Finally, if we omit the dining-room also, with its china-closet, our area becomes 3,931 square feet, and the cost only $14,350 for the “flat,” against $40,000 for the “tower,” the former being but little over a third of the latter.
So much for the saving in the case of a large family and large suite. For a small suite, such as would be required for a single person, or a small family of two or three persons, the saving at once mounts to a very much larger figure; so much so, indeed, as to render the use of the isolated house in such cases a most inordinate extravagance, except for the very rich. Thus a single person, or a family of two or three, could be very comfortably provided for with three or four rooms, and a bath-room in an apartment-house having a good café. Estimating the rooms to measure 18 x 22 feet, their area would be a little over 400 feet each, including closets, and their cost $1,460 apiece; or for smaller rooms of, say, 14 x 15 feet, or 224 square-feet surface, the cost would be but $818 apiece. An isolated dwelling, on the same land, of only eighteen feet frontage and fifty feet deep, would cost, including the lot at $5 a foot, not less than $18,000 or $8,000, without the land. Of course, in such an isolated dwelling, electric-lighting, steam-heating, fireproof stairs, and other luxuries of the “flat,” would hardly be expected.
By the arrangement of our apartment-house, there are twenty-four corner-suites out of the eighty. These have direct sunlight on either one or both of their exposed fronts, and may be estimated as worth fifty per cent more than the rest. In other words, 3/10 of the whole available room space is worth fifty per cent more, and 7/10 correspondingly less than the average price of $3.65 per foot. Therefore, $3.65 x 1-1/2 = $5.47 = price of corner-suites per foot, 3/10 x the total area 169,296 square feet = 50,788 square feet x $5.47 = $277,810, which, deducted from $617,771, leaves $339,961 to represent the total cost of the remaining 7/10. The total area 169,296 x 7/10 = 118,507 square feet of available space in the inner-suites. Hence $339,961/118,507 = $2.86 as the price per square foot of the inner-suites, or all suites which are not corner-suites.
Now, as our estimates on the “tower” were made on the basis of its being an inner building in a block and not a corner-house, our estimates for the “flat” should be on a basis of $2.86, instead of $3.65, as taken. Therefore, our suite of 4,859 square feet would be but $13,896 if the “flat” were any other than a corner one, and if the public kitchen and café were used, it would be $11,242, or but a little more than a quarter of that of the “tower!”
The foregoing figures are easily explained, and their correctness verified by the following simple diagrams and considerations:
Figure 2.
In [Figure 2] the shaded parts of the plans represent the unavailable room which, under the apartment-house system, are rendered unnecessary, and they are practically wasted. Thus the eighty families, by uniting their eighty homes in one coöperative apartment, save 156 staircases consisting of seventy-six front and eighty back staircases, seventy-eight furnaces, seventy-nine laundries, etc., and nearly all the space they occupy, and the land, foundation and roof they represent.