The 160sq ft apartment | Hacker News Reader

The 160sq ft apartment

berkeleyside.com

32 pointsolegious48 comments

I don't think the market will bear that price. In NYC or DC the market wouldn't bear that price. And frankly Berkeley, while nice, is no SF, NYC or DC.

The concept of this place isn't bad. Many will decry the lack of space, but the concept is just a place to sleep and get ready in the morning. If the price were right (say $500 or so), it could be a nice way to live in a great part of town without spending a ton of money. One of the joys of urban living is that the city is your extra rooms. You don't need thousands of square feet and a huge yard.

And if this place were $500 or so, you would have plenty of cash to go out and enjoy the city on a daily basis. But at $1,600 a month, only someone with a lot of money could afford to live there and enjoy the city a lot, which I think defeats the purpose of this kind of living arrangement. $1,600 would get you at least a studio in a very nice part of DC.

100 years ago, it was common for people to live in apartments that didn't have kitchens. You ate in the cafe on the first floor of your building. You could get away with a much smaller place by living this way. I think the concept makes a lot of sense still for people who don't want to take care of a home, but the price has to be right.

At $2/sqft, people would be snapping these up by the dozens just for crash space. At $10/sqft it's a ludicrously bad deal. This seems so obviously doomed that I wonder if the article is a misprint.

Particularly considering that one of the main marketing thrusts is how cheap these places are to build. It's be hard not to feel like your getting shafted at $1600/mo.

nod for $500 a month, it might be worth it to rent it to shorten commute during the weekdays (or a place to crash after partying on weekends), then live the weekends and the rest of the time further out from the city where $1600 might even get you a 2 br apartment.

They could learn a lot from boating.

I live on a boat, and coincidentally I have 160 sq. Ft. of indoor living area.

In that space I have a functional kitchen w. Fridge, oven, cookers, freezer, microwave etc. A bathroom, a table where 8 people can sit and eat, bedroom, two chaiselongs, two guest beds, an office, cupboards and storage. And of course an engine and a steering console - which I presume isn't of much use in a normal apartment.

I can also change the view out the window if don't like the current one. :-)

On the other hand, boats don't stack very well. But I'm sure you could take all the stuff from your 160-sq. Ft. boat and fit it just as easily into a stackable box-shaped 160 sq. Ft. apartment.

I'm sure you could stack a few, they're pretty sturdy :-)

But most of them don't have flat bottoms (or tops, for that matter).

Isn't boating quite a lot cheaper than conventional housing too.

In my case I paid around $36.000 for the boat, and I pay on average $300 a month for mooring, electricity and heating. A small apartment in Copenhagen, which is where I live, is around $300.000.

So yes, it's a lot cheaper. Also a lot more fun.

The best definition of a boat I've heard is a hole in the water you throw money into.

"The San Francisco units will rent for $1,595 a month." Even in this property market, even downtown, that's just ridiculous for a dinky 160 square feet. Even furnished.

"a reconfigured bathroom and the addition of a washer/drier." Only 160 square feet and you install a washer/drier instead of in-building laundry or a laundromat up the street? That's not really the epitome of "sustainable" / "urban infill" either.

"It’s a regulatory thicket in San Francisco." Yes. It's true. We suck.

$10 per square foot per month is almost double the commercial real estate rate in SF.

Presumably, rent costs don't remain linear as you approach 0 square feet.

At 1600 per month I am guessing his target market requires at least a few perks. I think the point is mostly that lots of these people have no need for the extra space.

> The San Francisco units will rent for $1,595 a month.

I was wondering about this pricing. I pay the same amount for a 850 square foot apartment in Upper East Side Manhattan (83rd and 1st so a 10 minute walk from the 4/5/6 but still...). I started reading with the thought "I'd pay ~$800 for that if it was decently located".

I split an apartment in Cole Valley SF in 2006-7 and think we were at ~$1800 for a two bedroom but it was a pretty crappy apartment for the area.

Yes, this is way higher than a studio over twice this size would be in the building next door. Not sure what value they claim to be adding...

