Micro-Housing: Who Needs It?

by Tamara M. Roy

On January 16^th, IFMA invited residential experts Tamara Roy and Quinton Kerns from ADD Inc, Barry Bluestone from the Dukakis Center, and Sean Cassidy from LogMeIn to speak about the need for more compact living models in Boston.  The group also brought in students from Suffolk and Northeastern University to present their designs for units below 400sf.  It was a fun night at District Hall in the Innovation District.

Who would be interested in renting a smaller unit?  Let’s start with the millennial workforce, the largest generation after the Baby Boomers.  With an average starting salary of $44,000 and college debt averaging $35,000, this group desperately needs inexpensive housing to keep them here after college and out of their parents’ basements. Then add seniors, widows and widowers, with limited incomes and spiraling health care costs.   How about workforce singles and couples – nurses, chefs, creatives, city planners, construction workers, anyone who doesn’t have a job in medicine, finance, or high technology?  Many divorcees also tell us there’s little housing for them.  Then there are the upperclassmen and graduate students, who may want to live independently but take on roommates in order to afford the rent. It turns out there are a LOT of people who could benefit from renting a reasonably-priced, well-designed small studio or micro one-bedroom apartment.

ADD Inc is working with Barry Bluestone of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy to communicate the staggering demand for smaller units and why our supply isn’t catching up, using the Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2013 the 2005-2011 American Community Survey.  These databases show that households are shrinking: nearly 30% of the Greater Boston population is in single person households and only 26% live with children under 18.   Due to extremely low vacancy rates, rent burdens are rising: over 30% are paying half of their income on rent. Yet our current housing stock was built for large families: out of 1.4 million units in Greater Boston only 2.6% are studios, and of the City of Boston’s 272,000 units onlyAs we become a society of singles and couples who increasingly desire walkable urban environments over suburbs, there are nowhere near enough small units to go around.

Micro-housing offers an alternative to roommates and long commutes.  With creative design, the quantity of space becomes less important than its quality, location, and being in a building with an energetic community of like-minded individuals.  So far it is the price tag that is the most difficult aspect of matching supply to demand.  Developers want to charge more per square foot because they still have to provide a kitchen and bath no matter how small the unit, and because they can – the demand is that great.  Lately we’ve seen many more luxury units created than affordable ones.

We hope that Mayors across the Commonwealth take a hard look at the shortage of small affordable units and propose policy changes to address the crisis.  Several solutions were suggested, including removing Boston unit size minimums (like Cambridge for instance), overhauling city zoning to make dense, small unit projects easy to permit, supporting non-profit developers and CDC’s, and providing free city land to whomever could produce 80 to 100 percent of their units as affordable housing.  If Governor Patrick could create a housing authority similar to quasi-public student housing authorities, it could be the single most effective way to introduce thousands of reasonably priced small units to the market.

For now, it is encouraging to hear architects, students, economists, demographers, and housing activists raising their voices about the need for more affordable small units.  It is a need that is aching to be filled.

Tamara M. Roy is a principal at ADD Inc