There seem to be goods of many different sizes and price-tags, with people being able to buy bulk or the bare minimum, e.g. transportation: walking by foot, biking, public transport, leasing a car, owning a car, or by helicopter.
However, the very small scale for apartments seems to be neglected – cheap apartments are often in bad neighbourhoods, with longer commutes and worse living conditions, but rarely just extremely small (<10 m²). But one could easily imagine 5 m² apartments, with just a bed & a small bathroom (or even smaller options with a shared bathroom). However, I don’t know of people renting/buying these kinds of apartments – even though they might be pretty useful if one wants to trade size against good location.
Why, therefore, no nano-apartments?
Possible reasons:
No Supply
Perhaps nano-apartments are not economically viable to rent. Maybe the fixed cost per apartment is so high that
it’s not worth it below a certain size – every tenant being an additional burden, plumbing + upkeep of stairways, organising trash & electricity just isn’t worth it. Or, perhaps, the amount of walls is too big – the more separate apartments you want to create, the more floor-space is going to be used on walls to separate those apartments, and at some fixed point around 15 m² it’s just not worth it.
Another possibility is that there are regulations dictating the minimal size of apartments (or something that effectively leads to apartments having a minimal size).
No Demand
I could be over-estimating the number of people who’d like to live in such an apartment. I could see myself renting one, especially if the location is very good – I’m glad to trade off space against having a short commute. But perhaps I’m very unusual in this regard, and most people trade off more harshly against the size of the apartment, due to owning just too much stuff to fit into such a small place.
Or the kinds of people who would make this kind of trade-off just move into a shared flat, and bare the higher costs (but most rooms in shared apartments are still larger than 10 m²).
The group of people who would rent those nano-apartments would naturally be young singles who want to save money and live urban, perhaps that group is just too small/already served with university dorms?
So, why are there no nano-apartments? Does anyone have more insight into this? (The title is, of course, a hansonism).
My guess is: Regulation. It would be illegal to build and rent out nano-apartments. (Evidence: In many places in the USA, it’s illegal for more than X people not from the same family to live together, for X = 4 or something ridiculously small like that.)
To add a bit more detail to your comment, this form of housing used to exist in the from of single room occupancy (SRO) buildings, where people would rent a single room and share bathroom and kitchen spaces. Reformers and planners started efforts to ban this form of housing starting around the early 20th century. From Wikipedia:
By the 1880s, urban reformers began working on modernizing cities; their efforts to create “uniformity within areas, less mixture of social classes, maximum privacy for each family, much lower density for many activities, buildings set back from the street, and a permanently built order” all meant that SRO hotels had to be cut back.[10] By the 1890s, SRO hotels became “forbidden housing; their residents, forbidden citizens.”[10] New York City police inspector Thomas Byrnes stated that rather than give SRO hotels “palliative” care, they should be dealt with using a “knife, the blister, the amputating instruments.”[12]
Reformers used moral codes, building codes, fire codes, zoning, planning committees and inspections to limit or remove SRO hotels.[12] An example of moral critiques is Simon Lubin’s claims that “unregulated hotels” were “spreading venereal diseases among the soldiers”.[12] Other reformers tried to ban men and boys from rooming in the same hotels, due to concerns about homosexuality.[12] The building and safety codes criticized SRO hotel problems such as “firetraps, dark rooms, inadequate plumbing, an insufficient ventilation.”[12] In San Francisco, building code inspections and restrictions were often used to racially harass Chinese labourers and the places they lived.[12]
In 1917, California passed a new hotel act that prevented the building of new hotels with small cubicle rooms.[12] In addition to banning or restricting SRO hotels, land use reformers also passed zoning rules that indirectly reduced SROs: banning mixed residential and commercial use in neighbourhoods, an approach which meant that any remaining SRO hotel’s residents would find it hard to eat at a local cafe or walk to a nearby corner grocery to buy food.[12] Non-residential uses such as religious institutions (churches) and professional offices (doctors, lawyers) were still permitted under these new zoning rules, but working class people (plumbers, mechanics) were not allowed to operate businesses such as garages or plumbing businesses.[12]
This fits into a set of ideas about urban planning that were popular in the 20th century but have (at least in my opinion) contributed to housing unaffordability and reduced the diversity and vitality of many of America’s cities.
