Proposed: NYC Should Have
Even Smaller Apartments

Chinatown — MTV’s "Real World," which for its 21st season set up eight young people in a Brooklyn loft, is illegal under local housing law. That’s because New York housing law forbids more than three unrelated people to live together in a single dwelling unit, sharing a kitchen.

The rule is just one example of housing regulations that have fallen out of touch with how many New Yorkers live, from low-income workers to nontraditional families – and even to aspiring young celebrities – according to the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC). Many current housing rules stifle innovative design, restrict the construction of new affordable housing, and exacerbate the city’s never-ending housing shortage — practically making overcrowding the unofficial housing policy.

“We need more variety — more different types of housing,” says Jerilyn Perine, a former city housing chief who for the past three years has headed CHPC. “For 100 years we used to think of ourselves as the housing innovators. We’ve lost that edge.”

In effort to spark new innovation in New York City’s discussion on housing, CHPC gathered more than a hundred architects, developers, city officials, and academics in Manhattan last month for a symposium called “One Size Fits Some.” Throughout the day, designers and developers from locales including Japan, Italy and California presented photos and drawings of well-designed small homes and shared spaces that are difficult, if not impossible, to build under New York’s existing building codes.

Rebuilding the housing ladder

Building codes across the country call for the construction of houses for the classic nuclear family, with two parents and some number of children. Codes methodically rule out housing where extended families or unrelated people can efficiently share smaller spaces, experts say. The memories of crowded tenements in early 1900s and crumbling single-room occupancy welfare hotels in the 1970s and 80s makes many communities resistant to loosening these codes, even though the demographics of the country have radically changed since many of these rules were written decades ago.

The symposium began with a visit to a newly- renovated building on New York’s Lower East Side. Andrews House was built in 1901 as a lodging house, providing a very modest place to sleep at a very low price. A lodging house can fit people into even smaller spaces than a single-room occupancy building, because its sleeping chambers are more like office cubicles than full bedrooms.

Lodging houses earned a terrible reputation for shoddy management. It’s illegal to build new ones, and all but a handful have long since closed their doors and been converted to other uses. The anti-homelessness organization Common Ground is only allowed to operate Andrews House because its site was zoned a century ago, before new lodging houses were prohibited.

However, homeless advocates now say the number of homeless people living on the street swelled dramatically as the lodging houses closed. Places like Andrews House once formed the bottom rung on what advocates call “the housing ladder,” or the range of choices provided by the market, from the smallest rental apartments to the most deluxe single-family homes.

“Having multiple options for housing is imperative,” says Nadine Maleh, chief design officer for Common Ground.

Common Ground has revived the Andrews as what it calls “First Step Housing.” The new Andrews has 146 units, averaging just 66 square feet in size with shared bathrooms, showers, and even windows. The floors of the nine-story building have relatively open plans, with up to 19 sleeping rooms arranged like office cubicles. Each room has a door that locks and walls that change from solid wood to perforated steel panels above seven-and-a-half feet, allowing light and air into all units.