Video: Tour Arcade Providence Micro-Apartment Complex
I’ve long expressed my affection for the Arcade Providence, America’s oldest indoor mall that was recently converted to house ground floor retail and two upper floors of micro-apartments. Fair Companies took a video tour of the building and interviewed the building’s developer Evan Granoff as well as a few of its tenants.
Besides getting a live action view of the spaces, the video goes into more detail about the building’s economic and social structures. Granoff touches on some of the economics, about how the micro-apartment structure, with its high cost per dwelling unit square foot offsets some of the expenses related to the building’s huge common areas. He also talks about the “micro-retail” shops on the ground floor that support independent businesses. The tenants talk about how the little spaces give them everything they need as well as some of the adaptations they’ve made to fit into the dinky spaces. Worth a look.