Sara Solovitch, a former staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is a California-based freelance writer. She is the author of Playing Scared, a memoir and history of stage fright, being published in June by Bloomsbury Press.

OK, so there wasn’t a sink in the bathroom. But the kitchen sink was only four steps away. And so what if the apartment—all 192 square feet of it—was half the size of a budget hotel room? The $822 monthly rent included all utilities plus free Wi-Fi and a double bed.

“I don’t feel like we need bigger spaces,” says Alexa Case, gesturing at the mini-flat screen TV that she’s mounted on the wall, her collection of black shoes and a pan scraped clean of something chocolate—all within easy reach of her bed.


Like many millennials, Case isn’t ready to settle down in the suburbs and commute two hours a day. The 25-year-old hairdresser doesn’t have a lot of stuff—doesn’t want a lot of stuff. She’s just moved out from under her parents’ roof to this, her very first apartment. She spent six weeks scouring Seattle and finally found a place in Capitol Hill—the onetime nucleus of punk and grunge, today the crucible of the city’s metamorphosis, home to funky shops, artisanal breweries and upscale eateries that serve up marrow bones and water buffalo burgers.

“Even though it’s tiny, it’s easy for me to keep organized,” she says, the edges of a tattoo peeking out from under her T-shirt. “I got a sweet deal.”

More than a quarter of all households in the United States today are made up of just one person, up from 17 percent in 1970. This growing demographic is part of an ongoing renaissance of American cities and contributed to a 2.3 million-person jump in the urban population between 2012 and 2013, according to the Census Bureau. Single-person households have also inspired a national movement toward smaller living spaces. And nowhere is this trend more in evidence than in Seattle.

The country’s fastest growing city (population 640,500), Seattle is the pioneer of micro-housing—tiny, one-room dwellings that are in turn hailed as an affordable, sustainable alternative to the high cost of city living, and disparaged as an inhuman experiment in downsizing. They are disruptors—real estate’s version of a high-tech innovator, literally altering the landscape of the city they occupy. But are they are a force for good or ill? Seattle is still figuring that out.

Tiny Homes, Big Dreams The pros, cons, and way of life in Seattle's micro-units.

Some micro-unit buildings look like skinny, color-blocked townhouses, often towering over the squat cottages and bungalows that dot Seattle neighborhoods; others resemble sleek, ultra-modern low-rise apartment buildings. Inside, they’re typically laid out dormitory style: groupings of eight private sleeping rooms, each with its own bath and kitchenette, that share a full-size common kitchen for anyone who cares to cook. Few do.

Seattle boasts the highest number of micro-dwellings in the country—3,000 at last count. It also permits the most audaciously minimal units, some as small as 90 square feet. That’s about the size of two prison cells put together.

It’s not for the claustrophobic, but it does come with perks—including the chance for millennials and those with modest incomes to settle in vibrant urban neighborhoods. Their presence, in turn, injects new energy to the heart of the city while tamping down suburban sprawl. Micro-housing reflects a growing zeitgeist—to stop accruing, go minimalist and reduce one’s footprint. Indeed, the name of Seattle’s leading micro-housing development company is called Footprint.

A variety of industries across the country have begun to mushroom around this new model of simpler living, marketing services and products to architects, builders and residents of micro-apartments. LifeEdited, a New York “specialty consultant,” offers advice on everything from how to build a Murphy bed for $275 to how to get rid of excess stuff on Craigslist. The goal, according to its website, is to “live large in small spaces.”

Seattle has more than 3,000 micro-housing units—more than any other American city. | Mark Peterson/Redux

But compared with Seattle, New York is barely getting its toes wet. In 2012, it introduced a competition for developers to design a micro-unit building on city-owned land in Manhattan. The competition drew 33 applications—the largest response ever for a proposed housing project in New York, according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. The winning proposal will result in 55 units, ranging between 250 and 370 square feet.

San Francisco, where the median home price just crossed $1 million, has approved 375 micro-units, the smallest being 220 square feet. Boston has limited initial construction to 195 units, with a minimum size of 350 square feet—practically a palace compared with Seattle’s high-end cubicles.

