Author Archives: paninterests

With all the hoopla around the adAPT NYC competition and other micro-apartments around the country, it’s clear there’s a demand for smart, small apartments. In fact, people write us daily asking if we have apartments available to rent or buy.

While LifeEdited is working with development teams to get you your micro-apartments with the greatest haste (be sure to sign up for our list), many of the developments are years away. This leaves the question: What do I do now if I want a micro-apartment?

Boston Properties Inc. is so bullish on the future of San Francisco that it is investing more than twice as much capital in the city’s office market as it is in the rest of the country combined.

“It is a thick market with a tremendous labor pool coupled with barriers to entry,” said Raymond A. Ritchey, national director of acquisitions and development for the real estate investment trust. “We are betting long.

“Virtually all of our major new investments are coming to San Francisco,” he said.

The Boston-based company has owned the iconic Embarcadero Center since 1998, is redeveloping 680 Folsom St., which is leased to Macys.com and Riverbed Technology, and is building the 1.4 million square foot Transbay Tower with the Hines company. “We are designing it to appeal not only to technology tenants but also to be equally attractive to law firms at the top. A building that size, you have to expand your base to a large pool of prospective tenants,” he said.

Daniel Marienthal, 23, lives in a Twin Peaks mansion with 11 other men, where privacy is so scarce that for a few months he lived in a canvas tepee he had built.

Josh Furnas, 23, has taken up residence in a converted closet, near the living room, in a Bayview apartment that he shares with an Ecuadoran family of seven.

Dan Stifler, 24, wakes up – under two faucets – in a Mission District laundry room.

This is the reality of pop-up housing in San Francisco, where young entrepreneurs, drawn to the promise of startup riches yet finding few affordable housing options, are inventing homes of their own – often in violation of zoning codes.

In response to skyrocketing rents in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a challenge to the city’s best architects: to design a space no bigger than 350 square feet into a comfortable and affordable micro-apartment. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports.

By Ben Popken, TODAY contributor

New Yorkers are famous for their teeny apartments, but a new trend in dwelling seeks to tranSForm those tiny spaces into big assets. They’re called “micro apartments,” and they make a few hundred square feet feel like over a thousand.

The apartment of New York City’s future, as the city imagines it, has all the amenities of modern life: wheelchair-accessible bathroom, a full kitchen, space for entertaining and access to a gym, communal lounge, front and back porches and a rooftop garden — all in 250 to 370 square feet.

This 420-square-foot studio has a moveable wall that hides a guest bedroom. (Photo: By Matthew Williams for Life …People who live in big cities are used to small spaces — and to longing for larger ones . One green-minded entrepreneur may have found the perfect solution: He renovated a 420-square-foot studio in New York City to function like a 1,100-square apartment.

Squeaky wheels tend to get the grease. But sometimes it’s more instructive to look at wheels that are spinning smoothly on their own, and how they got that way without all the dramatics.

I moved to San Francisco 9 months ago from the East Coast bastion of Boston. Despite having experience living in a major US city, I found quite a few surprises coming here.  Some have been great, while others not so much.

If you’re planning the move here, I hope this will help you know better what to expect. And if you already live in SF, this should give you a laugh or two and hopefully inspire you to leave a comment with anything I missed. Consider this the guide I wish someone had given me when I moved here.

If the Bay Area economy were considered a stock, analysts would definitely rate it a “strong buy” for 2013.

“You folks will continue to outperform the U.S. economy and all of California,” predicts Wells Fargo’s chief economist, John Silvia.

Of course, prognosticators can be wrong. Many had predicted the state’s unemployment rate, for example, would continue in double digits through 2013. In fact, unemployment dipped below 10 percent last month for the first time in four years and continued to fall even further in the Bay Area. And job growth numbers were led by industries such as transportation, construction and leisure and hospitality, rather than high tech, which has almost single-handedly powered the local economy.

Background: Kennedy spent 20 years developing apartments and condominiums in Berkeley, eventually selling a 500-unit rental housing portfolio to Equity Residential for $146 million. Kennedy bought his first San Francisco property in 2009 and developed the 23-unit 38 Harriet St. His company is now entitling 1321 Mission St., 180 units of efficiently designed studios and suites. He expects to break ground in spring 2013.