Micro-apartments will become a cost-effective solution for renters — eventually

The response was overwhelmingly positive, said Tamara Roy, principal at design firm Stantec. Rather than encouraging people to decide whether they’d live in one, they asked, “Do you know someone who could use this as a housing type?”

“Almost everybody could,” Roy said. “They were either saying, ‘Yeah, my elderly mother could.’ Or, ‘Yes, I’m a divorcée.’ Or, the college-aged folks who just said, “Yes, I don’t want to have roommates anymore.”

Nicknamed “mother of the micro-unit,” Roy has been one of the earliest supporters of creating compact-living opportunities in Boston. In 2018, after the UHU’s tour, the Boston Planning Department greenlit a compact-living pilot program to test out life in smaller quarters.

“We worked with the city of Boston to create these compact-living regulations that changed the [square footage] downward and basically made it so that it was more like an open-ended thing,” Roy said. “You had to just show it to the Boston Planning Department, go through the design, and make sure that you fulfilled certain requirements — there’s some storage, there’s a decent kitchen, there’s a place to put your bed, and there’s a certain amount of light and air.”

Six years later, micro-units have proliferated throughout Boston — like the ones for rent at Micropolis in Beacon Hill and the studios at Troy Boston in the South End — but they aren’t quite nailing the goal of UHU yet. That’s because many of the micro-apartments for rent today aren’t exactly affordable. A 250-square-foot unit at Micropolis, for example, fetches more than $2,000 per month.

The driving force behind building micro-units, Roy said, was to help ease the city’s housing crisis. They were meant to increase supply for Boston’s overwhelming demand for housing, as well as create homes for individuals to live alone affordably. To get there, Roy said, building subsidized, affordable, small-unit cohousing is necessary. In cohousing models, apartment dwellers share common areas like kitchens.

By definition, a micro-apartment is typically smaller than what’s stipulated in zoning codes in a particular city or town. They can range anywhere from about 250 to 450 square feet. Many micro-apartments maximize their square footage with features like fold-up furniture, Murphy beds, recessed nooks for dining or sleeping, and unique floor plans.

“There’s always a niche for that [lifestyle] where someone says: ‘I don’t need a lot of space. Quite frankly, I’m always out on the go,’” said Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, an online apartment marketplace.

At Troy Boston, studio apartments designed by Stantec hover around 420 square feet and offer combined living and sleeping areas.

“Most people walked in [the UHU] and were like, ‘Wow, this is bigger than the apartment I have, and it’s nicer planned,’” Roy said.

Smaller homes can present advantages, too. Though there’s a shortage of space, there’s also less cleaning and maintenance to be done, Salpoglou said. Utility bills will be smaller, and you’ll likely be buying less “stuff,” like furniture, accessories, and things that might constitute clutter. “There’s no question there’s an added benefit to them,” he said.

Micro-apartments make sense for a city like Boston, which has a low vacancy rate. “The appetite for housing is there,” said Salpoglou. “And we’re going to see more of these micro-apartments come to the market.”

Roy points to a soon-to-open micro-unit development in New Bedford based on Boston’s UHU called One Custom House Square. Built in partnership with the New Bedford Development Corp. and E3 Development, the building offers 45 units of mixed-income housing and a ground floor with retail space. The development’s 14 income-capped studio apartments range in price from $975 to $1,350 per month.

It’s the kind of project Roy thinks could benefit Boston, along with more cohousing models. Both would serve demographics like workforce singles and couples, graduate students, single parents, divorcées, the elderly, artists, and recent immigrants, which make up many of the groups currently priced out of Boston’s housing stock.

“There has to be a way for the city and the state to subsidize nonprofit development to do this,” Roy said. “It’s necessary for the workforce — for people who don’t make $100,000 a year and just need a place to live.”

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Correction Due to incorrect information provided to the Globe, previous versions of this story identified the wrong partnership for the One Custom House Square development in New Bedford. It was New Bedford Development Corp. and E3 Development. The Globe regrets the error.