“I’m not aware of any place that has even a tenth as many units as Seattle,” says Alan Durning, author of Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Housing and founder of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that researches environmental policies in the Northwest. “And that’s because most cities’ rules don’t make it easy.”

New Window OPTICS: Livin' Small in Seattle (Click to view gallery.)

Seattle proved an ideal pioneer of micro-housing for a confluence of reasons: a permissive city code; a burgeoning population of millennials; a real estate boom fueled by the incursion of Amazon and other tech giants; and, not least, a visionary developer who early on discerned the pieces of this puzzle and put them all together.

The model—which took off in 2009—also happened to coincide with state and city goals to increase urban density and leave rural and agricultural lands untouched. In doing so, it triggered an unlikely coalition of developers and environmentalists, while turning some longtime progressives into wary NIMBYs, outraged that their residential neighborhoods are being transformed by what many perceive as the rebirth of seedy early 20th century boarding houses. Now, after five years of assuming a hands-off approach, the city is pushing back against micro-housing, putting the future of these tiny dwellings in limbo.

“In most cities, whenever there’s a period of massive growth, the political impulse is to clamp down,” says Durning. “People feel like there’s too much change. The streets are all cut up, real estate prices are going up.

“But this is not housing that poor people can afford. It’s all being done by private sector funding—no subsidies whatsoever. The developers are making money, the residents are delighted and it’s happened very fast, sort of by accident.”

Well, not entirely.

***

The roots of micro-housing in Seattle can be traced to a single developer named Jim Potter. At 6 foot 6, he was the movement’s Johnny Appleseed, an imposing presence with a booming voice, an aggressive businessman who owned properties up and down the state of Washington. But his true claim to fame, at least in the Seattle real estate world, was his compulsive study of the city’s zoning code.

“Read the code,” he regularly admonished young developers. There are Seattleites who assert that Potter knew the Codes & Rules better than most of the city’s planners.

Six years ago, his study led him to discover a loophole, unique to Seattle, that would allow him to build eight small units around a common kitchen and call it a single apartment.

That’s because the city code counts kitchens, not sleeping units, for the purpose of regulating development. Seattle is unusual in this regard and Potter quickly realized his advantage. The way the code was written, he could circumvent the kind of design and environmental reviews usually required for big, multi-family projects. It meant that a townhouse that on first sight appears to have eight apartments might actually contain 64 units.

By the time neighbors figured out what was happening, many felt hoodwinked.

West Seattle resident Cindi Barker thought she would have eight new neighbors in a traditional apartment building when she moved to her house. Instead, she will have 75. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Cindi Barker, a West Seattle activist, says she regularly hears complaints like this one from homeowners across the city: “I went from thinking that the lot next to me would hold eight apartments and instead it will hold 75 people. They’re messing with what I thought was a commitment when I bought into this neighborhood. I pay my taxes. Now, suddenly, the low-rise area I live in has gotten denser and denser.”

Barker appreciates the vagaries of urban neighborhoods. When she moved into her current block 20 years ago, she discovered that her house—a tall, skinny structure on a subdivided lot next to turn-of-the-century Victorians and bungalows—was itself the subject of neighborhood consternation. But this, she says, is different.

“Now, the developers have stepped in and said, ‘There are people who are only going to be here for short periods of time.’” Barker is alluding here to the fact that a good many tenants in micro-units are short-term leasers. “I was a manager of Boeing and I remember when we brought contractors in, sometimes for six months, sometimes for three years. I’m familiar with that. But where do you put them?”

By 2009, Potter had an answer. He built dozens of Spartan micro-units in neighborhoods throughout Seattle—from Capitol Hill to Wallingford, West Seattle to First Hill to Roosevelt—attracting mostly young (18 to 31 year-old) tenants with an average annual income of $40,000 who’d rather spend their money on skiing and dining out than on a pricey apartment.

Potter’s model was so successful that it was soon being picked up by other developers—one company calls its micro-units aPODments—and carried to other cities. Before he died of cancer at age 58 in May, he was planning to take it across the country.

Open In New Window

“He used to say that everything he did in his 40-plus years of business led him to micro-housing,” recalls Cathy Reines, his business partner, who is currently pursuing that same goal. As CEO of the newly incorporated Koz Development, she has applied and received permits for micro-housing in Oakland, Portland and Denver. She says Detroit will be next.

