Are microapartments a solution to the homeless crisis?

From NY1:

When Dario Luciano first opened this door, he said the feeling was amazing.

"It felt phenomenal," Luciano said.

Phenomenal because until earlier this year, Luciano was living in a Bronx shelter for veterans.

Now home is Carmel Place, the city's first micro-apartment house, which officially opened last week.

The apartments range from 260 to 360 square feet. Some come with furniture, like pull-down beds, to conserve space.

These teeny tiny apartments are barely half the size of an average Manhattan studio.

But for Luciano, who is single, it's just the right size.

"It's perfect for one person," he said. "It's completely perfect. I mean, I know where everything is and know that nothing is out of place, and I can walk around freely.

Carrmel Place is on — appropriately— a tiny side street in the East 20s.

There are 55 micro apartments. Thirty-two are market rate renting for the not-so-small price of $2,500 to $3,200 per month.

The rest are set aside for low- and middle-income New Yorkers and for formerly homeless veterans, like Luciano, who pays $537 a month.

No limit to microunits?

From the Daily News:

Manhattan's newest mini apartments have generated maximum interest.

More than 60,000 people applied to live in 14 below-market-rate apartments ranging from 265 to 360 square feet, slightly bigger than the size of an average one-car garage.

In response, the de Blasio administration is proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door to more "micro-apartments" that advocates see as affordable spaces to help the growing population.

Live like the servant you always dreamed to be

From Wall Street Journal:

Fifty-seven new residences under construction in Long Island City, Queens, are small apartments being billed as micro units, but with a twist.

While the city’s only other prominent project advertising its apartments as “micro” will offer only studios, the Queens units will have two or three bedrooms.

“Our concept is we can offer really high-quality public amenity space, and better value with smaller private spaces, and bring the rental cost down,” said Sheldon Stein, managing principal of Ranger Properties, developer of the project at 37-10 Crescent St.

The building’s two-bedroom units will be about 490 square feet, and the three-bedrooms 735 square feet. Most of the bedrooms will be 10 feet by 12 feet and may have built-in desks and Murphy beds, which fold into the wall, said Chris Fogarty, a partner at Fogarty Finger and the project’s architect.

So it's come to this

From the Daily News:

So, you thought you’d look to live in happenin’ Harlem? And you hoped to find a pad for, say, ballpark of $1,300 or less?

If you’re lucky, you might land one of a handful of newly refurbished cubes that’s just big enough for a party of one, with a common washroom just down the hall.

Developers Matthew and Seth Weissman are lifting the curtain this weekend on their second set of five recently completed mini-apartments ranging from 150 to 450 square feet at 2299 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, at W. 135th St.

It’s called a Single-Room Occupancy, or SRO - a vanishing segment of city real estate that was long associated with tenants who were down on their luck.

The Weissmans have identified an opportunity to market the minis to a new, up-and-coming niche even as housing advocates bemoan the loss of affordable options for the lowest-income residents.

Two of the building’s four residential floors are occupied by tenants with rent-stabilized leases with rents of $350 to $600 per month, but the landlords are asking $1,200 to $1,550 for the renovated units.

They’ve sunk more than $500,000 into facelifts at the building, which they bought for $1.4 million in 2013.

But not everyone supports the brothers’ rare move to preserve the building’s 20 tiny SRO units, which are grouped five to a floor and share 2 1/2 bathrooms.

Housing advocates have long bemoaned the loss of SROs, which have declined from 200,000 units in the 1950s to as few as 15,000, according to a 2014 report published in the CUNY Law Review.

The authors acknowledged the relative affordability of refurbished minis but said they did nothing to stanch the rise in homelessness that has long been correlated to the decline of SROs.

Turning parking spaces into micro apartments

From the NY Times:

What is the solution to affordable housing in New York?

One number has been repeated over and over — 200,000 subsidized units, to be built or preserved over a decade. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised it, but has yet to explain how he’ll get there.

Here are two other numbers: 9 x 18. In square feet, that’s 162, smaller than the most micro micro-apartment.

It is the size of a typical parking space. That lowly slice of asphalt has prompted three young architects — Miriam Peterson, Sagi Golan and Nathan Rich, fellows at the Institute for Public Architecture — to come up with what could be an innovative way to ease the housing crisis.

