Lara Maia hurriedly typing on her laptop, leaning on the desk that occupies a space between the fridge and the closet, facing the bed against the wall. In her 16 m² apartment, this Brazilian resident of São Paulo manages to live and work.
“I don’t need anything else: I’m close to everything and I feel free to leave whenever I want with a few suitcases,” the 34-year-old systems engineer told AFP as she watched the sunset over the skyscrapers of downtown São Paulo from the 16th floor.
Located in the Bela Vista neighborhood, next to the heart of the city, this micro-apartment reflects a growing trend in recent years in the most populous city in Latin America and in others in Brazil and Latin America, such as Bogotá and Buenos Aires, where homes the size of hotel rooms multiplied.
Although it is already common in large world capitals, in São Paulo, the boom in residential apartments of up to 30 m² is more recent: between 2016 and 2022, the supply rose from 461 units to 16,261, 21% of the total, according to the State Housing Union (Secovi-SP).
A flow of investment into the sector and incentives from the urbanization plan boosted the market for these apartments in this city of 11.5 million inhabitants.
Some, with furniture fitted like Tetris pieces or the kitchen centimeters from the bathroom, became the subject of viral jokes on social networks, where one user called them “gourmet captivity”.
That did not scare off the demand, made up mainly of adults between the ages of 20 and 39, according to a survey by digital real estate firm Quinto Andar.
“They are young professionals – middle and upper-middle class – starting their careers, most of them single, attracted by modern and well-located properties, close to their workplaces or with good public transport connections”, something very valuable in a a city with chaotic traffic, describes Ely Wertheim, executive president of Secovi-SP.
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Raised in a large house in Baurú, a municipality in the interior of São Paulo, Maia acknowledges that “I could get a bigger apartment” in another neighborhood for the 2,300 reais (almost US$475, about two million pesos) per month that she pays for her micro-apartment.
However, he resigns meters to be close to his family and his face-to-face work, which he intersperses with remote work.
At the end of the teleworking day, she closes the screen and prepares tea with toast that she heats in her single pan on an electric stove. Afterward, she unfolds a rolling table hidden under the desk and sits down to eat.
In such a small space, one learns to get rid of many things and changes the perception of what is needed.
“In such a small space, you learn to get rid of many things and change your perception of what you need,” says Maia, who has adapted to a more minimalist and sustainable lifestyle, even moderating laundry.
Gatherings with friends take place in a room on the terrace, a shared area that has become common in new buildings, which offer laundry, coworking and game rooms, and even spaces to wash pets.
Like New York and Tokyo
Óscar Borghi, a 39-year-old engineer, has lived with his girlfriend since last year in a 28 m² two-room apartment in the south of the city. “We thought it would be small, but we are comfortable with the layout and spaces of the building: when we agreed on home officeone works in coworking”, says Borghi, who also lives near his office and the train station.
Rodger Campos, an economist with the Loft platform, assimilates São Paulo, the fifth largest city in the world, to others such as New York or Tokyo, where micro-apartments abound: “It has population density (concentration), global connection, and it is a pole of work, health and education.
In addition, the flood of micro-housings is explained by interest rates, which registered a drop between 2018 and 2021 (from 6.75% to a historical floor of 2% due to the pandemic), says José Armenio, deputy secretary of the Municipal Urban Planning Secretariat. from Sao Paulo. Those levels increased capital in the sector and encouraged investors to buy rental properties.
It also contributed to a reduction in building permits for small apartments ordered by the Municipality in 2014, says Armenio. The objective was to increase the concentration of inhabitants in areas served by public transport, with more accessible housing for a less affluent class. But the result was different: “Apartments up to 30 m² have the most expensive m² in the city”details Fields.
Even in São Paulo, the smallest micro-apartments in Latin America are being built at high prices. One of these projects, VN Higienópolis, belongs to the company Vitacon, which is building 10 m² micro-apartments in São Paulo. When the project was launched on the real estate market, each micro-apartment reached an approximate price of US$18,000 (71.3 million pesos).
