I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.
That’s as big as my entire house, and we can fit 4 rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in there.
2.5 rooms per floor would be the height of luxury.
Why do you say these are terrible?
I think we’d find that the number of people that need single floor apartments fairly closely follows the available supply.
There should be all kinds of everything. A city should be a massively diverse cacophony of individual choices. That means that finding exactly what you want is going to exclude >90% of the properties -- but means that finding exactly what you want is going to be possible.
It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.
Because you're competing with Boston money. The fact that it's possible to live in Worcester and work in Boston (and the fact that Worcester is known for being nicer than New Bedford/Fall River and Fitchburg/Leominster) means there's tons of working professionals who are jacking up prices.
I think people liked to live like that, just like they'd like to have fresh made meals and live in walking distance to everything now. But once you get married have kids, it gets too expensive. You're housing and feeding multiple people that aren't working. Also, people forget boarding houses usually came with a shared bathroom.
Many of these triple-deckers are pretty great in the sense that they can house a lot of people - they are not so great in many other aspects.
The youngest triple decker in Worcester is ~100 years old and many of them catch on fire and burn really easily. Your mileage may vary depending on the landlord you get. One landlord I had owned 100+ properties in Worcester and barely had anyone working for him. He refused to hire more people, so many of the issues we brought up would not be addressed for a while. My current landlord is great and any issue we have gets addressed almost immediately.
That being said, the city is currently working on revitalizing triple-deckers: http://www.worcesterma.gov/announcements/city-announces-worc....
Triple-deckers have a certain quirky charm to them. My current apartment has closets that are the right depth, but for some reason are super-wide. Many other triple-deckers have split the living room in half so that there can be a bedroom - this means that the door to the bedroom are sliding doors that you close.
These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage.
My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities.
New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties.
SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?