For newcomers, that mental realignment can take considerable effort. Yes, large wall mirrors are a venerable design trick. The overstuffed couch can find its way to the street. But how do you fit your brain into the tight corset of your new home?

That is the challenge to renters that the Bloomberg administration set up with its competitive bid for architects and developers. The goal, said city housing officials, is to help singles remain in New York, contributing to its financial and creative lifeblood. According to the mayor’s office, the city has 1.8 million one- and two-person households, but scarcely half the available housing scaled to fit — only one million studios and one-bedroom apartments. The need for smaller housing will only increase: planning officials project that by 2030, the population will grow by 900,000, most of whom will not be in traditional nuclear families.

The administration is trying to jump-start a model for small-space affordable housing before the mayor leaves office in January 2014. (Officials declined to put a specific dollar figure on “affordable.”) Earlier this month, the city received 33 proposals, from as far afield as London and Amsterdam, for a building of at least 50 micro-units on East 27th Street, replacing what is now a parking lot. The winning proposal is expected to be announced in December, with groundbreaking planned, fingers crossed, for December 2013.

For the new building’s potential renters, worry not. There is extensive precedent for living tiny and tranquilly in Manhattan.

As Ms. Stolarski and others who live in studios smaller than the mayor’s minimum can attest, the experience can be liberating. If you downsize your stuff along with your expectations of square footage, you really can do more with less. And surely you can do more with less rent.

“I thought I’d crave more space,” said Lauren Applebaum, 30, who used to live in a 700-square-foot Toronto apartment. In January, when she started graduate school at New York University, she and her Yorkshire terrier moved into a 200-square foot studio on West 75th Street. But after her broker, Citi Habitats’ Rory Bolger, a studio man himself, showed her tips to expand the room — a cubbyhole divider to screen off her bed; furniture that does double duty, like a dresser-TV stand — “I think that extra space would be unnecessary.”