***

Micro-housing, of course, is hardly a new invention. Residents in London, Paris and Amsterdam have been going home to tiny walkups for years—a fact that American tourists often find charming as long as they’re on vacation. In Tokyo, the rage for micro-houses, or kyosho jutaku , is part necessity in a jam-packed city of 9 million; it is also driven by the creative challenge of turning a small abode into a livable space.

But in Seattle, as micro-housing has grown, it has become a flashpoint for all the changes overtaking the city. Seattle is in the midst of a real estate boom, with 10,000 new apartment units this year and another 14,000 projected for the next. Seventy-five power cranes hang over the skyline of the Greater Seattle area. Chain link fences ring whole blocks—now little more than holes in the ground.

Gone is the small-town feeling that 23 years ago greeted Matthew Gardner, a land-use economist then newly arrived from London. He was struck by the fact that back then “you could fire a bazooka downtown at 6 p.m. and not hit a single person.” The change since the ’80s has been so visceral that some residents complain of a pit in the belly whenever they go out for a walk.

The city is girding for 115,000 new jobs by 2035. Amazon alone is expected ultimately to employ 40,000 workers in the Seattle area— 12,000 of them at its new headquarters, under construction in South Lake Union, a once-gritty, low-rise neighborhood of auto repair services, tire shops and trophy stores. Google recently doubled the size of its Seattle-area campus; Brooks Sports Inc., a footwear company, has relocated its global headquarters to the Fremont neighborhood; and Boston-based Northeastern University just opened a new campus for graduate students.

According to Mike Podowski, land-use policy manager in the city’s Department of Planning and Development, 70,000 new housing units are needed in the next 20 years. The shortage is already acute. In the past year, rents have risen by 8.3 percent and the average one-bedroom apartment now costs $1,412 a month. Everywhere one goes, the refrain is the same: We must not become the next San Francisco.

It’s the new political mantra. Flush from his success in pushing through the $15-an-hour minimum wage, the highest rate of any major city in the country, Seattle’s recently elected mayor, Ed Murray, has vowed to make affordable housing his next priority. He identified micro-housing as an important tool in the fight.

Murray’s commitment irritated many neighborhood activists, who have coalesced around this issue more than any other in memory. Some neighborhood opponents have posted flyers that pointedly ask what kind of person would willingly move into such a small space.

“People can’t imagine who would want to live like this,” says Scott Shapiro, a developer of several micro-townhouses around the city, all with an average unit size of 163 square feet. “Who are these people, they want to know. Well, they are your bank teller, your barista, your bus driver.”

Micro-Housing Around the World Paris, France (Flickr/homestile) Tokyo, Japan (Wikimedia Commons) New York, New York (AP Photo)

And the demand keeps growing, to the point that the vacancy rate for micro-housing is zero. When a new project opens its doors, it’s not uncommon for a property manager to fill several units over her lunch hour. Some tenants have leased their apartments sight-unseen.

The same appetite appears to exist in San Francisco. Though that city’s first micro-apartment is still under construction, its developer is already fielding five inquiries a day from interested tenants. Patrick Kennedy originally conceived of marketing the building’s 160 units—each 285 to 310 square feet, right across the street from Twitter headquarters—as condos.

And they wouldn’t have had any trouble selling: “Not in San Francisco,” asserts Kennedy, who notes that half the city’s buyers come in with all cash, mooting the question of whether banks would issue a mortgage on such a novel property. “And if these were at $300,000 to $400,000 each, they would be at the low end of condo housing.”

Halfway through the project, however, he decided to rent them out—starting at about $1,600 a month. “Our micros are pretty high-end,” he says. “They’re not just providing four walls, a microwave and a fridge. Not that I’m against that: $700 a month wouldn’t even get you a broom closet in the Tenderloin. That’s a very great achievement. It fulfills a very basic need—the clean, well-lighted place concept.”

Just the basics: that’s what residents of Seattle’s micro-units are seemingly so content to have found. Few of them even seem alert to the controversy swirling around their presence.

But Mark Hinshaw, a Seattle architect who writes about urban planning and “walkable” cities, is disturbed by what he terms a “classist” nature to the criticism.