But, prices are up >15% since you were here. You can thank the explosion in population of and increased income of the demographic that reads this very site.

That's half the price of every similar Manhattan apartment I have seen. That is a DC price, not an Upper East Side price. Long term rent control?

It's a small/non-doorman building and I got it in late 2009 and the landlord had just remodeled, had a number of vacancies in the building (coincidence, not a building problem) and really wanted to rent it. I got a good deal on it but I've talked to other people in the area with similar apartments in the $1800-1900 range. If I were closer to Central Park or the river, the price goes way up.

Or when the new 2nd Ave subway is finished...

Thought has occurred to me but I'm looking forward to this! Will be neat to be able to go from home to work without actually walking a full block at either end.

Pretty sure one of the 86th street entrances is coming up on my block because they dug a ~40 foot deep hole and have a giant white truss sitting on my corner.

$1800 will get you only a 1 bedroom in Cole Valley these days - and not even a nice one. Tech Bubble 2.0 and all that. Anything on the east side of the city is through the roof, really, especially if it's a nice neighborhood like Cole Valley or Duboce. Moreover, as soon as Facebook goes IPO everyone expects alllll the Noe Valley homes to get bought up by the new millionare types.

But you can still get a good 2BR in the Inner Sunset or the Inner Richmond / north of the Panhandle (near USF) for the low-to-mid $2000s, and it will easily be five times as big as this place. You can do even better in the outer mission or Ocean View / Taraval (near CCSF), and quite fine in the southwestern corner by the main UCSF campus. Mission Bay students have it a little harder if they're not in on-campus housing - perhaps somewhere in the Bayview? Of course, Mission Bay campus is a short walk from the Caltrain depot, as well, and the transfer to a streetcar from BART is doable.

I still suspect that apartment is for PARTYING PARTYING every night and living the Bohemian lifestyle where you're mostly in your place to sleep and occasionally study. Their parents are paying for it. The price premium is because "we can easily sell this to the rich parents who are only in town a short period of time".

I don't know much about living in SF, but would people actually pay that much? It seems like people would only go for this if it was cheaper (to me).

>Or for any modern city dweller for whom home need not mean much more than where you wake up and go to sleep.

Unless it costs less, it'd be just as easy to use a regular sized wake-up-and-go-to-sleep place, wouldn't it? I'm just baffled.

It really is ridiculous. For around that much you can get a nice, if small, studio in most desirable places in the city that is at least twice that size. And that would still hurt to pay for.

>"The San Francisco units will rent for $1,595 a month." Even in this property market, even downtown, that's just ridiculous for a dinky 160 square feet. Even furnished.

Even for a carbon-nuetral home? Eco-homes are pretty expensive usually.

http://www.zetacommunities.com/interactive-graphic.html

I hear of downtown SF studios going for up to 2500/mo. Perhaps they're betting that demand will keep rising uncontrollably over the next decade, making their prices comparatively reasonable.

I would not have minded living in such small of a space in the past. With two big caveats. Based on actual experience, I've found the two biggest problems living in apartments -- well, sharing walls/floors/ceilings with strangers, anyway -- is the noisey neighbors phenomenon, and the smoking/non-smoking thing. No matter what the official policy is on noise, there will be that guy who decides to operate what sounds like a jackhammer at midnight, on a work night. Or you'll be in an absolutely non-smoking building, floor, apartment, etc. and yet this mysterious cigarette smoke will come out of the ventilation system.

Providing a small living space? Not that hard of a problem.

Solving the rude neighbors problem and/or totally insulating/mitigating it? Harder. (Still not impossible, in my judgment.)

Sound insulation isn't that difficult, it just costs money, and it's one of the easiest places to cut corners. When people are looking at an apartment they look to see how the kitchen is, if it has hardwood floors, a balcony, etc. No one asks, "how is the sound insulation," but they should.

Municipalities would be doing civilization a huge favor if they upped the minimum sound insulation requirements for apartment/condo buildings.

Some neighbors are just plain rude and in their own world, but a lot of the issues that buildings can have are from poor materials.

The good news is that it's pretty cheap to throw down extra foam insulation under the floor to mitigate noise issues. But don't expect builders to do it.

