2015
"San Francisco’s Self-Defeating Housing Activists"
Tech companies and workers are vilified while longtime homeowners who fight high-density growth continue to profit from rising rents and property values.
A recent This American Life episode, “Poetry of Propaganda,” describes a San Francisco after-school program’s production of an original musical starring young children. “I don’t know what I expected,” said the writer Jon Mooallem, whose daughter played a tiny part, “but it wasn’t this. Act One opened on a sinister tech-executive meeting with a corrupt mayor and San Francisco’s board of supervisors.”
...More"NYC MAY FIT MORE ‘MICRO’ APARTMENTS INTO HOUSING PICTURE"
NEW YORK (AP) — The apartments in a new Manhattan building boast little balconies, tall ceilings, dishwashers and storage space. All in 360 square feet or less.
It’s micro-living in the nation’s biggest city, and New Yorkers could be seeing more of it. Planning officials are proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door for more “micro-apartments” that advocates see as affordable adaptations to a growing population of single people. Critics fear a turn back toward the city’s tenement past and question whether less space will really mean less expensive.
"Don’t let fear get in the way of solutions"
Here in San Francisco, passions run high. But sometimes it’s hard to match the mood of anger and fear to the scale of the real effects on residents or to match the proposed solutions to the real issues, which makes me think that there are subtexts and currents below the surface.
When I served on the San Francisco Planning Commission, I was often puzzled by the angry, passionate objection to minor changes. Often, I realized, it had little to do with the item before us, which was sometimes just the trigger for people’s fears or other emotions.
...More"In Defense of Micro-Apartments"
It’s like Yoda once said: “Size matters not.”
Put aside for the moment the size of the units in Carmel Place, a new multifamily housing development that just went up in New York City. Here are a few numbers that matter more than the square footage: Carmel Place is a nine-story development that includes 55 units. Of those, 33 units are designated market-rate; eight of the 22 units slotted for affordable housing are reserved for very-low-income renters.
...More"The Micro Housing Development Boom Across the U.S., Mapped"
The pronounced swing back towards urban living, and the renewed fervor for downtown development, has only made our cities more dense, making the search for cheap housing that much more challenging. While mayors across the U.S. have called for more affordable housing (in New York, both Bloomberg and De Blasio have said it was imperative the city offer more low-rent options), many developers have decided the solution to density and affordability is downsizing and designing smaller units.
...More"Zoning board approves new units on Telegraph, Shattuck"
Berkeley’s zoning board approved two largely car-free buildings Thursday set to add 92 new residential units to the city’s housing stock.
Both of the projects — 70 units on Telegraph Avenue and 22 units on Shattuck Avenue — were proposed by Patrick Kennedy’s Berkeley-based Panoramic Interests.
The Telegraph project, dubbed The Nexus, is set to take the place of a 1-story office building where the nationally recognized Center for Independent Living got its start.
...More"There’s Shelter, And Then There’s Housing. Utah Claims Muted Victory"
Utah has housed nearly all of its chronically homeless people — those who have a disabling condition, and who have been homeless for more than a year, or four times in the past three years. These days, there are fewer than 200.
But chronic homelessness is just a small part of a major problem.
An additional 14,000 people in Utah experienced homelessness this year. As in many places around the country, housing prices are rising, forcing people onto the street and into shelters.
...More"This Ad Campaign Hits Nail on Head About NYC’s Cramped Apartments"
There’s been a lot of recent hype about New York City’s Carmel Place (aka “My Micro”). Rightfully so. It is the city’s first purpose built micro-apartment building after all. But if you have ever lived in or visited a typical NYC apartment, you know New Yorkers are no strangers to micro living.
...More"Micro Goes Even More Mainstream"
When LifeEdited began several years ago, the micro housing conversation was happening but primarily in small pockets–the odd tiny house in northern California, Gary Chang’s tranSForming Hong Kong apartment and so. But in the last few years, spurred by things like the adAPT NYC competition and, we like to think, our own efforts, the micro-housing movement has grown considerably and become far more mainstream.
...More"New York City’s first micro-apartment is 302 square feet… and costs $2,750 a month"
Nearly three years after winning a competition to design a residential building with units smaller than 400 square feet, Carmel Place is on the verge of completion.
Located in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, the building is the first micro-apartment development in New York City. Its 55 units range between 265 and 360 square feet, and market-rate units cost between $2,650 and $3,150 a month.
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