“People in popular neighborhoods are suddenly confronted with a new type of household,” he says. “It’s a different choice from what you and your neighbors have, and I think that’s behind some of the criticism. It’s gotten to the point where a lot of judgment is now being directed at people who want to live smaller. Their choice is being criticized as unsafe, unhealthy, anti-social.”

Hinshaw frowns on the loopholes that were taken advantage of. “The developers slid under the radar for design reviews,” he tells me. “They knew their neighbors wouldn’t want it.” But he considers micro-housing to be a viable and legitimate answer to Seattle’s looming housing crisis.

“When you look at it on a square footage basis, yes, the developers are probably making a generous profit margin because they’ve skinnied back on the costs,” he says. “But the people who are renting don’t care if they’re paying $3 or $4 a square foot. They care about the total rent. Does it have a nice view? Is it in a good neighborhood? We now have a whole cadre of people who aren’t just buying a place to live in. They’re buying a good neighborhood. And that’s a big change.”

Property values, meanwhile, have hardly suffered. Quite the opposite, according to Cathy Reines, who cites the Roosevelt neighborhood just north of the University of Washington, where developers are paying as much as $960,000 for a small, older home they plan to tear down to build a micro-unit building. A year ago, a comparable house was selling for $775,000. The value is in the land—up from $193 a foot to $240 a foot within that time period.

Cathy Reines, CEO of a micro-housing development company, in front of an empty lot that she and her co-worker, right, hope to use for micro-apartments. | Mark Peterson/Redux

And if some developers replace a 100-year-old Queen Anne bungalow with a 68-unit micro-complex? Well, in this city, Queen Annes are practically a dime a dozen. Or so the argument goes.

***

When micro-housing began cropping up in neighborhoods across Seattle in 2009, a majority on the city council saw it as a positive force. “They have a commitment to dense local neighborhoods,” explains Durning of the Sightline Institute. “So the planners didn’t clamp down on it as they would have in many cities.”

All that changed with the 2013 election, when Seattlites voted to end most at-large council races in favor of district-based elections. The amendment, which created seven geographic districts and two at-large positions, meant that councilmembers who previously might have considered the interests of the city as a whole suddenly had to focus on the districts they represented.

Accountability quickly became the new watchword. In an editorial the week after the election, the Seattle Times concluded that voters were “tired of feeling like their city council members operate in an ivory tower in downtown Seattle.”

It wasn’t long before neighborhood groups recognized their new influence. Within a few months, micro-housing became one of the most contentious issues facing the council.

“The groups certainly feel they have a voice that they never had before,” says Councilmember Mike O’Brien, chair of the Council’s Planning, Land Use and Sustainability Committee.

All nine council members were soon drawn into the fray, a reflection of the fact that come next year all nine members face re-election—the first time in living memory that’s ever happened. Every one of them is scrambling to curry favor and guarantee their political futures.

“It’s a pretty volatile political environment out there,” concedes Mayor Murray, who came into office in the 2013 election. “People are feeling pretty caught out there.”

O’Brien, a cycling enthusiast and longtime Sierra Club volunteer, was determined to find some consensus around the divisive micro-housing issue. He formed a stakeholders’ group of developers, residents and tenants.

Two of the most polarizing figures—the activist Bill Bradburd, chair of the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition and a tenacious critic of micro-housing, and Roger Valdez, a self-described micro “evangelist” and lobbyist for the developers—were barred from the group.

Yet agreement wasn’t within grasp.

“Each side hates the other and shame on them,” says Reines, the developer who was one of 12 stakeholders. “Now both are so dug into their respective camps that they are afraid to give an inch, for fear that the other will take a mile.”

At the first meeting, she approached a man she’d never met before, stuck out her hand and introduced herself. “I’m your enemy,” he answered by way of greeting.

O’Brien eventually cobbled together a compromise proposal separating micro-housing into two categories: small efficiency dwelling units and congregate housing.

The difference lies in the number of units permitted. The so-called efficiency dwellings consist of eight rooms, each with its own bathroom, around a common kitchen. Congregates, which represent 23 of the 77 micro-housing projects in Seattle, operate under no such restriction. A congregate residence is required to include just one common kitchen in the entire building.

