How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing
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You have to have a certain cynicism to understand that there is a huge disconnect between what regulations discuss (health and safety; parking requirements; setbacks; etc.) and what is the impact of the rules. The reason rules are made is they have a desired effect. The effects are often not obvious from the language of the rule, but if the effects turn out contrary to the interest of the rule-makers things will be tweaked.
So the language and purported purpose of rules is obfuscation. The rule-makers are paying attention to the effect of the rules. That is their real purpose.
The form of the rules is optimised to make them appear beneficial to all, while the function is optimised to benefit the rule-makers.
>You have to have a certain cynicism
You certainly have to be cynical to believe that somehow Seattle is not operating in its own self interest. As faults are found, we try to correct them. Some are very difficult to correct (hello I5, hello American street widths, hello North Seattle sprawl, hello West Seattle suburban wasteland, hello unlivable industrial area) and some are geographic constrains (hello hills and water).
Making tiny shitty apartments does not correct any of these deep problems.
>The form of the rules is optimised to make them appear beneficial to all,
The form of the rules isn't 'optimised' at all. It's an organic living document called "the law." You apparently think the world would be a better place if developers could make whatever size dwelling they want. I think that happened in the 19th century and the result was skid row. I am not interested in trying the experiment again. I am interested in more housing for my community, but honestly that means rezoning SFHs, not getting rid of height restrictions and parking requirements when they're justifiable.
And yes, my opinion is entirely qualitative. I like 3-4 story buildings because I like them. They have been a staple of the environment that dragged me out of adolescence and into responsible, productive adulthood. They are the good geometry.
At least you have the insight to realise your opinion is "entirely qualitative" (i.e. entirely emotional) but apparently not the insight to recognize you should then change your opinion.
Is it a net good? I don't know. But I think it's a huge and common misconception to interpret NIMBY-ism as a malicious action rather than a simple case of people acting in their own self interest.
That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. Plus, I think it's a bit disingenuous to imply there's this big, nefarious "they". It seems more realistic (to me, at least) to view NIMBYers as a bunch of individual homeowners concerned about the value of what's likely their single biggest investment.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that the post you're referencing the "tent city" thing from was tongue-in-cheek. That's entirely personal speculation, however.
In areas like San Francisco and San Jose, there is just not enough housing to house all of the homeless people. There is not enough public funding to create housing for all of the homeless people. And the effectiveness of each dollar keeps going down, faster than inflation.
The article goes into detail, how micro-apartments can be $900 per month each in current market conditions, unsubsidized. But regulations force the cost upwards and the unit count downwards, so both the price goes up (or you do not build until median rent goes up) and the number of low-income people housed goes down.
But, hey, at least the tent city is not directly in your backyard.
I think we have some common ground in that we both think the best solution is not have a tent city in the first place. Homelessness comes with a whole host of other problems that microhousing can't actually solve - like the fact that most homeless people have a hard time applying for housing by virtue of the fact that they have no prior address.
So, maybe the better question is: how do we do that?
Between walking, bike, bike share, car2go, uber, lyft, zipcar, busses, and the light rail, and upcoming self driving car services... Why do i need a car again?
No, but I can expect them to suffer if they do have one. Our current car system is unsustainable, and is a luxury. We really need to get rid of it long-term. I'd love to have a boat in my front yard, but it's too hard to find a place to park it. Should boat-owners have the right to a boat spot?
I take it you haven't spent much time in non-downtown Seattle?
The problem, and the reason why parking requirements exist, is because people externalize that "suffering" on others. They decide they need a car anyway, and then they park that car on other streets, or they park overnight illegally on private property, etc.
It's not like parking requirement laws fell from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets. They didn't exist a hundred years ago, but were created and became ubiquitous across the U.S. as cars became more popular because there were such problems when parking is in short supply.
Now, maybe there are some alternative solutions -- maybe you could get people to sign some sort of blood oath that they'll never own a car while living at a particular address, or maybe we could pass laws that prohibit cars from being registered to addresses that lack parking...? (Maybe we could require that in order to register a car, you have to prove you have the right to a place to park it, and stop treating parking as a public good?) But until there's some better solution, the underlying problem that parking requirements were created to solve still exists.