I lived at 20Mission, which was technically an SRO. I enjoyed the setting quite a bit, though I’ve heard they’ve had trouble recently with COVID. That said, most of the other SROs I know of nearby (in the Mission, SF), are really not nice places. (lots of drugs and some violence).
There is a symbolic example of your “nano-apartment,” called Goshitel. It is the cheapest form of rent, with about the area of 3.3 meter squared. The term “Goshi” is attached because it has been used by people who decided to spend every minute studying for the Goshi exam and become the public governor, the most sustainable job in the country.
Therefore the first reason people need the nano apartment is to have the longest possible time while not working for their reasons: people who refused work. Well, the second reason is to just save some money: people who work. The third reason is that they don’t have money to escape: people who can’t work, like the homeless.
I’ve seen some documentaries about these Goshitels and I think you can easily find one with that term. As Goshitel has a poor image, those are more focused on the difficulties of one and people inside. But as I described, it has a diverse demographic and the documentaries only show portions of it. Things to note is that it has an overall negative image of dirty facilities and depressed people. That can be why nano apartment was not spread outside Korea to America.
Back to your question, I suspect some reasons that nano-apartments does not exist in the US while more frequent in Korea:
Korea has much smaller land, compared to the US.The common housing form of Korean is an apartment(or “advanced apartment” with at least 10 floors. It is not exactly the one of America), while Americans usually live in detached houses. The degree of viewing a nano-apartment can differ a lot. -Counterargument: Both have extremely populous cities, where the land is always in shortage.
The US has more restrictions on the housing structures. …but I know nothing
The group of “Goshi” students would have been the obvious demand for such nano apartments in Korea. It would have brought proper development over decades. In the US, there are no exams that can be comparable to Goshi—that can guarantee the rest of one’s life, even during economic depressions. The exam also required students to attend prep classes, mostly in the expansive and populous Seoul area.
Maybe the lifestyles of homeless people are different in America and Korea.
One more:
I just sparked some thoughts here and it may be insufficient to bring a complete concept. I realized explaining Korean stuff to America and bringing American stuff to Korea are extra time consuming, as you don’t know “Goshi″ and I don’t know housing in New York. But I enjoyed comparing cultural differences and hope you ask more for confusing parts.
Thanks for your answer! I had an idea that there’s more very small housing in Asia, but never got such a clear exposition to a clear example. I’m not from the US, but from Europe, but they’re fairly similar culturally (although I suspect Europe might have even stronger housing regulations than the US).
After some of the comments here, I’ve settled on a mixture of “it’s the regulations” and “not *that* many people want it, but it’s still available for the ones who do”. I think that’s because the need for dense housing during the industrial revolution was a long time ago, and the majority of people don’t need/want nano-apartments, so they don’t care/think about the possibility of very dense housing.
My guess would be that it’s different in Asia because there industrial development is much younger, and the population is more used to “poor” and less luxurious living conditions.
My guess would be that it’s different in Asia because there industrial development is much younger, and the population is more used to “poor” and less luxurious living conditions.
You suspects there is an association between “industrial development” and “living conditions.” I can start from here.
By the way, thanks for reply! My comment below contains mainly American evidences, so I hope this can fit to the situation of Europe.
For people who want to live in city, but are poor, you brought up nano-apartment to fulfill the needs and wondered why it is not frequent. I thought about this again, and thought “wait, isn’t that why slums exist?” The existence of slums may explain why there was no demand for nano-apartment. So I started from it, then I looked back at the progressive era(1896-1916) and how Jacob Riis wrote “how the other half lives” to reveal the poor situation of tenements. These tenements are the actual example of a nano-apartment in New York city, with the overpopulation and shortage of housing. Basic history of tenements are well described in Wikipedia, but it doesn’t describe the current situation of tenements except the tenement museum part. Wikipedia also says tenements are not necessarily slums and By this time I don’t think any more people will choose to live in slums. According to this blog, I learned slum is not a thing anymore. Oh.
I tried to look up tenement development over time, and at history.com, I found FDR’s First House project, which included slum-clearing and building public housing. I looked up a New York public housing site and it seemed like a good replacement for tenements.
