Ah...roughly the same size of an RV motorcoach! Nothing beats living in a bread box! with bike storage!

"The residential units range from micro-studios at 263 square feet, one-bedrooms at 369 square feet, to townhouses at 450 square feet, to two-bedroom units at 568 square feet."

Wow, Mr Madden sure seems to get each square inch possible. At 263 sqft, that's smaller than those display rooms at IKEA.

Wanna bet on whether or not they will rent for over $1000/mo?

Thanks
JK

Retail and living space in 400 square feet. Two bedrooms in 570 square feet. That's about the size of my garage.

These are the types of living standards in the New York slum tenements that actually sparked the fair housing movement 100 years ago. Recreated in 2013 with the city cheering it on!

At what point does this just become rank exploitation of renters? 100 square foot units? 80 square foot units? Should we just slide our young and poor into bunk-bed-sized stacks like Chinese factory workers?

263 Sq Ft? OMG! If minimum wage is a cruelty because it isn't a 'living wage' how can anything less than 500 sq feet be family home?

Must be quite a money making deal charging the same or more for less. Apparently this has been in the works for some time getting people moving along with the agenda/program/propaganda that this less is the chi chi way to be and go now. . . .
meanwhile all the way to the bank and the ruling elite can do and have more and more. Some of the entitled have bathrooms larger than these micro-apartments.
Works well when so many can be convinced to do with less!

Does being a Historic District offer any protection at all, with regard to providing on-site parking or prohibiting a building with non parking provided ?????

living like rats. welcome to the new frontier.

We are not a small little country having to live like rats. We have vast open space, and no, I am not suggesting sprawl, however, living in smaller communities with open space between. . . is possible with the internet and placing some business facilities in small communities.

Why do they all look like commercial buildings. None of these things says "home" to me. Warehouses for people for sure. This can't be the future for mankind.

I forgot to say - shame on the architects if this is all they could come up with. Design is dead.

Only two stories and not filling the lot? It's a waste of valuable space on a busy street with good transit and many businesses to walk to, plus within bikeable distance from downtown. If the city is trying to accommodate growth without commercial corridors encroaching back into the single-family neighborhoods, it is important to maximize the narrow, 100-foot deep commercial zoning with mixed use buildings. That said, this building may not even be as high as the four-square-with-attached-store-in-front that the seems to be the predominant type on this block, so many will think it fits in just fine.

Has a loan officer really signed off on lending to this project? So many red flags.
I guess banks learned nothing from the last five years.

the small storefront in the photo was once upon a time the "Broadway Ice Cream Bowl"...a wonderful independent business run by a husband and wife team, serving incredibly tasty ice cream. We used to go there after dinner or on special occasions for ice cream cones. The husband/proprietor was Phil Hawley, who later rose to the top at the Broadway department store (in LA) which then became part of the Carter Hawley Hale department store group. Phil was one of the top retail executives in the country during the 60s, early 70s.

A little slice of Irvington history, from a kid who was there, and remembers the great ice cream cones.

For those wondering why anybody would live in these spaces, consider the big push for attracting the "creative class". For them, it's absolutely perfect, as they'll stay in the space for a year or two, until they either move up and out or until their parents' money runs out and they have to move back home. Then it's time for the next wannabe weekly newspaper editor to move in. Just think: it'll be just like off-campus housing in a university town in a couple of years: no maintenance because the intended renters are too dumb to care, and anyone who dares complain about noise or sanitation issues will be pilloried with passive-aggressive notes stating "you just have something against young people." Meanwhile, the property owner will be laughing himself sick.

An upbeat article on the subject in this month's Northwest Examiner:
http://www.nwexaminer.com/issues/03March2013.pdf

You wanna see some architecture? Look at the Dougy Center on SE 52nd near Foster. Beautiful. That style might look great on NE Broadway- assuming it was the right scale for the lot, and has some parking.

Creativity and thoughtful design cost money and these people have already demonstrated in interviews and by their actions that they want to squeeze every possible penny out of the square footage they're working with. That's why these things all look like salt boxes with occasional weird stuff attached to the outside as a nod to "art." There's no parking, little to no landscaping and the only concessions made on the rush to the bank are legal concessions.

When condos were hot, the guy who owned the property upon which our apartment complex sits, paid a design firm to create the plans for the 10-floor w/penthouse condo tower he planned to build, after tearing the old place down. It didn't happen because he asked for variances, which meant there had to be hearings and the loan window passed (even though the land use board rolled over and gave him everything he asked for). In the meantime, the thing actually won a design award from the Board of Architects. And it hadn't even been built! Then the bottom fell out of the market.

The only good thing about buildings meant to be condos that had to convert to rentals is that they were built considerably better than the dreck now being thrown up to accommodate the rental crowd.

Re. the recent "works in progress": we are looking at the slums of the future, my friends.