For eight years, we’ve lived in a 350-square-foot apartment in a fourplex in Oakland, and we aren’t particularly interested in upsizing. When we tell people this, their jaws usually drop, and they follow with some variation on the theme of I’d kill my partner if we lived in such a small space; Where do you put all your stuff?; or Doesn’t it feel claustrophobic?

We indeed have employed some clever—or maybe not so clever?—design tricks to make the space feel bigger than it is: furniture that is at window sill height or below; shelving raised up on feet (if you can see underneath furniture, a room will subconsciously feel larger); a high-end, modern sofa bed that allows our bedroom to double as a den during the day and evening; and minimal clutter (e.g., all laundry gets put away the second it is done, no superfluous stuff left out or placed on the floor, etc). 

The space also benefits from some good bones that aren’t our doing. We have a large bay window that lets in dazzling light and offers a view out over the neighborhood and to the hills beyond—that classic phenomenon of “borrowing” a view to make a room look bigger. And the layout of the apartment is not simply a box with a bathroom tacked on but rather a set of small, interconnected rooms that ultimately allow for windows on three sides of the apartment, offering us constant views of trees and greenery outside and also of the street life happening below. 

Many of these kinds of spatial layouts and design tricks are explored on umpteen websites, video channels, and TV shows that have arisen in recent years that focus on how to make small places more livable and provide the impression of spaciousness by cleverly maximizing every available inch. 

While the average American home size has nearly tripled since 1950, the prospect of owning that jumbo-sized home is no longer a given for many, particularly in the most in-demand cities. There is now enough of a critical mass of folks either living in, considering living in, or simply curious about small-space living that provides the audience for all those media outlets.

And yet there is so much that these articles and videos—not to mention the overall discourse on housing and livability—miss the mark on: 75% of what makes our 350-square-foot space livable and enduring really has nothing to do with the space itself. 

Just outside our front door we have access to an inviting, thriving, and socially connected public realm and life, and it is this very public reality and set of conditions that make living in 350 square feet feel, well, normal, and like plenty. 

Blocks are short, sidewalks are generous, streets are relatively narrow, and trees and front yard gardens abound, thus walking is a no-brainer. Not two blocks away lies a commercial spine of the neighborhood where we have access to numerous grocery stores, bakeries, and more. And the BART station is well-integrated into the urban fabric, allowing us to be connected to San Francisco and the broader region without having to get in a car. 

On the subject of cars, we have a front driveway that no one can park in. In a similar vein to when we tell people we live in 350 square feet, when we tell them we can’t park in the driveway, they immediately look worried: “Can’t you convince the landlord to let you park there?”—as if we were expressing a grievance. No, and we don’t want to.

Absent cars, the driveway doubles as a kind of plaza or gathering space. Almost nightly when the weather is fair, James transforms it into his outdoor studio, and we host happy hours, coffee get-togethers, and DJ events. John has transformed what was once the eyesore of the neighborhood, the front yard, into a thriving garden/science experiment, monitoring how much water each plant needed for over a year. 

Because we are outside in the front so much, we end up meeting neighbors and even folks just passing through town. As a result, we have a rich social network that reminds one there are people who will look out for you—or at least lend you a cup of milk, if you need one. 

Despite our real lived experience with these very public amenities, when new urban developments are advertised, the leasing agency typically extols the virtues of the building’s private amenities: a rooftop barbeque area, a ground-floor gym, choice countertops. Yes, you’ll be living in a smaller space than a house and you’ll share walls, but you’ll have these great things, too.

In a recent article on a rehabbed small home in Nashville, the owners sang the praises of the public realm the house sits within, how walkable it is and how there are always people passing by on bike or foot. However, not a single photo was devoted to that very street in question; rather, all the photos focused on newly transformed and pristine interior spaces—as if the newly renovated interior space was the real ticket to happiness. 

And yet in the hands-on model-building workshops we lead with people of a range of backgrounds and ages, when we have people build models of their ideal housing, they never build private amenities; no rooftop barbeque facilities, no high-end gyms, no kitchen islands with dual sinks. Instead, participants focus almost solely on the public realm: streets that are comfortable to walk down and places to walk to, connection to neighbors and community, trees, water—in short, the very real and meaningful things that we know firsthand can offset the fact that we live in such a small apartment. 

Actually, these outcomes and findings of the workshops shouldn’t really come as a surprise. When we work with our hands, we can more readily access what we feel instead of what we think we know and want. Expand this real psychological phenomenon to a national level and you have a citizenry that thinks it wants and needs more interior square footage but that on a more emotional and physiological level deeply feels it needs access to nature and an inviting, satisfying, and interconnected public life. 

Unfortunately, those American neighborhoods and cities that allow for both easy, walkable access to nature, and a satisfying public life are few and far between. Most of our built environment is now made up of streets and neighborhoods whose design and scale make driving a pure necessity. While one could argue that this less public-oriented urban form is simply the result of market demand, the more walkable, public-oriented neighborhoods of our nation’s cities are now some of the most expensive in the country. The demand far outpaces the supply, and we’re not really making new ones on any meaningful scale.

Here in California, in the conversation on adding more housing to cities, the emphasis has been placed squarely on the number and size of units to be added; the quality of the public realm and access to a public life beyond those units are never even given a passing mention. Car-based sprawl is still the default mode of development here—perhaps a denser version of it, but inward-turning, car-based sprawl all the same.

We’re still a nation of people who see multifamily housing as second best and merely a temporary arrangement on the way toward single-family homeownership, even if that ownership option is increasingly out of reach. As author and urbanist Frances Anderton underscores in her book Common Ground, this collectively narrow view of multifamily housing is no accident. “Even though both houses and apartments are the products of rampant real estate speculation, the house is perceived as more of a ‘home,’” Anderton writes, “an ideal undergirded by land-use policy, tax benefits, and popular culture that have crystallized over a century and diminished other forms of dwellings.”

As a result, our lived understanding of the vital interplay between a livable multifamily experience and a comfortable and inviting public realm is limited at best. And this shows in how we talk about and craft policy around multifamily housing, how we write articles about small-space living, even how we romanticize or fetishize small-space living. Rather than treat the housing as part of an interconnected public/private ecosystem, we treat the multifamily housing development as the ecosystem itself. And unfortunately, there are limits to what one development—no matter how thoughtfully designed—can do if the public realm it sits within is garbage.

It’s instructive for all of us to imagine what the public realm would need to have in it for us to consider living in multifamily housing as a permanent option and not merely a stepping stone toward a single-family home. Trees? Safe, comfortable sidewalks and amenities within an easy walk? Other people walking? Neighbor friends who live literally just around the corner? When we start to think in this way, we get beyond the idea that multifamily housing is for those “other people” and place ourselves squarely within the small-space-living equation. We can then start to understand in a meaningful way that having a comfortable and amenity-rich interior space is part of that equation, but likely won’t make us want to stay for the long haul. Instead, there is much that needs to lie outside those walls.

All images by courtesy of the authors.