At the 41-second mark of the YouTube blockbuster “Shit New Yorkers Say,” a young man stands in a friend’s tiny bedroom and exclaims with disbelief, “This place is huge!”
It’s a knowing wink aimed at other locals, and in fact, the entire video is a deftly edited drumroll of the pedestrian concerns and biases of the city’s young, recent arrivals. The same type of people whom Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to lure to the city with more “huge” apartments. Last week, Bloomberg announced that the city will construct a “micro-unit” building on city-owned land. A pilot project to test the idea of rezoning the city to allow smaller units in general (the current minimum is 400 square feet), the building’s apartments will be around 300 square feet and rent at the market rate, now about $2,000 a month.
Reactions ran rampant. News outlets wondered if such small apartments were inhumane — Tokyo, the world’s go-to city for “people living in drawers,” became a common point of reference. Others, like the New York Times architecture critic, praised the plan as an innovative way to add density and studio apartments to a city that needs more of both. A few linked the proposal to the tiny-house trend, dubiously insisting that Americans suddenly love cramped quarters. And in a fit of self-parody, a game of one-upsmanship commenced as Manhattanites insisted that the micro-units are palatial. “What’s the big deal?” asked one online commenter. “I lived in a 200 square foot apartment on the [Lower East Side]. 300 square feet sounds huge…”
That’s a silly statement, but it illustrates a point: There’s no baseline “normal” for dwelling size. What seems crazy to suburbanites is routine for city people, just as a 300-square-foot studio might seem luxe to someone with four roommates. As if observing an exotic tribe, the AP marveled that “Some New Yorkers, desperate for storage space … turn their ovens into storage for clothes,” as if to insinuate, how dismal a life! (For the record, hardly anyone does this.) But a New Yorker might find it more cruel and unusual to be stuck in a big, roomy house 10 miles from any decent Thai food or public transportation.
by Will Doig, Salon | Read more:
Photo: Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
