9 ms·

Seattle’s micro-housing boom offers an affordable alternative

52 points by luu 11y ago

humanrebar 11y ago
An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too. I'm not even sure you could design a space for a young family. Things change so fast, you'd need a whole economy to support it. You'd need to rent a lot of things, like high chairs, cribs, extra linen storage, etc. because you can't store anything in your home.
- varelse 11y ago
  Call the rental service C2G: the sharing economy of your life, and it's unicorn time...
- paganel 11y ago
  > An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too. For what it's worth I've lived a very happy life as a kid in a 2-room apartment, in about 70 sqm. Granted, I used to spend most of my time in front of our apartments' block, playing with other kids. If it matters I grew up in Eastern Europe. What I wanted to say is that resorting to "but would someone think of the children?" in this kind of situation in order to mask the harm done on the environment because of McMansions and huge houses in general is the wrong way to do it.
  - gbuk2013 11y ago
    You were lucky! ;-) I think ours was ~36sqm if I remember correctly (it's been a long time...). http://www.kvmeter.ru/information/homes_series/1_468/ http://www.kvmeter.ru/information/homes_series/1_468/ (in Russian but there are pictures).
  - razvanh 11y ago
    100% agree. That's how I grew up too and I never felt like I needed/wanted more space.
  - delecti 11y ago
    Just for reference, 70 sqm is about 750 sqft, where these are 200 sqft, or less than 20 sqm. These are absolutely not sufficient for a family with children, or likely even a single parent with a child. Also, I live a 10 minute walk from this place, and pay 50% more for over 3 times the space, so they're not even that good of a deal.
    - BrianEatWorld 11y ago
      I don't think they're going for that market directly. The housing market is connected though, so interest in these, which may be limited to singles or couples without children, will remove some of the demand on larger units, such as yours, which can house children and families.
- dubcanada 11y ago
  This is a very North American ideology, lots of families live in very small apartments around the world.
- abalashov 11y ago
  My wife and I have three children and live in a 1150 ft^2 2 bedroom apartment in downtown Atlanta. It's certainly a little cramped by suburban American standards, but is table stakes in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It's the same way we all lived in my native USSR, though the apartments there tended to be larger and more rationally subdivided into lots of little rooms (so, an apartment with three rooms with closing doors, plus effectively a fourth room in the form of a kitchen, plus a foyer hallway, was a commonplace thing). My biggest annoyance with American apartment floor plans is the intense compulsion to imitate houses -- a door straight into a large combined living room and kitchen area. I'd gladly trade that for more compartmentalised rooms, and a layout that doesn't require someone entering the apartment to walk through space where someone else is hanging out.
pessimizer 11y ago
Seattle’s hipster SRO boom offers an affordable alternative to homelessness.
netcan 11y ago
This is interesting. It's the kind of topic that can easily be interpreted as anyone into their pet big issue and/or worldview, dangerously so. This could be about The Plight of The Middle class and the cost of housing. Are we really returning to a world of boarding houses? It could be about a less is more world where people are discarding processions, home and contents and living a smaller, more environmental and simpler existence. It could be about demographic and cultural shifts. More single people. It could be about the decline of extended families, communities and multigenerational households. The continued accession of cities… Anyway, interesting. Beyond anything else, I think this points at how much of any issue housing is these days. Manufactures goods have dropped in prices for generations to the point where looking back a few generations to a time when cutlery and crockery, salt and other things were wealth is ridiculous. Transport has improved more slowly. Air travel has certainly become a lot cheaper and international travel has become more accessible over the years. So have services like restaurants, gyms and lots of recreational goods. Information has been revolutionized. But housing, it's not really improving with time. We're not better off than our grandparents in many cases.
- kiba 11y ago
  More like real estate. The amount of land is fixed, after all. And some are more valuable than others. Even the materials used to build houses had gotten cheaper, presumably. Skyscrappers and high density housing can increase supply but only if regulations and market conditions allow it.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    Here is a list of cities by population density. They're not the ones you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d... It is possible to have lo-rise, high-density. As for "regulations and market conditions?" Everyplace has those.
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      That list doesn't tell us much, because what counts as the official city limits is completely arbitrary. There are some parts of London for example that are very suburban.
coldcode 11y ago
Sad that a good idea was immediately killed for the future.
Avshalom 11y ago
So is this just an article saying people are still living in efficiencies?
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
In Japan, there is a similar idea called "Shared Houses". This kind of reaction to the status quo means that we're solving the housing problem in the wrong way. Instead of providing faster transportation mechanisms, we're investing into places that are even more cramped. As many have pointed out, a micro-house is unlikely to be good when you have a family and children to raise.
- padobson 11y ago
  There's a question of whether or not those faster transportation systems would be a good long term investment. Create the means for people to spread out more and still enjoy the advantages of cities for just a 10 minute train ride, and people will spread out. But is that scalable in a society where both population growth and economic growth is slowing? The cost of maintaining infrastructure for a suburb is far greater per capita than the cost of maintaining a city. How much more expensive when the whole concept is reliant on the latest mass transit technologies? It seems to me that the marketplace might be providing the best and most practical living arrangements for the long term.
