Seattle’s micro-housing boom offers an affordable alternative | Hacker News Reader

Seattle’s micro-housing boom offers an affordable alternative

seattletimes.com

52 pointsluu66 comments

There are two forces at play here. The developers argue that dorm style living (rebranded micro-housing) is the result of a new, anti-consumption mindset:

“People have different perspectives than our parents might have had. They were geared to acquire as much stuff as you can. They buy a big house and fill it up with as much stuff as they can. It’s a paradigm shift. Our generation is not being geared to the acquisitional mindset. It’s more normal for us being able to shift gears.”

On the other hand, most residents seems to be there for economical reasons: the average tenant only stays 12-14 months, and it seems dubious that anyone (other than Steve Sauer) would enjoy living in a micro-housing unit for a long time:

“I certainly don’t want to live this way forever,” she says, “but at this point in my life, it makes it easier. I need to stay close to work, I need free (street) parking, I need something affordable and just the convenience of being in the city. A space like this allows me to be in the city without breaking the bank.”

Affordable housing is a big problem in a highly-regulated market with a lot of money at stake. If these jail-density units continue to proliferate in and around large cities, I fear that we are moving in the wrong direction. They are good indicators of the number of people who are willing to live in a 200 sq. ft dorm room because a) all they do is work and sleep and b) they can't afford the rent anywhere else. It's not a population of people we want to see growing in the US.

I don't get it: what is "dorm style" here? What is communal exactly?

Imagine a building of ~60 180sqft apartments broken up into groups of ~6 where each group has a single, shared kitchen. That would be a communal kitchen. There might also be a communal living room. Specifics vary of course.

ok; I didn't figure whether kitchen and anything else is shared, from the site.

It's one of the most common formats for American university students to live in, especially during first or second year, where a study/tv room, sometimes a kitchen, and typically bathrooms are shared amongst multiple rooms of students. Also the rooms often come pre-furnished with basic furunture: bed, desk, and a dresser.

It's okay, we'll fix it with VR /s

You're right and I don't think you can think of this in isolation of the cost of housing more generally… On one hand.

On the other hand, I think the marketing schpiel has more than pure dishonesty to it. There are bigger "transient young urban singles" groups today. SSomewhere between student and work, lifestyle-wise. In earlier generations they would be coupled or living with family. Some do spend a lot of time working or just out of the house. So convenience, location and of course price are big concerns.

Basically, people who aren't students that live a lot like students.

Like you say price is the strangest current here. If you could rent a normal flat for the same money, most would. That said, I'm not sure if there's ever been a time where decent single person housing has been available at a reasonable price.

Government intervention-wise I think the worst thing possible would be to try and shit this kind of thing down. That just takes away the option for these who don't have a better one. Use it instead as a canary.

It's not a population of people we want to see growing in the US.

As somebody who just moved into a 140sqft unit a few weeks ago, ouch.

I moved here because I'm a single person and had a 1000sqft house filling up with garbage from Amazon.

I spend my days working with my awesome distributed team from a coworking space, my evenings getting to know my new neighborhood and city (while playing an awful lot of pinball), and my nights in a small but quiet and comfortable apartment.

My rent (including utilities/internet) is less than my previous Midwest mortgage, which is less still than the savings I'm seeing in tax burden from my previous city/state.

Sounds like a good change from a lifestyle/place/cost of living you were not completely happy with before.

The proliferation of this type of housing indicates a problem in that many more people are forced to live in these situations. They, unlike you, do not have the financial stability to choose to purchase a house/take out a mortgage/start a family etc. I recently graduated and decided to live out in the suburbs in an unconventional living situation to avoid paying a ridiculous rent in the city for a tiny space.

Definitely not trying to make a value judgment on the way people should or shouldn't live. Just concerned that the economic freedom to choose how to live and be happy is eroding.

I don't completely disagree but it also seems as if we've also seen an increase in people who feel that their life isn't complete unless they live in one of a handful of urban cores. Recent graduates living in really crappy conditions in Manhattan because they couldn't imagine living in Queens was a thing decades ago. Now we're seeing it in places like San Francisco and Seattle.

This is interesting. It's the kind of topic that can easily be interpreted as anyone into their pet big issue and/or worldview, dangerously so.