People are very, very good at sharing their suffering with everyone else and society is typically worse off for it. It takes a lot of work to prevent that from happening.
But that problem is still a luxury problem. It's not some fundamental right for people to own a car. If you want luxury benefits, you should have to pay luxury pricing. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the right to own a car, just that, like any luxury good, it shouldn't be cheap.
In Seattle there are many public transportation options. Sure, it could be much better, but it's still available and quite feasible to use.
They usually are designed to produce neighborhoods where no one ever needs to spend any time searching for a free parking space— which leads to a great deal of suffering for anyone not in an automobile, since such neighborhoods have vast expanses of surface parking that are completely inhospitable to human beings, and are very difficult to serve with public transit.
They also often require an amenity that is very expensive to produce (parking spaces, especially structured spaces) be provided for free, which incentivizes people to own cars and drive everywhere— exactly what we don't want in urban areas, since cars pollute a lot, are dangerous, and require huge amounts of scarce land to store and transport.
Inadequate parking does have a negative impact on a neighborhood, and it's not the only way to nudge society in the direction of driving less.
Sure, there are better ways to push people, and that's now why I want less parking, that's just a pain-point we shouldn't be trying to fix.
> Unsustainable or not, most people do have a car, and it is a major nuisance when there is inadequate parking around housing.
So? A nuisance that those people can avoid if they chose too. Sure, they have a right to own a car, but there's not right to avoid nuisance.
EDIT: Are you able to reply to my other post now? I think HN has a timer that limits how often you can reply, but I could be wrong.
If people can't even store a bike anywhere, that's a problem. And as the business case for these pods is that they're for people who can't afford a bigger place, they're unlikely to want to pay for an uber that regularly.
I've lived in Seattle since 1991. I've lived without a car since 2005. It was harder then than now. These days we have Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Light Rail, marginally better Metro. Walking and biking are always options. It's getting to the point in Seattle, as in other cities, where having a car is a cultural choice rather than a necessity.
Zipcar is great for the days or evening where you need to be in the car culture. It's way cheaper than actually owning one in Seattle, and you have a lot of models to choose from including some nice Audis, BMWs, etc.
This doesn't describe everyone but lots of people who live in cities like Seattle tend to want to get out of the city pretty regularly.
And to your broader point. Right. Developers can't build housing without parking on the grounds that people don't really need to have a car in Seattle. And good luck renting apartments that can't have a car registered to them. (Though people would just find a way to cheat I suppose.)
The fact that the city of Seattle has legislated a need for off-street parking in new construction does not mean that the market actually demands it in any way. Further, the skyrocketing price of housing in Seattle shows pretty clearly that folks will take whatever they can get, parking or no.
Pity it's not shared.
The solution to unaffordable housing certainly begins with building a lot more housing.
[1] http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...
What I do see is a lot of what amounts to saying that "those people" should just go somewhere else. As long as that somewhere else isn't one where I have to notice their homelessness.
But yes. We have to build upwards. In cities where building vertically benefits the well-off (as in NY), and where it's profitable to do so, it happens. But note that it only generates high-end and expensive housing stock (excluding rules that require including "affordable" housing, which based on the examples I've seen seems to mean "affordable to a family making $120k/yr instead of the $500k you need to afford the market rate units in this development".)
Will adding more housing stock at the top decrease prices at the bottom via market effects? Yes and no. If the availability does trickle down, it takes a very long time.
Here in downtown Brooklyn there's a temporary glut of high-end housing added in the last 5 years. But compared to the number of people added to what was already a tight rental (and sales) market in the city 10-15 years ago, the number of units added is laughable. We're talking almost a million more people living in the city but something like 20-30,000 units (enough to house 50-100k people) having been added.