- shawnee_ 11y ago
  Correct. People with only the basic gist of "Economics 101" fail to understand that supply and demand economics do not apply to the housing market the way they do for consumer goods. In a nutshell, hyper-inflation of rents in a metro area actually decreases the rate at which new units are built. Landlords have incentive to keep supply down; and when they do build "nice new" units for rent, those rent prices increase the average rents on the market. In a sense, landlords are able to bully renters into being "customers" for longer period of time. Harms middle-class housing in two ways: (1) larger portion of renters' income dumped into rent decreases ability to save for down-payment to buy (2) fewer people buying decreases rate at which new units are built, and thus never allows the "housing supply" to react to actual market realities. And what causes hyperinflation in rents? People being unable to "save enough money for a down payment" to buy. Great documentary called "The Flaw" that explains more. [edit] formatting
  - mrec 11y ago
bluejellybean 11y ago
I love the concept of micro-housing and have looked into micro-houses quite extensively. The biggest issue with them is of course zoning laws and the only easy way to actually live in one is to buy a plot of land way out in the country. If you want to live in a city cheaply, you're pretty much forced to have roommates. That's fine but roommates are not always great and personally I would much rather live on my own. So what are the options? Well, the cheapest studio I could find in my area (Ann Arbor, MI) that is within a 10-15 minute to downtown (as my current place is) is almost double what I'm paying currently for a bedroom in a shared house. Ridiculous! As a young 20 something, I don't have a family, I don't need space. When I'm home, I'm at my desk or sleeping. I view a city in the same way as a phone being an extension of your brain, the city is an extension of your home. If I need a bunch of space, there are plenty of places I can go to get that. Is micro-housing and super dense living for everyone? Of course not! But for many young people, it's pretty damn great to have an affordable to sleep. Build 'em high, build 'em dense.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  The reason that "evil zoning" makes building crap like this hard to build is because the long game for property like this is that it devolves into a flophouse. When time rolls on and the six-figure people embracing dorm life gets old, or the workers are "disrupted" into low-paying gigs, this type of housing will turn into typical SRO housing in the US -- people on public assistance with nowhere else to go.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I'm very suspicious that this particular trend that's driven by well-paid 20 somethings who just can't bring themselves to live anywhere but in the trendy areas of a handful of coastal US cities is going to be looked back upon as a somewhat amusing transitory early 21st century phenomenon. Smaller self-contained apartments are less ridiculous but I suspect that by the the time you take into account shared space like hallways, stairwells, possibly parking, and so forth dropping an apartment size from 800sf+ to 400-500sf doesn't let you offer it that much more cheaply at a huge cost in livability.
  - 11y ago
maxsilver 11y ago
It's nice that more companies are building dorm rooms. But it would be great if someone would build dense urban living for families too. A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's the largest (and sometimes only) option for folks with children. They don't need to match suburban house sizes. Most people don't need 1800+sqft. But if we could start getting modest 3 and 4 bed urban condos with 1000-1300sqft, it would do a lot to improve things. Incentivizing a huge chunk of the population out into far flung suburbs doesn't seem smart from a efficiency, infrastructure, land use, or pollution standpoint.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  Something like that might rent for 2400 to 3000 a month, if the pricing trends that I've observed hold. Even if such a thing existed, the average person couldn't afford it in their wildest dreams.
  - maxsilver 11y ago
    Yes, exactly. And I think that's a huge problem. We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land. A 1100sqft condo with no land in a city, should be much cheaper than a 2200sqft stand alone McMansion on a quarter acre of private land. But today, the opposite is true. That's going to end up being a long term mistake. And because of the housing cost distortion, we're incentivizing people to continue that mistake.
    - MajorLOL 11y ago
      >We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land This is exactly it! We are seeing a ton of individuals who are not wealthy, even if they have a strong income. They are buying into the idea of paying these crazy rent prices to stay "connected" or in the "heart" of the urban areas. Access to these things is not granted by housing, you can attend every fancy nightclub, restaurant and bar while living 15min away in a drastically larger/cheaper living arrangement.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
roymurdock 11y ago
There are two forces at play here. The developers argue that dorm style living (rebranded micro-housing) is the result of a new, anti-consumption mindset: “People have different perspectives than our parents might have had. They were geared to acquire as much stuff as you can. They buy a big house and fill it up with as much stuff as they can. It’s a paradigm shift. Our generation is not being geared to the acquisitional mindset. It’s more normal for us being able to shift gears.” On the other hand, most residents seems to be there for economical reasons: the average tenant only stays 12-14 months, and it seems dubious that anyone (other than Steve Sauer) would enjoy living in a micro-housing unit for a long time: “I certainly don’t want to live this way forever,” she says, “but at this point in my life, it makes it easier. I need to stay close to work, I need free (street) parking, I need something affordable and just the convenience of being in the city. A space like this allows me to be in the city without breaking the bank.” Affordable housing is a big problem in a highly-regulated market with a lot of money at stake. If these jail-density units continue to proliferate in and around large cities, I fear that we are moving in the wrong direction. They are good indicators of the number of people who are willing to live in a 200 sq. ft dorm room because a) all they do is work and sleep and b) they can't afford the rent anywhere else. It's not a population of people we want to see growing in the US.
