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For those of you who didn't think 2,500 words in @BW on stumpy apartment buildings was enough, I've written more at @bopinion bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Here's the @BW article, with a headline that's more negative about the phenomenon than I am (and has been successful in attracting many, many readers, so I'm not complaining) bloomberg.com/news/features/…
The new column is, first of all, another attempt at getting the word "stumpy," which I encountered in a three year old comment at @UrbanizeLA, into general circulation as the name for these buildings urbanize.la/post/little-to…
It's also an appreciation of stumpies, which aren't all as boring as the ones in and around Dallas featured in the @BW article. This new one in Boise, designed by @Holst_Arch, may be my favorite (photo by @GabeBorder) 
Another fun thing is that they're super easy to ID from overhead. Here's a big concentration of them in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. I was also able to find buildings in Dallas for the photographer to shoot simply by looking at satellite view on Google Maps
Here's what that same Little Tokyo block looked like 14 years ago, when the second stumpy, Teramachi Homes, was under construction. Seems better now, no? (Photo from the Gary Leonard collection @laplphotos)
Oops: link for the photo in the preceding tweet tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem…
This seems like a fair critique of the general tone of my @BW article. Truth is, my attitude went from curiosity tinged with enthusiasm when I started out to a bit worried as I talked to fire safety folks
A wood-framed stumpy apartment building with a full NPFA 13 sprinkler system is certainly a lot safer for the residents than a single-family home without one, which is what most Americans live in, but ...
... the shift from reliance on passive fire resistance (by using noncombustible building materials) to active fire suppression with sprinklers and the like does put a lot of reliance on those active systems continuing to work for many decades.
I think it's *probably* worth the long-run risk to get more apartments built now, but the decisions on how to build these stumpies are effectively being made by institutional investors, and they're not always great at assessing long-run risks
Also, the building code process is what Karthik Ramanna calls a "thin political market," dominated by industry experts who (1) can make better-informed decisions than elected officials but (2) have interests that don't always converge with the public's dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/hand…
Of course, elected officials' interests don't always converge with the public's, either, and the old system of having lots and lots of different local building codes was widely (and justly) decried for unnecessarily raising housing costs huduser.gov/periodicals/ci…
As for the aesthetic critiques of the buildings, I would take them more seriously if practically every new housing trend of the past couple of centuries hadn't been criticized as monotonous/repetitive. This is from Gwendolyn Wright's "Building the Dream" amazon.com/Building-Dream…
Although I do think there's something to this, from an email from @DunhamJones, a professor of urban design at Georgia Tech: "I worry about all these buildings aging poorly at the same time a few decades from now."
Also, since I've heard from many builders about this: balloon framing was long ago supplanted in single-family construction by platform framing (I had a couple sentences on that which were cut), although modified balloon framing is used in some stumpies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(…
And finally (I think). This is one of the stumpies that first made me realize that stumpies were a thing, the Philips Avenue Lofts in Sioux Falls. They're within easy walking distance of downtown and the falls, and I like 'em. lloydcompanies.com/case-study/phi…