So what happens? This oversupply will likely last about 5 years. The only real effect will be 1-2 year 10-15% concessions on rent in the new rental buildings until they can fill them up. People looking for high-end rentals will be able to take 24 hours instead of 3 minutes to commit to a specific apartment after viewing it, and might be able to get it if they wait an hour or two to apply instead of contacting the management company within 5 minutes of the listing going live. In a couple years, the high end rental market will go back to its normal cut-throat self.
Maybe the gentrification of Crown Heights will be delayed by a couple years, but I doubt it. This trickle of new housing at $2500-4000 per person per month isn't nearly enough to keep up with the constantly expanding demand for units under $1200 per person per month.
The for-sale units in the crazy high-end buildings will sit vacant until enough new Chinese billionaires are minted who want to park their money outside the country, and then they'll continue to sit vacant indefinitely anyway because they're investments rather than homes. The ones in only normally high end buildings will also sit vacant for a year or so and then generate a tiny bit less profit than the developers were hoping for. But sales don't really factor into the affordable housing market here anyway. If you're having trouble affording rent, buying is unimaginable.
The affordable housing rules you mention are an example of an attempt to legislate our way out of the problem, and obviously they haven't worked. I'd say the reason they haven't worked is because they don't address the real issue: to have cheaper housing we need to reduce the barriers to building more housing.
At least that's my personal view. I'm not an economist or a city planner or any kind of expert, just a rando on the Internet. :)
Net result is that a developer can profit quite a bit more from luxury housing than affordable housing. If you are a developer (which presumably means a for-profit business) and have a choice between the two, you naturally decide to go after the higher profit option. Can't say I'd blame them either.
This is where incentives need to be provided to balance the profit equation. If they could make the same amount of profit, or gain other business benefits, I imagine the problem would start solving itself.
That may be true if the limiting factor is the number of developers - they will only develop the highest-value properties. But in a city like New York the limiting factor is not developer capacity, at least not that I have ever heard. Developers are effectively constrained by the number of profitable building sites, not their capacity to put up new buildings. And, in turn, the number of profitable building sites is dependent on not just the cost of labor and materials, but the cost of navigating city planning, obtaining permits, etc.
Don't forget that land is cheaper to acquire in less desirable neighborhoods, and it is also generally cheaper to build there due to lower existing density (which eases logistics by making it easier to get equipment in and out, allows more on-site storage, etc.). The development that maximizes returns is not always the development that maximizes revenue - cost and time also matter. And there are more developers who can handle building a 10-story building in the Bronx than can tackle an 80-story mega-project in Manhattan. Plus, a "cheap" neighborhood in NYC is often as expensive as an "expensive" neighborhood in most US cities, so if developers are willing to build in Milwaukee or Cleveland, they should be willing to build in the Bronx.
But in a world where the administrative cost of starting a relatively small project is overwhelming vs. the potential returns, then those smaller projects in lower-price neighborhoods simply won't get built.
What do you do when land prices and the obstacles to construction posed by high density (such as not being able to store large quantities of raw materials or keep a bunch of trucks on site) make development costs prohibitive for affordable housing? What do you do about the NIMBYs who are afraid the new skyscraper will block their view?
And why would a developer choose to build in a cheap area for lower rents when they can get higher ROI on everything but the land costs if they build luxury housing in an expensive area?
I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)
I would argue this is a false choice: very few developers have the capital to build luxury housing in expensive areas.
For example, I know a guy who builds lower-end housing in Philadelphia (among other places). He would never consider building anything in Manhattan, simply because he can't afford to tie up the capital it would take to build even a townhouse-scale project. Lower-end is his game, period - only a small handful of mega-developers get to make the kind of choice you propose.
By the way, he lives in New York, and logically/logistically it would make more sense for him to build in New York than Philadelphia, but the economics of lower-end development in New York are prohibitive. Once in a while a good opportunity will come along here, but to pay the bills and not be idle he has to look elsewhere.
> I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)
Yes, I totally agree on safety regulations (I don't think I cited them as an issue, did I?). I don't think they are a primary driver of the cost of building in New York vs. other cities. Logistics of operating in the nation's densest city, yes; safety regulations unique to New York, probably no.