This could be about The Plight of The Middle class and the cost of housing. Are we really returning to a world of boarding houses? It could be about a less is more world where people are discarding processions, home and contents and living a smaller, more environmental and simpler existence. It could be about demographic and cultural shifts. More single people. It could be about the decline of extended families, communities and multigenerational households. The continued accession of cities…

Anyway, interesting.

Beyond anything else, I think this points at how much of any issue housing is these days. Manufactures goods have dropped in prices for generations to the point where looking back a few generations to a time when cutlery and crockery, salt and other things were wealth is ridiculous. Transport has improved more slowly. Air travel has certainly become a lot cheaper and international travel has become more accessible over the years. So have services like restaurants, gyms and lots of recreational goods. Information has been revolutionized. But housing, it's not really improving with time. We're not better off than our grandparents in many cases.

More like real estate. The amount of land is fixed, after all. And some are more valuable than others.

Even the materials used to build houses had gotten cheaper, presumably.

Skyscrappers and high density housing can increase supply but only if regulations and market conditions allow it.

Here is a list of cities by population density. They're not the ones you would expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

It is possible to have lo-rise, high-density. As for "regulations and market conditions?" Everyplace has those.

That list doesn't tell us much, because what counts as the official city limits is completely arbitrary.

There are some parts of London for example that are very suburban.

Exactly. San Francisco is just twice the size of Manhattan and Houston is about 200 times as big of an area.

Hong Kong has closet sized apartments. That trend didn't always get the favourable write ups though. E.g. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/photos-lif...

Can't wait for the next trend after this one for the neo hipsters: hobo-housing. It's so affordable. You just push a vintage shopping trolley loaded with your stuff to a homeless shelter. Make an app to find the closest bunk bed!

Are there any capsule hotels in the US?

I think the short answer is no--not in the Japanese sense. There are hotels optimized around small (say 170 sf total) rooms. But in most (all?) cases they still have private bathrooms and you can certainly stand up and walk around. They're sometimes called "pod hotels" but that's sort of marketing; lots of hotels in a city like New York have pretty cramped rooms.

It's kind of rediculous that the article ends with a picture of the apartment building and it is barely 4 stories tall, and on either side are 2 story suburban dwellings. Walk down any block of brownstones and in NYC and you'll note even the 100+ year old brownstones are 5 stories tall. At that height you still don't even need elevators or any of the other special systems that go into tall buildings. The owner simply prices the 5th floor walk up at a lower price, which actually turns out to be a win if your goal is affordability.

We're not suffering from a lack of space, just a lack of permissive zoning.

There was no ADA in 1910.

IIRC, if you have more than 4 units, you need an elevator. Elevators cost a fortune to install and represent a significant ongoing cost for a landlord. Landlords avoid incurring costs at all costs.

Also, you need to incur more costs for things like fire escapes in taller buildings, need to build to a higher standard, and have to figure out issues like parking that get more complicated at higher density.

...Or you can just throw up some 4-story disposable building, milk it for 10-years, then offload it to another property manager who squeezes the pennies out of the property.

The economics don't make sense, which is why they don't get built.

I live in an 8 floor building with two elevators that seem to break every other week...and yet despite that ongoing expense, our total HOA fees are less that $600/yr. That is half of what I pay for a parking spot that needs no maintenance. Elevators aren't a ridiculous expense.

A two-stop hydraulic elevator costs about $70k, depending on where you are. Maintenance is around $3k/year, plus about $500-900 in energy.

If it's being appropriately maintained, a traction elevator like what is in an 8-story building can cost 2-5x more in annual maintenance.

I would argue requiring parking and elevators fall exactly into my point that the problem is restrictive zoning. In the general sense the solution here should not be forcing people to make do with terrible living situations, it should be fixing the laws causing these problems.

If you want more ADA units, require a certain % are ADA compliant. That basically means in larger buildings the first floor units will all be ADA. Do we really need the elevator? Do we really need to still mandate off street parking a world of Uber and soon self driving cars?

That's not what the law says. If the building was built after 1991, residents and employees with disabilities must be able to reasonably access all apartments, period.

Re: Uber, etc. I do not live in the future, nor do the people next door. So if you put a 20 story high-rise on my street, there will be no place for the people to park their cars.

The tech world's focus on disruption and telling everyone to go fuck off is really irritating. Nobody cares about disabilities until they need to deal with such a situation. Declaring cars irrelevant is a completely absurd position for something like 90% of the US population, but hey, lets screw up the neighborhood anyway!

> We're not suffering from a lack of space, just a lack of permissive zoning.