I’ve settled on a mixture of “it’s the regulations” and “not *that* many people want it, but it’s still available for the ones who do”.
So I can credit government efforts to replace nano-apartment and this reasonably explains why it is not popular, even in populous cities. There are options to choose other than a nano-apartment. It is important to point out that there is no necessity, distinctive from just preference.
In Korea, I have another interpretation. It is true Industrial development was recent, starting from the 60s. But that brought urbanization late, too. When my mom was young, she lived in a detached house in Gangnam-gu, now the most populous and expensive area in entire Korea. Therefore by the time the “K-tenement” was developing, I guess Modern technology and mindset did not make it too inferior to make the government intervene. Even in the final stage of industrialization, I don’t think Goshitel will go away.
But I think Korean population is obviously used to small apartments, for another reason. Again, Korea is small. South Korea is even smaller. That’s why high/low rise buildings are the default in Korea. I hope you can see it is not necessarily “‘poor’ and less luxurious living conditions” but just small and dense. People can have ideal housing after suburbanization, but urban houses will still be small and become old.
Lastly, I want to caution you about generalizing to Asia, because it is really large and developments are still vigorous in many countries. I think the situation of Korea differs a lot from those of even China and Japan, as they went through industrialization in different time periods. Southeastern Asia? I have no clue. Media has portrayed Southeastern Asia as underdeveloped countries for a long time but haven’t updated their developments and improvements.
p.s. Last Sunday I wanted to write history essays to prepare for my exam, but in a less wrong-way. I did not want to write just a summary of contents, so I appreciate you asking this question. I feel I wrote something not a summary:)
I think the nano spaces you describe kind of exist, but they tend to be called “pods” or “capsules”. They seem to emerge where people without family commitments place an exorbitantly high value on living in a particular location for long enough. Places like podshare SF come to mind as examples.
Having lived in a micro-apartment (400 sq ft) for a year during my first job out of school, and having stayed in capsule hotels while traveling, I have 2 personal speculations about why it takes extreme pressure to get people to consider pods desirable:
Lack of third space in the US. Having friends involves spending time with them, and spending time in person with multiple friends is impractical in a micro space and impossible in a nano one. Some countries and cultures seem to have different norms around the third space from those in the US, so nano spaces would function differently in say Tokyo Japan compared to say rural Iowa.
Privacy expectations. I think many people have a certain baseline expectation of privacy, in terms of both how much space and time they want the privacy in and how private they want it, which is incompatible with nano or pod style accommodations long term. I suspect that increased prevalence of time-shared, “public” private spaces with the right features and price points could increase how many people are able to build a lifestyle with enough privacy for their needs in a nano style living space. Examples of these “public” private spaces include hotel rooms, karaoke booths, float tanks or private meditation rooms, parks which allow sufficient distance from others, well-appointed bathrooms, and similar.
Why Not Nano-Apartments?
There seem to be goods of many different sizes and price-tags, with people being able to buy bulk or the bare minimum, e.g. transportation: walking by foot, biking, public transport, leasing a car, owning a car, or by helicopter.
However, the very small scale for apartments seems to be neglected – cheap apartments are often in bad neighbourhoods, with longer commutes and worse living conditions, but rarely just extremely small (<10 m²). But one could easily imagine 5 m² apartments, with just a bed & a small bathroom (or even smaller options with a shared bathroom). However, I don’t know of people renting/buying these kinds of apartments – even though they might be pretty useful if one wants to trade size against good location.
Why, therefore, no nano-apartments?
Possible reasons:
No Supply
Perhaps nano-apartments are not economically viable to rent. Maybe the fixed cost per apartment is so high that it’s not worth it below a certain size – every tenant being an additional burden, plumbing + upkeep of stairways, organising trash & electricity just isn’t worth it. Or, perhaps, the amount of walls is too big – the more separate apartments you want to create, the more floor-space is going to be used on walls to separate those apartments, and at some fixed point around 15 m² it’s just not worth it.
Another possibility is that there are regulations dictating the minimal size of apartments (or something that effectively leads to apartments having a minimal size).
No Demand
I could be over-estimating the number of people who’d like to live in such an apartment. I could see myself renting one, especially if the location is very good – I’m glad to trade off space against having a short commute. But perhaps I’m very unusual in this regard, and most people trade off more harshly against the size of the apartment, due to owning just too much stuff to fit into such a small place.
