San Francisco Approves 220-Square-Foot ‘Micro-Apartments’
wired.com
wired.com
No, let's not build any more housing, let's completely stonewall any attempt to redevelop any land whatsoever (except Mission Bay, because it's the San Francisco Yuppie Quarantine Zone). Instead, let's subdivide existing housing into increasingly tiny units.
Because gosh-durnit the cute colorful Victorians are sacred and override all other concerns, including economic stagnancy, transportation nightmares, unprecedented rent increases, destroying traditional neighborhood demographics, and very fundamental quality of life.
Nope, none of that matters, because we're basing a housing policy on whether or not this neighborhood can pass for one from the early 20th century!
> economic stagnancy
It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
> transportation nightmares
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
> destroying traditional neighborhood demographics
Lol. The Chinese are doing just fine, but I guess you're referring to the former ghettos (Lower Filmore, Hunter's Point, the TL, etc.) that had huge drug problems and violence (It's still there, but siginificantly reduced) Yes, gentrification is unfortunate - but building high rises everywhere would ruin the "culture" much faster (though I would argue the Tenderloin doesn't have much culture to lose) and wouldn't solve the poverty among "traditional neighborhood demographics". What needs to be done, is a lot more needs to be spent on schools and city college and less on low income housing (where people are locked into poverty).
> very fundamental quality of life
That's just a vapid hyperbole. Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for. The NewYorkification of SF (started by the Gavin Newsome) is what will ruin the quality of life.
In my experience the people that whine and moan about there not being enough housing in SF are people that don't live there. I think what they're thinking is if there were more teeny tiny apartments then they could afford to live there. While that may be true, then SF wouldn't be SF anymore - and it would only be a short term fix as SF would become just as crowded and expensive as Manhattan.
> It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
You have a source on that stat? Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?
> I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
Nope, MUNI is awful. Unless you live relatively close on one of the train lines, you are in for a world of hurt. The average speed of a MUNI bus has been going down continuously over time (due to extra traffic), to the point where it is now like 7mph. That means it takes an hour to go from one end to the other (vs 25 minutes tops to go a similar distance on BART). That means more people get cars, which means the buses get even slower. I'd happily pay the NYC monthly rates if I had an equivalent transit system.
> Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for
San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings (6-7 stories) in more areas without forcing developers to jump through all the hoops they have to right now. Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly. Vancouver is consistently rated as having one of the highest quality of life scores in the world and has tons of high rises
It's actually pretty common for European cities to limit high-rise condos/office buildings in the city centers (usually with limits around 5-8 stories). To still achieve dense housing, tall condos and office buildings are usually built close to public transit somewhere a bit outside of the city center, plus the suburbs don't start as close in, so there's a bigger urbanized area. The Manhattan/Chicago/Vancouver style of a downtown characterized by skyscrapers isn't very common in Europe; more of a North American invention, particularly in the Chicago/Vancouver form where there's a high-rise downtown that quickly turns into suburban homes within a few kilometers.
The SF equivalent might be to not allow condo towers in SF, but to urbanize the areas a few BART stops out: why are there single-family homes, not denser housing, in San Bruno, West Oakland, and Daly City? But of course, the Peninsula is even more anti-development than SF is, so politically that just trades one source of opposition for another one (to take another example, people have been trying to convince Palo Alto to allow more dense housing near downtown/Stanford/Caltrain for years, but Palo Altoans want to keep it suburban).
That's in large part because people don't want to buy houses now (b/c of the volatility of the SF real-estate market and a lot of people don't feel it's a safe investment). And yet people are still renting (b/c wages are high).
> San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings
This is just not a longer term viable solution.
> Lots of cities in europe are filled with buildings of that height (eg paris) and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.
Paris a great example of where it does NOT work. You have the old center with the culture and the tourists and the traditional way of life (and yes, very very expensive real-estate). The parts that do have apartment blocks are on the outskirts and are poverty stricken monstrosities (with exceptions). People don't even consider them to be part of Paris proper.
Paris is definitely not an example of healthy development.
