Our visit to the Museum of the City of New York was both a very exciting and educational experience. The Making Room exhibit demonstrated the housing situation in New York City and conveyed how housing could be made cheaper and more easily accessible for New Yorkers. It showed us how one can maximize each square foot of his apartment to change a tiny apartment into a beautiful home with a den area, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. It demonstrated how New York City can look to the future by focusing on the increasing population of people looking for cheap one-bedroom apartments.
As I entered the exhibit, the first thing that surprised me was the fact that 33% of all New York City residents live alone. I believe that the museum did an excellent job in portraying how large of a percentage 33% really is by displaying it in block formation as compared to the other types of housing situations. I was surprised to find that living alone was the primary choice of housing due to 2 things. Firstly, as Alice mentioned, growing up in Brooklyn, outside of Manhattan, I never really encountered anyone who lived alone. I believe that like myself everyone lived with either a roommate or with siblings. I believed that the percentage of people living with family or with a roommate would be much greater. Secondly, due to the fact that only 1.5% of apartments are one-bedroom apartments I found it hard to believe that 33% of New Yorkers lived alone.
After viewing the percentages of housing situations we moved on to the restrictions that are placed upon residential developers, particularly related to the size of apartments and the amount of space that the building could take up on the lot. For instance, one restriction provided that each apartment must be at least 400 square feet and another stated that you could only cover a certain percentage of the lot. In my opinion, these restrictions were wasteful and inefficient. Especially in a location with as many people as New York, I believed that we should make efforts to maximize the amount of building area instead of minimizing it. We should try to build as many units as we can to account for the growing population. I also found it unfair that people would have to pay for 400 square feet, when in reality they would only need 300 square feet..
The portion of the exhibit which i enjoyed the most was the model apartment. It truly demonstrated the meaning of maximizing the potential of space. They fit everything needed in an entire house in an area of 325 square feet. Wherever, you looked there for places that could provide for extra storage. For instance, there were many shelves around the apartment and the television can be pushed aside for extra shelving. The kitchen was the greatest part of all, because it had all of the appliances of a regular kitchen, except in half the space. When I walked out of that apartment I honestly said to myself that I would want to live there.
The exhibit clearly demonstrated the housing trends of New York city and what must be done in order to accommodate the growing population of New York City. Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to create many affordable units sounds like a very viable plan and in my opinion can be extremely successful. I was able to learn many things about the past and future of New York city through this exhibit and it changed my view concerning New York City housing.