Or the kinds of people who would make this kind of trade-off just move into a shared flat, and bare the higher costs (but most rooms in shared apartments are still larger than 10 m²).
The group of people who would rent those nano-apartments would naturally be young singles who want to save money and live urban, perhaps that group is just too small/already served with university dorms?
So, why are there no nano-apartments? Does anyone have more insight into this? (The title is, of course, a hansonism).
My guess is: Regulation. It would be illegal to build and rent out nano-apartments. (Evidence: In many places in the USA, it’s illegal for more than X people not from the same family to live together, for X = 4 or something ridiculously small like that.)
To add a bit more detail to your comment, this form of housing used to exist in the from of single room occupancy (SRO) buildings, where people would rent a single room and share bathroom and kitchen spaces. Reformers and planners started efforts to ban this form of housing starting around the early 20th century. From Wikipedia:
This fits into a set of ideas about urban planning that were popular in the 20th century but have (at least in my opinion) contributed to housing unaffordability and reduced the diversity and vitality of many of America’s cities.
A bit more info;
I lived at 20Mission, which was technically an SRO. I enjoyed the setting quite a bit, though I’ve heard they’ve had trouble recently with COVID. That said, most of the other SROs I know of nearby (in the Mission, SF), are really not nice places. (lots of drugs and some violence).
https://www.20mission.com/
There’s been discussion of having “Micro-Units” in SF, but they’re heavily regulated. It seems like small progress is being made.
https://socketsite.com/archives/2012/11/microunits_approved_for_san_francisco_capped_for_market.html
That’s disheartening :-(
But good to know nonetheless, thanks.
Perhaps not a *completely* senseless regulation considering disease spreading (though there are better ways of attacking _that_ with other means).
Well, I know it exists. At least in Korea.
There is a symbolic example of your “nano-apartment,” called Goshitel. It is the cheapest form of rent, with about the area of 3.3 meter squared. The term “Goshi” is attached because it has been used by people who decided to spend every minute studying for the Goshi exam and become the public governor, the most sustainable job in the country.
Therefore the first reason people need the nano apartment is to have the longest possible time while not working for their reasons: people who refused work. Well, the second reason is to just save some money: people who work. The third reason is that they don’t have money to escape: people who can’t work, like the homeless.
I’ve seen some documentaries about these Goshitels and I think you can easily find one with that term. As Goshitel has a poor image, those are more focused on the difficulties of one and people inside. But as I described, it has a diverse demographic and the documentaries only show portions of it. Things to note is that it has an overall negative image of dirty facilities and depressed people. That can be why nano apartment was not spread outside Korea to America.
Back to your question, I suspect some reasons that nano-apartments does not exist in the US while more frequent in Korea:
Korea has much smaller land, compared to the US.The common housing form of Korean is an apartment(or “advanced apartment” with at least 10 floors. It is not exactly the one of America), while Americans usually live in detached houses. The degree of viewing a nano-apartment can differ a lot. -Counterargument: Both have extremely populous cities, where the land is always in shortage.
The US has more restrictions on the housing structures. …but I know nothing
The group of “Goshi” students would have been the obvious demand for such nano apartments in Korea. It would have brought proper development over decades. In the US, there are no exams that can be comparable to Goshi—that can guarantee the rest of one’s life, even during economic depressions. The exam also required students to attend prep classes, mostly in the expansive and populous Seoul area.
Maybe the lifestyles of homeless people are different in America and Korea.
One more:
I just sparked some thoughts here and it may be insufficient to bring a complete concept. I realized explaining Korean stuff to America and bringing American stuff to Korea are extra time consuming, as you don’t know “Goshi″ and I don’t know housing in New York. But I enjoyed comparing cultural differences and hope you ask more for confusing parts.
Thanks for your answer! I had an idea that there’s more very small housing in Asia, but never got such a clear exposition to a clear example. I’m not from the US, but from Europe, but they’re fairly similar culturally (although I suspect Europe might have even stronger housing regulations than the US).
After some of the comments here, I’ve settled on a mixture of “it’s the regulations” and “not *that* many people want it, but it’s still available for the ones who do”. I think that’s because the need for dense housing during the industrial revolution was a long time ago, and the majority of people don’t need/want nano-apartments, so they don’t care/think about the possibility of very dense housing.
