Can someone explain the reasons why there is such resistance to micro apartments from city councils? Fear of increased population density? Neighbours complaining?
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
And roommates can pretty much always outbid families for housing.
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.
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".
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.
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.