The Capital Stack that Built the City - Part 1 - By Gevorg Yeghikyan

TL;DR

• 1

  Paris and London solved the same density problem with opposite morphologies: On a 0.36 hectare block, a 5-story Continental perimeter block housed about 500 to 680 people, while a dense British 4-story back-to-back rowhouse block housed about 540 to 720, so density alone does not explain apartments versus terraces.

• 2

  The real divide starts with inheritance law: Yeghikyan contrasts the French Code Civil of 1804, which forced equal cash-equivalent division among heirs, with English strict settlement, which preserved estates intact through life tenants and 99-year building leases.

• 3

  Britain's small-builder rowhouse regime was an institutional equilibrium, not a taste choice: Estate offices, solicitors, country banks, and master tradesmen were all set up for clusters of 3 to 6 houses, while Britain lacked a Prussian Pfandbrief or French Credit Foncier-style system to finance multi-year apartment block construction.

• 4

  Several famous explanations fail on contact with counterexamples: Walls were mostly gone before the apartment boom in places like Berlin, Belgium shared the Napoleonic Code with France but built mostly row houses, and freehold Leeds and leasehold Birmingham produced near-identical middle-class suburbs.

• 5

  Vienna and Madrid show there was more than one road to the apartment city: Vienna had multi-tenant courtyard housing centuries before modern mortgage finance, while Madrid's 1836 to 1855 desamortizacion plus the Banco Hipotecario de Espana of 1872 created a Paris-like apartment machine through liberal land breakup and bond finance.

• 6

  This is not just urban history, it points to today's rental revival: By 2022 the four largest US single-family rental landlords owned more than 200,000 homes, and build-to-rent rose from under 2% of US single-family starts in the 1990s to over 7% by 2025, suggesting institutional rental production is back in force.