Yes, my daughter lives in one that’s 250 sq ft., with a loft sleeping area. They’re about $1100/month, but they’re in a highly desirable neighborhood. Many units in the building, with the permission of the mgmt, are sub-rented out as AirBnb’s.
Bias much? If they weren’t popular then why are so many zoning codes designed specifically to ban them and other multifamily development? Duplexes, boarding houses, basement and backyard apartments, home to apartment conversions, and small lot developments were more the norm in the past. However, large-lot single-family homes are mandated by law in most places due to a history of racist and classist social engineering. @Lord_Feldon’s take is rather cynical but also quite accurate. Nearly a century of strict zoning rules forbids smaller units either explicitly or implicitly with minimum unit sizes, minimum lot sizes, floor area ratios, setbacks, and parking requirements. That’s whittled away most of the non-compliant properties over time except in the hottest markets, and we’ve collectively forgotten just how common they once were. Developers would absolutely tackle this market if the higher end wasn’t also severely constrained. Why bother with lower margin projects when the luxury market isn’t even satisfied, let alone the middle and upper middle income markets?
Why are you attacking me for social decisions that happened long before I was old enough to vote? As to the racist part of your attack, I live in small town Arizona. I get along quite well with our brown skinned neighbors because they are good neighbors. The white asshole who leaves his dogs out to bark 24 hours a day is universally despised and not because of the color of his skin.
I’ve never voted against smaller units or high density housing and have actually spent a good part of my working life trying to help with the homeless issue.
Perhaps I would be justified to ask about your broad brush and why you feel the need to splatter people who are sharing their opinion and life experiences outside of the Pit?
For extreme tiny, I remember a photographer did an essay of that complex in Hong Kong/Kowloon [not sure which] that took the place of a shanty town. It has long corridors of 10’x10 foot rooms that share a common kitchen and bathroom facility [not sure how many of each are on each floor, they didn’t show that, just the individual use of their space] How each resident [or family !] set their space up was fascinating.
But as mentioned above, SRO [Single Room Occupancy, or what many people think of as slum boarding houses] were rendered illegal in many urban jurisdictions - which I can understand however it also reduced the available dirt cheap places for singles and new couples working scutwork jobs like dishwasher to live. Not everybody living in say NY makes those big bucks, someone has to wash dishes, be line cooks and mop floors for those that do make the reasonable bucks. I had lived in a series of 3 studios in the Rochester NY area that ran about $400 a month back in the early 80s, and one slum studio in Norfolk VA that ran $300 a month in 1985, all were roughly 300 sq feet, the legal minimums for the areas. I did also look at a room in a remaining SRO in Rochester in 1981 that was $200 a month, the room itself was 12’x14’ and had the ubiquitous early 20th century sink in a corner.
Until some helicopter parent accuses them of child endangerment because Mommy or Daddy [or daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy, to be fair =)] isn’t outside riding their ass watching them incase some stranger comes and kidnaps them from their yard … I grew up in the era of mom stuffing breakfast into my brother and I and turfing us outside and telling us to come home when it is turning dark …
I can understand that. I can ignore the cooking smells [except when I was pregnant, my roomie of the time ate liver and onions at least once a week - it took me years before I could comfortably smell cooking onions, but I still detest the smell of liver. And during chemo, my body decided that the smell of an Italian being cooked [italian sausage, peppers and onions] was absolutely revolting and was an immediate vomit trigger. I have to avoid a particular corner because the deli there makes the damned things every tuesday and the smell still triggers nausea but at least the vomit reaction has gone away]
You could always try London.
London’s smallest microflat up for sale at £50,000 for 7 square metres
7 square metres is around 75 sq feet.
The Clapton flat has recently been renovated and has a large window. To maximise space, it has a captain’s bed above storage space and cupboards. The space between the bed and the wall is about wide enough to spread your arms in, and there’s a foldout table for eating or working on. A toilet and shower are in a separate wet room.
The owner [who bought it for £103,500]has already recouped their investment by getting £800 ($1050) in rent each month.
@jjakucyk & @JaneDoe42 you both need to dial it back in IMHO.
Don’t continue the sniping or fighting back please.
I’m closing this thread for 14 minutes as I see jjakucyk is typing a reply already. Hopefully this prevents any possible escalation.
This topic was automatically opened after 14 minutes.
Yep. Artificial scarcity is a huge driver in the whole real estate picture. Lots of scholarly articles written about it. Also, some organizations for whom this kind of thing is central:
Manmade Scarcity Drives Up Housing Prices | NBER
And another example of artificial scarcity in a totally unrelated market:
I lived in just such a flat for a year and a half. But, would you want to stay there for five years? Ten? Not too fun for overnight guests, either, since one of you will be sleeping on the floor (which uses up all the floor).
Here’s the thing about tiny apartments - where exactly the apartment is and the amenities available make a huge difference , as does what it’s used for. There’s a difference between living in 7 square meter room full time and using one as a pied-à-terre and staying there when you work late or attend an event in the area. Similarly there are some new apartment buildings that have common areas - I’ve never lived in one but I would think the common spaces make it livable , in the same way I can tolerate a 140 sq foot cabin on a cruise ship because I am literally never in the room except to sleep but couldn’t tolerate an ordinary hotel room that small if I was on a business trip and would be spending a few hours every evening in my room.
A tiny apartment in my neighborhood would be very different though. It would be like renting a room in someone else’s house or apartment - which people do, but generally not for any longer than they have to. Which means there’s a lot of turnover.
