JERSEY CITY -- Developers of so-called micro units say they are the answer to growing demand for housing among young professionals looking to live in urban areas near their jobs, who can't afford standard apartments on their own but don't want roommates and don't need much space.



But while micro units of only a few hundred square feet with space savers like Murphy beds have become a reality in cities like Seattle, Portland, OR, and elsewhere, they have been slow to catch on in Jersey City.



This despite or, experts say, because of the city's unprecedented building boom involving more conventional rental apartments, which gives builders and investors little incentive to try something new.



Micros have also been opposed by neighborhood groups.



"They're concerned with density, they're concerned with parking, they're also concerned about changing the demographic of the neighborhood," said Michael Berney, a director at Liberty Realty in Jersey City, who believes micros are a sensible solution to an affordability problem in the city's increasingly costly housing market. "We disagree with all of that."



A pair of projects , are vying to be the first micros built in Jersey City: one near Journal Square with units of 220 to 285 square feet and rents starting at $1,100; and the other in the Van Vorst Park neighborhood with units of around 340 square feet still not priced.

But at least a year after their approvals, neither project has broken ground. For one of them, it's because of the kind of neighborhood opposition Berney cited. The other still needs to secure building permits and raise more cash.



Since Jan. 1, studios in the Journal Square neighborhood have rented for an average of $1,246 am month, while rents for downtown studios, including those on the waterfront, have averaged $1,843, according to figures from Liberty Realty.



Jeffrey Persky, an executive vice president at the Kushner Real Estate Group, now developing the massive Journal Squared high-rise rental project near the Journal Square PATH station, said the project would include hundreds of studio apartments with common amenities. But Persky said the units would be 450-500 square feet, larger than micros, with commensurately higher rents that nonetheless still would be lower than in New York.



"Fortunately, we're already giving them a substantial benefit," Persky said of Journal Squared's prospective tenants. As for developing micro units, he added, "I can't see us right now going that way."

In Journal Square, Manhattan-based developer Smart Living Associates LLC won approval last spring to build 122 micro units ranging from 222 to 285 square feet in a seven-story building on Academy Street, a few blocks from the PATH station.



With rents expected to start at $1,100 a month, the developers say the units would be affordable for millennials, retirees or other households of two people or less with incomes of around $45,000. The units might also be attractive to executives with suburban homes wanting an apartment closer to the city.

"The problem that we're trying to provide a solution for is that young professionals come to the New York area, and they can't afford a studio," said Ken Sato, a principal at Smart Living. "They end up having to share apartment in some of the outer boroughs, in Queens and so forth."



Typical of micro projects, the Journal Square building, known as the Nest Micro Apartments, would provide common amenities including a ground floor cafe and coin-operated laundry, a gym and a roof deck, where tenants will not only have added space to stretch out in, but also will be able to mingle and build a sense of community.



"When I was in my 20's," said Keith Schwebel, Sato's partner at Smart Living, "I remember I hardly spent any time in my apartment. I was at work or out socializing."



While the project's target clientele is young professionals, there will not be age or other residency restrictions, other than a maximum occupancy of two people per unit. Smart Living officials said their project complies with the city's Journal Square redevelopment plan.



The other proposed micro project, in the Van Vorst neighborhood downtown, is an 87-unit building by developers Rushman-Dillon. It was approved in 2014 by order of a judge, who ruled in favor of the developers in a suit asserting that the Jersey City Planning Board had failed to act on the application in a timely manner.



The judge granted the project an automatic approval, but the case remains tied up in the courts following an appeal of the ruling by the Van Vorst Park Association, a neighborhood group that interceded in the case, and Rushman-Dillon has not yet broken ground.



The Van Vorst group has opposed the project for the same reasons that homeowners have objected to micros in other parts of the country: its high density; lack of parking; and the threat it poses to the character of the neighborhood.



In contrast to the city's reluctance to approve the Van Vorst project, the Journal Square micros received an unusual public endorsement from Planning Board Chairman Christopher Langston.



"This is the way of the future," Langston is quoted as saying in a press release issued by Smart Living last week. "I am so glad to see this come to Jersey City."



The micro world is a small one, and the two projects have the same architect, Richard Garber of GRO Architects PLLC in New York, a longtime Jersey City resident who is also director of the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture in Newark.

"The unit designs were inspired in part by the design of living quarters in yachts, where there is a logic for every component within the cabin and no square inch goes unused," Garber said in an email.

Smart Living's partners say they have to raise $4.5 million in private equity to meet the total construction cost of $17 million, after sinking $1 million into the project themselves and borrowing the rest. They hope to have the money by summer, with a 15-month construction period that would then see the building open by late 2017.



A spokesman for Smart Living, Ron Simoncini, said the project hadn't broken ground because construction drawings still had to be completed and permits applied for, not because of any lack of funding. Simoncini said there was ample investor interest in the project.

"They hope to commence construction by mid to late summer," Simoncini said in a statement. "They are simultaneously raising the last of required capital, which is typical at this stage of the development cycle."

But like KRE, Journal Squared's developer, some developers or their backers might pass on micros as an untested concept in a market already leasing up standard apartments as fast as they can be built, said Berney, the Liberty realtor, who has 20 years experience in the Jersey City market.



"They may not want to take that risk," Berney said of developers and investors. "The market's hot, and they can go for the standard studio, one, two or three (bedroom units)."



Picking up on the micro trend, the non-profit Urban Land Institute, a planning and development think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently published a study of the tiny apartments titled, "The Macro View on Micro Units." The group defines micros as typically 350 square feet or less, with their own fully functional and handicapped accessible kitchens and bathrooms, a definition that excludes single-room-occupancy (SRO) units, where residents must rely on communal kitchens or bathrooms.



Echoing a point emphasized by Smart Living, the Urban Land Institute study found that, "smaller and micro units outperform conventional units in the marketplace they achieve higher occupancy rates and garner significant rental-rate premiums (rent per square foot) compared with conventional units."



"Both the consumer research and the case studies indicate that a segment of renters is indeed interested in the micro-unit concept," the study found. "Nearly a quarter of renters in conventional apartments indicate they would be interested or very interested in renting a micro unit."

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.