“I just don’t think [micro-apartments] belong in a low-rise zone where someone has invested half a million in a townhouse and then 56 people move in next door,” says Bill Bradburd, chair of the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition. | Mark Peterson/Redux

For some opponents, the term “congregate” raises the specter of the old city tenement or boarding house, whose decrepit conditions once prompted the introduction of housing standards for health and safety.

“Congregate housing is the category under which boarding houses generally need to be permitted,” explains Durning. “And cities usually have very strict laws on boarding houses. If you ask them if they allow it, they say ‘oh, yes.’ But in fact, the rules are very restrictive so that effectively none of it gets built.”

Developers suspect that’s the strategy of their opponents: to ratchet up Seattle’s restrictions against micro-housing, cut into developers’ profits and reduce their incentives to build.

“There’s nothing wrong with a boarding house,” protests Bradburd, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned artist who moved to Seattle four years ago and became a stay-at-home father and fulltime activist. “I just don’t think they belong in a low-rise zone where someone has invested half a million in a townhouse and then 56 people move in next door.”

***

Sarah Chido moved into a 286-square-foot room that feels palatial by micro-unit standards. The floor is a distressed grey wood laminate; the walls are light grey; there’s no sink in the bathroom but the shower is “fair game.” Good enough, in other words. Her new place is in a much safer neighborhood than her last, and the rent—$1,000—is unbeatable, especially because it includes utilities and WiFi. She plans to stay put for the next two years, long enough to get her degree in dental hygiene at nearby Seattle Central College.

“It’s big enough for me and him,” Chido says, climbing the steps to the third-floor walk-up, followed by a muscular pit bull named Jackson. Apart from the bed, his crate is the most commanding object in the room.

At the turn of the 20th century, boarding houses were one option for the young and childless in big cities, and as recently as the 1970s, Seattle had as many as 10,000 of them. Above, an early 1900s Seattle boarding house is pictured alongside a modern-day micro-apartment building in the city. | Mark Peterson/Redux

In addition to school, she works fulltime in a gluten-free food truck specializing in quinoa and vegetables. At home, she invested in a hot plate to supplement the small microwave. She hasn’t used it yet. She’s been warned that her apartment is equipped with sprinklers that will likely go off in the event that she tries to cook.

“Which I personally like,” she says. “It makes me feel safe, knowing that no one around me can start a fire.”

In some ways, history is repeating itself. At the turn of the last century, boarding houses—the micro-unit buildings of their time—comprised a third of all rental housing in the United States, according to Durning. As recently as the early 1970s, Seattle counted more than 10,000 boarding rooms among its housing stock, most occupied by young men working in the city’s canning, fishing and metal extraction industries. After a series of fires, including a 1970 arson that killed 20 residents, the city effectively closed its boarding houses by regulating them out of existence.

Paul Groth, a historian and geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been watching “the reinvention of the boarding house,” as he puts it, with great interest. He has written and lectured widely on the American boarding house; for a brief period during the 1980s, he lived in one in San Francisco.

The boarding house plays an important role in fostering urban development by bringing new workers to the city and generating the growth of local business, he argues:

“Back in the ’20s, the assumption for those who were renting in rooming houses was that you’d eat in a cheap eatery around the corner. ‘Home’ was scattered up and down the block: Your bedroom was in one building. The bar you hung out in was your living room. The restaurant was your dining room. And around the corner, there was a place you went to for recreation.”

Sherlock Holmes famously lived in a London boarding house. Walt Whitman lived in a boarding house in Boston, as for a time did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. Boarding houses help make a city thrive by promoting nightlife, supporting corner stores, inexpensive restaurants and laundry services, and stimulating systems of mass public transit.

It’s easy to see parallels to today’s Seattle, where young workers leave their tiny apartments to patronize local restaurants in Capitol Hill, artisanal breweries in Eastlake and gourmet food trucks lined up in fleets along Terry Avenue in South Lake Union. Chido, 34, knows all about it.

Because she works for one of those trucks—hauling a 1,000-pound food cart through the streets of Seattle, serving up organic vegetables she herself can’t afford, going home to a room that, as she continually reminds herself, is new and safe and functional. “We, the working class, have two choices,” she says. “Cry about how it’s unfair that some have so much and others so little … Or grin and bear it and tell people how cute our little apartments with no stove can be, how it’s OK that this is what hard workers have been reduced to.”

