a column by Jakub Glaz from issue 06|A&B
The bigger the Pole, the smaller the meters. We'll get a little fatter and won't fit into investment products, pardon me, micro apartments. Among the country's big cities, Łódź is in first place. What's the record? One-tenth of Lodz apartments do not have a bathroom. To put it in numbers: in about forty thousand units a bathroom occupies zero percent of the space. There are pluses: arguments over washing the bathtub and dilemmas over which of the leading remedies for scale and rust leads the way the most are dropped. But - inexorably goes the new.
We are noting a rebound in Lodz in the bathroom section. In new developer units today, bathrooms sometimes account for more than 20 percent of the total square footage! Case in point: an enclave of buildings near the Polytechnic, with units known throughout the country as micro-apartments. The smallest is just over ten meters, including a bathroom two meters with a tail, the rest is supposedly a room with an annex (also with a door, a window and electricity). It's just as well to consider the whole thing a comfortable bathing lounge, an enclave that bathroom-less Lodzers can buy themselves. Admirable flexibility of function and response to market needs.
With the ears of my imagination, however, I can hear the dutiful whiners spoiling this enthusiastic mood: hurr, durr, clapboard apartments, sub-standard, cage farming, regression and bending the law. Patodevelopment.
And they go on, pushing under their noses the regulations that an apartment is a minimum of twenty-five meters and that these new cottages impersonate services, for example, ruining the provisions of development plans. That we are going from extreme to extreme: following scaled-down houses into sickly minimalism. That this is, yes, inexpensive, but nevertheless a pathological reaction to other pathologies: the absurd prices of speculative housing, the lack of rental units at a reasonable price, and the destruction of older apartments by subdivision. That here is not Hong Kong. That the parking norm. That housing and urban planning are a bore.
Despite these calumnies, customers have their wits about them and go into micro like smoke. All over the country, including Warsaw and its moloch in Wola, micro apartments are being snatched up almost like Ekipa ice cream wrappers (although they have a slightly higher value than them). Both the young incapable (of credit) and the old are buying - investing capital and counting the coconuts from the expected rent. Because, which micro-apartment offer you don't look at, the word "investment" rings in your eyes. The word "apartment" also sometimes appears, although formally these clusters do not exist as apartments. They are service premises or, as it may happen in one of Poznań's large-panel estates, holiday homes. So much the better, it's the Poles turning. Dancing on the edge of the law. Bachelors struggling, apartments cursed. So they are gaining fans. And fanatics - sometimes with Stockholm syndrome.
Here, in a video, a national youtuber squeezes through the corridor of a bachelor apartment narrow as the Keret House and argues that no one has yet died from living on nine meters. Neither she nor her cat, although there are indeed downsides: in a squeeze the cat gets more mossy. In a Poznan house with micro-apartments, the German TV crew arouses distrust and a conspiracy of silence: buyers of the units prefer that after the broadcast the building supervision not check how they live in the commercial units. Some young man pokes me online to tell me (he apparently considered me a spokesman for all writers) to disassociate ourselves from micro-apartments, yes they suck, but it's the only way out of the stalemate. I have not yet noted the fan clubs of designers who make these houses. Worse, I know architects who are fans of them.
I was so taken by this fervor in defense of the dwellings hatched that I toss their admirers and manufacturers a few more arguments. It's silly to reduce a dwelling only to a speculative investment, when it has many other assets - especially after a pandemic.
Take health. We are getting fatter by leaps and bounds (the statistical Polish male is already 83 kilograms at 177 centimeters tall!). Micromanaging forces us to reduce our own volume. It also prompts us to leave the premises frequently and exercise or sport outdoors. On the other hand, a single elevator serving often dozens of cubicles crammed into a block of flats will force you to take the stairs frequently. Fit! It's also hard to get cold in one-window units. Zero drafts.
Other aspects: social and demographic. Escaping from cramped housing means integrating with other escapees in the yard and street. Priceless after covid isolation! As is the forced reduction of social distance in the interior, which, in addition, may end up in a carnal rapprochement. Another plus: the birth rate will jump up. That with a baby tighter? For a toddler, even ten meters is a powerhouse. Besides, at first he will not complain, then, because of the tightness, the old people will divorce and it will become looser. And when the kid grows up, he will quickly go to work to buy whatever there is on offer to the young. A basement with a balcony, a residential elevator.
Let's fly further: saving money. Family and friends stay overnight, so they won't eat us out and use up water. Plus, creativity and new skills, because we can't do without advanced marketing when we want to sell a micro-apartment in a slumlord's block.
Finally, consistency. Those in power today often speak Gomulka. It is to the norms of his era, stretched to the point of absurdity, that the meters of micro-apartments are closest. Everything fits. Anyway, we are still in the tail of Europe with the number of square meters of housing per head. Twenty-eight meters gives us a bland fourth place from the end. Micro-apartments will help maintain this ratio and only look how, overtaken by other countries, we will forge ahead to the honorable first place.
This may be helped by the intention announced in the Polish Lada (once again) to rebuild castles and the Saski Palace. Ideal volumes for thousands of micro-apartments! Only that - on the other hand - the authorities have announced seventy-meter houses without permits and, it seems, also without an architect. Here the meterage is already growing dangerously, but what's the use of creativity: divide the house into micro-apartments and there will be contemporary foursomes - a nod to tradition.
Marauders are already bored that houses so pieced together without architects will probably fall apart quickly. Micro-apartments don't bode well for a long life either. Very well. We have always been solid in reconstruction. We built poorly, but reconstructions: first rate.
So it's time to implement the "build and demolish" mode. Then Poland will be rebuilt.
Even more magnificent.