- netcan 11y ago
  You're right and I don't think you can think of this in isolation of the cost of housing more generally… On one hand. On the other hand, I think the marketing schpiel has more than pure dishonesty to it. There are bigger "transient young urban singles" groups today. SSomewhere between student and work, lifestyle-wise. In earlier generations they would be coupled or living with family. Some do spend a lot of time working or just out of the house. So convenience, location and of course price are big concerns. Basically, people who aren't students that live a lot like students. Like you say price is the strangest current here. If you could rent a normal flat for the same money, most would. That said, I'm not sure if there's ever been a time where decent single person housing has been available at a reasonable price. Government intervention-wise I think the worst thing possible would be to try and shit this kind of thing down. That just takes away the option for these who don't have a better one. Use it instead as a canary.
listic 11y ago
Looks like a regular flat to me. Has America just discovered flats? Can't see any floor plans under "floor plans": http://www.thealderflats.com/floorplans.aspx http://www.thealderflats.com/floorplans.aspx
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  200 sq ft is considered small in Europe but still on a scale that IKEA has an example flat in that size. You're not going to want to live there forever as your main property, but then they might discover the concept of a pied a terre...
krschultz 11y ago
It's kind of rediculous that the article ends with a picture of the apartment building and it is barely 4 stories tall, and on either side are 2 story suburban dwellings. Walk down any block of brownstones and in NYC and you'll note even the 100+ year old brownstones are 5 stories tall. At that height you still don't even need elevators or any of the other special systems that go into tall buildings. The owner simply prices the 5th floor walk up at a lower price, which actually turns out to be a win if your goal is affordability. We're not suffering from a lack of space, just a lack of permissive zoning.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  There was no ADA in 1910. IIRC, if you have more than 4 units, you need an elevator. Elevators cost a fortune to install and represent a significant ongoing cost for a landlord. Landlords avoid incurring costs at all costs. Also, you need to incur more costs for things like fire escapes in taller buildings, need to build to a higher standard, and have to figure out issues like parking that get more complicated at higher density. ...Or you can just throw up some 4-story disposable building, milk it for 10-years, then offload it to another property manager who squeezes the pennies out of the property. The economics don't make sense, which is why they don't get built.
  - saosebastiao 11y ago
    I live in an 8 floor building with two elevators that seem to break every other week...and yet despite that ongoing expense, our total HOA fees are less that $600/yr. That is half of what I pay for a parking spot that needs no maintenance. Elevators aren't a ridiculous expense.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      A two-stop hydraulic elevator costs about $70k, depending on where you are. Maintenance is around $3k/year, plus about $500-900 in energy. If it's being appropriately maintained, a traction elevator like what is in an 8-story building can cost 2-5x more in annual maintenance.
  - 11y ago
tomcam 11y ago
Didn't these used to be called tenements? Not trying to be snarky.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Some neighborhoods fought the projects — theirs and others — likening them to early 1900 tenements. Judgments abounded: one online magazine referred to them as “hipster hovels,” while others likened their size to prison cells, parking stalls and carports. None of it stopped people from moving in. “It’s satisfying,” says Carr, “and we realize we’re meeting a big, pent-up demand.”
backtoyoujim 11y ago
Affordable housing persons maybe can't afford most of the furniture in those interior photographs.
- zardo 11y ago
  It's not just poor people who want low cost living. You don't get rich by spending money.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
    You do, but you have to spend it on the right things...
tedmiston 11y ago
Our local startup accelerator, The Brandery, did a related experiment a few months ago. They paid the master lease to an apartment building and sublet to founders on favorable short-term contracts and with a slight discount [1]. I'm hoping to see more of this communal housing model with other accelerators. I didn't get a chance to see the Y Scraper [2], but perhaps that concept was similar. 1: http://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2015/06/19/welcome-home-otrs-branderyhaus-offers-affordable-living-to-entrepreneurs/ http://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2015/06/19/welcome-home-otrs-... 2: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Y-scraper https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Y-scraper
Futurebot 11y ago
As someone who lives in an actual 1900s tenement that costs twice what these do without any of the amenities, I'd be happy to live in one of those for $1000/month if they were in Lower Manhattan or West Brooklyn. For those who value location and low cost, these would be amazing. For reference, the micro-apartment experiment we have here: "Enter My Micro NY, the city's first micro-apartment complex, at 335 East 27th Street, with 55 units ranging from 260 to 360 square feet. The building will begin leasing studios this summer for around $2,000 to $3,000 a month" The same price as non-microapartments in the studio-1BR range. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartment...