Zoning, on the other hand... I think it's a bigger restriction than most people realize. My favorite illustration of the zoning issue is this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...
But as long as demand at the high end is unmet the people with money will outbid everyone else and drive up the price of "affordable" housing if that's the only thing they can find. Nobody wants to pay $2,000 for a shitty apartment. But the price of shifty apartments will well rise north of $2,000 if that's the only thing you can find walking distance to Amazon.
I think there is so much pent up demand for housing close to work that you can double housing stock and still not make a dent in prices, so it's easy to conclude that simply building more does not lower costs. I think we need to build a LOT more if we are ever going to have truly affordable housing near city centers.
Your moral priorities are screwed up. It's the ultimate "let them eat cake" moment of local housing policy. "Well, if they don't want to spend an extra $500/month on a mandatory car parking space, they should just live in a cardboard box on the street."
Growing up in the world I have, I've come to realize physical things weigh me down and participating in consumerism makes me unhappy. Working for 50 years so i can save up enough money to retire at 65 doesn't make sense to me. Why suffer for 50 years so you can live free for a few at the end, when you're old, maybe sick.
I found minimalism, FIRE, and the idea that you ruthlessly reduce expenses for things you don't need.
It turns out... I don't need a one bedroom apartment. I certainly don't need a house. I've lived out of a school-sized backpack for months at a time. Last time i moved, I packed everything I own in 3 hours, moved in one trip in a van, and unpacked in about 2 hours.
I appreciate that you like 3-4 story buildings and your two bedroom apartments. I appreciate you like your parking.
But I don't have enough stuff to fill an apartment. I don't have a car. I don't WANT either of those things. It's okay if you do, but why force me to have them?
> "Making tiny shitty apartments does not correct any of these deep problems."
It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?
Oh. Poor baby :(
FWIW I'm a millennial that lives in a 600 sqft apartment and has never owned a car. I just don't think that it's justifiable to rewrite zoning laws to achieve my weird goals of absolute independence.
>It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?
I think it's a meaningless drop in the bucket and a wasted opportunity. You don't build shit that you don't want around for at least 30 years, and preferably 100.
That goes hand in hand with how another poster above commented about how regulations are written to look like they are for the common good but are only good for those writing the laws. And when you exist in a system where money buys politicians and the will of the people has no effective influence on politics, you end up using regulation to stop competition.
I want to see one city who bucks the profiteering and greed and just dezones everything and just lets people build. Yes, you would need to be more responsible as someone moving there to know if the building is safe or not, but really you have always paid for that through taxes and increased home prices, so paying someone to appraise your potential properties or more likely having general agencies that organically do it would be so much more preferrable to just preventing any innovation in the space at all in the name of NIMBYisms and market capture.
My personal favorite example is around the general population's opposition to school choice / voucher programs while based on the status quo the only people who have that choice now are the people with higher incomes.
The parking was the biggest sticking point. It was already tough to find parking in the area: I would often drive 45+ min circling a several block radius looking for a spot and I had a friend who would just park way outside the area and take a bus to his car. A traditional apartment building with more than some number of units needed to provide parking for residents, but the Apodments skirted that having many separate residents share the same kitchen.
IIRC the taxing for utilities including the sewer system also was determined based on the number of dwellings (kitchens).
The laws and decisions cited in this article all reflect that the buildings would have many residents but for legal purposes were low density housing.
The micro-housing was a workaround of these laws, which in practice disadvantage the working poor.
Those that have cars and want to park them on the street should pay for a parking permit, then the local council builds parking spaces in line with how many permits they've given out. You're only allowed to park with a permit in your area.
Then those that really want a car can get one and find parking, and those that want micro apartments and don't need a car can have them too. Everyone wins. The prices for parking and the prices for housing are separated and both dictated by the market and it's fair for everyone.
It seems that a large fraction (most?) of the tech people picked their cities largely because that is where their job is.