Although they are not the smallest in the world: in capitals like Tokyo, with a population density among the highest in the world and sky-high prices, you can get 8-square-meter micro-apartments. The Municipal Chamber recently approved a revision of the urban plan that makes the construction of micro-apartments more expensive, to create more family homes. Although some believe that an oversupply in the market is what will stop the trend.
Buenos Aires and Bogota
In other capitals such as Buenos Aires or Bogotá, micro-apartments are also becoming a trend, basically because many inhabitants spend up to more than three hours a day making public or private transportation trips from their home to their office or workplace, and as their Salaries do not allow them to buy larger apartments or houses, they exchange space to save time, generally those who live alone.
With spaces that reach 20 m², Micro-apartments are positioning themselves in these two capitalsin addition to São Paulo, as a consequence, in part, of worsening problems such as population density and mobility.
Buenos Aires, with more than 3 million inhabitants, is one of the capitals where these kinds of construction projects abound today. One of them, from the firm Predial, offers micro-apartments between 40,000 and 50,000 dollars (between 158 million and 198 million pesos). The residential units are between 18 and 20 m².
17 m² micro-apartments in a central area of Bogotá are promoted on social networks with different payment schemes to cover the total value: a little more than 141 million pesos. The value and the area attract many buyers who let their interest be known in comments on social networks, but its characteristics also scare away others who are not willing to pay that value, much less live in that space.
In the Colombian Chamber of Construction (Camacol) they explain that a weight factor for this trend is the scarcity of land, which makes the offer of housing with larger areas, well located, in office areas and with good equipment, economically unfeasible.
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In addition, in cities like Bogotá, almost 20 percent of households are single-person, which may explain the tendency for properties that have a better location and shared spaces, even though the private area is smaller.
This trend has spread to other Colombian cities in recent years, such as Cali, Manizales, Medellín and Barranquilla, in where you can see the construction and sale of housing units from 18 to 39 m², highlighted in an interview with Bloomberg Juan Esteban Martínez, leader of Alianzas de la protech the house.
“Bogotá, Santa Marta, Cali and Medellín concentrate the largest real estate supply of this type, where the average price per square meter is 7.4 million pesos. Likewise, Bogotá, Cali, the Caribbean, the Coffee Region and Medellín are the regions with the highest demand from buyers and investors,” Martínez added.
In addition to associated factors, such as the conformation of new families and changes in gender roles today, Robert Paul Castillo Ramírez, urban planner at the National University of Colombia, academic and leader of the School of Public Space of the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, also identifies the phenomena of redevelopment of cities, due to which houses are demolished to build high-rise buildings or are converted into shops.
“And the apartments are also bought to be able to rent them through applications like Airbnb. That profitability that is obtained today from those small apartments 40 years ago was unthinkable,” said the urban planner.
Buyers profile
Investors, young people and amateur buyers are among the groups that currently demand these projects the most.
While investors buy them mainly for short-term rentals, the young people who opt for these alternatives are generally people looking for their first apartment and are motivated by prime locations.
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“Young people like this type of apartment because they can be bought for amounts equal to or less than 200 million pesos, they are higher prices than a VIS unit, but not as high as those of an apartment in the exclusive areas of the city ”, adds Martínez, from La Haus.
And although micro-apartments are a life alternative for more and more buyers, there are also those who oppose the model, considering that it is a cage between brick blocks.
“In order to have enough money to buy a 90-square-meter apartment, for example, a person has to wait a long time. If a person of 25, 28 or 30 years old does not have those possibilities, then he has to, yes or yes, buy something very small, which is within his means. So, in that sense, let’s say that it is like an obligation for certain social classes to buy those apartments and in that sense their lives are also precarious,” said Castillo Ramírez, from the National University.
While from La Haus, they complement that “micro-apartments will continue in a sales trend and this is aligned with the construction models that seek to break entry barriers to real estate investment. Currently, in Colombia there are more than 11,000 units available with these characteristics. Builders and developers have understood the changes in consumption patterns and buyer expectations.”
LUJAN SCARPINELLI
AFP
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On Twitter: @AFPespanol
With information from Bloomberg
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