What Makes a Family-Friendly Floor Plan?
"As a kid, as a parent, and as a professional, I’ve seen how these things matter."
This past May, I chatted with Bobby Fijan, a developer and the founder of Form, a data technology company that focuses on optimizing the efficiency and practicality of apartment floorplans. Fijan spends a lot of his time thinking about how floorplans can better accommodate families, and in turn, help cities accommodate children and young parents. We spoke about what got him interested in floorplans, how his ideas play out in the current real estate market, and how family-friendly apartments can become the norm in cities throughout the United States.
Adeleine Geitner: Do you mind starting with an introduction? What do you do now and how did you get there?
Bobby Fijan: Sure. I was homeschooled K-12, and I moved around the country. My dad was a professor and then a consultant, so I've lived in a few different college towns.
I first went to school out in LA, and I studied history and film. The deal I came up with with my mom was that if I studied history, I needed to either go to law school or have a secondary focus, so I ended up doing all my electives in math. When it turned out that I didn't want to work in Hollywood, I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and I studied economics and statistics. I worked on a consulting team for a bit, and then I went back to graduate school to do applied math—moms are always right.
I ended up dropping out of the grad program to start a real estate development company with a few other people. I didn’t do it out of any interest in real estate, really, but because I liked the other guys—one of them had been a roommate of mine in college—and I think I was intrigued by the idea of being an entrepreneur.
The first project that we were all in on was this old hotel that had been converted into a seminary, and these guys were trying to convert them into apartments. I liked the idea, and it was neat to just try. I remember thinking: “Okay, cool. If I try this and waste my time and lose all my money over two years, I’ll go back to business school and I’ll have a cool story.”
That was 2011. I'd say the advantage of getting started at that time, and in a very small company—we had no money—was that you had to learn to do everything right.
My background is in math, so I could think about, say, how something looked in Excel. But you also need to lease apartments. You need to go through applications. Since we didn't have enough money to hire other people, we ended up doing a lot of that ourselves. We didn't even hire lawyers. Instead, I had to be very judicious when we called our zoning attorney. We learned to do a lot of things on our own.
If you go to Wall Street—or something like that—and you work on the investment side of real estate, you're going to understand the Excel side, but you may not understand what it really means. The example I always use is the way that every pro forma looks: you'll have a constant number of units leased, maybe ninety-five percent. Every month, 10 units move out and 10 units move in. That doesn't really click until you realize what it is like to find out at 5 o'clock that someone moved out, there’s a new lease starting tomorrow, and “Oh my gosh! This person's destroyed the carpet.” So you learn a lot of different stuff. That first experience was awesome.
We did a few historic conversion projects, and some infill projects, and we ended up with a lot of units with very odd floor plans. Given my background on the math side, I thought a lot about ‘how should these units be designed?’ and ‘how should they be priced according to that design?’ As we were going through the design process, I realized that units were being designed based on a function of my personal preference, but why did that matter? I'm not renting these apartments.
And I also thought, “You're not going to live here based on how large the kitchen or the closet is, right? That shouldn't be the thing that matters.” But it is. And it ends up that the developers, and maybe a few architects, are the people making these decisions.
So that was, I think, the genesis of my thinking about floor plans.
Then on the personal side, my wife and I met at school and ended up staying in Philadelphia. We had a church downtown, so we wanted to live as close to there as possible, which meant living in an apartment. We sort of fell into figuring out what it was like to have a family with kids in that setting. Even if we did have the perfect floor plan, we also knew how hard it is when you don't know anyone else in the area. My wife started a preschool at our church because there just weren't any in the area.
So as a kid, as a parent, and as a professional, I’ve seen how these things matter.
AG: You’ve written about a chicken or egg problem, in which banks perpetuate similar development patterns when deciding which apartments to finance by favoring previously successful models. Could you explain this dilemma?
BF: In a market-rate housing environment, a lot of the reasons people build for a very specific demographic—early twenties to maybe early thirties, predominantly single—is because that's what everyone else has done. This trend means it's very easy to show that people can rent to that specific cohort, that safe demographic. So without good data to show that people want something else, we just keep building the same thing. It ends up being forced demographic turnover.
There are many worse problems in the world; I don’t need to worry that a 27-year-old software engineer from Google has to move from, say, San Francisco out to Walnut Creek [a San Fransisco suburb] to be able to start a family. And yet, I'd say there is a loss to the city when there's a constant churn of people. Every time a 27-year-old from downtown becomes a 32-year-old, gets married, has a child, and moves out—I think that's a loss.
