"What's In?" Micro Apartment Model on Display

[bbfen]

You're right. I retract my earlier defense of trying anything at all.

 

[Nexis4jersey]

Most of my friends even the ones making 80-90k are saddled with at 60-140k in debt from student loans , some have car loans and credit card debt....so that 90k they make a year amounts to very little. So by pricing these micro apartments at 1800$ your really target age is in the 30s like CBS said.... But the Reality is that most of my friends who have graduated and entered the workforce except for a few lucky ones earning over 80k , make a measly 40k..... These Micro Apartments should be cheaper around 500$ and marketed to people who have just graduated and need a small cheap place to live. We have Art Villages down here which run off that formula....and work out just fine.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

You're right. I retract my earlier defense of trying anything at all.

Now you're just being needlessly flippant.

Again, I'm not against the concept of a micro-apartment. I'm not arguing that they aren't potentially a very valuable part of the housing market in Boston.

What I am arguing is that the economics of the cost of living in one of these units doesn't even come close to lining up correctly. What I am arguing is that if you can't capture your target demographic right out of the gate, when they have little spending power and sizable loans to repay, you have absolutely no hope of getting a second chance at it two or three years down the line.

And I hate to bring up "the cost of doing nothing," but having a bunch of micro-apartments go unfilled while recent graduates continue to leave the city and not come back in two or three years to fill them would truly be a worse scenario than not having them built at all.

Look, I'll bite. Having this whole thing degenerate into an argument over culture and lifestyle isn't going to help any of us - so I'm sorry for reacting to your earlier post in the way that I did. Really, I am. Could you please edit the content back into your previous posts and we can move on?

(By the way, strikeout is not supported by this BB software. Most of the smilies are apparently missing as well.)

 

[JohnAKeith]

I'm not adding anything to this conversation, but simply repeating myself only because the whole micro-unit fad annoys me. This type of housing won't do anything to lower the price of living in the city (or in NYC) and only create (as we see here on this board) false expectations.

What we all would prefer - a multi-class downtown - isn't practical, given all the problems we know about on this board (land-use restrictions, neighbor resistance, etc. Given these limitations, it's not practical to expect brand-new one-person housing in downtown Boston affordable to a 20-something college graduate. How many of you could afford a brand-new car when you graduated from college? No, you got a used car or your parents gave you one.

You have [strike]three[/strike] four choices:

1) Pay 50%+ of your (gross) income and live in downtown Boston;
2) Get a roommate (Crummy 2-beds in the South End can be had for $2,400);
3) Live in Allston, Brighton, South Boston, Malden, Medford, Dorchester, or Mission Hill, either alone or with a roommate;
4) Apparently, move to Philadelphia, the promised land.

I won't suggest that "it's always been this way" since real estate prices are obviously higher (compared to income) than ever, most-likely. However, when I graduated college in 1989, I paid $650 per month to live in a sixth-floor walk-up in Allston - and only found out on Thanksgiving Eve that the oven never worked (yeah, that was the first time I cooked something in there ...). My salary was $22,500 per year, about 35% of my gross income, and half my take-home.

Rents have, what, doubled since then for a similar crappy apartment? Or, more? $1,500? Of course, salaries haven't, by far. I bet the same job I had wouldn't pay more than $32,000-$35,000 today. I'd have to take on a roommate.

Oh, this is a good place to say to that a-hole who said all I want are higher rents that you're an a-hole and obviously know nothing about me. Also, you're an a-hole.

EDIT: Reading this post, you'd think I am high or something. Not sure - maybe there's a gas leak here.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

Right, and I actually agree with John in the sense that I don't think it's practical to expect that a multi-class downtown can be created in Boston as things stand today. What's needed for that to happen, in my opinion, is an extremely large and diverse portfolio of new housing to be built all across the city, top to bottom. Nothing less is going to solve our problem, as much as we'd all like to believe that just building enough [luxury units/micro-units/dorms/fill-in-the-blank] is going to somehow offset the fact that at the end of the day, a housing surplus can only deflate the cost of rent so far. No amount of luxury units in the city is going to suddenly make them all 'affordable' by any appreciable metric. Only a wide range of target rents from the low ($600~$800) all the way up to the exorbitant ($4000+) can make living in the city 'affordable' for most people.

