[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
To my surprise, yesterday’s little post on the psychological risks of living in a micro-apartment, using as source material an interesting article in The Atlantic (December 13, 2013), expanded so much it didn’t fit in the original slot, so I’ve carried it over.
Fun if we don’t do anything together
Perhaps that’s a metaphor for why micro-apartments are at least mildly controversial:
Eugenie L. Birch, professor of urban research and education and chair of the Graduate Group in City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, says this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve had this debate over micro-living.
Birch smiles when she debates
New York has grappled with the public health costs of crowded living conditions and minimum apartment standards throughout its history.
“Over time, New York City developers conceived of many ways to address the need for affordable housing,” said Birch. “They built slums in the nineteenth century that reformers fought against.”
Ms. Birch should stick to what she knows. Slums weren’t built, they evolved from natural overcrowding that resulted from the waves upon waves of immigrants passing through Ellis Island and into America.
Our mission in life
“Other solutions have been boarding houses, missions, shelters, and what came to be known as single room occupancy units or SROs.”
Dinner in a miner’s boarding house, Canada, 1908
As I’ve previously written, after World War II so great was the lure of the white-picket-fence suburb that homebuilders were able to impose the tyranny of single-family zoning across most of America, with the result that sub-nuclear-family housing gradually starved to death or was hounded into extinction. Either way, the demise of the flophouse coincided with a rise in structural homelessness, a problem that New York has proven itself utterly incapable of solving (see this article in the New Yorker (October 28, 2013), about which I hope to post, because failure is a system too).
While it might be stressful to live in crowded conditions, consider the alternative.
George and Gracie
“How does it feel to be 100?”
“Beats the alternative.”
The problem is, there’s often a discrepancy between housing standards and actual housing conditions.
People do not live like antiseptic architect figures; people are messy.
We have no trouble living in small spaces
Nor do we
While micro-apartments may not be everyone’s ideal, as several of the architectures and urban planners realized, every alternative involves tradeoffs:
Rolf Pendall, director of the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center asks: Where would all these people be doing business and living without the density?
What about the density?
Except for the neo-Malthusians who would like us all to have fewer people, or at any rate many fewer of them in our cities, people constantly trade space and quality of life for time and quality of commute.
Would you prefer your metal can to have wheels, or be cables in an elevator?
Would they be commuting longer distances or earning less, and is living farther from economic opportunities “better” for them?
Choice is always better; indeed, a robust ecosystem maximizes the range of choices, and the ease with which rational adults can make them.
The problem is, there’s often a discrepancy between housing standards and actual housing conditions. Countless New Yorkers illegally share apartments, and current zoning rules [rent control – Ed.] can create poor living environments – dilapidated kitchens or dark, dingy rooms with a window that opens onto a brick wall.
As usual with New-York-based articles, all market problems are ascribed to developers, landlords, or occasionally zoning – none ever mention the underlying distortions caused by rent control and the resulting permanent supply shortages.
A worst case scenario would yield hundreds of thousands of micro-apartments and poor conditions.
Actually, that’s fairly likely – indeed, these micro-apartments might well become instant Airbnb crash pads, for which they will serve much better than as residential accommodations.
Are the developers imposing occupancy restrictions? I very much doubt it. And even if such restrictions are imposed, will anyone enforce them?
He used it as a stepping stone
He used it as a stepping stone too
If I were New York City’s attorney general following in the ambitious footsteps of previous attorneys general who used their bully pulpit as a visibility booster for their eventual run at being governor, I would aggressively register every owner of these micro-apartments, or every landlord if they remain rentals.
Oh, do I look ambitious to you?
For this project, while New York may be taking a step backwards in terms of square footage, Eric Bunge, a principle [sic! – Ed.] at nArchitects, (the firm that created the winning micro-apartment design), is adamant that the city is taking a big step forward in terms of actual living conditions.
“The city sees this initiative as one mechanism in a set of complex issues,” Bunge says. “Nobody is claiming that micro-apartments will be a silver bullet.”
Not much smaller than a micro-apartment
By his calculus, the East 27th street building does address concerns of mental and physical well-being.
For example, residents might be losing physical space, but they’re gaining access to a series of amenities, like a gym with floor-to-ceiling park views, a lobby with a public garden, and yes, a Juliet balcony.
As we’ve seen before, because high-rises require a larger footprint than walkups and low-rises (square-cube law and structural reinforcement dictate this), they become much more complex structures, not only for their architecture and engineering, but also in terms of the amenities and services they can provide. And they become machines for living, serviced by professionals. So there is a trade – is it a good one?
For that, many city dwellers might happily trade away 75 square feet and a freestanding bed.
Adults should be allowed choices – though it’s hard to believe that only 75 square feet make the difference. I suspect the development economics requiring trading 250 square feet for the amenities, and that’s equivalent to a room and a half.
Here’s what you get for 250 square feet (and a strategically placed fish-eye lens)
In that context, Pendall says he welcomes micro-apartments as long as they fit within the larger housing ecology of the city –
Though Mr. Pendall’s test sounds reasonable, and is unquestionably well-intended, it’s unverifiable. Ecologies are constantly changing, everything affecting everything else
– and don’t ultimately displace other types of units for families.
This too, though well-meaning, is unverifiable. In direct terms, any new homes built, of whatever size, by adding to supply reduce demand pressure throughout the ecosystem. But as they add to the supply, they also bring people into the city, creating jobs and revenue and changing the land-use economics.
Saegert doubts whether it’s a valid public goal to develop smaller units on city land. “In New York, property is just gold,” she points out. “Isn’t this something a developer could do in a [Brooklyn] neighborhood like DUMBO and make a lot of money?”
A developer could make a lot of money developing anything here
By the same token, if micro-apartments are indeed the wave of the future, Saegert argues, they increase the “ground rent,” or dollar per square foot that a developer earns and comes to expect from his investment.
So over time, New Yorkers may actually face more expensive housing, paying the same amount to rent a studio in the neighborhood where they used to be able to afford a one-bedroom.
That would be true only if the additional supply did nothing to alleviate additional demand – which is of course nonsense. If Ms. Saegert really wanted to bring down the cost of housing, she and her colleagues could spotlight the real scandal – gratuitous over-housing in public housing and rent controlled housing – something that even the British are finally tackling.
With the gradual erosion of zoning rules, the micro-apartment could very well become the unit of the future, the only viable choice for a large number of renters.
Nonsense; get rid of rent control and artificial supply constraints and Manhattan will go up and up and up, staying affordable all the way.
Preferably without the soullessness of Beijing