Exactly. In Seattle, the big bogeyman is Manhattanization. But even Brooklynization with its midrise density that is common throughout pockets of Seattle could allow for a 6x increase in the population living within Seattle. A little bit of zoning flexibility can go a long way.

An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too.

I'm not even sure you could design a space for a young family. Things change so fast, you'd need a whole economy to support it. You'd need to rent a lot of things, like high chairs, cribs, extra linen storage, etc. because you can't store anything in your home.

Call the rental service C2G: the sharing economy of your life, and it's unicorn time...

> An affordable alternative... for single people without families. You can perform most of the basic functions of life, but reproduction is a major one, too.

For what it's worth I've lived a very happy life as a kid in a 2-room apartment, in about 70 sqm. Granted, I used to spend most of my time in front of our apartments' block, playing with other kids. If it matters I grew up in Eastern Europe.

What I wanted to say is that resorting to "but would someone think of the children?" in this kind of situation in order to mask the harm done on the environment because of McMansions and huge houses in general is the wrong way to do it.

100% agree. That's how I grew up too and I never felt like I needed/wanted more space.

Just for reference, 70 sqm is about 750 sqft, where these are 200 sqft, or less than 20 sqm. These are absolutely not sufficient for a family with children, or likely even a single parent with a child.

Also, I live a 10 minute walk from this place, and pay 50% more for over 3 times the space, so they're not even that good of a deal.

I don't think they're going for that market directly.

The housing market is connected though, so interest in these, which may be limited to singles or couples without children, will remove some of the demand on larger units, such as yours, which can house children and families.

You were lucky! ;-) I think ours was ~36sqm if I remember correctly (it's been a long time...).

http://www.kvmeter.ru/information/homes_series/1_468/ (in Russian but there are pictures).

This is a very North American ideology, lots of families live in very small apartments around the world.

My wife and I have three children and live in a 1150 ft^2 2 bedroom apartment in downtown Atlanta. It's certainly a little cramped by suburban American standards, but is table stakes in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

It's the same way we all lived in my native USSR, though the apartments there tended to be larger and more rationally subdivided into lots of little rooms (so, an apartment with three rooms with closing doors, plus effectively a fourth room in the form of a kitchen, plus a foyer hallway, was a commonplace thing). My biggest annoyance with American apartment floor plans is the intense compulsion to imitate houses -- a door straight into a large combined living room and kitchen area. I'd gladly trade that for more compartmentalised rooms, and a layout that doesn't require someone entering the apartment to walk through space where someone else is hanging out.

It's nice that more companies are building dorm rooms. But it would be great if someone would build dense urban living for families too.

A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's the largest (and sometimes only) option for folks with children.

They don't need to match suburban house sizes. Most people don't need 1800+sqft. But if we could start getting modest 3 and 4 bed urban condos with 1000-1300sqft, it would do a lot to improve things.

Incentivizing a huge chunk of the population out into far flung suburbs doesn't seem smart from a efficiency, infrastructure, land use, or pollution standpoint.

Something like that might rent for 2400 to 3000 a month, if the pricing trends that I've observed hold. Even if such a thing existed, the average person couldn't afford it in their wildest dreams.

Yes, exactly. And I think that's a huge problem.

We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land. A 1100sqft condo with no land in a city, should be much cheaper than a 2200sqft stand alone McMansion on a quarter acre of private land. But today, the opposite is true.

That's going to end up being a long term mistake. And because of the housing cost distortion, we're incentivizing people to continue that mistake.

>We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land

This is exactly it!

We are seeing a ton of individuals who are not wealthy, even if they have a strong income. They are buying into the idea of paying these crazy rent prices to stay "connected" or in the "heart" of the urban areas. Access to these things is not granted by housing, you can attend every fancy nightclub, restaurant and bar while living 15min away in a drastically larger/cheaper living arrangement.

Why should it be? That's like saying that the $2.15 bottle of Coke you find at the counter should be significantly cheaper than the $1.99 two-liter in aisle 15. It's not, and there's a good reason for that. A two-liter and a 20 oz bottle are completely different products, different people are buying them for very different reasons. They don't compete against each other, they compete against other products in that segment.

On the surface, a 1000 sqft condo in the city and a 2000 sqft house are comparable products. But they're not, they are marketed to completely different kinds of people whose selection criteria are not comparable in the least.

