Thursday, May 19, 2005

Living in a shoebox

There's an article in today's Herald about small flats being built in Auckland's CBD.

I can't see what's wrong with small apartments if people are willing to buy/rent them. I owned a studio flat in London for a while - I can't remember the exact size, but I'd be very surprised if it was over 30m2. It was perfectly adequate for my needs at the time and it certainly wasn't a slum - like most of my neighbours, I was a young professional who was willing to trade off a shorter journey to work and a lively neighbourhood for the extra space I would have had in suburbia.

I suspect that a lot of Aucklanders are opting for a personal, if small, flat over a shared house, which is perfectly reasonable. I can't see why Auckland City is preventing people from making this choice by imposing size limits.

1 comment:

Lewis Holden said...

Because when it comes to housing many New Zealanders fall victim to narrow-minded closet thinking, naively believing that everyone has the right to a quarter-acre section, and more importantly, small houses are ‘slums’ and ‘not part of our culture’.