NYC Unveils Newest In Teeny Tiny Living With Winning Micro-Unit Apartment Design

Just a few months ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg put out a request to designers to try and figure out how to shrink down an apartment to its legally smallest size for a new “micro-unit” building, and now the winning design has been chosen in all its teeny tiny glory. It’ll be perfect for anyone sipping a small soda on their cute little couch, see?

The city asked for proposals back in July and had received 33 completed submissions. The new itty-bitty dwellings in the 55-unit “My Micro NY” building measure as small as 250 square feet with pantries that pull out from the wall, reports Bloomberg News.

It’ll be the first multifamily building in Manhattan made up completely of prefabricated modular pieces, said Mayor Bloomberg in a statement yesterday. Each unit will be between 250 and 370 square feet, have ceilings ranging from 9 to 10 feet high, balconies and loft spaces overhead. And lest you were afraid  the bane of city living would strike in the form of tiny fridges, it seems the city is going for full-height refrigerators. Ooh lala.

“The growth rate for one- and two-person households greatly exceeds that of households with three or more people, and addressing that housing challenge requires us to think creatively and beyond our current regulations,” Bloomberg said in the statement.

Of the 55 apartments, 22 will be rent-restricted depending on tenants’ income while the other 33 will just go for whatever the current market demands. The restricted units will cost about $939 per month if the tenant earns 80% of the area’s average annual income, about $55,000. The rest will go for around $1,873 a month.

Illustrations on Bloomberg News show day and night scenarios, with a couch out in the daytime perhaps folding out into a bed. Oh and look, you can have six of your smallest friends over for dinner at dusk and then hide the table in the wall at night!

These apartments sound perfect for anyone who’s always yearned to have a Murphy bed fly out of the wall at the exact right moment of comedic timing.

Manhattan to Get First ‘Micro-Unit’ Apartment Building [Bloomberg]

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