People who oppose major changes to the character of their neighborhoods and cities aren't all just worried about the resale value of their house. They often are more motivated by a desire to preserve those features of the area that attracted them in the first place.
Also, I think a lot of tech people forget that there are other sectors that also provide a lot of jobs and bring a lot of money to the local economy. For instance, tourism and hospitality provide a very large number of jobs in San Francisco, and bring in a lot of outside money.
Change the look and feel of San Francisco too much and you could reduce the appeal to tourists. You risk changing it from people thinking of it as going to San Francisco and while there visiting attraction X, Y, and Z to people thinking of it as going to see X, Y, and Z which happen to be in San Francisco. A city will do a lot better with tourism when the city itself is thought of as a major attraction.
Here's a representative example from CHS: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2015/07/mayor-backs-off-af...
And one from the Stranger: http://www.thestranger.com/news/feature/2015/04/29/22131155/...
Notably, I live about six blocks from the OneOne6 building mentioned in the article. It's a great neighborhood, even though I—ahem—lived here before it was as cool as it is today, and even though rents have doubled or even tripled in the past decade.
[1] Not In My Back Yard!
[2] I've lived in Capitol Hill, the neighborhood described in the article for almost 11 years.
There are benefits to density as well, as most people who live in a city will attest. But there are certainly compelling disadvantages too, and I think any honest discussion about housing should recognize that residents of an area have a legitimate and fair desire to want their circumstances to stay the same or not get worse. Increasing the density of an area usually entails a lot of quality-of-life disadvantages for the current residents, by straining services and infrastructure, whereas it entails advantages for business owners and business developers and potentially new residents. It also sometimes results in lower housing prices, but the effect of this is not entirely clear (development is virtually never genuinely motivated by the desire to provide low income housing since that's a poor business proposition), and low housing price is not always a priority for residents compared to quality-of-life.
Some of the infrastructure challenges that I'm describing can be fixed over time, but it's by no means a given that it will happen at all: the lower quality of life might just become permanent. Plus shutting down major roads to widen them or increase throughput is a disruptive activity on its own, and is not always possible (where do you get property for a new school?) So major problems can trail increases in density by quite a while. Traffic congestion in particular can become considerably worse because of changes in density, and that takes a very very long time to fix on the scale of city planning.
It's also worth recognizing that people have different values, and so some people might value the increased benefits from further density differently than others, and the increased disadvantages differently. If you purchased a house somewhere that's quiet, safe, and has little traffic, because you keep to yourself and want to raise a family, then you'd be upset if the area around you was transformed into a college dormitory party atmosphere.
I'm not saying that I think there's a clear answer for how to handle city planning problems, but I think we could have better conversations about the problem by recognizing that development and density increases are usually bad for existing residents (those who can afford the area, are happy with the price, and value the quality of life they currently have). It is a conundrum to an extent that many of those current residents would not be there if it were not for previous decisions to increase density in that same city. However, this is only a conundrum on the surface: there is a tipping point where increasing density at first yields tremendous advantages but few disadvantages, and then slowly the disadvantages begin to mount up until they overcome the advantages. I believe many big cities in the US are at this tipping point, such as San Francisco.
Cities are democratic organizations that exist to serve their residents, and so if residents believe that policies are not in their interest, they will vote them down. These zoning questions are ultimately entirely political, just like the question of whether a country should accept Syrian refugees.
Anybody that lives in a city that can attest to the benefits of density? Living in Seattle with kids, can't think of any.
Typically it's "jobs", followed distantly by everything else, to include things like walkability, cultural attractions, food and dining, ease of visiting friends and family, etc. It varies by person, but the benefits obviously exist or nobody would live in cities.
Maybe none of those are the benefits of density qua density, but they are hard to achieve without the density. (I mean, I would love to live somewhere with a great tech job market, walkable neighborhoods with bars and restaurants, delivery food at 2AM, and where nobody except my friends and I live there. But of course that's impossible. The density is a precondition for everything else.)