Unfortunately, a diverse range of housing is not what's being built. Most of the new projects, last I checked, were "luxury" - with a smattering of dorms and 'affordable' housing that turns out to be 'falsely affordable.' There's no 'moderately priced' projects, no 'middle-of-the-road' projects, nothing to fill the extremely wide berth between "luxury" and "affordable" - even if the 'affordable' metric has been pushed ever closer to the luxury one.

The illusion of affordability, helped along by statements like this, doesn't help:

Inquiring minds want to know: Why aren't more emerging professionals living in the city center? Are they even interested? Does it matter?

It turns out that it does matter. Emerging professionals (read "cheap workforce") make up the essence of a diverse, innovative and creative economy. They have been shown to contribute progressive ideas, engage in community activity, and turn the economic engine of urban environments.

Yet the Boston "brain drain" is a very real condition affecting the city's economy year after year. The city welcomes students in the fall and lets them go in the spring. Some stay local and live in affordable suburbs but many leave the region all together, taking their good ideas and bright futures with them.

The What's In team believes that it is in Boston's best interest to offset this trend and is investigating ways to 1) attract emerging professionals to live in downtown Boston and 2) provide emerging professionals with a variety of housing opportunities to appeal to their lifestyle interests.

In fact, the false expectations generated by such things are, in a way, even more damaging than hypothetically going in the opposite direction and making direct statements like "affordability is not the goal."

Do I think 'micro-units' have a place in the city's housing market? Do I think they have the potential to be a valuable part of the city? Yes, I do. I would never live in one, but I don't pretend to be typical. Several of my friends would gleefully move in tomorrow morning - for the right price. Unfortunately, the right price is not the apparent price as things stand today, with the facts as we know them.

I wasn't trolling or being hyperbolic when I said that these micro-units would "by all apparent indications end up producing absolutely nothing of any value to the city" - because at $1500 or $1800 a month, they won't.

And I think it's better to come out against a bad project than to let it happen and then be 'shocked and disappointed' when the 'micro-units' fail to accomplish the goal they claim to have been designed for, leaving the city worse then they found it.

 

[underground]

Good news is, knock down one wall and you've got a 2 bed 2 bath. Maybe they can even charge extra for the strange second kitchen.

 

[JohnAKeith]

Cross reference this post with the "adapting dead malls" thread ...

One of America's Oldest Shopping Malls Converts to Micro-Apartments
Lamar Anderson, Atlantic Cities

Aside from the economic whupping of 2008–2009, a major casualty of the recession was space itself. Homeowners and businesses bled square footage, leaving behind a landscape of empty McMansions, vacated big-box stores, and now-famously abandoned shopping malls. Since then, many municipalities have been grappling with how to repopulate these spaces with more nimble, post-boom uses. Existing mall mashups pretty much stick to the public realm—like Cleveland’s indoor gardens and Vanderbilt’s health clinics—but this spring a shuttered shopping center in downtown Providence will be reborn in micro form, with two stories of micro-apartments above ground-floor micro-retail.

As nightmarish as a total mall existence sounds, this project offers Providence residents the best shot at living in a landmarked piece of architectural history they’ll probably ever have. Built in 1828 by architects James Bucklin and Russell Warren, the Greek Revival structure was the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1976, but by 2010 had made the Providence Preservation Society’s 10 Most Endangered Buildings list.

Working with J. Michael Abbott of Northeast Collaborative Architects, developer Evan Granoff sliced up the Arcade’s two upper floors into 48 apartments. Thirty-eight are micro—between 225 and 450 square feet—a scale that brings the new spaces closer in line with the mall’s 1828 design, according to Granoff. "It’s allowing us basically to put the building back to what it was when it was built," he told Providence Business News. "They were individual rooms that were tiny. We’re actually creating more of the streetscape [feel] that was inside."

It's just like a dorm-room! Hooray.

The tenants who move into the $550 apartment-lets this spring won’t need to bring much. The units come with built-in beds, full baths, and storage, so anyone fresh from dorm life or a recession-mandated stay with family could breeze in with nothing but a new mall wardrobe, a toothbrush, and some takeout from one of the ground-floor restaurants. With no stove to speak of, micro-dwellers will have to make due with, yes, their micro-waves.

Remind me again; who would want to live here?

Source: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/de...hopping-malls-converts-micro-apartments/4755/