Meet the Philadelphia developer who wants to bring more family-size apartments to U.S. cities

Philadelphia-based developer Bobby Fijan, who has worked on buildings such as the Icon at 1616 Walnut St., wants the real estate industry to start thinking seriously about building new apartments for families.

The 37-year-old founder of Form Developers is known in a real estate-centric corner of the internet for posting images of apartment floor plans more accommodating of families with children.

In the United States, where it’s long been the norm that most people with money leave cities for suburbs when they start having children, urban apartment buildings are dominated by small units for single people. Fijan says there are ways to build larger that will attract the kind of demand and rents needed to support new construction.

Fijan believes that the availability of family-oriented apartments will keep more people in the city, instead of taking their economic resources and political clout to the suburbs. And that, he says, is good for everyone in Philadelphia and other cities like it.

This Q&A with Fijan has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The most straightforward one: It just has to do with the difficulty in financing apartments. Smaller units have been shown to get higher rent per square foot than larger units. It is cheaper to build a 1,300-square-foot, two-bedroom than it is to build three 430-square-foot studios. But it is not more expensive relative to the amount of extra rent that you get for small units. So that’s the main reason why it doesn’t happen.

It also comes from the fact that lenders and equity investors and developers are extremely focused on two-year windows. The way that underwriting works in an apartment is someone’s going to say, “What are the rents today? Let me do a survey about which units seem to be getting the most rent per square foot right now. I’m going to build those. And then in two years, I expect those to lease up.”

There’s a problem of short-term thinking. No one thinks, well, what happens if everybody else looks at the exact same data and builds the exact same thing?

Philadelphia has a lot of people come to the city for grad school or for first jobs. The main thing that’s lost in not having units that allow someone to step up is it causes everyone who is here in the city for a certain period of time to have that countdown clock.

Having people know that they can stay more easily allows a lot more people to opt into the city. I don’t know anyone who’s lived in the city and hasn’t loved Philadelphia, loved its walkability, but there’s always the question: Can we stay here long-term? Is there somewhere for us to live?

We do have lots of rowhouses, and I think that is frankly one of the things that makes Philadelphia as well-positioned as it is. There are certainly a lot of other problems that Philadelphia is going to have to solve in order to keep people — schools and safety and all that other stuff. There’s no floor plan so perfect that it fixes all those different problems that cause someone to leave. But [having family-size units available] helps to get someone to that mindset of staying a little bit longer and pulls them into a community a little more.

That is a very fair pushback. But it is probably always going to be the case that the majority of developers are going to build one-bedrooms, and they’re going to design two-bedrooms for roommates. I would agree that the city is going to be most dynamic when it is a young place, and there’s a lot of space for people to come and do that first job and have a single household.

But I also don’t think there’s anybody who loves the city who doesn’t wish they could stay. I’ll admit that I’m biased, but it enables higher-income people — because all new construction is top of the market — to choose to not move [to the suburbs]. I firmly believe that then induces a positive cycle.

It is certainly the case that single-stair reform makes it more possible. [In North America, most multifamily buildings are required to have two staircases, which require much larger apartment buildings and a lot of wasted interior space along shared hallways.] Everywhere with a very large townhouse could easily be a single-stair building with 1,300-square-foot apartments or even condos on every floor.

I’m hesitant to say mandating bedroom count because bedroom count often ends up becoming de facto co-living. I’d say equating bedroom count with family-friendly is not the right way. If you look at the actual floor plans of the product that is great in Europe, in those units all the bedrooms are really small, and none of them have closets. That’s what enables someone to do three-bedroom units. Those are the things which [don’t require a] mandate as much as it’s an inaccurate assessment of people’s minimum needs or desires.

That’s why I try to focus more on floor plan data, to try and show other developers that there are lots of places where people want these different things. And if you were to design differently, in frankly a more European style, you will still get rents by driving unit size down.

It is also certainly the case that there are more family-oriented units that will naturally occur in conversions. So to the extent that you allow more conversions, there will be more units that are going to have lower rent per square foot because they’re bigger. Single-stair reform and more conversions, you’ll see more families in those kinds of buildings, even ones that are explicitly designed for roommates.