We live in Seattle because it was the smallest / least dense city where both me and my wife could find work relevant to our skills. Across the lake, in the Redmond area, there are plenty of jobs and even less density, but we landed in Seattle before we knew any better about the local geography.
The density axis goes from lots-of-breathing-room-but-no-jobs to suffocating-and-jobs-that-barely-afford-a-box, with lots of tradeoff points in the middle. I fail to see how density is a positive in itself, or that more density is a always a net positive.
As for walkability, it is seriously overrated. Most people are not rich enough to live in walking distance of their jobs. If we could make everyone move in walking distance of job, then most likely we wouldn't need density. Next, you get overpriced shops in walking distance. I'll do groceries at Costco, thank you very much. Parks are more likely to come by in less dense areas. The major benefit I see is that one can safely party within walking distance, and even that benefit is eroded by Uber :)
[FWIW, I lived in a couple "walkable" European cities in a previous life. Slogging through cold rain for basic necessities, oh the memories.]
I'm not saying it makes sense, but that's the only real argument I've heard.
This is an ongoing argument in Northern Virginia (which is not quite as expensive as SF / Seattle / NYC, but probably only one cost tier below that) and the major arguments are basically the same issues that apply to all "just build more housing, stupid" proposals.
Basically, if you suddenly build a lot more housing, you'd start to strain the infrastructure of the community in other ways. That strain is really, really unpleasant to other people who share the infrastructure, and so current residents -- who are often already feeling like things are strained and getting worse over time -- would rather avoid making things worse. The easiest way to avoid making things worse is just to control the number of residents, and the easiest way to do that is to control the amount of housing. If you don't live here, you're probably not using the infrastructure. QED.
In many ways, building more housing is the easiest problem to solve when it comes to urban infrastructure. Providing a heated place out of the rain just isn't that hard, compared to (say) transportation or schools or figuring out sustainable economic balance.
Existing residents are probably (very reasonably) suspicious that once a bunch of tiny apartments are air-dropped in, and then a bunch of people move in to fill them up, that there won't be any solution to any of the knock-on problems that will inevitably result -- parking, traffic, school overcrowding, tax-base changes, stress to physical infrastructure like gas/water/sewer/electric systems -- until those systems become untenably broken. I mean, I can't speak to Seattle, but those things are already an increasingly-severe problem today, with the current number of residents, in my area, and people don't have much faith in government's ability to fix them; so the idea that the situation will be improved once everyone installs a couple of backyard apartments is ridiculous. (And then there are questions like: how are these backyard apartments going to be taxed? Are people who move in really going to pay more in taxes than they consume in services and infrastructure impact, or is this going to externalize costs via taxes on everyone else? There's no clear answer to these questions, and people are reluctant to become the test case.)
If you want more housing, you need more infrastructure. If you want more infrastructure, either you need a very different funding model or you need better government and more trust in that government. Our government is largely (perceived to be) broken, and public infrastructure is (perceived to be) broken or breaking, and so the unsurprising result is that nobody wants to build more housing and add more strain to a system that's well beyond its design capacity anyway.
The bigger one is that the image most of these types of units seem to be trying to convey is that of small, efficient studios with bath & minimal kitchen for yuppies that used shared spaces to augment the small private spaces. (I've stayed multiple times in a 170 sq. ft. designed hotel room in NYC and it is indeed pretty much a place to sleep and work at a small desk.)
However, what a lot of residents probably see is something that isn't far removed from an SRO [1] such as you see in the Tenderloin and other dingy old downtown areas. If this is your perspective, it's not hard to see why you'd resist it.
From a city planning perspective if the majority of your new housing being built is being targeted to mid-20 year olds who just got imported by Amazon right out of college and only need space for a bed, then when those mid-20 year olds become mid-30 year olds and want a family there will be no housing to raise a family in.
Cities need families or the only way they grow is by relying on their major industries to import new residents, which is exactly what is happening with Amazon right now (Amazon has enough office space to employ about 11% of the city, and currently employs ~8-9% of Seattle). This is really dangerous for the long term health of any city.