There's an article in today's NYtimes about tiny apartments (250-350 sq ft) starting at $2500/month in the Kips Bay part of Manhattan (i.e. a nice area but not the nicest or trendiest).

The usual rule in NYC is that you must make 40x the monthly rent to rent an apartment. So those shoeboxes are being aimed at people making six figures.

On the upside you get a virtual butler.

> A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's literally the only option for folks with children.

How do you figure? Last I checked there are children in cities.

Yeah but Americans are taught to think cities are scary and suburban sprawl is safe, even though you're several times more likely to die in a car accident than being murdered in a city, not to mention health problems in kids whose primary exercise is walking to and from their parents' minivan.

In all fairness, that wasn't a completely inaccurate generalization in the 1970s or so. That's changed a lot for the most part, but a number of effects linger such as the quality of most urban public schools. Therefore, for a variety of reasons--including having more space--many (though of course not all) middle class+ families still are inclined to move to the suburbs when they have children.

With respect to exercise, you'd have to convince me that kids living in a city condo/apartment routinely get more exercise than ones in the suburbs.

At least in Toronto and Vancouver they didn't plan on children in the city so now there are no schools for the children that are here. There are also very few 2 and 3 bedroom places so having a child is very impractical.

On the other hand I changed my commute from a 15minute walk to a 1h20m ride on transit and my living space when from 500sqft to 1500sqft

To add a datapoint:

I used to live in a very nice neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN with my GF and a child. House was just under 1,000 sq ft with unfinished basement and attic (not included in the sq footage). We loved it there. Great neighborhood: I could walk to the grocery store, or bus and restaurants etc. It was within walking distance of Lake Harriet (beautiful lake/park with free music performances, etc) and close to many other lakes and parks. We were outside a lot.

But we moved to a 2X larger house in the suburbs on a half-acre lot behind a nature preserve. Why?

Pretty much the only reason was that our son was going to be old enough to start kindergarten soon and the local schools sucked.

Private school was an option, but we soon figured out that it was cheaper to move to a bigger house in the suburbs in a better school district than to keep living in the city and pay for private schools.

This is a common reason for parents to move out of very liveable cities. It's often much cheaper to move to the suburbs than pay for private schools, especially if you have 2 or 3 children. And with more and more businesses moving from city to suburban locations, it may even make your commute shorter (it did for both of us).

tl;dr: Improve public schools in cities and more parents will stay.

In Japan, there is a similar idea called "Shared Houses". This kind of reaction to the status quo means that we're solving the housing problem in the wrong way. Instead of providing faster transportation mechanisms, we're investing into places that are even more cramped.

As many have pointed out, a micro-house is unlikely to be good when you have a family and children to raise.

There's a question of whether or not those faster transportation systems would be a good long term investment. Create the means for people to spread out more and still enjoy the advantages of cities for just a 10 minute train ride, and people will spread out.

But is that scalable in a society where both population growth and economic growth is slowing?

The cost of maintaining infrastructure for a suburb is far greater per capita than the cost of maintaining a city. How much more expensive when the whole concept is reliant on the latest mass transit technologies?

It seems to me that the marketplace might be providing the best and most practical living arrangements for the long term.

Correct. People with only the basic gist of "Economics 101" fail to understand that supply and demand economics do not apply to the housing market the way they do for consumer goods.

In a nutshell, hyper-inflation of rents in a metro area actually decreases the rate at which new units are built. Landlords have incentive to keep supply down; and when they do build "nice new" units for rent, those rent prices increase the average rents on the market.

In a sense, landlords are able to bully renters into being "customers" for longer period of time. Harms middle-class housing in two ways:

  (1) larger portion of renters' income dumped into
  rent decreases ability to save for down-payment to buy

  (2) fewer people buying decreases rate at which new
  units are built, and thus never allows the "housing
  supply" to react to actual market realities.

And what causes hyperinflation in rents? People being unable to "save enough money for a down payment" to buy.

Great documentary called "The Flaw" that explains more.

[edit] formatting

Completely with you on the general gist, but a few points:

1. It's not just LLs who have an incentive to keep supply down; it's homeowners too. And banks, and estate agents (realtors), and builders, and media that relies on property advertising, and policians wanting votes and/or donations from any of the above. Anyone with a vested interest in higher prices has an incentive to constrain supply.

2. I don't think reduced buying decreases new build directly; a lot (most) of new-build here in London is being bought to rent (or even bought to leave empty while waiting for capital gains). Supply constraints are coming from all the people in point 1.