I concede that SF is an expensive city and lots of people can't afford it. I think that's just the new reality of the city and there isn't any viable long term way to fix it short of actively making the city less appealing to live in. I don't complain that rent in Manhattan is too high. I just don't live there. I personally can't afford to live in SF (though I grew up there and love the city), so I live elsewhere in California. But at the end of the day I don't expect SF resident to change their city to accommodate me.
If the population of the country is growing then those people have to go somewhere. You can either suburbanize the wilderness or you can let more people into existing cities, and while I can understand the desire of the people living in San Fransisco not to share the nice things they have I can't say I sympathize.
You've also presented a bit of a false dichotomy. I think the solution IS to develop smaller cities - that are stagnant and that have room to grow - into larger cities. You can call it "suburbanize the wilderness" but it's not exactly suburbanization because suburbs imply that people still commute to larger city centers. You can look at cities like Portland or something (I don't really know for sure if they're a good example) that develop a local tech field (or other industry), have local companies grow and multiply and they then become an economic center in their own right.
Getting to/from downtown and to the Outer Sunset easily takes an hour on severely over-capacity rail cars - a distance of a mere 6 miles. At rush hour the cars are literally packed - these are the most crowded transit vehicles I've ever been on on this continent, NYC included.
Their on-time performance is atrocious, frequently late by over 100% of their frequency (e.g., an every-15 schedule routinely results in trains late by more than 15 min).
So not only are the vehicles slow and infrequent, but they routinely fail to show up when they're supposed to. Every major study into public transit use will tell you that schedule reliability is critical to establishing a transportation network - without the ability to reliably make transfers people will simply stop using the system. The last I saw of it, MUNI vehicles were on time only 57% of the time (lateness is defined as being within 4 minutes of schedule, which in any large city transit is a margin as wide as a football field).
Large swathes of the city are entirely not served by anything even pretending to be mass transit - Pac Heights, Inner/Outer Richmond, the Marina, Russian Hill, are all big neighborhoods that are completely disconnected from any form of mass transit, BART, MUNI, or otherwise.
Buses are even worse off than light rail - there have been many efforts to improve the bus system to little effect. Efforts to make commutes substantially shorter (by taking out extremely closely spaced stops) have been repeatedly rejected by members of the public, who will proceed to complain about MUNI anyways.
Literally the only neighborhoods that have effective mass transit are the ones lucky enough to be connected to BART (read: Mission, Bernal, Balboa Park). These are the only neighborhoods that have access to a transportation system that is frequently on-time and actually reasonably fast. The BART has a slew of its own problems, but it's about 10x better than MUNI for getting people around.
SF isn't the worst transit system I've ever had to use regularly (Seattle takes the cake there, just barely), but it's severely under-developed and under-funded for a city of San Francisco's stature and ambitions (i.e., its very open goal of creating a car-free/car-reduced city). I dare say that if you do not own a car in San Francisco you will spend a significant sum on taxis, or Uber, or SideCar, or any of the other services that have been born from City Hall's transportation failure. That or you bike a lot.
The issue may be that this will raise prices of bigger apartments, but if they're reasonably priced ($1000 per month?) I can't see how this is a big problem. For someone that spends all day inside they might not be ideal, but someone who treats their apartment as their "base" for sleeping and eating and nothing more it shouldn't be a problem.
Location really is everything. Around here, you'll get about 2,200 sqft of living space in a less than 10-year old colonial house with a 2.5 car garage, 2+ acres of landscaped yard, for about $1,500/month. That's ownership, and only about 30 minutes from a large-ish metro area (1M in Greater Rochester). Traveling to NYC / BOS / PHL? By car: 6 hours, by plane: 1 hour.
With telecommuting being as accessible as ever, I have a hard time understanding why people pay these prices for such abysmal living spaces.
I spend maybe two hours a day awake in my (reasonably large for SF) apartment during the week, tops. The rest of the time I'm at work or out in the city somewhere; I treat the local downstairs basically like my living room.
It's not a lifestyle for everyone, but I consider the entire city my living space and I don't think it's abysmal at all.
That's why organizations such as this exist:
http://coworkingrochester.com/ http://interlockroc.org/ http://refreshrochester.org/ http://rochestermade.com/
If you don't like something about where you live, either change it, or move. Complaining about it for the sake of complaining won't change anything.
