The Faces Behind Boston’s Mini-Apartment Movement
Though Seaport’s Innovation District is the current face of Boston’s micro-unit trend, many in the Hub have long desired “tiny living.’’
Nick Martin’s Allston studio is technically a micro apartment – a unit below 450 square feet – yet he lives roughly 6 miles away from the Seaport District, the area Boston officials have approved for micro living.
“Sometimes I want more space, but it’s the perfect amount of space for maintenance and upkeep,’’ Martin said of his 350-square-foot apartment. “I don’t actually have that many belongings, so it’s the perfect compromise.’’
Martin, a spokesperson for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, said his teeny unit is in an older building, and was probably “grandfathered in’’ to the city’s housing stock.
Seaport’s Innovation District, located on the South Boston waterfront, is currently the only neighborhood in Boston where the BRA allows developers to build “innovation units,’’ also known as “micro apartments,’’ because the BRA wants to monitor the quality of living tiny apartments offer on a case-by-case basis. But Martin, like so many others, enjoys living alone in a small space, and can’t afford the Seaport’s much talked about micro units.
“What we really intended when we started the innovation housing unit experience was that we’d incentivize building smaller units because they could be constructed, leased, and rented at a lower price,’’ Martin said of the BRA’s initial push for micro units in 2010. “But we were surprised the level of demand was so high for these, so the prices were higher than we expected.’’
There are approximately 300 micro units constructed or under construction in Seaport, and many rent for upwards of $2,000 per month, Martin said. But a quick search on any local real estate site shows that Boston already has quite a few “micro apartments’’ up for grabs in Back Bay, the South End, and Fenway, for example. Like Martin’s studio, many have been grandfathered in.
So will the new micro unit trend break out of the Innovation District?
Aeron Hodges, a designer and manager at architectural design firm ADD Inc./Stantec, hopes so.
Hodges is used to small spaces. She grew up in a tiny apartment in Shanghai, and currently lives in a 375-square-foot studio in Fenway with her husband. While affordability is what first drew her to their micro apartment, Hodges said she also loves “using the city as her living room.’’
“Being able to live in the city and close to all the urban amenities — I think that’s the best draw,’’ she said. Hodges’s work for ADD Inc. involves neighborhood outreach and cultural studies, and she said she’s found many underdeveloped areas of Boston where micro apartments could be built and rented at a relatively low cost.
“Dorchester, Somerville, and East Boston are well-established with neighborhood amenities like being close to public transit, restaurants, and public laundry areas,’’ Hodges said. “Our view is that the city should work with small nonprofit and for-profit developers to fill this need for smaller, more affordable units,’’ she added.
While the average household size in Boston is two people, one-bedroom units make up only 25 percent of the city’s housing stock, according to the 2013 U.S. census. The discrepancy in what Boston’s housing stock offers and what Bostonians need is part of what drives architect Tamara Roy, president-elect of the Boston Architectural Society. Her firm ADD Inc./Stantec has designed 200 micro units around Boston and she’s currently working on a 100 percent compact and affordable housing unit in South Boston.
Roy has been an advocate for Boston’s micro unit trend ever since former Mayor Thomas Menino asked for Roy’s opinion in 2012.
“They asked a bunch of architects what innovative housing could be in the Innovation District,’’ Roy said. So she crowd sourced her architectural firm of 150 employees (average age of 31) to find out what “innovative housing’’ meant to them.
“The answer came back and was, ‘Who cares? We can’t afford to live here anyway,’’’ Roy said.
Roy thought about this for a while, creating a policy statement for city officials that requested a portion of new developments in the Innovation District be affordable, through less parking and smaller units with more communal social space. The city took Roy’s advice and let developers “play around’’ with micro units, but many ended up being unaffordable, she said.
“It’s a free market. I can’t control the social policy of who lives in them,’’ Roy said. “The push for me is to create more of them. When the supply goes up, the price will start to come down.’’ Through further policy change and education, Roy said she’d like to see the minimum unit size abolished, so developers outside Seaport can experiment with inexpensive micro-unit design.
“This is not at all new, and it’s not going to pass,’’ Roy said, citing the frequent usage of micro units on the West Coast, and in many Asian and European cities. “If you don’t want to live in one that’s fine for me. That’s okay. But then to say that there has to be a metric for everyone else is where I argue with you. It’s kind of suburban elitism to say to somebody else — if they’re perfectly happy — that they shouldn’t be allowed to live in 350 square feet.’’
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