We’re About to Build Millions of Apartments for Regular People

Let’s Not Screw This Up.

Look, everybody knows we’re in a housing mess. Rents are insane, mortgages are a joke for most young people, and half the country is one missed paycheck from disaster. Finally—finally—cities are letting builders build again. Cranes are going up from Spokane to Salt Lake City. We might actually add the seven or eight million homes we need in the next ten years.

But here’s the part nobody’s talking about in the zoning meetings: most of the new places we’re rushing to build feel like crap to live in. Long blank hallways, fake materials, windows you can’t open, no place to sit outside, no spot where kids can play and moms can still see them from the kitchen. They’re cheap to build, sure. They’re also accidentally designed to make people miserable and turn neighbors against each other.

Two guys who never met—one a French thinker who studied violence, the other an architect who spent his life figuring out why some places feel good and others feel dead—figured this out decades ago. Their ideas fit together like puzzle pieces, and if we listen to them right now, we can build all the homes we need without creating a whole new generation of hellholes.

The guy who explained why we tear each other apart

René Girard was a college professor who noticed something brutal about humans: we copy each other’s wants. You want the new truck because your buddy got one. She wants the apartment with the view because somebody on Instagram has it. Pretty soon everybody’s chasing the same limited stuff—parking spots, the good school district, the last quiet unit on the third floor—and we start hating each other over it.

When the tension gets too high, groups have always done the same dark thing: pick one person who seems a little different (too poor, too loud, wrong skin color, wrong accent) and blame them for everything. Kick them out or worse, and suddenly the rest of the group feels better. Girard called this the scapegoat trick. It’s why witches got burned, why lynchings happened, why your apartment building’s Facebook group turns into a cesspool the week somebody’s kid draws on the elevator with a Sharpie.

The scary part? Modern life ripped away the old rituals that used to hide this ugly habit, but we never really fixed the habit itself. So now the fighting just keeps ratcheting up, especially in places where people feel cramped, broke, and anonymous.

The guy who explained why some buildings calm us down and others wind us up

Christopher Alexander was an architect who got obsessed with a simple question: why do you walk into an old Italian hill town or a quiet New England street and instantly feel… safe?

Not rich-safe, just human-safe. Your blood pressure drops. You say hi to strangers. Kids play in the street without anybody freaking out.

He spent fifty years measuring, drawing, building, and testing until he could prove it wasn’t magic. Certain things almost always make a place feel alive:

• Every room has light from at least two sides.

• You move from public to private in slow steps—sidewalk → front porch → entry → living room—instead of sidewalk → giant parking lot → metal door → hallway that smells like old pizza.

• Windows are low enough to lean out and talk to someone on the ground.

• There’s a spot where ten different apartments can all see the courtyard at once, so people naturally keep an eye on each other’s kids.

• Materials look like what they are—wood that looks like wood, brick that looks like brick—instead of stucco pretending to be something else.

When those things are there, even in a super-cheap building, people fight less like jerks. Kids play longer. Old folks sit outside. Fights still happen—humans are humans—but they don’t spiral the same way.

Where the two guys secretly agree

Girard says cramped, anonymous, ugly places are perfect kindling for the scapegoat fire.

Alexander says beautiful, human-scale places are fire extinguishers.

Put them together and you get a dead-simple truth nobody in the housing debate is saying out loud:

The cheap, soulless apartments we’re about to build by the millions aren’t just boring. They’re dangerous. They take people who are already stressed about money and put them in environments that crank the stress higher, make neighbors feel like threats, and guarantee someone’s going to get blamed and pushed out. We’re accidentally designing scapegoat factories.

But it flips the other way just as easily. Give people front stoops, real windows, a courtyard everybody can see, a little pride in the front door—and a lot of that pressure leaks out. People wave instead of glare. They borrow an onion instead of calling the cops about noise. The single mom with the loud toddler isn’t the building’s “problem”; she’s just Jessica on the second floor whose kid is learning to walk.

This isn’t about marble countertops

Nobody’s saying every new apartment needs hand-carved beams. Alexander built dirt-cheap housing in Mexico that still feels good thirty years later. The tricks are stupidly simple and add almost nothing to the budget if the architect gives a damn:

• Put the parking in back, not wrapped around the building like a moat.

• Make the front doors face the street or a real courtyard.

• Break the building into smaller chunks so it doesn’t look like a prison.

• Spend the $800 to make the entrance feel like an entrance instead of a fire door.

• Give every unit a window in the kitchen and one in the living room.

Developers already do this stuff when they’re building for rich people and call it “placemaking.” We can do it for regular people too. The math works.

Why this matters most for the people who have the least

The folks moving into these new “affordable” buildings are usually the same ones who’ve been priced out, stressed out, and kicked around the longest. They’re exactly who Girard warned about—the ones who end up carrying everybody else’s frustration when things get tight.

If we build places that secretly tell them “you don’t matter,” we’re setting them up to fail. Higher eviction rates, more police calls, more kids growing up thinking the world is hard and cold. Ten years from now we’ll be shocked—shocked!—that the big new housing projects turned into “troubled properties” and nobody will remember we designed them that way on purpose to save 2 percent.

Or we could build places that tell a different story: “You belong here. Your kids are safe. Your neighbors have your back.” Turns out that story is cheaper in the long run—lower turnover, fewer vacancies, less drama.

We only get one shot at this

The market may soon force it and, if it does, for the first time in most of our lives, America is actually going to build a ton of housing. Not luxury condos with rooftop infinity pools—regular apartments and townhouses for teachers, nurses, line cooks, young families, retirees on fixed incomes.

We can build them like disposable products, or we can build them like homes.

Girard would tell you the first option keeps the scapegoat cycle spinning. Alexander would hand you the checklist to stop it.

Let’s not blow it. The permits are finally here. The money is soon likely to flow. All that’s missing is the guts to say: people who can’t pay $3,000 a month still deserve a front porch, a place to grill on Sunday a spot where their kid can chalk the sidewalk without starting World War III.

Build it right and the buildings themselves start doing half the work of keeping people human to each other.

That’s not poetry. That’s just the cheapest, most effective crime-reduction, eviction-prevention, community-building program we’ve ever had. And it’s sitting right there in a couple of old books nobody in the zoning office has read yet.

Time to change that.