52 points by luu 11y ago

An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too. I'm not even sure you could design a space for a young family. Things change so fast, you'd need a whole economy to support it. You'd need to rent a lot of things, like high chairs, cribs, extra linen storage, etc. because you can't store anything in your home.

varelse 11y ago
Call the rental service C2G: the sharing economy of your life, and it's unicorn time...
paganel 11y ago
> An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too. For what it's worth I've lived a very happy life as a kid in a 2-room apartment, in about 70 sqm. Granted, I used to spend most of my time in front of our apartments' block, playing with other kids. If it matters I grew up in Eastern Europe. What I wanted to say is that resorting to "but would someone think of the children?" in this kind of situation in order to mask the harm done on the environment because of McMansions and huge houses in general is the wrong way to do it.
- gbuk2013 11y ago
  You were lucky! ;-) I think ours was ~36sqm if I remember correctly (it's been a long time...). http://www.kvmeter.ru/information/homes_series/1_468/ http://www.kvmeter.ru/information/homes_series/1_468/ (in Russian but there are pictures).
- razvanh 11y ago
  100% agree. That's how I grew up too and I never felt like I needed/wanted more space.
- delecti 11y ago
  Just for reference, 70 sqm is about 750 sqft, where these are 200 sqft, or less than 20 sqm. These are absolutely not sufficient for a family with children, or likely even a single parent with a child. Also, I live a 10 minute walk from this place, and pay 50% more for over 3 times the space, so they're not even that good of a deal.
  - BrianEatWorld 11y ago
    I don't think they're going for that market directly. The housing market is connected though, so interest in these, which may be limited to singles or couples without children, will remove some of the demand on larger units, such as yours, which can house children and families.
dubcanada 11y ago
This is a very North American ideology, lots of families live in very small apartments around the world.
abalashov 11y ago
My wife and I have three children and live in a 1150 ft^2 2 bedroom apartment in downtown Atlanta. It's certainly a little cramped by suburban American standards, but is table stakes in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It's the same way we all lived in my native USSR, though the apartments there tended to be larger and more rationally subdivided into lots of little rooms (so, an apartment with three rooms with closing doors, plus effectively a fourth room in the form of a kitchen, plus a foyer hallway, was a commonplace thing). My biggest annoyance with American apartment floor plans is the intense compulsion to imitate houses -- a door straight into a large combined living room and kitchen area. I'd gladly trade that for more compartmentalised rooms, and a layout that doesn't require someone entering the apartment to walk through space where someone else is hanging out.

