A new batch of micro-apartments in SoMa (remember those?) will be hitting the market around June 2015, called The Panoramic. Located at 9th and Mission, the building has already been largely leased out to California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as Curbed reports, providing some spiffy, if tiny, new housing for students at both schools, but therefore doing nothing to help the affordable housing crisis for the rest of us non-students.
The building has 160 units on 11 floors, with an average size of 354 square feet, but with studios starting at a very teeny 274 square feet units that would have been illegally small until a vote by the Board of Supervisors in 2012. And yes, those would include Murphy beds.
Berkeley-based developer Patrick Kennedy, who already built a micro-unit building at 766 Harrison Street called Cubix with units averaging around 300 square feet, previously said he wants to build "thousands" of these units around the city in order to address our housing shortage. In the case of The Panoramic, however, he's getting to skirt around the city's affordable-housing rules because of an exception that's made for student housing, now that these leases are in place.
Over in Hayes Valley, some even tinier units clocking in at 174 square feet, in a "co-living" community called The Karl, are on their way to construction at Oak and Octavia.
And as sad as the prospect of living in a closet may seem, at least these micro-units are less likely to get scooped up as pied-a-terre's for wealthy suburbanites. But if local art schools keep grabbing them all, what good is this doing us?