The Menino administration and private developers propose building thousands of new apartments and condos, some as tiny as 375 square feet (the cutoff then is 450 square feet in the city's downtown core, 500 square feet elsewhere). The units, called micro-apartments, are pitched as a solution to Boston's chronic housing crunch. The new units would go up in commuter-friendly areas and would ostensibly be targeted toward younger professionals who don't need that much space.

Micro-apartment trend pieces start popping up in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and other media 'round the region. The apartments are pitched as a solution to the area's chronically high housing costs and residential shortage.

The Boston Society of Architects sets up an exhibit of a theoretical micro-apartment in the Waterfront Square lobby of Atlantic Wharf. Designed by ADD Inc., the model is 300 square feet and soon pops up as illustrative imagery in more stories, etc., about micro-apartments. (The model was briefly on display in 2012 as well.)

The newly converted shoe factory at 63 Melcher Street in Fort Point includes so-called "innovation units"--ruthlessly functional apartments of no more than 600 square feet each. The apartments provide an excellent sense of what new micro-apartments might look like. They also give a sense of what they would go for: In this case, around $2,300 a month, basically the same, if not more, than traditional studio or even 1-BR.

The Menino administration authorizes the construction of housing units as small as 450 square feet across the city, not just in its downtown core. There's one caveat: These new units must be built within 1 mile of public transit. The idea is to further foster an urban wonderland of transit-oriented development, where young professionals move car-less through a Boston of severely functional living spaces and hip new common areas, including restaurants and WiFi-wired parks. Importantly, this 450-square-foot cutoff is not as small as the cutoff in other cities embracing micro-apartments (nor is it as small as the 375 square feet that Boston originally intended). In places such as Seattle and San Francisco, they can be as small as 300 square feet.

Leasing is brisk at developments such as 63 Melcher that include innovation units—the closest things Boston has so far to new micro-apartments. Yet, there is very little new construction of actual micro-apartments of 450 square feet or thereabouts.

By mid-winter 2014, the city has approved about 350 micro-apartments. Some are around 450 square feet and all are concentrated in the Seaport—and all cost about what a more traditional studio or 1-BR would cost. Three years on from the idea of micro-apartments solving Boston’s housing crunch—or at least helping to solve it—and the approach is hyper-localized, snail-paced, and expensive.

Tiny hotel chain Yotel pitches a 307-room inn for Seaport Square. The first-of-its-kind-in-Boston would include “cabins” of 160 to 200 square feet each. The idea is a conscious nod to the micro-apartment trend, though these micro-rooms probably would have check into the city at some point regardless. Still, it’s a watershed: Boston micro-apartments as reference point. This might, indeed, represent the high-water mark of the trend.

... the trend seems essentially over in Boston. Developers constructed several hundred during the past five years, most of them in the Seaport District and Fort Point. But there remain very few Boston apartments or condos of under 450 square feet, never mind 375 square feet or smaller. As for the city's housing costs, they do remain among the nation's priciest.