Press
"Small is Beautiful for Patrick Kennedy’s Micro-units"
SoMa Studios, a building of 23 micro-units in San Francisco, is hitting the for sale market.
Now that the building is built and fully-leased by the California College of the Arts to use for dorms, developer Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests is ready to sell with an asking price of $7.4 million or about $321,500 per unit.
...More"Micro Living Trend Sweeps The U.S., As Cash-Strapped Renters Look For Affordable Housing In Pricey Cities"
SEATTLE, June 2 (Reuters) – Aaron McConnell doesn’t mind sharing a kitchen with seven neighbors. He’s fine in living quarters with just enough room for a twin bed, a corner desk and little else. Closets? Forget about it – he stores his clothing and other possessions on shelves and hooks.
...More"Gulliver Seeks Rental: The New Found Fascination With Tiny Dwellings"
In Luke Clark Tyler’s last New York City apartment, his shoes had some unusual companions in the closet. The shoes sat, in neat pairs, on a rack, directly below his dishes and right next to the microwave. A few inches away, a hip-high refrigerator lived beneath his desk. And the apartment was so narrow that Mr. Tyler could sit on a sofa pushed against one wall with his feet propped up on the opposite wall.
...More"Brave New World Department Mini Dinner"
Depending on how you count, Graham Hill’s micro-apartment, in SoHo, has either six rooms or one. The other night, a dozen people gathered in them/it for a dinner party. “This is the first time I’ve had apartment envy for a place even smaller than my own,” one of them whispered.
...More"San Francisco rental construction soars"
A historic $5 billion explosion of rental housing is about to dramatically reshape San Francisco’s skyline, neighborhoods and politics.
Ending last decade’s flirtation with high-end condo towers, the city is rattling and humming with the biggest burst of apartment construction witnessed since Joe Alioto was mayor in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly 8,000 new apartments, mostly in mid-rise and high-rise buildings, will come on line between now and 2015 — 3,498 in 2015 alone. It’s more new rental housing than was built in the last 15 years combined, according to real estate research firm Polaris Pacific.
...More"Don’t like Market Street? Wait a few minutes"
Central Market Street is not changing by the day, it’s changing by the hour.
After a week out of town traveling with my family, I cycled down Market Street Monday morning. Of course I expected some of the progress I saw: AvalonBay had added a couple of floors at 55 Ninth St., Crescent Heights had snapped on more of the glass skin at 1401 Market and poured a few more floors on the tower as well. But other developments were more startling.
...More"KCBS Cover Story: A Look Inside San Francisco’s Micro-Apartments"
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) – Crews are putting the finishing touches on some San Francisco micro-apartments, spaces under 300 square feet, meant to be a more affordable option for those looking to live in the city.
Just off Mission Street at 38 Harriet sits a sleek new building with 23 units, “smart spaces” that are small, but comfortable
...More"It’s a Small World"
In Seattle, they call them “apodments,” a neologism that could have come straight from Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs. Certainly that’s the target market. Some of these apodment buildings are even in suburban Redmond, convenient to Microsoft headquarters, with units that measure a mere 140 square feet. Kitchens are communal, like laundry rooms. The rent is about $800 a month, including Wi-Fi. Similarly, in some of Seattle’s most desirable residential neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill, skinny towers full of tiny dwellings have popped up in recent years, encouraged by a loophole in the zoning law that allows as many as eight unrelated people to share a kitchen. Eight living spaces with one kitchen count as a single unit, allowing developers to add density without applying for a variance.
...More"Nine Berkeley buildings win ‘design excellence’ awards"
Nine buildings have been singled out as representing the best new design work in Berkeley for 2010-2012. Berkeley Design Advocates, a volunteer group of architects and urban planners, selected three UC Berkeley buildings, a restaurant, a senior home, two retail spaces — one newly built, one restored — a wine store, and the renovation of a branch library from a list of 15 submissions, and handed out the award certificates at a ceremony on Thursday, March 28. (See the 2013 Awards Brochure for full details.)
...More"Micro-apartments come to the City"
Micro-apartments. Twitter-apts. Mini-flats. There are many descriptive names one could come up with for the small apartments that we will soon be seeing more of in San Francisco. But judging from the opposition, you would think they were named like the media names disastrous East Coast storms: Apartmogeddon, Frankenapt, Apocalyptment.
Scary thoughts aside, in November 2012 the Board of Supervisors passed legislation by Supervisor Scott Weiner — the anti-Peskin —that approved the construction of a limited number of micro-apartments. The units, as small as 220-square-feet of total space, are expected to rent for around $1,500 per month, about a quarter less than the average apartment in the City.
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