Test Driving New York City's New Micro Apartments
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
While the space is acceptable, technically, to live in - I can't recommend it if you have the choice of a larger place. These sorts of places typically feature high ceilings, which is nice, but that's about all they have going for them.
For me, coming home felt more like arriving at a hotel. With everything so tightly packed, there was a constant need to pack things away and shuffle items around. It's hard to feel at home when you can barely even (and possibly even not at all!) fit your own furniture in your place.
Murphy beds seem like a fun idea, but unless you're entertaining guests you'll end up just leaving it down during the day (if you're like me, that is..) You then come home to what is essentially a bedroom.
I won't dispute this is a better living situation than many people currently have, but given the price tag of these apartments (I paid over $1000/mo here, $2500-3000 in Murray Hill for 300sqft???) I would advise finding somewhere else to live. Somewhere that has a doorway to walk through that separates your living spaces.
That's exactly my thought. I'd rather just have a normal bed, save a couple of square feet of floor space, and maybe be able to cram in some more storage under or over it.
Otherwise, Brooklyn and Queens offer much more cost-effective, well-connected, entirely urban neighborhoods, maybe not as dense but still perfectly walkable, bikable, and equipped with subway. The cost is, of course, 20-40 more minutes to/from Manhattan.
In Tokyo, this apartment fits reasonably cleanly in the 1DK category ([1] room, dedicated [d]ining/[k]itchen space). It's bog standard. Prices, even in the most desirable neighborhoods, would be a lot closer to $1k than to $3k, and generally coming from the downside.
My current place is a 1DK, slightly smaller than the apartment in the article, but even that feels big for one person. In any case, after living in Tokyo, I find it hard to describe a 300sqft apartment as "tiny."
It was basically a dorm room. I was able to downsize to make it work and it was freeing to reduce my possessions to the necessities.
Anyway, yes, this sort of tiny apartment appeared to be the norm for single 20-somethings in Tokyo.
Yes, the corporate culture is terrible but some people decide not to participate (job availability went up recently but unemployment didn't go down). Some people are putting the foot down and things are slowly changing.
You can point at suicide rate, I'll point at police brutality in US, the mass shootings, rampant drug problems (including painkiller epidemic), obesity, health problems (how many people are on disability?).
So when you come out and say how terrible life is in Japan, have a good hard look at the land of the free. From what I see there's no milk and honey left for 99% of the people.
I love my country, I simply hate what its government and citizens have done to it :(
This is where that trend is heading: http://blog.sleepinginairports.net/2015/10/13/zzzleepandgo-b...
I moved into the ues from bk 2 years ago and pay $1800 for a one bedroom (700sq feet).
Commute, door to door, from midtown is 25 minutes (86/lex -> 42nd) and with the 2nd avenue subway (hopefully) opening in December should reduce that by 5-10 minutes.
I agree. Both are not really worth the price.
Screw the big cities.
edit: I guess lots of people just live where they were born, or move to a bigger place for the education / work opportunities, or the lifestyle. Then there's the sea-changers and tree-changers. I think I've undergone a tree-change.
Adelaide is not a big city. Adelaide is a small, very affordable city. A big city is Sydney, Melbourne, Paris, London, NY, Tokyo.
Its good you have found something you like, but I have no need for so much space. Why would I, I think it is wasteful. And having to own a car, I would hate that.
I'd give a move like that serious thought, especially if you can land something decent in the area. The salary delta will more than be eaten by what you'll pay for rent. The hardest part in our area is finding comparable social stuff, but it's really not that hard... There's tons of like-minded people around.
The apartment shown in the article appears to have a shower instead of a bathtub, which hopefully gives you more room for a bed. In hindsight, I wished this apartment had a conventional oven instead of a dishwasher; feeding myself I only owned two plates, two bowls, two cups, and some cutlery (which can easily be hand-washed in the sink, especially in a drought).
When these SF micro-apartments were approved, local press suggested they'd rent for $800-$1000/month (based on 1br rental rates at the time) -- the entire market (including these apartments) is now 3x-4x that.
It's only a matter of time before the bed/living area gets crammed into the kitchen like I've seen in some of the weirder parts of London.
[0] http://www.elliman.com/pdf/eed565a3adc1c94a4ccc9243ad0b932f6...
I grew up in 33 m^2 apartment. Layout is similar to this, minus the balcony: http://cdn.gdeetotdom.ru/b/b9f1203ec7061e6dc65984ff104ecfb7-...
The major difference is that you have a separation of space with the kitchen and hallway (with closets). That separation made it fairly livable for a family with a child! (Don't recommend stuffing a teenager in there, but it has been done...)
The completely open studio layout will likely not be great even for a couple, as sometimes your really do need space or privacy. A blocked off kitchen affords that and doubles as a decent home office.
I don't recall us resorting to space-efficient furniture, but then again Soviet furniture was smaller already and I did sleep on a foldout couch.