I’m intrigued by their proposal, “9 x 18,” because it’s about more than apartment buildings plopped onto vacant land. It considers how parking spaces — mandated in outmoded zoning regulations, prolific at public housing sites — might be leveraged into something more ambitious, something that encourages a mix of housing in active neighborhoods with accessible transit, public services and lively streets. In effect, the proposal trades asphalt for housing and amenities.

And even if “9 x 18” isn’t perfect or foolproof — especially when it comes to finances — at least it is concerned with more than hitting some arbitrary number.

After all, the New York City Housing Authority, albeit with a wealth of federal money, did build nearly 200,000 subsidized apartments in the two decades after World War II. But that was hardly an unqualified success: Too many of those apartments ended up in projects on the far edges of the city, without shops or grocery stores, surrounded by vast parking lots that acted like moats, thwarting street life and cutting off residents from the rest of the neighborhood. Many of the projects are crumbling today. The housing authority is broke.

The “9 x 18” proposal capitalizes on an outdated and onerous zoning mandate that requires private developers to build parking spaces for new apartments in certain parts of the city.

At one time "market rate" housing was "affordable" in most parts of the city. And if the parking spaces in question are at housing projects on the "far edges" of the city, then how can units be built on top of them that will have "accessible transit, public services and lively streets"? Did anyone proof this article?

A tiny apartment could drive you nuts

From The Atlantic Cities:

...as New York City’s “micro-apartment” project inches closer to reality, experts warn that micro-living may not be the urban panacea we’ve been waiting for. For some residents, the potential health risks and crowding challenges might outweigh the benefits of affordable housing. And while the Bloomberg administration hails the tiny spaces as a “milestone for new housing models,” critics question whether relaxing zoning rules and experimenting with micro-design on public land will effectively address New York’s apartment supply problem in the long run.

“Sure, these micro-apartments may be fantastic for young professionals in their 20's,” says Dak Kopec, director of design for human health at Boston Architectural College and author of Environmental Psychology for Design. “But they definitely can be unhealthy for older people, say in their 30’s and 40’s, who face different stress factors that can make tight living conditions a problem.”

Home is supposed to be a safe haven, and a resident with a demanding job may feel trapped in a claustrophobic apartment at night—forced to choose between the physical crowding of furniture and belongings in his unit, and social crowding, caused by other residents, in the building’s common spaces. Research, Kopec says, has shown that crowding-related stress can increase rates of domestic violence and substance abuse.

For all of us, daily life is a sequence of events, he explains. But most people don’t like adding extra steps to everyday tasks. Because micro-apartments are too small to hold basic furniture like a bed, table, and couch at the same time, residents must reconfigure their quarters throughout the day: folding down a Murphy bed, or hanging up a dining table on the wall. What might seem novel at the beginning ends up including a lot of little inconveniences, just to go to sleep or make breakfast before work. In this case, residents might eventually stop folding up their furniture every day and the space will start feeling even more constrained.

Microunits may become the new normal

From Crains:

The Bloomberg administration has taken a small step toward building tiny apartments. The mayor's micro-apartments, officially known as adAPT NYC, were certified by the City Planning Commission on Monday, and will now go through the labyrinthine, half-year-long public approval process.

The milestone is especially significant because the micro-units tweak the zoning code in a number of ways, and having those changes vetted by the community, the commission and the City Council could prove an important test of the project's viability—and possible expansion onto other sites. An expansion is something the administration has been seriously considering, given adAPT NYC's popularity in the development community.

On the one hand, adAPT NYC is seen as an innovative way to provide cheaper—if not necessarily affordable—apartments by making them smaller, and thus cramming more units into a building—mitigating the city's expensive land and construction costs. (Those costs will further be driven down by Monadnock's decision to construct the project using pre-built modular units, the first time the cutting-edge process will be put to use in Manhattan.)

However, some have criticized the project because they fear that, once developers win the right to build smaller units, that will become the norm, further starving space-constrained New Yorkers of living space. When the city launched the micro-apartment competition last year, it called for units ranging in size from 250 square feet to 375 square feet in size.