Affordable Housing Institute : US

How many room’s of one’s own?  We are accustomed to answering “many,” just as we are accustomed to answering “one” to the question, How many households in one home? 

 

Nuclear family, nuclear home

 

But housing demand is elastic, and just as the upper scale of consumption expands when owners are flush with money, at the other end of the scale where money is tight, enterprises dwellers create their own multi-family housing.

 

No, not multiple apartments in one complex.

 

Multiple families in one apartment.

 

This arises spontaneously any time when housing cost rises above an affordability level for a population segment will to accept reduced accommodations, as demonstrated by this tongue-in-cheek New York Times article:

 

Talk About Renting a Hole in the Wall

 

So you think your place is small? One night recently, a group of architecture students staying up late in a loft in Brooklyn took to amusing themselves by stuffing a mattress into a hole cut into the wall above a bedroom door. Then they tried the mattress out for comfort. Not half bad! It occurred to one of them, Nick Freeman, that people might pay money to call that elevated mattress home.

 

So Mr. Freeman posted an ad on the Web site Craigslist: “$35 — elevated mattress-sized space between rooms.” He used a minimalist pitch. “Opening between hall and room available for long/short-term use, accessible by ladder, sheets and pillows not provided.” The ad went up around noon, and by the end of that day, Mr. Freeman had a dozen potential takers.

 

“I was actually surprised with the amount of places that fall into that category — kind of like ‘I’ll rent a corner,’ ” said Drew Hart, who answered the ad.  “I went to look at a place recently in Queens; I wasn’t aware until I got there that it was a cloth shower curtain separating part of the living room.”

 

Propinquity precedes procreation

 

A very substantial portion of what symbolically constitutes a ‘room’ is thus merely the ability to ignore others, a combination of screening, silence, and a lock (physical or psychological) against unwanted entry.  And if all one needs from a home is a safe sleeping place, then the minimum acceptable standard drops:

 

Into the six-ring circus that is the housing market in New York City — where a house can sell for $40 million, an apartment can rent for $25,000 a month and extended families sleep in shifts in single rooms — came the airborne mattress, at least briefly.

 

As real estate prices remain stratospheric and people keep pouring into the city, some housing experts believe the market for space within other people’s space is on the rise.

 

Markets always clear, and when the minimum price for a stand-alone flat exceeds the maximum affordable payment for some population cohort, then there will be sub rosa subdivision.

 

On Craigslist alone, one can find hundreds of ads for rooms within apartments, beds within bedrooms, even the occasional couch — if not living quarters, then living eighths.

 

Subdivisions in accommodations may be behavioral or temporal:

 

Some are available from Monday evenings through Friday mornings, some only on weekends. Some exclude kitchen privileges, request teetotalers, insist upon plant care, limit sleepovers.

A few will take some of the rent in trade.

 

Time sharing of bed space in cramped quarters has a long tradition going back through submarines, the Maginot Line bunkers, and even the Royal Navy from before Nelson:

 

England expects every man to sling his hammock

 

where the hammocks were famously slung fourteen inches apart on the grounds that only half of them would be occupied at any one time (the other half were always on watch).

 

“The regular value of this studio is $2,000 per month,” one recent ad seeking a roommate for a West Side apartment said. “Your share of the rent is specially reduced to only $250 per month for a female in exchange for doing small chores a few hours a week (i.e. cooking, cleaning, answering phones, massage, etc.).”

 

Even though these sub-subdivisions are eminently practical — willing seller, willing buyer — they are illegal, because they violate habitability standards (as well as common sense):

 

Drew, 19, right, who didn’t want his last name published, came to look at the $35 a month mattress for rent. Nick Freeman, a Pratt student, on the mattress, acted as a kind of broker for the mattress.

 

“You’re in the subterranean world in this particular issue,” said Frank Braconi, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a policy research group in Manhattan. “So little of it is aboveboard and legal and monitored, nobody’s counting anything. You’re inevitably going to be in the realm of anecdote rather than data.”

 

He added, “Anecdotally, it’s overwhelmingly the case that it is going on more and more.”

Caroline Adalian, a 33-year-old “child life specialist” in a Queens hospital who figures she has lived in 10 different places since college, recalls being required in one New York apartment to say she was a friend of the family and never mention rent. Another woman was told to say she was the cleaning lady.

 

These accommodations exist in the penumbra of legality.  They are technically illegal — often clearly illegal.  And minimum property standards arise to protect economically vulnerable renters from exploitation, overcrowding, and all the attendant health and sanitary risks.  But in modern America it’s hard, in a policy sense, to identify a proximate victim, especially when a household may be a legal tenant and what constitutes a ‘legal’ household is increasingly fluid.

 

Mr. Hart, a 19-year-old student from Manasquan, N.J., returning to New York after a semester of travel, fired off an email message to Mr. Freeman: “well O.K. I already know I’m crazy, but . . . if that bed’s really for rent and you’re all really as crazy as you seem as well (and those strings are strong) I’m there.”

 

He added, “Will also sleep in corner, in tent, etc. etc.”

 

 

This little Tale of the City has a very serious point — in much of the world, a single dwelling usually accommodates multiple families, one to a room, with kitchens and bathrooms shared space.  The upper stratum of informal settlements worldwide are multi-family flats, one family to a room.  I’ve seen this in Soweto, Johannesburg, and Kibera, Nairobi.  Within five minutes, you could find similar accommodations in virtually any of the world’s larger cities — including, if one counts post-college roommates, every city in America.

 

An open house for the mattress was scheduled for that Saturday, Jan. 21, between 6 and 9 p.m. Mr. Hart arrived, checked out the real estate and was willing to give it a shot. But, according to Mr. Freeman, the existing inhabitant of the bedroom in question was unenthusiastic. “Pretty much that was the point where it fizzled out,” Mr. Freeman said.

 

As for the mattress, Mr. Hart has only one regret. “I think I would have done it,” he said. “Because it’s, like, a good story to tell your kids.”

 

Many things can be tolerated if we know they are finite.

 

 

Like theoretical blog posts J.

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