Stupid Government Controls On Apartment Size In Boston
I lived in a 350 square-foot studio in New York City -- which was big compared to my initial pad, an 8 x 10 "apartment" in a converted SRO called the George Washington Hotel at 23rd and Lex. I would have liked more space in both cases, but both places made it in the neighborhood of affordable for me to live right in Manhattan, where I wanted to be.

In Boston, where the housing market is beyond packed and expensive, there are prohibitions against building apartments "too small." Prohibitions not written by people who are in their early 20s and just out of college and needing a place to live.

A Boston Globe editorial:

Virtually everyone who lives in Boston has decided to skimp on space to some degree. Yet city rules limit just how big of a sacrifice tenants can make; by one rule of thumb, new one-bedroom apartments must be 750 square feet or more to gain zoning approval, and studios must be 500 square feet. The city eased up in 2006 by creating a new category of "metro" units, which allow for one-bedrooms as small as 625 square feet, and studios as small as 450 square feet, in dense areas north of the Mass. Pike or along major transit lines.

But even that laxer standard can mean rents well north of $2,000 a month for a small apartment. The obvious way to bring that cost down -- without rent subsidies or elaborate regulatory interventions -- is to relax the prohibition on smaller units, and to encourage their construction all across the city. Building thousands of micro-units in transit-friendly locations, such as the Forest Hills T station and the Longwood Medical Area, would provide market-rate housing within the reach of people just getting their start in Boston. And neighborhoods would benefit as new residents bring their business to local stores and eateries.

Regulating low-cost market-rate housing out of existence, or refusing to let it be built in the first place, doesn't eliminate the demand for it. Students and others seek cheaper under-the-table living quarters: unlicensed rooming houses, illegally divided units. The consequences can be tragic, as when 22-year-old Boston University student Binland Lee died in April in a fire in an overcrowded rooming house in Allston.

That tragedy prompted calls, quite reasonably, for stepped-up safety inspections. Yet Bostonians -- and especially candidates in the upcoming mayoral race -- should also reconsider development policies that yield luxury housing and subsidized housing, but nothing in between.

Letting developers build smaller, cheaper market-rate apartments runs up against half a century of assumptions about housing policy. An earlier generation of community activists in a tumultuous era in Boston saw housing matters in stark moral terms: Proposals for new apartment and condo buildings were intrusions into the fragile fabric of a historic city; rising rents were proof of landlords' indifference to tenants' plight. Today, rent control is history, and it's clearer that Boston's stiff housing costs primarily reflect the mismatch between the limited supply of housing and growing demand for it. Yet an instinctive suspicion of the motives of for-profit builders and landlords still colors the development debate.

Indeed, Shen cites the fact that rents per square foot are significantly higher for smaller units than for large ones as a reason to proceed carefully on building micro-units; there's a palpable concern at the agency that developers will exploit the price differential to build too many small units.

Doesn't the marketplace decide what's "too many"? Why should the city tell you that you can't rent an 8 x 10 room if that's what serves your budget and needs -- rather than a bigger, less-expensive place a long commute away?

Nitwit commenter at The Globe decides people should instead live with roommates -- because that's what he thinks is the right thing.

ParksLover
Those microunits are nothing but modern age tenements and gravy trains for developers -- it's all about greed and exploitation of young renters. The city is wise not to allow them on a wide scale. This editorial is so idiotic on so many leveles. Contrary to what it claims, neigborhoods will not gain anything from this type of inherently transient housing.

Living with roommates in larger apartments is a time-sanctioned rite of passage - why would anyone prefer living in a shoebox-size unit that is goign to cost them twice as much as renting a room in a larger apartment? The ADD Inc. employee makes little money, pays off student debt -- he is clealry better off paying less than $700 for his room in Sommervile than $1500 for a new microunit.

Boston needs normal size apartments -- and if some young people want to split the rent, or put locks on their bedrooms doors for privacy -- so be it. What's so wrong about it? Nothing!

So what if developers are hopping on "gravy trains." Let the young renters choose what works for them -- whether that's living with roommates or living alone in a tiny space.