Mini Me

For a little more than a year, my wife and I and our 3-year-old daughter have lived in a house that measures--get ready to snicker, you owners of spacious manses in the grand Los Angeles tradition, you proud decorators of double-height great rooms and his-’n’-hers baths--about 830 square feet. We’re not a family of ascetics. We’re not trying to channel our inner Thoreaus (or would that be Thoreaux?) or thump Al Gore in a who’s-greener competition.

The character of the house and its setting, hidden behind a tangle of trees and tropical plants on a hillside in the northeast corner of Los Angeles, mean more to us than its size. We’re not likely to stay more than a few years, but as a solution at the very top of an entirely irrational housing market--we began looking to buy about 18 months ago--the place made a good deal of sense.

It’s amusing to watch the reaction of friends who come to visit, particularly, I have to say, those who grew up in L.A. As they near the end of the 20-second tour, searching in vain for the second bathroom, their looks of curiosity turn into ones of aggressive bafflement. Some say out loud what others only think: You are going to go nuts in a place this small.

It’s a pervasive and powerful thing, this Angeleno fear of the small living space. It reared its head again when the L.A. City Council voted unanimously, a few weeks ago, to relax some building guidelines and allow denser development downtown. One of the approved changes removed the upper limit on the number of units that can be built in a single project. Some developers said that without that limit in place they might consider offering condominium units and apartments as small as 250 or 300 square feet.

Critics pounced. At that size, an apartment is “just a tenement,” Noreen McClendon, an affordable housing developer, told The Times’ Sharon Bernstein. Other pundits said the Council was trying to turn L.A. into Midtown Manhattan.

Accompanying Bernstein’s piece was a diagram showing the outline of a vehicle that measures roughly 16 feet by 6 1/2 feet inside the floor plan of a micro-apartment. The graphic carried this heading: “No room to turn around.” The caption read, “The living space in a 300-square-foot apartment is barely larger than, say, a Hummer H2 SUV.”

Couldn’t you argue, though, that the problem is the size of the Hummer and not the size of the apartment?

As a critic who writes about cities for a living, what’s striking to me about the micro-apartment debate is that it suggests Los Angeles has slipped from the cutting edge when it comes to thinking about urban and domestic life. For most of the last century L.A. was an incubator for new models of residential architecture that were quickly borrowed, for good or ill, by other cities. This time, we’ve turned into spectators, watching as bloggers in New York, hotel designers in Tokyo and prefab architects in the Midwest make the small domestic space a thriving specialty.

Their work is part of the same shift in thinking that produced the Mini Cooper and the iPod, and that has brought sustainable design to the cultural forefront. Architecture will always be more resistant to miniaturization than electronic goods, of course; there is no Moore’s Law for buildings, since we humans get bigger over time, not smaller. But the larger trend in all the design disciplines is away from bloat and toward stylish efficiency.

There is a complex psychology reflected in the speed with which certain L.A. commentators savaged the extra-small-apartment idea. It has something to do with the city’s fundamental DNA; if New York is about opportunity and the American West about freedom, the appeal of Los Angeles has always been about space. As developers pack new projects into neighborhoods already plagued by gruesome traffic, it’s only natural to worry about L.A.’s ability to maintain its unique combination of urban amenity and suburban elbowroom.

But if you think of the downtown housing market as a kind of ecosystem, then a diversity of housing types, from compact to family-size, should indicate its general health, not some creeping illness. And if we can’t build small, efficient units in the downtown core--the one part of greater Southern California served by a full transit network--then we might as well give up on the higher-density experiment altogether.

Would a tiny apartment work for you? As an easy if entirely unscientific test, pull out a tape measure and mark off a 16-by-16 space inside your house or apartment. (That’s 256 square feet.) Then imagine where you would put the bed, the dresser or the refrigerator. You could even drag in a chair or a desk to see how it would fit.

Just be sure to leave the Hummer in the garage.