This is the dark side of the boarding house, says Groth, who points to its role in seizing on cheap and short-term labor. When businesses underpay their workforce and discourage long-term employment, boarding houses—or, in this case, micro-units—pop up to offer month-to-month leases.

“It’s a floating army of underpaid workers,” he says. “And if that’s all we have in our cities, it’s not a good thing.”

***

In a city where affordable housing is increasingly framed as an environmental issue—one pitting urban density and sustainable growth against long commutes and suburban sprawl—developers and environmentalists have forged unexpected alliances.

Sarah Chido and her dog, Jackson, share a micro-apartment in Seattle. "It's big enough for me and him," she says. | Mark Peterson/Redux

These came to the fore on Sept. 16, when the city council’s land use committee met to approve the proposed restrictions on micro-housing. As neighborhood residents, activists and developers lined up for a chance to address the committee, they were joined by representatives from several Washington state environmental groups. One after another, the environmentalists read aloud their letters appealing for fewer restrictive burdens and “flexibility” around market demands.

“We see micro-housing as an essential housing type to meet the growing demand at different price points,” April Putney, director of state policy and advocacy for the environmental nonprofit Futurewise, later explained. “We’re saying that it’s an important tool and we shouldn’t add so many regulations that it doesn’t remain a viable tool.”

The land-use committee didn’t see it that way. It endorsed establishing a 220-square-foot minimum, increasing the amount of common space and mandating that each unit have a second sink and additional covered space within the building for bicycle parking.

It would also restrict micro-housing to neighborhoods zoned for multi-family residences, require that new developments undergo design reviews, and limit congregate units to high-density, low-rise zones. (Though most cities require one parking stall per housing unit, Seattle continues to wave that requirement for high-density neighborhoods within walking distance of mass transit.)

Making matters worse, several developers told me, last month, in response to a lawsuit filed by critics, the city slowed the permitting process for new micro-unit buildings.

Mark Peterson/Redux

There’s no question that the new restrictions will jack up the rent, according to Roger Valdez, speaking on behalf of Seattle’s micro-unit developers. Valdez is not a mere spokesman; he is a true believer who lives what he preaches—in a 209-square-foot luxury micro-unit featuring a loft, a balcony and a drop-dead view of the Seattle skyline. The price: $1,350.

He warns that the proposed restrictions will add $300 to the average rent, taking micro-housing to the same rate as a studio apartment. “And then the whole idea of affordability is out the window.”

Scott Shapiro, the small-scale micro-unit developer and protégé of Jim Potter, is also discouraged and says he’s throwing in the towel. “I will do no more micro-housing because [these proposed changes] limit the number of units I can build,” he says. “Instead of 163 square feet I’ll do 280 square feet. And instead of charging $880, I’ll charge $1,300 a month. It’s still a great location. I’ll still find people to rent to. But it’s now limited a whole class of people. And I think it’s bad policy for Seattle.”

The mayor sounds almost as displeased. “I now believe the added amendments cause a cumulative effect in driving up costs,” he tells me, saying the new rules would result in 10 percent fewer units. “And that translates to 10 percent less affordable housing.”

The day after the committee approved the proposal, he threatened to veto the bill, expressing “concerns about the potential impacts” that the city council amendment would have “on the affordability of micro-housing in this city.” The city council has since adopted the measure, but the progressive mayor who ushered in the highest minimum wage rate in the country has backed away from his threat, without explanation.

“[W]e are about to open up a much broader conversation about housing affordability,” Murray said in an Oct. 6 statement, “and we will be looking at all tools in the toolbox to promote more affordable housing options for all.”

As developers, neighbors and politicians clash, there is this irony: Micro-housing hasn’t sparked comparable opposition in any of the other cities where it’s been introduced. It may be too early. Yet a housing solution that sprouted almost spontaneously here is now on the verge of being rejected by the very city that gave rise to it.

“Portland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis have all come calling, looking to Seattle and asking how to undo their minimum size requirement,” Valdez says. “And here’s Seattle, actively trying to institute one. If this goes through, we’ll no longer be in business.”

“It may just have been too far ahead of its time in Seattle.”