3. Various countries have failed in various specifics, but I think the overall driver for this worldwide is pretty clear: the Great Recession and resulting drive to "zero interest rates forever". The ultimate encouragement to take on ballooning mortgage debt, sending prices into the stratosphere and drawing in speculators, while at the same time punishing most non-parasitic forms of saving via financial repression.

I love the concept of micro-housing and have looked into micro-houses quite extensively. The biggest issue with them is of course zoning laws and the only easy way to actually live in one is to buy a plot of land way out in the country.

If you want to live in a city cheaply, you're pretty much forced to have roommates. That's fine but roommates are not always great and personally I would much rather live on my own. So what are the options? Well, the cheapest studio I could find in my area (Ann Arbor, MI) that is within a 10-15 minute to downtown (as my current place is) is almost double what I'm paying currently for a bedroom in a shared house. Ridiculous!

As a young 20 something, I don't have a family, I don't need space. When I'm home, I'm at my desk or sleeping. I view a city in the same way as a phone being an extension of your brain, the city is an extension of your home. If I need a bunch of space, there are plenty of places I can go to get that.

Is micro-housing and super dense living for everyone? Of course not! But for many young people, it's pretty damn great to have an affordable to sleep. Build 'em high, build 'em dense.

The reason that "evil zoning" makes building crap like this hard to build is because the long game for property like this is that it devolves into a flophouse.

When time rolls on and the six-figure people embracing dorm life gets old, or the workers are "disrupted" into low-paying gigs, this type of housing will turn into typical SRO housing in the US -- people on public assistance with nowhere else to go.

I'm very suspicious that this particular trend that's driven by well-paid 20 somethings who just can't bring themselves to live anywhere but in the trendy areas of a handful of coastal US cities is going to be looked back upon as a somewhat amusing transitory early 21st century phenomenon.

Smaller self-contained apartments are less ridiculous but I suspect that by the the time you take into account shared space like hallways, stairwells, possibly parking, and so forth dropping an apartment size from 800sf+ to 400-500sf doesn't let you offer it that much more cheaply at a huge cost in livability.

So even if the experiment fails, the housing will still be used. It seems rather efficient to me. They have to live somewhere right?

Very efficient, as long as they aren't next door to you!

Looks like a regular flat to me. Has America just discovered flats? Can't see any floor plans under "floor plans": http://www.thealderflats.com/floorplans.aspx

200 sq ft is considered small in Europe but still on a scale that IKEA has an example flat in that size.

You're not going to want to live there forever as your main property, but then they might discover the concept of a pied a terre...

As someone who lives in an actual 1900s tenement that costs twice what these do without any of the amenities, I'd be happy to live in one of those for $1000/month if they were in Lower Manhattan or West Brooklyn.

For those who value location and low cost, these would be amazing. For reference, the micro-apartment experiment we have here:

"Enter My Micro NY, the city's first micro-apartment complex, at 335 East 27th Street, with 55 units ranging from 260 to 360 square feet. The building will begin leasing studios this summer for around $2,000 to $3,000 a month"

The same price as non-microapartments in the studio-1BR range.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartment...

Sad that a good idea was immediately killed for the future.

Didn't these used to be called tenements? Not trying to be snarky.

Some neighborhoods fought the projects — theirs and others — likening them to early 1900 tenements. Judgments abounded: one online magazine referred to them as “hipster hovels,” while others likened their size to prison cells, parking stalls and carports.
None of it stopped people from moving in.

“It’s satisfying,” says Carr, “and we realize we’re meeting a big, pent-up demand.”

Our local startup accelerator, The Brandery, did a related experiment a few months ago.

They paid the master lease to an apartment building and sublet to founders on favorable short-term contracts and with a slight discount [1]. I'm hoping to see more of this communal housing model with other accelerators.

I didn't get a chance to see the Y Scraper [2], but perhaps that concept was similar.

1: http://weare.techohio.ohio.gov/2015/06/19/welcome-home-otrs-...

2: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Y-scraper

Affordable housing persons maybe can't afford most of the furniture in those interior photographs.

It's not just poor people who want low cost living. You don't get rich by spending money.

You do, but you have to spend it on the right things...

Seattle’s hipster SRO boom offers an affordable alternative to homelessness.

So is this just an article saying people are still living in efficiencies?

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