2015
"NYC’s first prefab micro-unit apartment building starts to rise in Manhattan Read more: NYC’s adAPT Carmel Place prefab micro apartments begin to rise in Kips Bay (PHOTOS) | Inhabitat New York City"
It’s been more than two years since nARCHITECTS’ My Micro NY apartment design won the adAPT NYC competition and now the micro-dwellings have begun to rise. The project, a collaboration between the DUMBO-based architecture firm and Monadnock Development, was selected as the winner of the 2013 call to develop innovative housing models for the city’s growing population of smaller households, and consists of 65 prefabricated modules
...More"The Place Report: Top ten global trends redefining how we shop, live, work and play"
Micro-Living: Supplying an affordable yet distinctive micro-living product, which trades private space for public amenities and infrastructure
According to the United Nations 2014 report ‘World Urbanization Prospects’, by 2050, the global population expected to live in cities will rise to 6.33 billion, or 66 per cent of the
world’s total forecast population of 9.6 billion.
"5 reasons why micro-units will be huge in the future"
Half the world today lives in cities — and, according to the United Nations, nearly 70 percent of the world will live in cities by 2050. At a recent National Association of City Transportation Officials conference in San Francisco, former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey even went as far as to label this the “Century of the City.” Data shows that younger generations are leading this urban migration.
...More"Why people are choosing to live in smaller spaces and are happier for it"
WHEN most people picture their dream home it’s hard to go past the six bedroom McMansion with seven bathrooms, home cinema and an acre of benchspace in the kitchen.
While it’s easy to get caught up in the cycle of wanting that bigger place, with the spare bedroom, bigger yard, study or airy dining area, an increasing number of people are waking up to the fact that instead of enjoying the extra space, having more room often means you just buy more stuff to fill it up.
And this clutter is not making people happier.
...More"“5 to 1″ Micro Apartment a Perfect 10"
Architect Michael Chen has one of the most impressive portfolios of small apartment projects in the United States, if not the world. “Although we [MCKA, Chen’s firm] work at a broad range of scales, we are fascinated by the design of small spaces because they demand inventiveness,” Chen wrote to us in an email. “We love taking on a complicated and difficult problem with the intent of creating solutions that are thoughtful, beautiful and deceptively simple.” His latest project, dubbed the “5 to 1 Apartment,” is a beautiful representation of his love of tranSForming the complex to simple. It is also, to my mind, his finest work to date.
...More"Micro Maven Patrick Kennedy Plans 395-Square-Foot Affordable Rentals for SoMa"
Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests is best known for developing teensy but livable micro-units. However, his newest proposal in San Francisco isn’t technically for his signature micro-studios, but instead for very small one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms whose diminutive size is meant to make them affordable by design—and thus cheaper than the average SoMa apartment. Panoramic just submitted a Preliminary Project Assessment (PPA) to SF Planning for a new building at SoMa’s 333 12th Street.
...More"Slack, Stripe and other billion-dollar ‘unicorns’ on the prowl for office space"
When new billion-dollar companies known as “unicorns” lap up equity funding, they’re usually on the hunt for big chunks of office space.
So it’s no surprise that San Francisco’s email-slaying startup Slack – which reportedly got a fresh $2 billion valuation Monday – is in the market for a sizeable 50,000 to 75,000 square feet of space, market watchers say.
...More"California’s housing crunch costs us big time; how to fix it"
Californians already know how expensive housing is in our state. But a new report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office makes it clear that as a state, this ever-growing bill is one we simply can’t afford to keep paying.
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"Ain’t Nothing New About Micro Housing"
While tiny houses, micro-apartments and even tranSForming furniture may seem like recent phenomenon, the truth is quite the contrary: it’s big homes, excess space and stuff that are the new thing. People have been living in dense areas, in tight quarters with little stuff for eons. Nowhere is this more evident than in Manhattan. As strange as it sounds, there were over 600,000 more Manhattanites in 1910 than there were in 2013, 2.3M and 1.6M respectively. A recent piece in Curbed gives an account of the island’s various schemes to pack more people onto its 34 square miles.
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