The tour of the Making Room exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York was a lot better and interesting than I expected it to be. The most informative things I learned were the statistics about how people in the city live. The museum had various statistics about the amount of people living alone in the city, unrelated adults living together, couples with no children, and some others. Most of these were what I expected, like how there are mostly people living alone in the city, and especially in Manhattan. When the tour guide was telling show showing us all of these statistics, I was just thinking about how accurate theses numbers really were. I’m guessing that a lot of people don’t answer surveys and such, like with the Census Bureau, so the numbers and percentages are probably off.
I was surprised to learn that New York City only ranked number 17 in the country with the most single households. I expected it to be in the top five at least. I always think of the city as a place where people come alone when they’re relatively young to find jobs and try to make it. I guess there must be other reasons for the large amount of single households in other cities, some of which I was surprised by, like Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Something else I found informative and interesting were the laws about living spaces. The most surprising law is that it’s illegal for more that three unrelated adults to live together. This is something that I, and I would think many people don’t know. Some of the other laws mentioned, like how there has to be a window makes sense, but this one doesn’t really seem to. I can see why this law would be good, like to prevent too many people from living together in unsafe conditions, but if the place is large enough, it should be okay for more than three unrelated adults to live together. This is especially true seeing how much everything costs and how high rent is in the city.
The tour guide mentioned that the projected population in New York City in 2030 is close to 9 million, which is kind of scary to think about. I read an article a few weeks about how some people in Hong Kong have to live in cages and cubicle apartments because they just can’t afford anything else. I know this is really extreme, and probably won’t happen here, but it makes me wonder what will happen if the population keeps on growing like it’s projected to and if there’s isn’t enough housing. Rent keeps on increasing and affordable housing isn’t always really affordable. I know that Bloomberg put in a plan a few years ago to create more affordable plan, and there is the new micro apartment plan, but I wonder how successful the plans will be.
The micro apartment shown in the museum was really cool and fun to look at. It seems like a really great idea, and it shows that a person doesn’t need 400 square feet to be able to live comfortably. Everything in the apartment took up as little space as possible and the whole thing was just really resourceful and creative. What remains to be seen is how successful it’ll be. The price is probably the biggest hurdle and whether or not people can actually afford to live there and feel like it’s worth it. Although it is resourceful, with the little space to move around, people might not think it’s worth the rent.
