Also the materials used, also the utilization of space.
Micro apartments should be doing two things:
1) lowering the price required for someone to be able to close a door, and find themselves in a room with a window, a bed, and somewhere for their clothes.
2) being small so that we can build a fuckton of them to increase the number of places where 1) is true.
Without cheap housing, unless wages grow tremendously, even reasonably financially comfortable earners (particularly the young ones) will not have the means to save and invest - - they'll keep throwing away a tremendous amount of money on rent.
Not having the means to own property (caused both by not having much money, and by there not being that much property to own, which causes property to be expensive when lots of people want it, which in turn reduces how much your money is worth, etc.) is one of, in my opinion, one of the the biggest factors in people perpetually delaying marriage (not just serial cohabitation) and having kids.
I'm not saying that everyone should marry and have kids - - I'm just saying, returning to the boarding house and tenement is probably not something we should see with increased urbanization.
This featured apartment is stupid: The furniture is absurd for daily function, it has to come with the apartment (will that cost be amortized over time, will future tenants pay less on that count) the way the apartment has been set up, and the space used isn't even being truly economical. The builders of microapartments should go look at any number of dorm rooms in American colleges, and see what they can do about running plumbing to each one.
And all of this is stupid unless we're prepared to build a lot
San Francisco has something like this, with their rowhouses built in Victorian/Edwardian styles that will never, ever, ever make way for large developments.
Okay, that's fine - - - but this building where I used to live is fucking gross.
No heating in winter, roaches because the garbage disposal room is a shed that opens into the street on the first floor, etc.
But landlords can basically do whatever the fuck they want, and charge whatever they want, because all the jobs are in cities.
More and more Americans "choose" to live in cities than ever before; for school and for work, and that trend isn't stopping.
We have to build more, and maybe micro apartments can be a part of that, but if they're going to be built with materials/designs that don't inherently accomplish 1) compared to current apartments, and don't come along with 2) (and 2) has got to be incentivized somehow, our zoning is insane), then nothing will really change.