300-square-foot apartments in the city?

Through The New York City Depart­ment of Hous­ing Preser­va­tion and Development’s (HPD) adAPT NYC, Mayor Bloomberg just announced a com­pe­ti­tion ask­ing for archi­tects and design­ers to sub­mit their pro­pos­als for 300-square-foot mini-apartments.

At this moment, the min­i­mum size of an apart­ment required by law is at least 400 square feet. adAPT NYC’s goal is to “cre­ate addi­tional choice within New York City’s hous­ing mar­ket,” since the growth rates of the one– and two-person house­hold pop­u­la­tions cur­rently exceed the growth rate of house­holds with three or more peo­ple. The project, which will be located in Man­hat­tan at a city-owned park­ing lot on E. 27th St. in Kips Bay, will con­tain about 80 micro units.

 image show­ing what the apart­ment design could look like. 

We will see pro­pos­als from dif­fer­ent designers–perhaps they will be sim­i­lar to those we’ve seen from cities like Hong-Kong or coun­tries like Japan, with their micro-apartments and houses.

This small house above is only 259 sq.ft. (located in Japan)

The pre-submission con­fer­ence will take place on July 31, 2012 at 2 pm at the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Archi­tects’ Cen­ter for Archi­tec­ture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, New York 10012.

Pho­tos: Apart­ment Ther­apy, Archiv­enue, NYC Depart­ment of Hous­ing Preser­va­tion and Development