A fascinating article by Neil Freeman at the Urban Omnibus on rowhouses: How Many Rowhouses Are There in New York City? The short answer is 217,000 if you agree with the author’s selection criteria. As Mr. Freeman points out, that’s more than a quarter of the residential buildings in the city but only about 12 percent of the residential units.
He spends a fair amount of the time describing his selection criteria because “rowhouse” is one of those words, like “skyscraper,” that means what the person using it wants it to mean. One of the criteria used in this article is “not an apartment house.” If we ignore that for a moment and focus on the geometry criteria, there are a lot of tenement buildings that would qualify. There are also plenty of rowhouses that have been converted to other uses but remain physically identical to when they were residential.
I’m not arguing with the selection criteria. I think they make sense. I am, however, pointing out the difficulty in establishing criteria to categorize buildings. I went through this problem a while back in my skyscraper research, trying. to create a definition of “skyscraper” that was usable. Building is a continuum, with thousands of minor variations on any idea that’s ever been built, so trying to find a place to draw a line that truly divides one type from another is futile. The best we can do is find definitions that work for the issue at hand and not worry if those definitions are good for all purposes.
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