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.
