I never thought of my grandfather Harry as someone who lived his life on the cultural or aesthetic cutting edge. He worked his whole adult life as an accountant for New York City, and retired to a ranch house in Plantation, Fla. But he was about 80 years ahead of what The New York Times tells us is a new trend: the micro-apartment.
Harry Adler grew up in tenements on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where toilets were shared down the hall. As a young adult, he lived in a residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights that now serves as a college dormitory.
Now the idea of building centrally located apartment buildings with small, one-room units has suddenly taken hold, and not just in coastal cities like New York and Seattle. Micro-unit buildings are being developed all over the country, from new buildings in Columbus, Ohio, to a former hotel in Denver.
[For more of this story, written by Ben Adler, go to http://grist.org/cities/tiny-a...ts-not-actually-new/]
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