My guess would be that it’s different in Asia because there industrial development is much younger, and the population is more used to “poor” and less luxurious living conditions.
Do you think that’s getting at the truth?
You suspects there is an association between “industrial development” and “living conditions.” I can start from here.
By the way, thanks for reply! My comment below contains mainly American evidences, so I hope this can fit to the situation of Europe.
For people who want to live in city, but are poor, you brought up nano-apartment to fulfill the needs and wondered why it is not frequent. I thought about this again, and thought “wait, isn’t that why slums exist?” The existence of slums may explain why there was no demand for nano-apartment. So I started from it, then I looked back at the progressive era(1896-1916) and how Jacob Riis wrote “how the other half lives” to reveal the poor situation of tenements. These tenements are the actual example of a nano-apartment in New York city, with the overpopulation and shortage of housing. Basic history of tenements are well described in Wikipedia, but it doesn’t describe the current situation of tenements except the tenement museum part. Wikipedia also says tenements are not necessarily slums and By this time I don’t think any more people will choose to live in slums. According to this blog, I learned slum is not a thing anymore. Oh.
I tried to look up tenement development over time, and at history.com, I found FDR’s First House project, which included slum-clearing and building public housing. I looked up a New York public housing site and it seemed like a good replacement for tenements.
So I can credit government efforts to replace nano-apartment and this reasonably explains why it is not popular, even in populous cities. There are options to choose other than a nano-apartment. It is important to point out that there is no necessity, distinctive from just preference.
In Korea, I have another interpretation. It is true Industrial development was recent, starting from the 60s. But that brought urbanization late, too. When my mom was young, she lived in a detached house in Gangnam-gu, now the most populous and expensive area in entire Korea. Therefore by the time the “K-tenement” was developing, I guess Modern technology and mindset did not make it too inferior to make the government intervene. Even in the final stage of industrialization, I don’t think Goshitel will go away.
But I think Korean population is obviously used to small apartments, for another reason. Again, Korea is small. South Korea is even smaller. That’s why high/low rise buildings are the default in Korea. I hope you can see it is not necessarily “‘poor’ and less luxurious living conditions” but just small and dense. People can have ideal housing after suburbanization, but urban houses will still be small and become old.
Lastly, I want to caution you about generalizing to Asia, because it is really large and developments are still vigorous in many countries. I think the situation of Korea differs a lot from those of even China and Japan, as they went through industrialization in different time periods. Southeastern Asia? I have no clue. Media has portrayed Southeastern Asia as underdeveloped countries for a long time but haven’t updated their developments and improvements.
p.s. Last Sunday I wanted to write history essays to prepare for my exam, but in a less wrong-way. I did not want to write just a summary of contents, so I appreciate you asking this question. I feel I wrote something not a summary:)
I think the nano spaces you describe kind of exist, but they tend to be called “pods” or “capsules”. They seem to emerge where people without family commitments place an exorbitantly high value on living in a particular location for long enough. Places like podshare SF come to mind as examples.
Having lived in a micro-apartment (400 sq ft) for a year during my first job out of school, and having stayed in capsule hotels while traveling, I have 2 personal speculations about why it takes extreme pressure to get people to consider pods desirable:
Lack of third space in the US. Having friends involves spending time with them, and spending time in person with multiple friends is impractical in a micro space and impossible in a nano one. Some countries and cultures seem to have different norms around the third space from those in the US, so nano spaces would function differently in say Tokyo Japan compared to say rural Iowa.
Privacy expectations. I think many people have a certain baseline expectation of privacy, in terms of both how much space and time they want the privacy in and how private they want it, which is incompatible with nano or pod style accommodations long term. I suspect that increased prevalence of time-shared, “public” private spaces with the right features and price points could increase how many people are able to build a lifestyle with enough privacy for their needs in a nano style living space. Examples of these “public” private spaces include hotel rooms, karaoke booths, float tanks or private meditation rooms, parks which allow sufficient distance from others, well-appointed bathrooms, and similar.
Why no nano apartments *where Part of what you are talking about sounds like bedsits, and part like foyers.which exist in some places.