It’s code-and-flue season

2,500 pages of new construction guidelines are giving developers headaches

Eran Chen
Eran Chen

From the January issue: While the square foot is the measure on many industry minds, real estate is often a game of inches: from plans for the length of a kitchen counter to the builder’s clearance for a bathroom door. Yet as developers consider scaling back the sizes of new apartments in an effort to hit more modest price points, they now have to contend with thousands of pages in the city’s new building codes that make the task more challenging.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

“It’s a very interesting phenomenon. In New York, the average apartment is getting smaller, but bathrooms are growing in size,” said ODA Architecture founder and executive director Eran Chen. “In some rental buildings where the apartments are really small, the bathrooms and closets are as big, or bigger than, the bedroom itself.” [more]