Video: Paige Saunders on apartment amenities

People really do want them

A video by Paige Saunders, with Zac Jardak. Looks at differences between older apartment buildings and newer ones, to see if there’s some high-cost and unnecessary requirements that could easily be cut out. But it looks like the answer is no: people really do want these things.

• Ground-floor accessibility requirements.

• Elevators - people would pay 10% less for a fourth-floor apartment with no elevator.

• Sprinklers - people would pay 10% less to live in a four-storey building with no sprinklers.

• In-suite laundry - people would pay 7% less to live in a building with no in-suite laundry.

• Balconies - people would pay 12% less if there’s no balcony.

One opportunity for cost reduction that doesn’t apply in Montreal (where Saunders is): single-stair design for low-rise apartment buildings, which makes it easier to build family-size apartments, instead of hotel-style layouts with a lot of hallway space and small apartments. Montreal already has this, because their city-specific building code allows for a shared external staircase, typically a narrow spiral staircase.