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Studio Units in Senior Housing Projects

Posted by kmancer on March 8th, 2010

Much like the human appendix, studio units, or bachelor units if you prefer, are in evolutionary decline. People don’t like them. Many owners of buildings with unrentable studio units are knocking down walls and joining units together. Even studio units that are subsidized or that have very low rents may be hard to fill. We worked for a client once who was convinced that studio units were the way of the future because of their sustainability, by which he meant that 100 people would take up less land if they were living in 400 square foot units than if they were living in 600 square foot units. That is unquestionably true. There is a whole movement afoot now to convince people to reduce their demands on the planet by living in smaller houses. It is rare to go a month without reading some aging boomer’s lament about the 900 square foot one bathroom house she grew up in and why can’t people today do the same? I grew up in a house like that, maybe a little bigger but only one bathroom for two parents and four children. Today I live in a 3,700 square foot house and politically correct or not, I love it.

On a smaller scale, literally and figuratively, that is what is happening to studio units. I kept telling our studio-fixated client that he was dead wrong but he was stubborn and convinced his own instincts were right—he was a developer, did I mention that? But he wasn’t a stupid developer because he was willing to test his ideas with consumers. It was a complicated issue to explore but eventually we designed a questionnaire that looked like this:

“If sizes and rents were as follows (note this was a few years ago):

Studio, 400 square feet:                      $1,500

One bedroom, 550 square feet:           $1,900

Two bedroom: 750 square feet           $2,300

Which unit would you choose (please check one):

Studio             _____

One Bedroom             _____

Two Bedroom _____

If you checked One Bedroom, at what point would you choose a studio instead (please check one):

If the studio were $400 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $500 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $600 cheaper         _______

If the studio were $700 cheaper         ______

It wouldn’t matter, I would still want a one bedroom unit    ______

No matter what the rent differential was, the majority of survey respondents still preferred a one bedroom unit. This didn’t surprise me but it did surprise the developer. He did not proceed with his plans, although he has never thanked me for saving him millions of dollars.

The dislike of studios is not so much a matter of space per se. There are very large studios and very small one bedroom units and still people prefer units with bedrooms. It could be a gender issue, at least partly. Somewhere around 75 or 80% of the residents of supportive housing projects are women. It is said (by who I am not sure) that women of a certain age apparently don’t like to entertain visitors in their bedrooms, which is essentially what a studio apartment is, and furthermore they don’t like to run the risk of someone coming to visit them when their bed is unmade, which would be instantly obvious if they were living in a studio unit. The fact that very few people in seniors’ housing projects visit in each other’s units is immaterial to this debate. Men on the other hand are assumed to care not at all about visitors or unmade beds. If, magically, the existing gender ratio could be  reversed, studios might become wildly popular, especially as they are unquestionably cheaper. And while we are on the subject of beds, it is not that unusual to run across people with no beds as in people who sleep in their recliners. By all accounts it is very comfortable especially if it is difficult for people to lie down for some reason.

Tags: Housing Development, Housing Options, Senior Housing, Studio Apartment

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under Senior Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.