[ed. See also: Seattle Landlords Are the Weirdest People.]
Ok, so there wasn’t a sink in the bathroom. But the kitchen sink was only four steps away. And so what if the apartment—all 192 square feet of it—was half the size of a budget hotel room? The $822 monthly rent included all utilities plus free Wi-Fi and a double bed.
“I don’t feel like we need bigger spaces,” says Alexa Case, gesturing at the mini-flat screen TV that she’s mounted on the wall, her collection of black shoes and a pan scraped clean of something chocolate—all within easy reach of her bed.
Like many millennials, Case isn’t ready to settle down in the suburbs and commute two hours a day. The 25-year-old hairdresser doesn’t have a lot of stuff—doesn’t want a lot of stuff. She’s just moved out from under her parents’ roof to this, her very first apartment. She spent six weeks scouring Seattle and finally found a place in Capitol Hill—the onetime nucleus of punk and grunge, today the crucible of the city’s metamorphosis, home to funky shops, artisanal breweries and upscale eateries that serve up marrow bones and water buffalo burgers.
“Even though it’s tiny, it’s easy for me to keep organized,” she says, the edges of a tattoo peeking out from under her T-shirt. “I got a sweet deal.”
More than a quarter of all households in the United States today are made up of just one person, up from 17 percent in 1970. This growing demographic is part of an ongoing renaissance of American cities and contributed to a 2.3 million-person jump in the urban population between 2012 and 2013, according to the Census Bureau. Single-person households have also inspired a national movement toward smaller living spaces. And nowhere is this trend more in evidence than in Seattle.
The country’s fastest growing city (population 640,500), Seattle is the pioneer of micro-housing—tiny, one-room dwellings that are in turn hailed as an affordable, sustainable alternative to the high cost of city living, and disparaged as an inhuman experiment in downsizing. They are disruptors—real estate’s version of a high-tech innovator, literally altering the landscape of the city they occupy. But are they are a force for good or ill? Seattle is still figuring that out.
Seattle boasts the highest number of micro-dwellings in the country—3,000 at last count. It also permits the most audaciously minimal units, some as small as 90 square feet. That’s about the size of two prison cells put together.
It’s not for the claustrophobic, but it does come with perks—including the chance for millennials and those with modest incomes to settle in vibrant urban neighborhoods. Their presence, in turn, injects new energy to the heart of the city while tamping down suburban sprawl. Micro-housing reflects a growing zeitgeist—to stop accruing, go minimalist and reduce one’s footprint. Indeed, the name of Seattle’s leading micro-housing development company is called Footprint. (...)
“I’m not aware of any place that has even a tenth as many units as Seattle,” says Alan Durning, author of Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Housing and founder of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that researches environmental policies in the Northwest. “And that’s because most cities’ rules don’t make it easy.” (...)
Seattle proved an ideal pioneer of micro-housing for a confluence of reasons: a permissive city code; a burgeoning population of millennials; a real estate boom fueled by the incursion of Amazon and other tech giants; and, not least, a visionary developer who early on discerned the pieces of this puzzle and put them all together.
The model—which took off in 2009—also happened to coincide with state and city goals to increase urban density and leave rural and agricultural lands untouched. In doing so, it triggered an unlikely coalition of developers and environmentalists, while turning some longtime progressives into wary NIMBYs, outraged that their residential neighborhoods are being transformed by what many perceive as the rebirth of seedy early 20th century boarding houses. Now, after five years of assuming a hands-off approach, the city is pushing back against micro-housing, putting the future of these tiny dwellings in limbo.
by Sara Solovitch, Politico | Read more:
Image:Mark Peterson/Redux