Seattle is simply making sure that it's being developed in a way that will continue to support its residents as they grow. I live in Capitol Hill, love it, but it's pretty much turning into a big ass college dorm. While anecdotal, everyone I know that is starting a family is headed to Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, etc...
Update: the more I think about this, the more it doesn't make sense to me. I don't think Amazon tech workers, earning, say, $8K a month, are the target for microhousing. I really don't see how pushing down price will do anything other than increase diversity.
More likely result, if there ends up being a dearth of young single people, is people who commute in from the burbs will buy these units to use during the week and airbnb them on weekends.
And I question that only young people will want these units. I'm in my 50s and would love to have a tiny affordable place in the city, even if I only used it on weekends and airbnb'd it the rest of the time.
Do I want to buy an expensive 2 bedroom with garage in the city? Not really.
So you're effectively saying that these would become unlicensed hotels. That's not very attractive to local residents.
(I actually agree that small apartments would be attractive as pied-a-terres. But that's not really the sort of housing that city planners prioritize or should prioritize.)
lol so you want a second home in a desirable location, but not too big or expensive, or require too much maintenance, that you use only when it's convenient for you, and that someone else pays for? this is a fantastic idea. i'll take 2.
this is why the housing system is so screwed up in cities. everyone is scheming of ways to make money on their home, or have someone else pay for it, before they've bought it, lived in it, before it even exists!
Its people seeking their self interest, as all people tend to do, that are to blame.
If only they would all just stop doing it it so I could pursue my own self interest unimpeded.
But joking aside, I do think that micro apartments speed up the population growth faster than is sustainable. Your small businesses give way to chain stores, and there would be lines everywhere if you didn't crack down on microhousing -- unless you were also able to introduce some sort of "microhousing-equivilent shops and services" model. (Maybe crowd-sourced delivery would partially work, but there's something to be said for having a local coffee shop with a free table.)
In the early 2000's we crammed 4 people into a 3 bedroom apartment near The Harvard Exit. Our total rent... $1600 a month -- I think my cut was $375 -- and another $25 / month parking. So in that sense, I don't think microhousing is any worse than what we did, but there certainly weren't that many people lining up to live in Capitol Hill back then...
To this day that was my favorite place to live.
They certainly need more than just space for a bed and certainly get paid enough to afford a full studio or 1 or 2 bedroom apartment.
> ...then when those mid-20 year olds become mid-30 year olds and want a family there will be no housing to raise a family in.
They will move to Ballard or some other suburb like everyone else does, or live in the many other condos or larger apartments all over the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_home
There is a slide towards smaller and smaller apartments. Two bedroom units in major city centers are clocking in at 600 sq.ft. at times. Then put two parents and two kids in to one, maybe operate a day care or two out of them. Again, these are rental units, so the owners care about low fees and no phone calls. Renters don't want to lose their place, so the calls don't come. Fools that are owner/residents find themselves trapped.
Buildings with low owner/renter ratio may have programs with mortgages:
http://www.trulia.com/voices/Home_Selling/What_are_the_curre...
Plus, you never know if a single organization might buy up a massive number of units in the building and throw their weight around the strata to unduly benefit them.
One should also consider the source of the article. The author is a developer who would stand to make significant amounts of money on lower quality, rental focused apartments with more units per block. The hosting site has a huge focus on micro homes as a solution to everyone's needs or desires as well. Look at the list of articles under that section.
It's a small European town, with a University and a few other higher schools.
The houses in some parts of town were split in smaller and smaller units to maximise the rent profit (split one 2 1/2 flat worth 1'400 p/m and rent two single room flats for 900 each...).
The results is that Anna from the article would have found a shady cheaper flat and would be very happy with it (well, it's a bit expensive but it's mine!). But the spreading of micro apartments will also make her very unhappy for the rest of her life (the life before the first five years in her working career and the long years after that!).
She will come back and ask why there are no flats of reasonable size, for a reasonable price! She will state that not everybody is a twenty-something, who is almost never at home and only needs a bed to rest after yesterday evening party!