pessimizer 11y ago

Seattle’s hipster SRO boom offers an affordable alternative to homelessness.

netcan 11y ago

This is interesting. It's the kind of topic that can easily be interpreted as anyone into their pet big issue and/or worldview, dangerously so. This could be about The Plight of The Middle class and the cost of housing. Are we really returning to a world of boarding houses? It could be about a less is more world where people are discarding processions, home and contents and living a smaller, more environmental and simpler existence. It could be about demographic and cultural shifts. More single people. It could be about the decline of extended families, communities and multigenerational households. The continued accession of cities… Anyway, interesting. Beyond anything else, I think this points at how much of any issue housing is these days. Manufactures goods have dropped in prices for generations to the point where looking back a few generations to a time when cutlery and crockery, salt and other things were wealth is ridiculous. Transport has improved more slowly. Air travel has certainly become a lot cheaper and international travel has become more accessible over the years. So have services like restaurants, gyms and lots of recreational goods. Information has been revolutionized. But housing, it's not really improving with time. We're not better off than our grandparents in many cases.

kiba 11y ago
More like real estate. The amount of land is fixed, after all. And some are more valuable than others. Even the materials used to build houses had gotten cheaper, presumably. Skyscrappers and high density housing can increase supply but only if regulations and market conditions allow it.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Here is a list of cities by population density. They're not the ones you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d... It is possible to have lo-rise, high-density. As for "regulations and market conditions?" Everyplace has those.
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    That list doesn't tell us much, because what counts as the official city limits is completely arbitrary. There are some parts of London for example that are very suburban.

coldcode 11y ago

Sad that a good idea was immediately killed for the future.

Avshalom 11y ago

So is this just an article saying people are still living in efficiencies?

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

In Japan, there is a similar idea called "Shared Houses". This kind of reaction to the status quo means that we're solving the housing problem in the wrong way. Instead of providing faster transportation mechanisms, we're investing into places that are even more cramped. As many have pointed out, a micro-house is unlikely to be good when you have a family and children to raise.

padobson 11y ago
There's a question of whether or not those faster transportation systems would be a good long term investment. Create the means for people to spread out more and still enjoy the advantages of cities for just a 10 minute train ride, and people will spread out. But is that scalable in a society where both population growth and economic growth is slowing? The cost of maintaining infrastructure for a suburb is far greater per capita than the cost of maintaining a city. How much more expensive when the whole concept is reliant on the latest mass transit technologies? It seems to me that the marketplace might be providing the best and most practical living arrangements for the long term.
shawnee_ 11y ago
Correct. People with only the basic gist of "Economics 101" fail to understand that supply and demand economics do not apply to the housing market the way they do for consumer goods. In a nutshell, hyper-inflation of rents in a metro area actually decreases the rate at which new units are built. Landlords have incentive to keep supply down; and when they do build "nice new" units for rent, those rent prices increase the average rents on the market. In a sense, landlords are able to bully renters into being "customers" for longer period of time. Harms middle-class housing in two ways: (1) larger portion of renters' income dumped into rent decreases ability to save for down-payment to buy (2) fewer people buying decreases rate at which new units are built, and thus never allows the "housing supply" to react to actual market realities. And what causes hyperinflation in rents? People being unable to "save enough money for a down payment" to buy. Great documentary called "The Flaw" that explains more. [edit] formatting
- mrec 11y ago

bluejellybean 11y ago

I love the concept of micro-housing and have looked into micro-houses quite extensively. The biggest issue with them is of course zoning laws and the only easy way to actually live in one is to buy a plot of land way out in the country. If you want to live in a city cheaply, you're pretty much forced to have roommates. That's fine but roommates are not always great and personally I would much rather live on my own. So what are the options? Well, the cheapest studio I could find in my area (Ann Arbor, MI) that is within a 10-15 minute to downtown (as my current place is) is almost double what I'm paying currently for a bedroom in a shared house. Ridiculous! As a young 20 something, I don't have a family, I don't need space. When I'm home, I'm at my desk or sleeping. I view a city in the same way as a phone being an extension of your brain, the city is an extension of your home. If I need a bunch of space, there are plenty of places I can go to get that. Is micro-housing and super dense living for everyone? Of course not! But for many young people, it's pretty damn great to have an affordable to sleep. Build 'em high, build 'em dense.

