Mayor Michael Bloomberg is thinking small. First it was his proposal to rid New Yorkers of the dreaded Big Gulp sodas and trim themselves down to size. But now he’s going farther. If you’re a one or two person household, you might be the lucky winner of the dream house Bloomberg has in his plans: a “micro-apartment” that is 275 to 300 square feet!
Now it’s clear! No wonder Bloomberg wants to outlaw Big Gulps; how the hell are you going to squeeze the behemoths who slurp Big Gulps into a closet?
Let’s try to follow the mayor’s reasoning. He said,
“Today, there are 1.8 million one- and two-person households in our city, but there are only about 1 million studio and one-bedroom apartments. You notice the mismatch. Our design guidelines stipulate that the apartments have simple access, have ample access to fresh air and sunlight, that development teams also think of making good use of shared space in the building and we expect the apartments to be more affordable than many Manhattan studios.”
The city is going to use a parking lot at 335 East 27th St. to build 80 apartments and will charge about $1,400 a month.
Bloomberg nobly recounted his own past suffering living in a studio apartment for 10 years:
“I cooked my meals, did the same thing you did. I did my laundry in the basement. How else do you live? We think it was about 600 square feet, but I would have taken a smaller one if I could possibly have found it. I didn’t have that kind of money. I didn’t have a lucrative job like you, at least not at that time.”
New Yorkers will probably be okay with Bloomberg’s idea; residents of Manhattan aren’t exactly used to the wide-open spaces. And with the demise of the Big Gulp and the inflated prices of groceries in the Obama economy, there should be hundreds of thousands of svelte volunteers eager to live in a closet. But when those myriad volunteers check into the psychiatrists’ offices to deal with their claustrophobia, and ObamaCare sets in, Bloomberg better not cry about the results.
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