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IPFS News Link • Housing

Take That, Tokyo! San Francisco Approves 220-Square-Foot ‘Micro-Apartments’

• http://www.wired.com, By Nathan Hurst
 If you live in San Francisco, chances are you already feel like you’re living in a closet. But soon the city’s smallest living spaces will likely be tiny enough to fit in a compact one-car garage.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors tentatively approved Tuesday a trial run of 220-square-foot “micro-apartments” — carefully designed compact living spaces that have become all the rage in urban development. Pending ratification and mayoral approval next month, the plan beats, in smallness, Vancouver’s 226-square-foot “micro-lofts,” and make the 275-square-foot units under trial in New York look like airplane hangars.

The micro-apartment trend traces its roots to cramped urban zones like Tokyo and Paris, which began looking at downsizing apartments as early as 2007 and 2008, just as the global number of urban dwellers first surpassed the rural population. The concept reached a crescendo this year, with micro-apartment experiments breaking out from London to Poland to China.


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