NYC Micro Apartments Actual Rents contradict earlier quotes: Barely justifiable rents used as selling point in 2013, now raised to senseless levels
In 2012, then Mayor Bloomberg backed a Department of Housing Preservation and Developments (DHPD) initiative to innovate micro apartments for New York City by creating the AdAPT NYC competition and corresponding exhibit, Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers‘, showcasing the proposed designs. Winning design, My Micro NY, was announced in early 2013 and the project to build 55 of these micro-units at a location in Kips Bay, Manhattan was underway. Despite the units sizes ranging from 250-370sq ft (in violation of city code) one of the selling points was price – the rent of these dwelling was to be way below market. The plan was to have a little less than half of the units be apportioned for low income renters at about $940/month rent and the others would be rented for between $1700 and $1800. The AM New York publication from January 23, 2013 noting that the average studio (which has at least 70 sq ft more) is around $2400. I know this to be false as I was personally renting a Midtown East one-bedroom in 2013 for $1850/month and it currently is being rented at about $2000. For those not familiar with the market, all those generalized numbers used to make the project sound reasonable were misleading. There were several publications that reported the same proposed max rents of $1700 (Business Insider, January 22, 2013 http://tinyurl.com/ag88frn). Fast forward to 2015, in September the first tenants are to begin occupying the microNY apartments. According to a New York Times article from February 20, 2015, Home Shrunken Home, (http://tinyurl.com/kf4wlyp) the going rate for these same 250-370 sqft spaces starts at a whopping $2000 up to $3000 per month. So what was a misleading and flimsy selling point in 2013 is no longer even a reality for this project. The article continues, and mentions one graduate student living in a similar space on the upper west side who pays $2600/month for a 313 sq ft. ‘efficiency’ unit and she explains that she knew she wouldn’t be saving money but rather is paying for privacy. The implication is that this sort of arrangement is the only option to live in NYC and have privacy. These micro dwellings are less humane yet being tauted as the solution to a housing crisis. Meanwhile they are grossly overpriced to a point of not even being competitive in the market. But as with many artificially created crises the press given to these types of initiatives will attempt to convey that there is a scarcity and no other recourse.
In my video from 2013 I highlighted some of the key issues surrounding this initiative when it was announced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAQgj2iYq-c