For entertaining, that tiny kitchen actually fit 5-6 people reasonably well. I think our informal record was 14 (3 standing, rest comfortably seating).
The kitchen became such a part of the culture as a place to sit down and talk privately, that there have been articles and books written about it. It really highlights the genius utility of that small extra space. Unfortunately, all I could find in English is a really terrible NPR article that shows a place you'd need a hasmat suit to enter as a "typical" Russian kitchen... Still the utility is amazing!
EDIT: as discussed below, Tokyo calls such layout 1DK (with 2 rooms effectively, 2nd being the kitchen). These are much more desirable than the 1K true studio apartments.
Edit: I do make more than $2400/month, I fudged the conversion rate
http://ceoworld.biz/2015/10/19/top-50-most-expensive-cities-...
Internet speeds are great and it only costs 10$/month to get 1gbps (probably just 100mbs external, 1gbps metropolitan). Americans are well regarded by everyone, especially girls :-)
Another negative is bureaucracy. The system is overly complex, stupid sometimes. If you need to open a company or get hired locally it can be a PITA.
Young people can speak English, some quite well. But older people don't.
Old communist blocks in some areas don't make the city look too nice, but most don't care about that. New York has worse looking areas.
About the bureacracy: it's better than Germany or UK for example, but everything moves way slower sometimes.
Not knowing the local language, culture, customs, bureaucracy or legal structures
With enough time and/or focus, one of these sentences can be rectified though
Cluj Napoca for instance is a major university town with a lot of students, the costs got down and the areas get quieter and cleaner.
Oh and the internet service is identical since all cities offer about the same speeds all over the country.
I'm a bit partial to Cluj since I have a lot of friends who decided to settle there after graduating and have a bit better knowledge of the city than others but any similar city will do.
Strongly consider asking for a pay raise, and/or applying for some new jobs in your local area. That sounds terribly low for a UK-based C++ position. Even in smaller cities and with a year or two of experience you could expect 30% more.
Prices are much higher in cities even in the uk.
750 pounds for a 3 bedroom detached house. We pay 600/month but the house is slightly less fancy.
Here is an interesting article on soviet kitchens on NPR if you don't have the time to read a book about it .
How Soviet Kitchens Became Hotbeds Of Dissent And Culture http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how...
> Carmel Place’s rent includes not just internet and Wi-Fi, but a weekly tidying service and a monthly deep clean, along with dog walking, dry cleaning pickup and any number of customized errands through an app called Hello Alfred, all organized by Ollie.
Are they in the cheap, low end or luxury high end industry?
People who want those amenities are in the luxury market. They want a much bigger apartment.
The people who want a 300 ft studio are in the cheap market. They don't care about these amenities.
The crazy thing is that the building could not be built today. It was 20 stories with about 15 units per floor and according to the recent NYTimes article it is no longer approved for the zoning of that neighborhood.
I'm not sure we need microapartments as much as we need to look at where people can afford to live today and clone that over and over. That's not the recipe for all of NYC, but in a neighborhood like Murray Hill where every other building is huge, why not just build out even more?
Unless prices have skyrocketed in the last year, this is pretty dumb.
Is it just odd word choice or does "formerly homeless" mean they're put up somewhere until these are ready to lease? Also, do these homeless vets have work? Or am I misreading this paragraph entirely?
This isn't any sort of indictment on the homeless population...just, $914 for something of that size is affordable pretty much only by New York (and I guess SF) standards, and I wonder if instead of putting a dent (maybe even a scratch) in some of the problems that creates chronic homelessness, if this is just cycling through a series of "guests" who stay for maybe months at a time and end right back up on the street.
I suppose I have to take the article at its word: "It's a start".
Also in official NYC-government-speak homeless doesn't necessarily mean living on the street. It means a lack of "secure, adequate, and permanent" housing. So it includes situations like living in a shelter or in a doubled up situation (e.g. on a relative's couch).
small tenement like housing is nothing new.
small apartments slowly create cabin fever-------ANXIETY.
if you live in a small space you must spend a lot more time outside of it than inside of a normal sized space.
also, it is vital to have minimum 9 foot high cielings for a small space. i had 8 foot ceilings that are standard in new york.
finally, a loft in a room with lower than 10 foot cielings means you cannot have a 5'10 foot person stand comfortably underneath the loft and have a 5'10 foot person on their knees in bed on top of the loft without one of them hitting their head on the underside of either the celiing or the bottom of the loft.
furthermore, a loft gets very hot in the summer and remains somewhat warmer than the floor in the winter. this effect increases inversely with measure of distance between the loft surface to the cieling
Imagine a "groovy millennial" Instagrammming a vegan cheesecake -- forever. I appreciate the job the NYT Real Estate section does. Without them (and Style) the newspaper probably would no longer exist. But articles like this are so devoid of reality that I understand why everyone thinks people are crazy to live in New York City.