Where I've ended up focusing professionally is on that particular cohort, and realizing the things I can affect and the things I can't. There are way bigger problems than anything any real estate developer or organization could do, but I believe in floor plans. I believe in families and cities. Still, schools are the biggest thing. Anything that people can do to fix schools is really going to be the decisive factor between families being in the city long term and families leaving.
AG: Given the many factors that affect new parents’ decision to leave the center city, where do you see family-oriented floor plans having an influence?
BF: For the couple having their first kid, up to the age of 12 months, every little kid just sleeps all the time. They don't go to school. If these young families already live in the city, there is nothing in these early stages of starting a family forcing them out other than design—the apartment unit’s interior layout. With a good product design and good product marketing, we can increase the likelihood, I think, that people will stay downtown in an apartment with their first kid. They already love their neighborhood. They probably don't want to have to change churches or find a new grocery store. It's incredibly annoying to navigate new grocery aisles, right? Even when you go on vacation.
So that’s my general idea. I hope that by using what I’ve learned as a developer, I can give people that option to stay. I want people to feel like they aren’t forced to choose between “I love my neighborhood” and “I want to have a kid.”
AG: Jane Jacobs popularized her idea of the sidewalk ballet, and children are the central pieces of the analogy—in a well-designed place, you should be able to raise a child and let them move on the street with neighbors and shopkeepers there to watch them. I saw a conversation you contributed to on X about raising children in a city in which a user commented that the deficit of children in the city is a childcare problem, and likewise a money problem. You said it is not necessarily a money problem but a community problem. Can you expand on that?
BF: Well, it is the Internet, and on one hand, it forces you to be…unnuanced, or slightly contrarian. So childcare is, of course, a money problem, partially. Things don't just happen without money or people caring about it.
But I would say that I think childcare is not just a money problem. I don’t think I would have lived downtown had it not been for our church—particularly given that our church has a lot of people from, I'd say, a breadth of demographics. So we could go and talk to people who had raised their kids in the city. They weren’t anywhere near our age, but we could say ‘Hey, Frank and Barbara, you've lived here for forty years. How did you do it?’ And they were able to tell us.
There were parents who said their children had different educational needs so they had to make certain accommodations and other people who sent their kids to public schools. It was fantastic.
But the main thing, the first cultural thing that is important, is that you need other people to have raised families in the city before you, and you need to be around those people. They can tell you it's possible. That to me is one of the biggest reasons why people have fewer children: when you just don't see people around you. If all you know is ‘the people I know move out of the city when they have kids,’ you’ll think that’s what you have to do.
I guess the point that I was trying to make in that Twitter exchange is that first, raising a child in the city is hard without a culture shift. I don't think you can say, “If we just push more money at it, then it must happen.” And I think there does need to be frankly, a common responsibility element, and an acknowledgment that it is difficult to raise kids anywhere.
The advocacy and the cohesion needed to make cities for children require both investment and a cultural shift. It isn't something that just happens. If we do leave things to just happen, then cities are going to keep going in the direction they are, which is primarily one that caters to high-income people who don’t have children—whether it’s before they have kids or once they’re empty nesters—because those groups have the most money and need the fewest services.
It's unfortunate that cities with dwindling numbers of children are looking at expenditures on schools and saying, “Man, that seems like a lot like, can we just cut services?” These things occur kind of naturally.
AG: That's great, and I appreciate that point because nuance does get lost on the Internet. In building places for children or families, what consideration have you given—if any—to building spaces where people can age in place or places for multi-generational families? Has that been something you thought about, either in general or specifically with floorplans?
BF: it's something I've thought about, but it isn't something that I've been able to think about actionably. I've talked to some senior housing developers, and I'd maybe say I'm not quite the person to do it. I think the reason why I am good at the stuff for little kids and for families is because I've been through that both professionally and personally.
There is a problem in that a bunch of older folks live in these single-family homes and there isn't a new product for people to move in. There's a lack of starter homes, et cetera. Where that is related to what I do building apartments for families is in the lack of apartments in the United States that are being built with what I'd call a ‘product-oriented design.’ I'd say the design philosophy for ninety-nine percent of apartments in the United States is to say, “How can I build something that offends as few people as possible,” right? You build so that people don't hate it rather than building to delight.
That can be evidently seen from the fact that every floor plan is the same. I could do an experiment for four hundred consecutive days, showing two floor plans side-by-side on Twitter and saying, “Is this in New York City or Amarillo, Texas?” and no one would have any idea. The layout is identical. To me, that's a perfect example that there is no product differentiation and there should be, because New York is not similar to Amarillo.