It's the people? That move away? So, move away? :)
I had heard of half of those organizations. Thanks for the link. Do you do Barcamp?
Silicon Valley isn't great because of its location, it's because of its people.
In other words, if you don't like like it in Rochester, either make it better (support local tech organizations, be proud to showcase work in Rochester, etc) ... or just leave. Complaining isn't going to do anything.
Are you kidding? Tokyo is laughing at SF's face, with its 80 square feet (4.5jō) rooms [1]!
(not that I'd want to live in this kind of arrangement again...)
[1] 1jō = 17.79 sq.ft. 1jō is the standard area for one tile of tatami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement#A...
This is in contrast to the UK, where it's culturally the norm for every flat to have its own washing machine (normally a condensor combi dryer, another thing not so popular in the US). Sames goes for heat: heat if often shared in the US, but here in the UK almost all apartments have individual boilers.
I am sure somebody here must have an explanation for exactly why this cultural difference has developed, because I have no clue!
How would the shared heating work, financially? Over here our energy costs are very high so a lot (most?) of our energy bills go on heating and hot water; if you want to save money, you put a jumper on and have a shower rather than a bath. With shared heating you don't have this option, but do the overall savings from greater efficiency (an assumption) make this a moot point?
e.g. Where we live started out as a 5 floor (enormous) town house with garden and stable block ~200 years ago and was split into 4 properties and then one of these was split into another 2.
...and you're not living in San Francisco, which is a deal breaker for some.
I live in the UK where the design of new build housing is generally poor. England and Wales have no minimum space standards for housing and we are very much the worse off for it. This is in contrast to many European countries that do have minimum space standards. (The exception in England is London which has recently adopted minimum space standards for any homes built with Government money.)
I completely agree that it's not just the size of an apartment that is important but the quality of the space. There's much that can be done to make better use of space in homes: it all comes down to design.
Housing is a topic that's very close to my heart. I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote some thoughts a while ago about the size of a dwelling and the quality of the space:
http://homesdesign.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/space-standards-...
Yes. If you don't make much money but want to work in SF/NYC/Boston/etc, your only option is to spend a lot of time driving/commuting from somewhere with cheaper housing. For some people, the choice to waste three hours of their life driving in traffic every day is worthwhile because they get a big house with a yard. But others would be happy to sacrifice lots of living space if it meant that they didn't have to blow 3 hours of stressful commuting.
When cities declare "you can't sell a 220 sq ft apartment", they force that choice on everyone, even people who wouldn't choose it for themselves.
Minimum area standards basically impose a floor on the cost of living. In some American suburbs, this is often explicitly used to keep out the undesirables; you require that each house have at least an acre of land and that the structure take up less than X% of the lot so that prices rise to the point that low income folk or recent immigrants can't afford to live in your town.
Artificial constraints based on illusory and/or narrow-minded premises are far more damaging.
You're not going to want to live in such a place with 4 kids, the grandparents, and a dog, but for many people it's fine.
It gives people the ability to make a tradeoff between, say, size and location, so one can live in a more interesting area without being a billionaire.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kent_larson_brilliant_designs_to_fi...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak
There's nothing "smart" about SmartSpace :-(
There are other examples around of similar sized spaces that are much better used
The SRO analogy immediately came to mind--I wondered what would prevent these from having the same issues residential hotels have. Is it really just the (reasonable) expectation that setting a artificially high price will drive away the poor?
Simply: these new units are more of the same, but for wealthier people (and I will be sending in my resume, TBH.)
They're still livable, mind you, for some value of 'livable'.
In other words, if that is considered "micro" nowadays then my standards must be awfully skewed (which they probably are) and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised when I move out of here.
That might be 'micro' for Queens or even Washington Heights, but that's certainly not 'micro' for Chelsea or the Village.....
> I have seen several "nano-apartments" in NYC that wouldn't fit a queen-size bed comfortably
My friend had a tough time figuring out how to fit his full-sized bed - ended up deciding that it wouldn't work, and opted for a futon instead.
I think the main issue with NYC "micro" apartments is that they're often carved out of older units/buildings and shaped very strangely, resulting in less useful space overall than the number you're actually getting.