Revisiting the Tiny Living Space Situation
As someone who lives in a small studio apartment, I’m always interested in reading about people who live in tiny spaces. Here’s the example the Times led with to show how a young woman living in the West Village makes her 170-square-foot apartment work for her:
A clotheshorse who doesn’t cook, she stores sweaters, not soy sauce, in her kitchen cabinets. She covers her stove burners with a cutting board — not for serving cheese and crackers, but as a counter area to dump sunglasses and her purse du jour. More important, she lives in her favorite neighborhood, near transportation, and for a rent that is almost bearable: $1,745 a month (Manhattan one-bedroom rents have inched over $3,300). As for entertaining guests? Like many others with no space to spare, she usually meets friends at bars and restaurants.
Among the things that this young woman lives without in her apartment: food. Clearly, this apartment is poorly designed for her lifestyle. I guess this living situation is fine for some people, and if I had to, I could be a minimalist, but I absolutely need food in my apartment. One of my must-haves when looking for an apartment was a full-size refrigerator. You’d be surprised at how many landlords are renting out spaces with a MicroFridge or no refrigerator.
So how much money does she spend on food relative to rent? Really does not sound like a life I would want at all.
@KatNotCat Seriously, $1,745 plus eating out every day…? In a conservative estimate, three meals a day out is, what, another $1000/month? So that’s around $2800/month to, basically, sleep and eat (in a very good neighborhood.) This is a lot of money.
@dj pomegranate But that’s still less than a lot of one-bedrooms or even studios in the West Village. And here’s the thing: do we think this person would do any more cooking/entertaining with a bigger space/bigger kitchen? Sounds to me like she hit the jackpot for her lifestyle.
My partner and I have been seriously considering buying some land and building two tiny houses on it, in a traditional dog-run or cracker style: one for living in, and the other just a kitchen. I would be 100% OK with my kitchen being half of my home. Lack of what I’d consider a usable kitchen in most small living spaces is what keeps me from downsizing (I live in a 1200+ square foot 3 bedroom house which is spacious nearly everywhere – because the kitchen and one bathroom are really tiny, at least for my preferences).
@ThatJenn I’ve told my boyfriend I’d be perfectly happy if we had the exact same kitchen and living room and then a small lofted living space above it. It would be basically a regular-sized studio but with a *real* kitchen. Everyone always ends up in the kitchen when you have people over anyway.
@KatNotCat “Everyone always ends up in the kitchen when you have people over anyway.” Yes, this. Me, too, when I’m at home. My kitchen right now is a tiny galley kitchen that is completely cut off from the rest of the house – you can’t even really hear what’s happening outside – and really can’t even fit two people working comfortably. I would cook more often, keep my kitchen cleaner, and do my dishes more often (I miss having a dishwasher…) if I could do it while still being social, seeing the outside world, listening to the radio/watching TV, etc.
However, I own my house and bought at the month that was the exact top of the market where I live, and the market has not rebounded at all here but declined consistently each month since then, so I don’t see myself being able to go anywhere anytime soon. However, I am saving to move the kitchen into what is currently my dining room and to turn my current kitchen space into a second bathroom and a pantry. :)
@ThatJenn My husband and I bought a couple of acres a few years ago with plans to build a tiny house. The tiny house structure we began ended up becoming a workshop and we bought a doublewide as a home. Which, I know, horrors! But it’s actually kind of amazing. For $50k, we have a complete 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with drywall, plumbing, oak cabinets, and awesome insulation (as Mr. Acony kept saying when we were thinking about buying one: “It’s plug-and-play!”).We’re hoping to buy some more remote land for recreational property when it’s paid off in a few years.
Granted, this would not be a great idea for someone planning move, since mobile homes tend to depreciate, but we are pretty firmly rooted on our land and in our community, so there’s no move on the horizon for us.
@AconyBelle That sounds awesome! I don’t think a doublewide sounds awful – I guess at one point in my life, I might have thought that, but now that I’ve spent a lot more time researching the process of building my own place on some vacant land, it looks like a more and more reasonable choice. Plus I’ve been in some really nice mobile homes since I moved here.
Your life sounds pretty sweet and like where I hope to be in about ten years. I wish it could be sooner, but I’m trying to be realistic, with my partner in school and the state of the housing market and the state of our savings.
@ThatJenn I will admit I was absolutely opposed to the idea at first, but as the construction project took longer and our living situation became worse, the “manufactured” home grew more and more appealing. The low cost has allowed us to keep doing all of the fun stuff we like to do, and when I’m sitting on my porch watching our cats run around our orchard, it doesn’t feel like a trailer at all!
