# Why This Tiny Apartment is Taking Over American Cities

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Stewart Hicks
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejPOLhfBpy8
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/43464

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

In 2017, residents began moving into this building. It's the first of its kind in Chicago. It's an entirely new structure that's filled with apartments that are no bigger than just a hotel room. Buildings have been sprouting up almost everywhere. And in some cities like Seattle, they make up almost 2/3 of every new apartment in construction. Neighbors were baffled why anyone would want to live in something this small. Community groups have voiced concerns that these units crowd too many people together and that they make neighborhoods less stable as young people come and go. — I'm wondering if this is just another form of uh shrinkflation like when a Pringles can that was 150 g became 134 without anyone announcing it. Across the country, apartments are collapsing at a pace of about 50 square ft just in the last decade. But the ones that we're talking about here, they're much smaller than average at around 350 ft or less. In addition to being small, if you look at their floor plans, they're all pretty much the same layout, too. There's a little entry strip off of the hallway and then a bathroom off to the side, a kitchen that's smashed up against a wall or tucked into some tiny al cove, and then there's one main room that's trying its best to do everything from being a bedroom to a living room to an office and everything else that you might need it to be. When a full space for living is compressed to become this compact, fewer solutions are available that satisfy all of the regulating laws and codes. So the layout becomes basically just a transparent reflection of these code minimums. For instance, let's look at the plumbing. Bathrooms and kitchens want to stack vertically in predictable lines so you're not running rogue pipes all over the place. And that's why all of the bathrooms form like a thick band somewhere in the middle near the hallway. Any lateral pipes will go into the hallway and then connect down to chase somewhere. The next invisible shaping force are accessibility standards and those set the minimum clearances between the walls, doorways, and kitchen access. You also have the structural module for the load bearing walls which divide up the units. All of those are non-negotiable strips of space that just can't be squeezed any further. So, plumbing sets locations for things near the hallway and then physical access and structure sets the width of the unit. The depth then is set by egress and the distance from daylight and ventilation. Each unit is allocated only so much of a window area and that's driven by the minimum ceiling height and obviously the minimum width. The outcome is a plan that is a result of this balancing act driven by costs and laws and that leaves the architect's creative freedom squeezed into just a thin veneer. So why are these so popular then? It's easy to assume that the proliferation of these dimminuative domiles is motivated solely by the bottom line of developers. more units, more rent, and more everything squeezed into the cheapest envelope possible. While profit is a piece of the puzzle, it's only just a piece. A surprising number of reviewers who live in this building call it the best value in Chicago, even when they're paying more per square foot than almost anyone else in the city. So, if it's such a good value, we have to look somewhere else which makes it a good place to live, like in the structure or the market or the codes, to see why they're spreading so quickly. And to arrive at that answer, let's just play developer on this site for a minute. This was just a lonely empty lot before it was a stack of these tiny apartments. On the other side of that block though is this bus stop. And that detail matters a lot because it makes this a transitoriented development or a tod in this zone. Developers don't need to provide parking for every single resident. It also means that according to Chicago code that you're allowed to build a project made entirely of small efficient units. No parking and all efficiencies. Both of those things would be completely forbidden if this was further from a bus stop. With that set, we can look at the maximum building area for this site, which is just over 50,000 ft². We have a choice. We can either fill this volume with 50 normalsiz units at about 1,000 ft each or 100 units at 500 ft² each. Common sense says that this 100 unit version will be more expensive to build than the 50unit version. That's because you've doubled the amount of kitchens and bathrooms and doors and all of the construction hassles that goes with connecting everything. Studies suggest that this increase in cost can run in the order of 5 to 15% higher than the same building area. Added to that, this building design is even more complicated and less compromising to manage at this scale. Despite this copypaste strategy that the architect might be deploying of similar units, a lot of design energy actually goes into squeezing those micro moments into a tight frame. a built-in ledge by the window or a nook that doubles as a desk and both a dining table or just a ceiling height that makes the footprint feel a little bit bigger than it is. Some designs even call for robotic furniture that adapts the functionality of that space throughout the day and those are not cheap. The design is also uncompromising in that unique footprints don't work very well because the strict unit layout can't accommodate that kind of scale of disruption. Just look at these horrible layouts from a proposal a few years ago for fitting micro apartments into the old post office. So, this version with more units is more expensive to build, and each unit rents for less because it's smaller. But let's not forget that