This is a real apartment, really available to lease.
I take it this person doesn't cook. My first apartment (which was quite a bit smaller than this apparent) came with a two burner stove and no oven. With those two burners, a rice cooker and the small toaster style oven I bought, I quite comfortable cooked just about anything you'd care mention.
I don't understand. Check Bay Area Craigslist and you will find that a rich selection of small studios is available for rent on any given day. And they're much more affordable than the one in this article too.
I could not financially afford that micro apartment but I consider the people who live in it far worse off than me.
I know that New York salaries are typically higher to compensate, but I work remote for a company as a front-end designer/dev and make a good living without having to pay "big city" prices. I get the appeal of living in a big with though, Atlanta is near by and I love visiting; but I greatly prefer saving my money and/or spending it on things other than expensive rent.
And one of the things you learn here pretty quickly is that you don't REALLY need all that much space. My first apartment was about 300 sqft, and a third of it went entirely unused. My current studio is probably 450, and while I have a ton more stuff now than I did then, the amount of space is more than adequate. I wouldn't know what to do with 1600 sqft even with a spouse and kids! Oh, and costs about 2/3 as much as that apartment, in an arguably nicer neighborhood in Brooklyn. /shrug
We each have our own priorities for what we're willing to pay for.
The mobile home and RV industries solved the problem of maximizing available space decades ago. The space spend on propane tanks, water heaters, and other utilities that are no needed at an apartment level can be repurposed having larger hardware in the kitchen and bathroom.
I know it's bad marketing to say "we modify off the shelf manufactured home floor plans to better fit an apartment use case" but that's exactly what micro-apartments are. The same tricks just get applied in a different context.
Living in a trailer isn't noteworthy but living in a 3 dimensional trailer park is? Well at least some writer made a buck off of writing about it.
It isn't cool. That's the problem. I listen to a podcast about a week ago (sorry forget all the details) on the general topic of how do you sell mobile home materials and economics and lifestyle to people who don't think mobile homes are "cool" especially not for "the cool people". Well, change the name, call it a tiny house or tiny apartment, all done.
There is an interesting economic side issue. Because bubbles are bubbles we can assume real estate will go up 5% per year into infinity, right? That solves the classic problem with RV / mobile home trailer parks where the materials are not built to last more than a couple years... wait for real estate bubble appreciation to build up for five years, cash out refinance, then gut and remodel. Doesn't matter if nothing in there will last more than 10 years if the business model is to gut and remodel every 5... Of course if the financial situation changes and prices can't go up 5% annually in perpetuity, then imagine what the place will look like in 20, 30 years.
Is this proof for too much or too less government intervention? Or is the usual increase in price caused by the new micro-renters themselves, in that they are increasing attractiveness of the area?
I think it's most likely just that: We're bad savers and not being in the red at the end of the month will turn off the biggest behavioral signal for switching expenditure habits.
Overall, even with all of the city centre built up to 40 stories, you'll still see relatively high rent---the location is just too good to do business in; so people will bid it up.
The Economist had a whole section about cities a while ago. It was in the issue that also had http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...
Allowing any part of the market to go upward in price puts upward pressure on the rest of the market because there's now more competition for whatever hasn't become out of reach.
Housing, transportation, education and a few others are necessities that pretty much everyone needs the same amount of. Until you saturate the entire market in an area with high end stuff to the point where the price of the high end stuff decreases dramatically the price of low end stuff will rise. It's really hard to saturate the housing market with expensive and new because no developer will build more nice expensive stuff when there's a larger profit margin building cheaper low end stuff that's been driven up in price by all the high end stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
except now market-rate (natch!), and with decidedly cheesier architecture.
* Wall bed: $7,780
* Coffee table: $1,450
* Expanding table: $4,165
* Folding chairs: $250/each ($1,000)People who aren't familiar with New York City (especially people whose impression of housing is influenced by San Francisco) may not realize that the city has a generally-competent public transit infrastructure, making is possible to work in Manhattan without living in Manhattan or even in New York City and without hating your life. Of course, housing in the outer boroughs and in nearby cities is also expensive compared to, say, housing in a small university town somewhere in the Midwest. But this project is specifically about increasing the density of housing in Manhattan itself, which will hopefully let demand from people who can pay $3200/month shift away from the outer boroughs and nearby cities.
While she may be a fine writer, clearly, she isn't a presenter for video.
There aren't a lot of better options, aside from cold-calling apartment management companies. Everyone lists on Craigslist.
Thanks for the stereotype, but I think we just want the right to keep our labour, not hand part of it over to the boomers and part to the banks, thanks.
"Perhaps this apartment is too good, too soft, for the demographic it purports to address. How will they mature in a friction-free environment? It irritated me that a 25-year-old would soon be lolling in my bed"
Really amazing. Such a soft option living in a cupboard and paying a fortune for it, or a fortune for other alternatives.