This story just reminds me that we’ve been living in an unreasonably large, unreasonably cheap house rental which may be coming to an end shortly due to roommate changes. I’m obviously spoiled (I have a foyer? I have a guest room? I have a kitchen the size of Montana) but the idea of hunting for a new place and coping with the many bizarre features of typical rentals is giving me hives.
I’m moving in a week (one week!) and the thing I am most excited about is my newly renovated totally functional kitchen with a gas stove. It’s smaller than my current kitchen but with a much more sensible and usable layout, and gas is so much better than electric. I think I have almost as much cabinet space in my new NYC apartment as my mom’s suburban kitchen. It’s going to be fabulous and I can’t wait to start cooking in it. Also: dishwasher. And a shit ton of outlets, not just in the kitchen but throughout the apartment.
I just visited a friend in Murray Hill yesterday and he lives in the tiniest apartment I’ve ever seen. Nice building, nice area, and the apartment is nice but it’s just like, where do you put stuff? I am lucky to have a decent amount of space in my current place (with a roommate though, whereas my friend lives alone) but my last apartment was the same deal. There’s just no place for all the stuff you accumulate to be store out of sight. I don’t cook much but I can’t imagine not being able to. Do you just eat take out all the time? That must add up.
@maebyfunke I have a tiny kitchen right now and I cook from a gourmet-ish cookbook several times a week. It requires planning and using the table as an extra counter, but honestly, way better than my old galley in a bachelor in Toronto
I kind of don’t think they should be allowed to charge so much for such a tiny space. Like I was looking at apartments here yesterday and they were charging $1200/month for 400 SQUARE FEET and I was like NO.
@Megano! I literally paid $1745 for my huge, palace-sized one bedroom loft apartment in Philly, near Rittenhouse Square. Central air, washer/dryer, doorman, everything. I had so much cabinet space in my kitchen that there were literally cabinets that I just put a single cup in, just to have something in them. And
everyone in Philly thought that was an obscene amount of rent to pay. (I’m not being smug, I live in Brooklyn now and get raked over the coals rentwise like everyone else, just sayin.)
@WaityKatie And I just realized that I used “literally” twice in that screed. I apologize to everyone for that.
@WaityKatie I love Philly so much. I live in DC and spent every weekend except one from August 1 to Labor Day there in my friend’s beautiful two story West Philly place for which she pays less than I would pay for a studio anywhere in DC.
@Megano! Agreed. I think this country needs to focus a lot more resources on providing rental assistance than we do on helping homebuyers. Not holding my breath though.
Also, you were looking at 33% more space than I’ve got for roughly the same amount of money. I would KILL for 400 sq ft at $1200.
@MuffyStJohn I think I have 700 to 800 square feet for less than that now, the only problem is it takes forever to go anywhere w/o a car. If I could just transplant my current apartment closer to downtown that would be wonderful.
1. NYC housing costs BAFFLE me. I have never lived in an apartment with fewer than two bedrooms and a full kitchen. And I have never paid more than $700 in rent. Granted, it’s the suburbs, but I can get on the max and be at the zoo in less than an hour. Priorities.
2. This person eats out every single meal of every day? Doesn’t that basically double her costs?
3. Seriously. BAFFLED.
I could not do this. I cook. It’s how I afford to live in a very expensive city with high rent. In DC, the trend in “affordable housing” (if you can call 4-digit rent affordable) is renovated townhouse basements. A lot of the time, homeowners remodel their basements with income in mind rather than a potential tenant’s quality of life. I can’t tell you how often I see ads on CL that essentially say “Here is a hot plate and a sink too small for a mixing bowl; you will pay me $1300/month for this privilege. Oh also never make any noise!” It’s insulting as hell.
That said, I am desperate (DESPERATE) to get out of my 250 square foot basement apartment, which has a lovely kitchen but features like no sunlight, an incessantly moldy storage room, frat boy upstairs neighbor, and a living area too small to accommodate my very modest life. I currently pay $1175 for this. I’m all about small living, but everyone has their limits – and I have definitely reached mine.
@MuffyStJohn Ahhh DC’s “English basements,” nooooo! I lived in one real one (actually more of a basement hellhole/rathole) and one half-above-ground one, and ever since then my one criterion for a place to live is that it be aboveground.
@WaityKatie They’re never real English basements either (which, by definition, have both front and back entrances), and oh so many of them are illegal (and the ads for which have a very high likelihood of being discriminatory). But I agree with you on never wanting to live below ground again. The total lack of light is profoundly depressing.
@MuffyStJohn Ooh, I never knew that english basements had to have back entrances! None of mine ever did. Although the one had a rathole right next to the door, so it was kind of like having a roommate. I always had to stomp and sing really loudly whenever I was trying to enter my apartment at night, so the neighbors most likely thought I was insane. Seeing that tail scamper back into the hole…ugh!!!