My stance: micro apartments are a need, but you probably don't want too many of them in town center. You need a good mix there and the twenty-something are not the ones who pay taxes nor the ones that build a solid social life.
If there's demand, won't there be supply eventually?
If people will start paying premium for reasonable size flats while leaving some smaller units unoccupied, market will surely correct itself. It's true that for some time market might be skewed toward wrong sizes, but you don't have to ban anything outright to prevent it, some soft regulations might be sufficient.
The problem you run into is that even people who have the money, can't find anything to buy or rent, and zoning laws or other types of limitations, prevent fixing the problem by increasing supply.
When the real solution to this problem, as to many others, is increasing supply.
And of course, nothing about that project is "exponential".
These are buildings we're talking about. A city can get stuck with the wrong size units for a very long time. There's a reason things like the Parker-Morris space standards were developed, and they recommended 30m^2 for single occupancy dwellings in the UK in 1961.
The 220ft^2 apartments are 20.5m^2, not very large at all. The really tiny ones have communal shared cooking areas, which have the potential to be a social problem.
I think people are terrified of some kind of Stand on Zanzibar future where they're economically constrained into smaller and smaller spaces, and this is one way to push back.
In a neighborhood like mine (75% SFR, 25% MFR free-standing homes in West Cambridge), you can bet that I'll object to zoning changes that would allow "just building up". I don't need the noise, traffic, additional pressures on the school system, nor do I want to live in a mid-rise and high-rise district. If I did, I'd have bought in one...
There should be other options than building in your backyard. Find underused places and build up there. The biggest problem is what to build and how: it's amazingly easy to screw this one up (too sparse? too dense? too high? too low?)
You can't simply conclude it's one xor the other.
And roommates can pretty much always outbid families for housing.
But do micro-apartments not just exacerbate the actual problem--that decent, reasonably sized homes for people in good locations are too rare or too expensive?
I can understand how these micro-homes might appeal to people in certain circumstances (I spent a while myself splitting a tiny studio in Seattle with a few other people--and that same apartment costs ~3x now what it did when I lived there 5 years ago), but I can't see how the problems these are trying to solve wouldn't be much better solved by building new desirable areas, increasing the supply of good housing, and driving the costs of all housing down.
If there are both families and individuals bidding for those reasonably sized homes, giving the latter a cheaper alternative should reduce for the larger houses, no?
We also already have cheaper alternatives in e.g. studio apartments, and we currently have families living in those.
I don't see how building downwards will solve these problems in a decent way going forward--it seems that it could only continually reduce peoples' living conditions.
Suddenly, there's a cheaper, lower end product that meets my needs. I go for that, someone who needs or wants the higher end product can go for that.
The article is not saying "build micro-apartments instead of normal ones". It is saying "make it possible to build micro-apartments alongside normal ones".
How much more would you be willing to pay for a micro apartment than for a house?
After a cup of tea, here's my conclusion: this is the housing equivalent of saying we must lower the minimum wage, otherwise employers will create fewer jobs.
It might be correct in a very narrow sense. It still doesn't feel right to me.
Some basic math on the author's numbers also reveal that the laws have compelling impacts on his bottom line for rental income - mainly in the downward direction.
Plus, looking at the floorplan of the proposed apartment: what on earth are people in one of these microhousing blocks going to do if there's a fire?!
Indeed, wages that go up increase fulfillment, all else being equal, but housing costs that go up increase civil unrest. It is not good for housing prices to increase unnecessarily.
Perhaps your discomfort is cognitive dissonance? If so, bravo. There are a lot about economics that defy common notions of decency, and you have to push through it to make decisions that bring actual long-term benefits. Human cognition is defective that way, but our remarkable intellect allows us to understand the bigger picture.
Often a builder requests special permission to exceed the zoning law, and build, say, 80 units per acre -- then solicits public outcry when denied. Zoning law gives owners a legal expectation.
You look at these shots, and you know instantaneously they're from the 21st century, spaces one would actually like to live in. It also looks like living in Seattle is really nice, something I've always suspected.