Many people who work in the most expensive part of a city are relatively well paid.
My sister spent the last few years before retiring working a four day/40 hour week in London. The commute from her home was expensive and inconvenient, so she rented a room in someone’s house for three nights - saving money and stress.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying anyone is necessarily racist/classist, but the origins of restrictive zoning are. Also, sharing an opinion is fine (this is IMHO after all), but stating “this is the answer” based on personal anecdotes does not reveal the actual truth about such a big topic as “small-lot multifamily housing isn’t popular in the US.” That’s a biased take.
Condos and apartments are not just popular in big cities where folks want to live downtown and have arts and entertainment right at their doorstep. There’s apartments in non-downtown neighborhoods and suburbs where they’ve been allowed (in a lot of cases before zoning was implemented) because some people simply don’t want to deal with yards or building maintenance, or they can’t afford a big house but want to live near a particular job or school. However, there’s also people who who’d want to live in an apartment or condo, but can’t because they simply aren’t allowed. That causes a statistics fail because “people buy single-family homes therefore they must prefer single-family homes” ignores the lack of options.
I’d be interested to know how often zoning related items actually come up for a vote of the general public. It’s not often that zoning codes get changed in a meaningful way to begin with, and usually that’s done by committee internally, rather than at large. Voting in that sense is usually limited to picking the particular mayor or councilpersons advertising a pro or anti development platform. Even neighborhood council type meetings, like you might see reviewing a specific project rather than broader zoning regulations, may not take an actual vote but more of a read of the general opinions of the room.
As to hearing neighbors or cooking smells, that’s not as much an apartment problem as a construction problem and a neighbor problem. To be fair, it’s more likely to be an issue in a multifamily building, but it’s a symptom of cheap construction and social norms more than building type. I could levy the same sort of criticisms about the neighbor barbecuing and smoking me out of my back yard, or excessively mowing the lawn and blowing leaves at 5 am on a Saturday. As a night-owl teenager trying to catch up on sleep during the weekend, those early Saturday morning leaf blowers (the really high-pitched ones from back in the 1990s) were my nemesis.
Did boarding houses get regulated away? It seems like they use to be pretty common. I know my current town had them when I was a teen. As did many others towns.
It does seem odd the way they’ve disappeared and I don’t know why.
I personally know about some apartments above a restaurant; this building would not be out of place in some urban area. However, it’s in a farming community with a stated population of 300.
NB: street view is from 2008.
In many cases, they lost out to aging hotels that converted to weekly and monthly rentals. By the time the wrecking ball caught up to these hotels, the boarding houses had mostly been demolished of converted back to single family homes.
ETA- the rise of ubiquitous and affordable fast food also made meals dispensable as part of the arrangement.
But the suburbanization I pointed to predates zoning. If you want to blame anything for it, blame the Industrial Revolution for turning cities from simply high-density spots into smoke-filled, noisy, high-density spots people had to share with factories.
My parents watched as white people moved out of their neighborhood when it became integrated, so I’m quite aware of the influence of racism and classism on housing patterns. I don’t deny that a lot of regulations are designed to keep “the wrong sort of people” from ruining our precious property values. My point was that, as soon as people had the means to get out of cities, they jumped at it.
Twenty or so years ago, I rented a small, 425 sq. ft., 1 bed/1 bath apartment with a kitchen so small it literally had NO DRAWERS and old enough that it only had 4 glass-fused circuits. It cost me a bit under $1000 when I left.
The same apartment is now renting for about $1600, and we are not talking an apartment in a major metropolitan area. This was in Bound Brook, NJ, which is crowded but is a long commute to most employments and has always been one of the more economically cheaper areas.
Right, historical small Main Streets and farming communities (where outbuildings have always been de rigueur) have a long history of multifunction buildings. Unfortunately zoning and parking regulations have made renovating or remodeling them difficult if not impossible, so in many cases the upstairs has been abandoned or turned into storage. There’s also building code implications as well, where additional egress, fire ratings, and other separation measures must be taken which can be either impossible or not cost effective to implement. This applies to boarding houses as well. Even if they’re not de facto banned, they may have enough restrictions imposed on them that remodeling may become impractical, so they switch to another format or are just lost to entropy. Is it any surprise that sale or rental prices keep skyrocketing when it’s so difficult to add supply?
Sure, and the biggest success of the planning profession was to separate noxious industrial uses from housing. Unfortunately they’ve continued to use that separation methodology to the point of absurdity, trying desperately to relive that initial success. Now you can’t even have $250K homes next to $400K homes. Offices can’t be next to restaurants, restaurants can’t be next to convenience stores, convenience stores can’t be next to homes, etc. Also most of the noxious industries are either gone or relegated to fringe areas, though we’ve replaced much of that trouble with automobiles.
This (admittedly old) lecture by Andres Duany explains a lot of this better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMvwHDFVpCE I also suggest Nathan Lewis’ writings on this subject. He talks about how much of the suburban pattern of the US was a result of what he calls “heroic materialism” or an industrial age aesthetic from the 18th century where bigger=better, leading to a deficient urban form of excessively wide streets and ersatz farmhouses. The “traditional city” posts are some of the most informative and illustrative. Traditional City/Post-Heroic Materialism | New World Economics
I have a fondness for Sam Bass Warner’s The Streetcar Suburbs, although it’s old and much of his groundbreaking insights have been built on by later works.