Press
"Living in a Box"
Amsterdam student Rose Mandungu stands in front of a colorful apartment complex constructed of a rather unusual material—discarded shipping containers. The crowded Dutch city has been meeting a pressing need for student and other low-income housing by using ubiquitous steel shipping containers. After years at sea, the containers were rusted and dented but ready for reuse to house people instead of products.
...More"Time to Make Room"
Single people are taking over U.S. cities. The numbers are so staggering that it’s hard to understand why housing policy has been so slow to react. In New York City, a third of all households are single people living alone. San Francisco beats New York at 38 percent, and Washington, D.C., Seattle and Denver top the charts for larger cities, with over 40 percent of their homes occupied by a lone resident. But even in smaller cities like Atlanta, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, single people make up close to half of their households.
...More"Why San Francisco May Be the New Silicon Valley"
A decade ago, billionaire entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk decided to take booming start-up PayPal public from a small coffee shop along Palo Alto’s University Avenue. The street, the epicenter of Silicon Valley high tech, also helped incubate such now-established giants as Facebook and Google. But today, Thiel has seemingly left the Valley behind.
The venture capital funds he runs are based 30 miles north, in a San Francisco building with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. A number of highly publicized start-ups like Twitter, Square, and Pinterest are also located in the heart of urban San Francisco. As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted last February from his new headquarters in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood, “I love the idea of an urban corporate campus with all the energy and variety that provides.”
...More"Mini-Apartments Are The Next Big Thing in U.S. Cities"
When Gil Blattner hired a housekeeper for his elegant apartment with 12-foot ceilings, tall windows and marble fireplace mantle, the woman looked at the living room and asked, “Where’s the rest of it?”
There was no more. She’d seen all 250 square feet of his cocoon, located on a tony, tree-lined street in Chelsea near restaurants, art galleries and bookstores. His monthly rent: $2,500.
...More"Mini-apartments are the next big thing in U.S. cities"
U.S. CITIES MAY EMBRACE NEW YORK’S TINY, LESS-PRICEY APARTMENTS
Construction will start soon on an experimental New York housing complex in Manhattan with 55 “micro-sized” apartments, from 250 to 370 square feet each. The prefabricated units, which will rent for $914 to $1,873 per month, aim to help alleviate the city’s shortage of less-pricey studios and one-bedroom apartments. As more urban dwellers live alone, other U.S. cities are considering similar solutions.
...More"The Rise of People Living Alone Has Led to More Sustainable Cities"
Whatever you want to call people living alone — some go with solos, others singletons — the fact is there’s a lot more of them than there used to be. In 1950, solos accounted for about 9 percent of all U.S. households; today that figure is roughly 28 percent. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg points out in his 2012 book Going Solo, one in seven American adults now lives alone, and the trend toward solitary living is truly global:
...More"The Tiniest Living Spaces in SF"
Whether it’s a closet-esque studio or the short-straw bedroom in an apartment, San Franciscans have evolved to forgo sofas and square footage for some of the “coziest” living spaces in the country. I talked to the inhabitants of seven spaces registering toward the “speck of dust” end of the size spectrum to learn about the good and the bad of micro living.
...More"San Francisco’s SmartSpace SoMa is the First Prefab Micro Housing Project in the US Read more: San Francisco’s SmartSpace SoMa is the First Prefab Micro Housing Project in the US | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building"
San Francisco recently saw the opening of the first prefabricated micro housing project in the US! Developed by Panoramic Interests, SmartSpace SoMA is a complex of sub-300 sq ft apartments designed by Lowney Architecture and fabricated by local prefab builder ZETA. The urban infill lot is close to transit and stores and provides 23 studio apartments with full kitchens and fold-out beds. The project is currently aiming for LEED Platinum certification and has secure bike parking along with an on-site City CarShare lot.
...More"Best Dorm Room Ever! A Peek Inside San Francisco’s New Tiny Apartments"
The Berkeley, California-based developer Patrick Kennedy does not like to hear his apartments compared to dorm rooms. “That’s a bad word in our office,” he told Architizer. Kennedy, who owns Panoramic Interests, had just wrapped up a tour of SmartSpace SoMa, a new micro-living development in San Francisco’s trendy tech corridor, South of Market. The urban research nonprofit SPUR had organized the tour, giving a few dozen architects, builders, and micro-enthusiasts the chance to size up the project’s 295-square-foot units—which, in an inconvenient twist of fate, are slated for student housing. Come fall, California College of the Arts will lease the building while Panoramic looks for a buyer.
...More"ULI Announces Finalists for the 2013 Global Awards for Excellence Competition"
Winning Projects to Be Announced at 2013 Fall Meeting in Chicago
For more information, contact: Robert Krueger at 202/624-7086
WASHINGTON (June 26, 2013) — The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has selected twenty-seven developments as finalists in the 35th annual ULI Global Awards for Excellence competition, widely recognized as the land use industry’s most prestigious recognition program. The competition — which honors real estate projects that achieve a high standard of excellence in design, construction, economics, planning and management — is the centerpiece of ULI’s efforts to identify and promote best practices in all types of real estate development. From this elite group, the jury will select a smaller group of winners that will be announced in November during the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.
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