Can Micro-Units Help Gen Z’s Loneliness Epidemic?

Studies show that Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—are not doing great. Having inherited a "fundamentally broken world," says Newsweek, Gen Z is dealing with a host of "social, digital, and developmental factors" that have led them to experience higher levels of loneliness than their elders. Nearly 73 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds report struggling with isolation—and this isn’t by accident.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and Dwell contributor Alexandra Lange has expounded on, America is, collectively, terrible at building spaces for young people to meet, hang out, and thrive. Gen Z is encountering a world where stagnant wages have resulted in a failure to launch: 33 percent of adult Gen Zers live with their parents, unable to afford housing away from their childhood bedroom. By not living together, young people miss out on the chance to build deep social ties that can sustain them throughout their adult years. Building more housing—importantly, designing such housing more intentionally to maximize both affordability and social well-being—presents an opportunity to address overlapping housing and mental health crises. The greatest chance to provide a stable and connected future for Gen Z could lie in a small-scale intervention: the micro-unit.

Micro- and compact units are typically defined as any living quarters that are half the size of an average unit in the area. They aren’t novel inventions; boarding houses, tenements, single resident occupancy hotels (SROs), and more housed America’s workers through the 19th and 20th centuries. But much of this housing is now illegal. According to a 2013 Atlantic essay, managing the existence of affordable, small-scale housing was a project of both the well-meaning elites who wanted to reform living conditions of working-class families living in these often poorly maintained buildings, and wealthy residents who didn’t want to live next door to them. Eventually many of these working-class units were eliminated entirely. Through building codes and zoning laws, dense, small-scale living was outlawed across U.S. cities; According to nonprofit think tank AEI Housing Center, nearly one million SROs were lost between 1920 and 2000. The result wasn’t just historic slum clearances—the effect is still felt today across the market spectrum, where "we’ve outlawed the bottom end of the private housing market, driving up rents on everything above it."

This is why many cities are now turning back toward compact living spaces as a means to address a lack of available homes. RentCafe shows that cities like Detroit, St. Paul, and Philadelphia have seen double-digit decreases in overall apartment sizes. A new study by StorageCafe shows that new micro-unit developments are being built in costlier cities in the West; San Francisco, Portland, and Oakland rank at the top for micro-units, but Boston and Newark are also delivering, with "more than half of their upcoming rental units expected to be compact living spaces." The trends toward smaller-scale living, says Building Design+Construction, could be attributable to young professionals who are rapidly overtaking the rental market and are willing to trade space for location—and likely, lower costs. As StorageCafe notes, micro-units can deliver "striking" rent gaps, wherein rents for conventional apartments are almost double than micro-units in places like Newark and Irvine, California.

In Boston, architects Jenny and Anda French, founders of their firm French2D, took on a micro-housing project in the early 2010s. The city had struggled to "right-size" its housing options as college students were frequently outcompeting families for larger units, says Anda. Though it wasn’t yet legal to build such compact units, the architects took advantage of a grandfathered zoning loophole that allowed for SROs, which meant that they could legally build 180 new units ranging from 340 to 400 square feet including large communal spaces, like a library, gym, and public cafe. "These kinds of flexible spaces that were just part of your living arrangement might just seep out more casually," she continues. "People might even leave their doors open a little bit more, and create micro-communities—that was the hope and the ambition."

When it was completed in 2016, the building became student housing for several years and has since been converted to market rate units. "There was a moment where there was enthusiasm for this model; this could be the secret sauce to produce a lot of supply, especially in cities where you are willing to whittle down your personal space because your life is elsewhere," says Jenny. But what the French sisters took from the project wasn’t just the economic possibilities for micro-housing—which, says Anda, some of their Gen Z grad students at Princeton have already marked as being "co-opted by capital"—but the possibilities for self-governance among residents of compact apartments.

"We’ve been talking a lot about what a new version of a boarding house could be," says Anda. "The mutual agreements, the chore charts, all of the ways in which cohabitation needs to be managed and agreed upon and self determined" are essential. This "charter," as they call it, is what differentiates, for instance, a micro-housing development wherein residents simply use their apartment as a sleeping chamber from a loneliness-busting multifamily building where units are, simply, cheaper and smaller than a regular apartment building.

When Boston finally began a pilot to legalize compact living arrangements, French 2D helped push for it. To their delight, the city’s four-year Compact Living Pilot program ended up requiring a registered governance charter that would speak to how these spaces would be used collectively; this solidified, for Jenny and Anda, the importance of residents cocreating an agreement about how they would live together. "It was a commitment from the city that they’re encouraging the social aspects of micro-housing, because that’s the health of the community," says Anda.