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

smaller units almost always rent for more per square foot overall. In some cases, even twice as much. And this is what people are probably reacting to when they see this tiny little apartment renting for what feels like a really big number. and it drives pretty much a singular narrative around developer greed. But the financials aren't set by the developer alone. The lenders with money, they actually prefer microunit projects, too. Since the Great Recession, they've been way more conservative. Even in 2025, they're giving out only half the number of construction loans as they did in 2007. But a building that's full of micro units have already proven themselves in a market. So, they look especially appealing cuz they tend to lease up quickly and they stay full. More units in a given footprint is also more attractive to lenders because it means a more stable rental income. Just a couple vacancies here and there won't be a big deal. And finally, lower rents open the door to a larger pool of people that can afford it. I mean, that's just math. So, yes, there is definitely an economic incentive to go smaller because this is where the other side of the equation starts to fill out. Sure, most people would prefer to pay less rent, but that doesn't explain why apartments are shrinking. Many micro apartments have premium finishes and rents that match that. That's just because the market rate is not set by the size alone. The demand for smaller units is riding on a much bigger shift. More people are living alone than almost any point in recent history. And they want to live in cities. The average number of people per household has been shrinking for decades. In the 1960s, it was well over three people per household. And now it's below two and a half. Zoom into Chicago and that pattern sharpens even further. Roughly four out of 10 households in the city are just one person and in the loop over half of the population lives alone. So when you're walking up and down State or Dearborn and you look up at Marina City all lit up, odds are that at least every other window is just one single person living up there. Now when all those people when they come to the city to live here, what kinds of units are waiting for them? Well, they find single family homes like classic workers cottages or those bungalows which are everywhere and they make up about a quarter of the building stock. Two to four flats make up about the same. Then around 20% are condos and then about a third are larger buildings with over five units in them. Very few of these were built with oneperson households as their main customer. That's because over the last half century zoning laws have quietly squeezed out a lot of the in between by locking in huge areas of the city into single family zoning. Other laws layer on required parking ratios or lot coverage rules that make small, modest apartments very hard to build at a price that most people can pay. At the same time, there's a big group of people who are perfectly happy to trade square footage for other things like a prime location or group amenities inside of their building or easy access to transit. So, here we are with this hugely turbulent mix. A lot of households that are just one person, a housing stock that's largely built for bigger families. The city has just changed and people's lives have changed and the building types they haven't kept pace. Tiny apartments then are just one way that the market has tried to catch up because we are short over 2 million homes in the US with well over 100,000 just needed in Chicago alone. So these micro apartments are one tool on the table to close that gap as quickly as possible, especially in areas where demand is high and transit is good. And even when they're marketed as luxury, they're still doing a basic job because they're putting front doors in places where zoning, land cost, and income levels make larger, cheaper units extremely hard to deliver because those units take pressure off of the genuinely affordable ones for those that need them. So, they're doing a deceptively large amount of work to help ease the housing shortage. But it's very easy to miss because they don't look like what we'd expect. Instead, they almost look like gentrification in physical form. And sometimes that feeling isn't just paranoia. Better finishes and higher rents means far fewer options for the people who used to live in a place like this. But in a lot of cases, when you pause and you ask what likely would have gotten built if these micro units weren't allowed, the picture is not so clear. In many cities, the honest answer is probably nothing would be built at all or a much smaller number of big expensive units. Seattle is a great example of this. When the city originally tightened rules around microousing, it didn't trigger a wave of large, generous, cheap apartments, it mostly meant fewer homes overall and more expensive small ones. Analysis there suggests that microousing restrictions cut production by hundreds of units a year and pushed the rents up of what did get built. But that kind of data does not line up with how people feel about housing. In a recent poll, 79% of Americans said that housing costs were too high or way too high. 62% said it's become harder to find housing that they can afford. But only about 1 quarter thought that building more housing in their community would actually bring costs down. So there's this strange tension where small apartments are blamed for the housing crisis that they're actually sitting

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 12:00) [10:00]

inside of. The real problem is when micro units are the only thing that can get built at all, which is kind of where we're at now. What's really missing in most neighborhoods isn't just raw square footage. It's also variety. The full spectrum of sizes of building types that let people move around as their lives change. A fully realized neighborhood needs just a little bit of everything. Studios for one person who just moved here for a job or something like that, one and two bedrooms for couples, roommates, and small families, and then three plusbedroom units for larger households, and flexible buildings that can cycle through all of these over time. So ultimately the fight that really matters should be around the rules and the laws that decide which buildings are even possible to build in the first place. Without thoughtful incentives or restrictions in place that are guiding what we build, microunits make developers easy money. They get made and they get lots of people new homes. But when the right rules are in place, housing systems will work much, much better, creating enough total homes spread across enough types so that people can move through them as their lives change. That's why cities across the US are experimenting right now with a broader set of goals and policies than we've been operating under recently. You might be hearing about initiatives to preserve remaining SRO's, for example. They offer a great opportunity for affordable housing. Or there's a lot of talk about legalizing backyard or basement units again or converting office buildings into homes. That said, the microunit phenomena is super interesting from a design standpoint because they force us to think incredibly carefully about every single inch of space. They're a compressed diagram of everything that a home has to do. And then from a city perspective, they're like a pressure valve. And their rapid spread is a sign of a larger problem, but not exactly the problems that we attribute to them. If they aren't accompanied by a full range of housing types, our neighborhoods will change in ways that are lopsided and extremely brittle. And in that case, tiny apartments are more like a symptom than the disease. Just a very visible clue that the rest of the system needs fixing.