San Francisco’s housing crisis is now legendary: the average rent for a 2 bedroom studio is $5000. To add housing stock fast, one developer has created the city’s first micro-apartment high rise (with units as small as 254 square feet, slightly larger than the city's new 220-square-foot minimum).

Patrick Kennedy has been crusading for increased urban density for years, when I first met him in 2011, he was surprised there weren’t more people focused on the same goal. “San Francisco’s an interesting city: 42% of the population lives alone, much higher than any other American city, and yet there’s very little stuff that addresses the needs of a single person, especially something that can be affordable to a single person.”

Back in 2011, he had built a 160 square foot unit inside a Berkeley warehouse to experiment with just how large a unit needed to be livable. “We built this prototype, it probably cost us a couple hundred grand, but we really needed to know if we needed to know whether we could make a room 9 foot 6” or whether it could be 9 foot 9”.”

See original 2011 video: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

In 2012 San Francisco supervisors dropped the minimum allowed apartment size to 220 square feet and Kennedy began plans for the city’s first micro-unit high rise. In 2015 the building opened with units as small as 254 square feet. To fit 160 units on a 9000 square foot lot, Kennedy replaced car parking for a Zip car and the city’s “largest, climate-controlled bicycle parking garage” (with space for 200 bicycles). He also installed a heated Uber bench and a transit screen with real-time listings for available bike/electric scooter shares, Zip/Uber cars, and bus and light rail schedules.

He had designed the tiny units for “garden-variety hipsters” like the employees from the Twitter headquarters across the street, but in the end, California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music leased the space for student dorms: rents are just under $12000/year for a shared double.

Original video: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...