There is nowhere in Berkeley that close to the Bay Bridge. In fact, that has to have been taken in San Francisco, so the caption is clearly wrong.

The author refers to a 'trompe l'oeil' view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27oeil

Trompe-l'œil, which can also be spelled without the hyphen in English as trompe l'oeil,[1] (French for 'deceive the eye', pronounced [tʁɔ̃p lœj]) is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.

(edit: HN doesn't like the ' in a link)

Ah, I should have actually looked up what that meant, and my question would have been answered. Thanks fennecfoxen.

The view is probably fake to hide the building's (as the article puts it) "top-secret location."

Look at the reflection of the window in the mirror.

I don't think those are real windows, or they're covered up with a picture.

I find these things interestingly creative, I've got a 'class B' motorhome (basically a full size van with stuff retro-fitted into it) and it's quite livable for one person.

I totally agree the $1600 seems out of line, but cities are really conflicted about low cost housing. There are many ways that such places could allow housing more people who are between homeless for chemical/physical reasons and just below the "food" + "housing" level.

Apartments of this size are typical in Japan, and also do not come at a reduced cost. There, however, one can buy miniaturized appliances (refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry) which do not cause one to sacrifice having those 'luxuries'.

Are you in Tokyo? Space is prized but at this size even in Yokohama, living out of a hotel room downtown cost barely more than these apartments. And that was before I caught on to all the 50000/mo ALT-havens...

Forgive my ignorance, but it's been a while since I was in Tokyo. What's an ALT-haven? Is that like a residential version of a capsule hotel?

Hah no no, ALT as in Assistant Language Teacher. The go-to "career" to anyone who speaks English (or any European language as well I suppose) and has no other reputable skills (okay fine... experience) to immigrate to Japan.

As others have mentioned, no, the costs in Japan are far lower than this. You could get a place twice as big for the same money, at a very central location, in a brand new building.

Hell, you could get a bigger place for much LESS. My friend just rented a brand new place in Shibuya for 95000 a month, with beautiful interior, entryway, super-modern shower/bath, gas range, ample space for a proper washing machine, and the main living space is separated from everything else by a heavy door. The whole building is built from such heavy concrete that there is no worry about bothering/being bothered by the neighbors.

This is utterly standard. I hope some day soon the US figures out how to build similarly awesome but affordable buildings.

In Redmond, $1100 buys you something like 1000 square feet (2 bedroom). $1500 for 700 REALLY nice square feet. I'm sorry, but no. 1500$ a month for a micro-studio is completely unacceptable. Even, I imagine, in the Bay Area. What's really insulting is that at 160 square feet and some good sound proofing, you can have 3 or 4 of those places in the space I have my 1. That means they'd be making 6000$ a month on people. I think I know where the price really comes from.

Isn't Redmond largely suburban? I don't think the two compare.

You're correct, there's plenty of space and they're continuously building new apt complexes. My old apt was 1300sqft for something like 1500/mo with 2 garage spots. It's a completely different situation compared to SF.

What are the apt complexes like? Can you walk to stuff? Are the buildings mixed-use with businesses on the first floor?

In most of the country, zoning prohibited mixed-use zoning for much of the 20th century. It was a huge mistake that only be unraveled now. The side effect of that is that areas with good mixed-use and walkability are really expensive. This is a large reason that places like NYC and SF are so expensive, especially the areas with mixed-use zoning.

New mixed-use housing stock isn't coming online fast enough and the Bay Area in particular is very anti-desnity, despite the fact that they need it. Restrict growth, particularly growth with height, and you'll have expensive rents and housing prices.

The 1500 for 700 square feet is right in the middle of town and has a restaurant on the bottom of one of the buildings. Red 160 is its name.

Soundproofing. I don't need a lot of space, but I do need peace and quiet.

I thought it looked like a great concept for someone in their early 20's, just starting out, that didn't need much space. Somewhere I'd have been willing to live at 22, while trying to start a company on a shoe string.

Then I saw the price. Hopefully the market teaches them a lesson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel

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