In the waning days of the Bloomberg administration, the Times announced that he had lifted the restrictions on how small you could build an apartment so that an experiment could take place to build, off site, tiny pre-fabricated apartments, then truck them into the city, and stack them in place to make a very cheap, instant apartment house.
The Times recently documented the near completion of just such a building at 335 East 27th with many photos and generous copy. The building on 1st Avenue is very near 129 Lexington Avenue at 29th Street, which became our first apartment when we got married 56 years ago and in which we had our first child Athena (as I write this, it is Athena’s birthday today—happy birthday Athena.)
Now these new experimental apartments are small—between 260 and 360 square feet, the size of the walk in closet on billionaire row, but they are not so cheap—$2000 for the very small one and $3000 for the still small but bigger one.
OK, our apartment at 129 Lexington was the 2nd floor back half of a brownstone built 20 wide with one bedroom and a kitchenette as you came into the door. We had an Irish bar underneath us and their kitchen roof extended way out under our windows, so we could climb outside and do charcoal cooking (My Greek father who grew up with nothing but charcoal fires wanted to know why we didn’t use the nice new gas stove). Oh, and the rent-controlled rent was $57.50.
This morning when I was discussing the idea of a 360 foot mini-apartment with neighbor Ron Morris over coffee, he surprised me by pointing out “hey, that’s smaller than this room” referring to my 20 by 20 kitchen.
The Times writer tells us that both housing advocates and developers are eyeing this experiment closely. The advocates as a way of cheaply building for recent college grads wanting their first apartment alone and developers to, well, to do what developer’s do—make money building cheaply off site and buying as little expensive real estate as possible.
Now you have to be careful with the Times, and maybe all newspapers these days, because they have cut way back on editorial staff and buy more and more of their articles. So the writer of an article may, in reality, have been retained by a PR firm to subtly push someone’s interests. Or, in this case, they may have been swept away by the tiny house enthusiasm that has infected popular culture, represented in a plethora of TV programs such as Tiny House Nation.
For whatever reason, our Times writer, Natalie Shutler is all out for tiny apartments, and neglecting the primary rule of journalism to tell both sides fairly, she cites only the positive. The city agencies, architects, builders and people living in tiny apartments she mentions are in love with the idea of micro mini-apartments.
There is a longish paragraph on 27-year-old Kelli Okuji, who lives in a renovated hotel room of 313 feet square with a Murphy bed and a rent of $2600 a month. Okuji is happy because she got away from three roommates. Her one negative comment seems a throw-away—she thinks the bathroom is too small and the sink too tiny.
Shutler does admit that the current zoning that does not allow for tiny apartments goes back to “1987 to prevent a return to the days of the overcrowded tenement.” But she also quotes mini-apartment architect Eric Bunge, who says the family size apartments built after the war are an “historic aberration” that have influenced “how much space we think we need.”
Interestingly, she does not ask anyone about what has influenced the size of those closets on billionaire row that could house one or two of these micro mini-apartments.
Shutler goes on to quote Sarah Watson of Citizen Planning and Housing Council: “The many two and four bedroom units on the rental market better respond to the housing market of the 1950’s” when apartments were “designed for families.” That doesn’t match our family’s experience. We had Athena in a one-bedroom apartment, but moved to a three-bedroom house on Charles Street to have Ariadne and Doric, with a garden out back for them to play. And as I look around my kitchen, I’m not sure I agree that my ideas about space have been unduly influenced by the apartment we outgrew as Bunge suggests.
It is when Shutler cites several authorities as concluding that zoning laws are “old-fashioned” that I think we are getting close to her real argument.
She discusses the “illegal housing underground” that already exists with “widespread flouting of the law” such as apartments occupied by “three people who are not related.” Then she moves on to the story of developer Mathew Baron who wants to be allowed to build two and three-person apartments with 250 feet per person, arguing, like Shutler has, that “people are already living this way.”
In essence, this article is an argument to change the zoning laws so developers can build cheap mini-apartments and get the same rents they could get in the larger legal size apartments that our zoning laws now demand. Believe me, if they were suggesting a return to the $57.50 I paid on Lexington, or truly affordable housing, my opinion would be much different.
If you wondered what de Blasio means when he says that in order to build 160,000 apartments in ten years we have to build “taller and denser” now you know how.
The word taller is pretty clear, but the word “denser” means apartments under 400 square feet.