Spooky23 11y ago
The reason that "evil zoning" makes building crap like this hard to build is because the long game for property like this is that it devolves into a flophouse. When time rolls on and the six-figure people embracing dorm life gets old, or the workers are "disrupted" into low-paying gigs, this type of housing will turn into typical SRO housing in the US -- people on public assistance with nowhere else to go.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I'm very suspicious that this particular trend that's driven by well-paid 20 somethings who just can't bring themselves to live anywhere but in the trendy areas of a handful of coastal US cities is going to be looked back upon as a somewhat amusing transitory early 21st century phenomenon. Smaller self-contained apartments are less ridiculous but I suspect that by the the time you take into account shared space like hallways, stairwells, possibly parking, and so forth dropping an apartment size from 800sf+ to 400-500sf doesn't let you offer it that much more cheaply at a huge cost in livability.
- 11y ago

maxsilver 11y ago

It's nice that more companies are building dorm rooms. But it would be great if someone would build dense urban living for families too. A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's the largest (and sometimes only) option for folks with children. They don't need to match suburban house sizes. Most people don't need 1800+sqft. But if we could start getting modest 3 and 4 bed urban condos with 1000-1300sqft, it would do a lot to improve things. Incentivizing a huge chunk of the population out into far flung suburbs doesn't seem smart from a efficiency, infrastructure, land use, or pollution standpoint.

jschwartzi 11y ago
Something like that might rent for 2400 to 3000 a month, if the pricing trends that I've observed hold. Even if such a thing existed, the average person couldn't afford it in their wildest dreams.
- maxsilver 11y ago
  Yes, exactly. And I think that's a huge problem. We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land. A 1100sqft condo with no land in a city, should be much cheaper than a 2200sqft stand alone McMansion on a quarter acre of private land. But today, the opposite is true. That's going to end up being a long term mistake. And because of the housing cost distortion, we're incentivizing people to continue that mistake.
  - MajorLOL 11y ago
    >We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land This is exactly it! We are seeing a ton of individuals who are not wealthy, even if they have a strong income. They are buying into the idea of paying these crazy rent prices to stay "connected" or in the "heart" of the urban areas. Access to these things is not granted by housing, you can attend every fancy nightclub, restaurant and bar while living 15min away in a drastically larger/cheaper living arrangement.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago

roymurdock 11y ago

There are two forces at play here. The developers argue that dorm style living (rebranded micro-housing) is the result of a new, anti-consumption mindset: “People have different perspectives than our parents might have had. They were geared to acquire as much stuff as you can. They buy a big house and fill it up with as much stuff as they can. It’s a paradigm shift. Our generation is not being geared to the acquisitional mindset. It’s more normal for us being able to shift gears.” On the other hand, most residents seems to be there for economical reasons: the average tenant only stays 12-14 months, and it seems dubious that anyone (other than Steve Sauer) would enjoy living in a micro-housing unit for a long time: “I certainly don’t want to live this way forever,” she says, “but at this point in my life, it makes it easier. I need to stay close to work, I need free (street) parking, I need something affordable and just the convenience of being in the city. A space like this allows me to be in the city without breaking the bank.” Affordable housing is a big problem in a highly-regulated market with a lot of money at stake. If these jail-density units continue to proliferate in and around large cities, I fear that we are moving in the wrong direction. They are good indicators of the number of people who are willing to live in a 200 sq. ft dorm room because a) all they do is work and sleep and b) they can't afford the rent anywhere else. It's not a population of people we want to see growing in the US.

