it’s the kind of thing that, when you need it, you NEED it. So it’s worth it.
For most of human history indoor plumbing has also been a luxury.
Though you're right that a 1-br + living space should be "decent" for 2 people (the 2-br probably has a living +kitchen too, so is probably not bad in living arangements). Studios are usually a pretty tight fit (euphemism) for 2 people I'd think though.
You (and those like you) have informally recreated boarding houses. It’s a shame that Single Room Occupancy is basically illegal to build in any major US city: most cities require building “single family units” that must have their own bathroom(s), kitchen and bedroom(s).
It would be nice if people who are OK sharing common spaces were able to have housing built specifically with them in mind.
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