CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Consider 300 square feet.

It's a single-car garage or a few office cubicles. It could fit eight times into the average new American dwelling. And it's what more people in cities including Cleveland could call home, as developers explore building tiny, efficient apartments in bustling urban neighborhoods.

Often called micro-apartments, these small living spaces are popping up in high-rent hotspots like Boston and New York. In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors just approved building code changes that lowered the minimum allowable size of an apartment to 220 square feet. Now a Cleveland development team hopes to build 80 small apartments in University Circle, where schools and hospitals attract young people for several-year stints.

Rents in Cleveland are creeping up, and new University Circle projects are helping landlords raise rates. But the average apartment here still costs less than half of what tenants pay in the nation's priciest cities, where developers and politicians are touting micro-apartments as affordable options for young, single professionals. That raises the question of whether small places will fly here, in a Midwestern market where people are accustomed to space.

Ralph McGreevy, executive vice president of the Northeast Ohio Apartment Association, scoffed at the notion.

"Three-hundred square feet for Cleveland? What's the point?" he asked. "This is the land of the free, the home of the brave."

Peter Rubin, the developer behind the University Circle proposal, believes young renters in Cleveland will sacrifice space for convenience in the middle of a fast-growing employment center driven by health care and technology.

Medical researchers, hospital residents and graduate students don't spend much time in their apartments, he points out. And having a smaller home is possible when your neighborhood becomes your living room, with new restaurants, a grocery store and other development at Euclid Avenue and Ford Drive.

"I'm more confident in this than in any other product on the site," said Rubin, president of the Coral Co. "I would expect the big players in Cleveland in the apartment market to be looking at this pretty soon."

Coral and Panzica Construction Co. are considering a stack of 300-square-foot studios, 450-square-foot one-bedroom apartments and 600-square-foot two-bedroom units as part of their Intesa project on Mayfield Road. The $100 million planned development, announced in March, would replace a surface parking lot at the edge of Little Italy with offices, housing, parking, retail and a hub for tech companies.

Rubin uses a more generous word - "metro-suites" - to describe the apartments. In a studio, a renter would cook on a two-burner stove and sleep on a bed that flips up into the wall. Plans for the one-bedroom unit show a kitchen spanning one side of the living room and the bedroom. Rents might range from $500 to $1,100 a month.

Ryan Severino, a senior economist with the Reis Inc. research firm in New York, said tiny apartments make sense in markets where rents are sky high. "I don't think less expensive markets really need to resort to that," he wrote in an email.

But the success of some older, small apartments owned by Case Western Reserve University indicate that there might be a market for what Rubin is selling. The 340-square-foot studios at the university's Triangle towers, just west of the Intesa site, are among the most popular units in the buildings, said Kevin Slesh, CWRU's director of real estate. They rent for $820 to $850 per month, well north of $2 per square foot.

Jillian Baugh has lived in one of those studios since August, when she moved here from Charlotte, N.C., for a two-year program at CWRU's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. At first, she struggled with the lack of space. But with help from an aunt who once lived in a studio, she transformed the micro-apartment with bookcases from Ikea, shoe racks in her closet and drop-down organizers.

She sleeps on a pull-out couch from Macy's and eats at a two-person table that doubles as a desk.

"I think people are surprised that I can actually function and at how I utilize the couch-bed thing," said Baugh, who is 21. "People are like, 'How do you sleep?' And I'm like, 'You're sitting on my bed.' They don't understand."

Zach Rodriguez walks to campus from his Triangle studio, which is furnished with a couch, a bed, a table and a television. The 23-year-old California native is halfway into his second year of dental school. He doesn't own a car. He rarely cooks. When friends visit, they sit on his bed.

"I feel like I'm getting a good value," he said, adding that his rent includes utilities. "If the pricing is right, the location is right, the area is right, I wouldn't be averse to living in a studio again."

Closer to downtown, students from Cleveland State University are among the tenants at University Studios, where apartments start at 320 square feet. NM Residential, which owns and manages the building, did not return phone calls about the property.

Patrick Kennedy, a California developer building micro-apartments in San Francisco, is targeting students at some of his projects but sees a broader audience that includes single professionals and retirees looking for a simpler urban experience.

"Here's what we have found," he said. "For the creative class, so to speak, people who are interested in that sort of cultural milieu, proximity is far more important than space. In the age of the Internet, you don't have a massive CD collection. Books are on a Kindle. You don't have as much stuff when you're in the Internet age."

To determine how small is too small, Kennedy built a 160-square-foot prototype apartment in a Berkeley warehouse and had a graduate student live in it for three weeks. "One-sixty was pretty small," he said. "Two-twenty was materially better. That's space enough for a dinner party for six."

Kennedy believes tiny apartments can work in any city, as long as the neighborhood boasts good public transportation and active streets lined with businesses, restaurants and stores - all present around the Intesa site where Coral and Panzica hope to break ground in 2013.

"University Circle is really meant to be experienced outside your front door," said Chris Ronayne, president of the University Circle Inc. neighborhood group.

"It's a different kind of dwelling for a different kind of worker," he added. "We are dealing with a demographic that is very focused on efficiency. Hours mean dollars. These are people who can't afford to be lost in long commutes."

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