How apartments got their bad name in America, and what to do about it

The American Dream Detour, or: how suburbs stole the spotlight from apartment living. Exploring the roots of the stigma surrounding apartments and what it will take to reclaim their place.

Having been raised in an apartment outside Barcelona in the 1980s and 1990s, I am always amazed at how apartment living has such charged connotations in the US West's collective unconscious. The stigma of apartment living is real.

But multi-housing isn't a phenomenon exclusive of rapid industrialization, which led to the vertical shanty towns depicted by