Can you say $675 a month to rent your very own newly renovated residence in an up-and-coming neighborhood within a vibrant city? That’s affordable to someone with a $25,000/year salary.

Mini-condos on the rise in walkable urban areas, and developers in Vancouver, Canada agree, announcing thirty 270 s.f. units to be completed in March 2011.

Apparently having City support for mini-residences is a new thing, “We took a position against these kinds of units 20 years ago, but times have changed.

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For emerging generations, ‘quality of life’ does not mean quantity of life, as “more evidence that ‘not so big homes’ are in” provides evidence for. People are increasingly favoring giving up square footage in exchange for having the freedom to live in whatever neighborhood they choose, like being closer to work, closer to friends, closer to, well, having a life. You can buy space, but you can’t buy time.

Even the Urban Land Institute, the leading organization for real estate developers

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There seems to be some fairly strong evidence that the price of an average home is higher than what the average person can afford. However, this isn’t the case around Toronto, Canada if you’re buying a home from Options for Homes, a nonprofit that’s already built 1500 attainably-priced homes for people with household salaries as low as $32,000… without government subsidy.

How are they doing it?

Lowering the cost of land - Options for Homes may spend $10,000 per unit on land otherwise costing

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It’s not easy to resist gentrification, but at least the City of Boston is trying via their Artist Space Initiative within their economic development agency.

Their mission is to develop spaces that:
- are permanently dedicated to artists through deed restrictions;
- are located in buffer zones between industrial and residential neighborhoods in locations that do not support traditional family housing;
- offer live/work spaces or work-only spaces for rent and for purchase at a variety of

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You live in a studio, but you wish you had a dining center, a guest room, a master bedroom, an entertainment room… How about a home spa, bar or lounge while you’re at it?

If you’re Gary Chang, you can experience all of the above in his flexible, convertible 344 s.f. Hong Kong apartment. Known as the Domestic Transformer - inspired by the morphing toy robots - the not so big unit features accordion walls, moving wall units (suspended from steel tracks in the ceiling), fold-down tables and

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That’s the headline for a recent USA Today article, as developers go smaller in response to emerging generations of buyers who have a fresher vision of the American Dream than previous ones. “The trend is here to stay”, says Michael Newman, president and CEO of Golub & Co., an international real estate development and investment firm. “In this economy, people still want to be in cool places, and they’ll trade down size for location.“

Ho do developers compensate for less living area? Open

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While we may be familiar with city policies promoting car-free living, what are the examples in the built world?

That’s where you need to visit the Moda condominiums in the Belltown district of Seattle, Washington. Moda is a model application of truly attainably-priced housing via reducing housing size and eliminating parking spaces. The evidence:

- 83 units have no parking at all, which are $30,000 less than those with parking.
- The units start at $149,950, almost a third of the median

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You may be noticing a lot of bicycle posts lately, reflecting a trend of low cost, low energy, low maintenance transportation as gas prices have reached a new plateau. The same is happening for housing, as cities and developers partner to build homes at price points (and thus sizes) that those in the workforce (ie from teachers to police officers) can actually afford.

San Francisco leads the way in this regard, first with attainably-priced Cubix Yerba Buena and its efficiencies, and now a

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Perhaps too many people buying homes they couldn’t afford wasn’t the problem behind the Wall Street collapse, but a symptom. The real problem may be that there are too many homes out on the market that people could never afford in the first place. In other words, the average U.S. American can’t afford $300,000 for a home, as is the going rate in many cities. So rather than lend out more money to buy homes people can’t afford, that banks can’t back, perhaps the real solution is addressing the

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The median home price in San Francisco is $749,000, so being able to buy anything new at a third of that price is noteworthy, especially if it’s in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city.

Enter Cubix Yerba Buena in SoMa (South of Market), an eight-story building of 98 condos starting at $279,000. The key to affordability is not in government subsidies, but in size - each of the condominiums range from 250 to 350 s.f. It’s the U.S. version of the UK’s iPad, or the housing version

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