FINDING SPACE VIA CO-LIVING
Architect sets out to tackle the housing problem of our time
Mark Macy is very familiar with San Francisco’s perennial lack of space. In 2008, the architect moved his practice into the office of some friends in Hayes Valley. He made the decision initially to keep things simple and save on rent, but the co-working setup led to those proverbial water-cooler conversations with his friends, who run a development company called Build Inc. As a result, his work went in a completely new direction. The two firms have partnered to create what will be the city’s first large-scale “co-living” development (more on this below). Before he went out on his own, Macy was half of Jensen & Macy Architects for 14 years, working on such plum projects as SFMOMA’s rooftop sculpture garden. Now he’s tackling what he considers the city’s greatest challenge: housing.
Q: What inspired you to focus on multifamily housing?
A: I think it is the ultimate architectural
Mark Macy, right, is the architect behind S.F.’s first large-scale co-living development.
problem of our time. We may be at ground zero in San Francisco, but major cities everywhere are facing a housing shortage. So what we do here could have a large impact elsewhere. It’s also a very complex problem. A lot of decisions have had a cumulative effect over time, starting with down-zoning (rezoning for less-dense development) here in the 1970s. People are blaming the tech sector, but they are simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. Now we are in a situation where a significant portion of the citizenry is struggling to afford the housing that is out there — new, old, whatever. It’s going to take more than a couple of building cycles to deal with the massive shortage of housing in the Bay Area.
Q: How do you propose to solve this problem?
A: Obviously, as a whole region, we need to build a lot more housing units. And it can’t all be luxury housing. Real-estate costs are largely dependent on square footage. If you can cut the square footage down substantially, you can make a substantial reduction in the rent. Thirty-eight percent of the households in San Francisco are single-person households. The median rent for a studio here is now over $2,300 a month. In new developments, it’s around $2,700, and we are trying to cut that in half. We like to call our approach “affordability by design.”
Q: What do these more affordable developments look like?
A: One of our new projects is 1532 Harrison, a co-living development with 235 private suites that are organized into 28 co-living houses. These suites are about 250 square feet, each with a small bathroom and kitchenette. Six to 10 suites are grouped around a large shared living/ dining/kitchen area to form one house. We’re not inventing the wheel — there’s
Embassy SF, Campus, Sandbox, Negev and a variety of artists collectives out there. But this is a purposebuilt, 100,000-square-foot development. And on Octavia Boulevard, we’re similarly developing Parcel R as a co-living project, which will provide housing for the maximum number of people possible. The building will have 34 private suites, but all the common spaces on the top floors, so everyone gets the awesome views and light. The suites themselves are pretty small — 174 square feet — but there are large shared areas including a living room, dining room, chef’s kitchen and other amenities that you wouldn’t be able to afford on your own. There are considerable economic and social advantages to this model.
Q: So these are both going to be rental properties?
A: Yes, in the extremely conservative real-estate world, doing something different is an uphill battle. Nobody else is doing anything like this. But once the concept is proven, there’s no reason why this model couldn’t extend to families and an ownership model.
Q: It sounds great, but how are you going to make sure that those common living areas and kitchens stay clean?
A: Right — you’re talking about the crisis of the commons, where nobody owns it, so nobody takes responsibility for it. There are a whole variety of scenarios for management. Say you’ve got a group of people who are very simpatico: Maybe they want to keep costs down by sharing the cleaning and cooking. Or another group decides they want professional cleaning on a weekly basis, which is how Campus operates. We can leverage existing models that people have established.
Q: Are you working on other types of housing besides co-living developments?
A: On Parcel S, we’re developing a more conventional apartment complex. But we’re still doing what we can to make it more affordable. The typical new two-bedroom unit in the city is 800 to 850 square feet. Our layout provides all the same livability in about 600 square feet, so we can reduce the rent accordingly. We’re able to do this by using a whole bunch of built-ins for storage as well as convertible furnishings, including Murphy beds — which, by the way, were originally invented in San Francisco by a guy named William Murphy at the end of the 19th century. This keeps people from having to schlep around furniture or buying a bunch of Ikea-type stuff that ends up in the landfill all too soon.