netcan 11y ago
You're right and I don't think you can think of this in isolation of the cost of housing more generally… On one hand. On the other hand, I think the marketing schpiel has more than pure dishonesty to it. There are bigger "transient young urban singles" groups today. SSomewhere between student and work, lifestyle-wise. In earlier generations they would be coupled or living with family. Some do spend a lot of time working or just out of the house. So convenience, location and of course price are big concerns. Basically, people who aren't students that live a lot like students. Like you say price is the strangest current here. If you could rent a normal flat for the same money, most would. That said, I'm not sure if there's ever been a time where decent single person housing has been available at a reasonable price. Government intervention-wise I think the worst thing possible would be to try and shit this kind of thing down. That just takes away the option for these who don't have a better one. Use it instead as a canary.

listic 11y ago

Looks like a regular flat to me. Has America just discovered flats? Can't see any floor plans under "floor plans": http://www.thealderflats.com/floorplans.aspx http://www.thealderflats.com/floorplans.aspx

cmdkeen 11y ago
200 sq ft is considered small in Europe but still on a scale that IKEA has an example flat in that size. You're not going to want to live there forever as your main property, but then they might discover the concept of a pied a terre...

krschultz 11y ago

It's kind of rediculous that the article ends with a picture of the apartment building and it is barely 4 stories tall, and on either side are 2 story suburban dwellings. Walk down any block of brownstones and in NYC and you'll note even the 100+ year old brownstones are 5 stories tall. At that height you still don't even need elevators or any of the other special systems that go into tall buildings. The owner simply prices the 5th floor walk up at a lower price, which actually turns out to be a win if your goal is affordability. We're not suffering from a lack of space, just a lack of permissive zoning.

Spooky23 11y ago
There was no ADA in 1910. IIRC, if you have more than 4 units, you need an elevator. Elevators cost a fortune to install and represent a significant ongoing cost for a landlord. Landlords avoid incurring costs at all costs. Also, you need to incur more costs for things like fire escapes in taller buildings, need to build to a higher standard, and have to figure out issues like parking that get more complicated at higher density. ...Or you can just throw up some 4-story disposable building, milk it for 10-years, then offload it to another property manager who squeezes the pennies out of the property. The economics don't make sense, which is why they don't get built.
- saosebastiao 11y ago
  I live in an 8 floor building with two elevators that seem to break every other week...and yet despite that ongoing expense, our total HOA fees are less that $600/yr. That is half of what I pay for a parking spot that needs no maintenance. Elevators aren't a ridiculous expense.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    A two-stop hydraulic elevator costs about $70k, depending on where you are. Maintenance is around $3k/year, plus about $500-900 in energy. If it's being appropriately maintained, a traction elevator like what is in an 8-story building can cost 2-5x more in annual maintenance.
- 11y ago

tomcam 11y ago

Didn't these used to be called tenements? Not trying to be snarky.

roymurdock 11y ago
Some neighborhoods fought the projects — theirs and others — likening them to early 1900 tenements. Judgments abounded: one online magazine referred to them as “hipster hovels,” while others likened their size to prison cells, parking stalls and carports. None of it stopped people from moving in. “It’s satisfying,” says Carr, “and we realize we’re meeting a big, pent-up demand.”

backtoyoujim 11y ago

Affordable housing persons maybe can't afford most of the furniture in those interior photographs.

zardo 11y ago
It's not just poor people who want low cost living. You don't get rich by spending money.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
  You do, but you have to spend it on the right things...

tedmiston 11y ago

Our local startup accelerator, The Brandery, did a related experiment a few months ago. They paid the master lease to an apartment building and sublet to founders on favorable short-term contracts and with a slight discount [1]. I'm hoping to see more of this communal housing model with other accelerators. I didn't get a chance to see the Y Scraper [2], but perhaps that concept was similar. 1: http://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2015/06/19/welcome-home-otrs-branderyhaus-offers-affordable-living-to-entrepreneurs/ http://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2015/06/19/welcome-home-otrs-... 2: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Y-scraper https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Y-scraper

Futurebot 11y ago

As someone who lives in an actual 1900s tenement that costs twice what these do without any of the amenities, I'd be happy to live in one of those for $1000/month if they were in Lower Manhattan or West Brooklyn. For those who value location and low cost, these would be amazing. For reference, the micro-apartment experiment we have here: "Enter My Micro NY, the city's first micro-apartment complex, at 335 East 27th Street, with 55 units ranging from 260 to 360 square feet. The building will begin leasing studios this summer for around $2,000 to $3,000 a month" The same price as non-microapartments in the studio-1BR range. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartment...