The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is this week considering amending the city's building code to reduce the minimum square footage of apartments from 220 square feet plus bathroom, kitchen and closets — about 290 square feet in all — to 150 square feet for a total area of 220. It's a solution to the problems of rising rents and the increasing population of single family households. Apartments this small are already permitted in San Jose and Santa Barbara, Seattle is testing these so-called "micro-apartments" and New York has a pilot project, and of course Tokyo and Paris did this long ago.

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