It's micro-living in the nation's biggest city, and New Yorkers could be seeing more of it. Planning officials are proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door for more "micro-apartments" that advocates see as affordable¹ adaptations to a growing population of single people.

 

At Carmel Place, the Manhattan building that marks the city's first experiment in decades with building super-small dwellings², the pitch is that little can be just enough.

 

"An efficiently³ designed micro-unit," says developer Tobias Oriwol, "is just a nice apartment."

 

Due to open early next year, Carmel Place features 55 apartments ranging from 265 to 360 square feet. By comparison, a typical one-car garage can be about 200 square feet.

 

As an experimental project, Carmel Place got city land and a waiver from New York's 400-square-foot minimum on new apartments, set in 1987. A proposed elimination⁴ of that minimum would allow smaller studios in buildings with a mix of apartment sizes, but entire micro-unit buildings would continue to need waivers.

 

"For us, it was really important to demonstrate how small space could be an enhancement to quality of life," said Christopher Bledsoe of Stage 3 Properties, which designed the interiors and amenities⁵ at Carmel Place.

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