@MuffyStJohn I used to live in a tiiiiny “English basement” in SE, near Eastern Market. I paid under $800 from 2005-2007, and even though it was a firetrap in every sense of the word, even though I had to return the beautiful couch I’d bought because it couldn’t fit in the door, and even though it was home to the hugest silverfish I’d ever seen in life, it was rodent-free, in a beautiful neighborhood and affordable on a grad student budget. I miss it and DC. But I’m sure it goes for even more money now.
But I am curious what you mean about discriminatory ads. I mean, I can imagine, but I’m so out of the DC Real Estate loop these days.
@madrassoup Haha, that’s exactly the neighborhood I live in now. So chances are that unit would go for between $1100-1300. It is a cute, safe neighborhood but I hate being around so many yuppies with young children.
By discriminatory I don’t mean in the classic sense of race/gender/marital status/religion (although I did see an ad yesterday looking for a “god-fearing tenant” to occupy one unit). I see a lot of ads requesting tenants who are only around during the week, or on weekends, or even who have hearing problems to deal with the noise from the houses above (not kidding). I think a lot of it is homeowners wanting to pretend as much as possible that they aren’t really going to be landlords and that there isn’t someone living below their houses, but somehow there’s just going to be a fairy that drops $1200 into their bank account every month. Which, to me, says that they would be absolutely horrible landlords and should be avoided at all costs, but there are a lot of desperate people in this market.
@MuffyStJohn yeah – I know people in Toronto who do this – basically to pay a huge part of their mortgage. Hilariously I know one family who did this – and then got a nice tenant – who now doesn’t want to leave even though the house is paid (or mostly) – and they don’t want to ask her to! (also, eviction laws in Ontario really favour the tenant, so there’s that too)
But why? What does she eat? What is wrong with eating and cooking? If this woman cooked at home instead of eating out, maybe she could afford a one-bedroom? Also…how very Carrie Bradshaw of her.
@amyfrances I’m guessing that the lack of eating probably comports well with the obsession with fashion.
Also, I have zero patience for the kind of people who keep clothing in their kitchens. It just sounds so Sex and the City to me, in the most annoying “who cares about food when there are so many shoes and purses to buy?” way possible. In fact as soon as I read that she uses her kitchen for that I decided that she was The Worst.
@madrassoup Also, with the clothes in the kitchen thing, I always have this fear of fires. Like, I know my stove probably won’t spontaneously turn itself on and set fire to the shoes I put in there, but it might! Better to be safe and keep the shoes in the closet.
@madrassoup @WaityKatie If she’s smart, she had the gas turned off to her stove so the whole burning down the house thing shouldn’t be a problem AND she’s saving however much that is a month.
And I like clothes and stuff as much, probably more, than the next person, but I hate people who store shoes and purses in their kitchens. Ugh. I bet they all have ugly logos.
An aside, I once contemplated having the gas turned off in my apartment because I rarely used it (I guess I ate a lot of cereal? Cold sandwiches? I was never home? I do eat) and it annoyed me that the bill for the gas itself was under $1 BUT the “delivery charges” or mandatory fees or whatever were like $20 a month. A similarly stingy boyfriend also did this. His oven was original to the building, which was built in the 1950s, and he cooked pasta maybe three times a year, at which point it just made more sense to go to the schwanky Italian place and get good pasta instead.
A lot of these notes are shitty. Who says anyone needs to cook in order to lead a valid lifestyle?
@aetataureate you do not. I know many people who do not. Or, who do cereal and coffee and not much else. I have lived with them. They baffle me, but whatevs. In big cities this woman’s lifestyle is very normal.
@theotherginger
This is so true. In Sydney it’s really common to see studios advertised that have no laundry or stove or oven. The kitchen is literally a sink with maybe 50 cm of bench – this qualifies as “good kitchen” in the ads.
No fridge, either. One Built-in wardrobe if you’re very lucky.
We’re looking at about $1200/month for that?
I had a one bedroom apartment with a full size fridge. It was constantly empty and I cook! I’d cook a big meal and have a few snacky things to whip together, but still so much empty space. I would fill empty yogurt containers with water to conserve energy. Then I’d have to explain to guests that I wasn’t a yogurt hoarder. Once I started cohabitation, my BF decided to use my yogurt container trick for empty fridge space, but instead use cheap beer. Viola. Even with two people who pickle – so much space in a full size fridge.
@Dont Move to Finland ha. I wish I had known this with my constantly empty old fridge. Now I do. Thanks.
If I was single and living in NYC I would do this exact thing.