In that same way, a lot of people say, “Why don't families want to rent two-bedroom apartments?” And I always say, “Look at the floorplan.” It is built with equal-size bedrooms, where each bedroom has an en suite bathroom, and each bedroom has a large walk-in closet. There is no family on earth, especially a large family, who thinks that should be the way this space is laid out. It doesn't mean they hate two-bedrooms, or they hate urban infill apartments. It means that they hate that layout, right? The same is true for any product.
I would say the same thing is also true among senior housing. If you want older folks to move out of single-family homes, build great stuff for them. It's going to be risky to build, but there are projects that could do it. That, to me, is the only way you could do it. You couldn't just say, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you’ve lived in this home for a while, you don't have a mortgage anymore, your home has appreciated a lot in value. Sell your home and move somewhere else.” Still, there are not many people who are building to delight a 62-year-old couple looking to downsize but still need some space to host Thanksgiving.
AG: You’ve written about the tradeoff between an apartment’s shared amenities and each individual unit’s floor plans. Each requires an added investment, but different investments attract different people. You also describe how single-stair buildings may allow for better floor plans. Can you expand on this?
BF: I'd say that single-stair allows for better floor plans in a certain type of building, particularly in very small infill projects. I would also say that its application in the United States is going to be muted, even if legislation to expand it passes. It doesn’t build at the density that apartment developers look to build. Those are very small infill projects, and one of the reasons why not many apartment buildings go on small lots is because it is very difficult to build an apartment building large enough to afford the mandates—like a second staircase—on projects that are small.
In terms of how that affects the amenities, real estate is very hard to price. So, when people ask why one building got higher rents than another, there should be a reason, aside from location. The problem is, we can pretty easily track the finishes inside the unit, and the building’s amenities. And so when a certain amenity seems to do well in one building, it becomes a trend across other buildings.
For example, a few years ago in New York City, buildings getting the highest rents had underground basketball gyms. I don't think there's a huge swell of people looking for apartments with underground basketball gyms. But people end up saying “This building has an underground basketball court, so that means we must need that, too.” You sort of put yourself into an amenities arms race.
The problem lies in our inability to properly quantify what may actually be better for people. There was a guy who worked at the front desk at our building, and one day he found a tricycle near the trash, and he fixed it up and gave it to my 3-year-old kid. How much is that worth, right? An incredible amount. Because he knew our kids and we felt incredibly safe and taken care of. There is no chance we would have moved from that to another place, and yet you could never capture that in an Excel sheet. That level of service and care and true community trumps any movie theater room.
AG: I was reading a Vox article that you were quoted in, and the author began by describing young people’s preferences to move to big cities for the urban amenities—public transportation, good bike paths and coffee shops, et cetera. I wanted to ask you what you think about the role these family-oriented apartments play in more Southern cities, ones that may not have all the amenities the author described but are receiving a lot of growth.
BF: One of the reasons I focus on floor plans and compare units that are basically the same size is to show that if we built the exact same thing, but with a slight change, it makes the unit incrementally more family-friendly. That's also why I continue to focus on the 28 to 32-year-old rather than the 24 to 28-year-old, because even a developer would rather have people live in their unit a little bit longer. And I don't know anyone who finds out they’re pregnant and thinks “I'm psyched to move,” right? Having a baby and moving combines two of the most stressful things. Yet, our apartments aren’t designed to solve that.
So I think the topic I focus on is narrow enough to apply to both big northeastern cities and sprawling cities in the southeast. If you see a lot of units I post about on X, I say “Here's the typical one-bedroom floor plan. It's 750 square feet and has a walk-in closet. All we're changing is the walk-in closet to, maybe a home office or a nursery, and that's it. It doesn't change anything about cost. It allows someone who finds out that they're pregnant to have the baby, and worry about moving later.”
That is applicable everywhere in the South, everywhere. Family-friendly floor plans enable someone to move to an area—the Research Triangle, maybe—get a job, and they don't have to buy a house when they decide to have a kid. They can continue to live close to downtown because they already love that area. That, I think, is broadly applicable to all places.
A step beyond a newborn requires more. It helps to maybe have family nearby, or other childcare up to age four. Then you may need a preschool or more advanced childcare, then affordable—public—elementary schools, et cetera. But the very specific thing that I look at—floorplans—are applicable in projects anywhere.
Designing cities for families will need to go far beyond floorplans. It will require street design—bike lanes, et cetera—and that is incredibly hard. And there are so many things beyond floorplans that matter once your children are a little bit older. But starting out, a 3-month-old spends a lot of time, you know, sleeping.
Adeleine Geitner is a senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.
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