It's kind of "transitional housing," but not in the way you likely think of that phrase.

European apartments aren't necessarily straight up better than American apartments. They exist in an older civilization and have things grandfathered in that many Americans would strenuously object to if they had to deal with this in most American cities, though I have heard New York apartments sometimes have things in common with European apartments that you aren't likely to see anywhere else in the US.

The YouTube short Emily apartment hunting in Paris shows an "unfurnished" apartment and shows her objecting to what the agent describes as a large kitchen because it's an empty room with just a sink. 

In my twenties while living in Germany, I moved into an "unfurnished" apartment and the American military supplied the sink, range (stove plus oven), fridge and cabinets. My previous apartment was listed as "partially furnished" in part because it had a fully outfitted kitchen.

There's a movie called Under the Tuscan Sun about a woman who buys a fixer in Italy. My recollection is she also finds herself with a kitchen (or bathroom?) with a faucet randomly sticking out of the wall and no sink beneath it.

My general understanding is that "unfurnished" apartment in Europe means you probably have a faucet sticking out of the wall in a room intended to become your kitchen and it is your responsibility to provide the appliances and cabinets and and sink.

The above short shows the agent showing her another apartment after that and she's like "The shower is in the kitchen!" And the agent is like "But I got you appliances!"

My understanding is you see stuff like a shower in a tiny kitchen in New York City apartments and probably nowhere else in the US.

The video Our tiny apartment in Paris home tour starts by touring the Latin Quarter where the apartment is located. This brilliantly gives you the reason she lives in an apartment Americans online no doubt drag endlessly and also important context most viewers likely won't fully appreciate.

I was a military wife and moved to a new duty station about every three years and typically lived in at least two different rentals while stationed there. To me, her tour of the Latin Quarter speaks volumes about both why she lives in that apartment and how her life works.

Americans routinely make implicit assumptions about what you need in a home to have a life because so many of our homes are in the suburbs and if there's no space to entertain in the home, you don't have a social life and if the kitchen isn't just shy of a commercial kitchen in terms of food storage, you will be living on pizza delivery.

If you are in the 'burbs, no, you probably aren't around the corner from an eatery or grocery store. What you have access to for food and entertainment is largely whatever you personally purchased and brought home to your house.

Her life is in Paris. Her home is where she sleeps and keeps her clothes, not where she lives.

Her kitchen has a very small fridge and she bought a tabletop convection oven and moved the microwave to have a place to put it. She says most Parisian apartments lack an oven. I've read the same thing about Japanese apartments: They typically have no oven.

The size of her fridge is probably typical in Europe generally. Germans also typically have the kind of fridge Americans think of as college dorm or hotel refrigerators, even if -- like my aunt -- they raised nine children while cooking from scratch daily.

Groceries are packaged a little different in Europe and you don't typically buy, say, a gallon container of milk like you do in the US. But they don't necessarily cook less than Americans while typically having much smaller refrigerators.

They probably live closer to whatever market(s) they use to buy groceries and probably shop more frequently than most Americans. Having lived that way in Germany, I never went back to loading a car to the gills once every week or two with groceries. Among other things, I like my produce fresh.

She says it's a walk up on the eighth floor. Historically, prior to elevators, top floors were cheaper because people didn't really want to walk up that many stairs. It's only after we got elevators that upper floors became expensive and statusy.

This YouTube short also talks about a typical Parisian apartment having "stairs -- many stairs." It also mentions having a place for a washing machine but no actual washing machine in it.

Note that it says "washing machine" not "washer and dryer" and the space looks like it would only fit a washing machine not a washer and dryer. It's much more common in Europe than in the US to to have a washing machine and hang dry your clothes -- even in a big city. 

They may have a line for drying clothes on the balcony or a retractable clothes line above the bathtub and my third apartment in Germany had a drying rack inside the kitchen cabinet in front of the radiator that I never understood the purpose of while I lived there. It may have been an upscale detail for hang drying clothes that made no sense to me as an American living in an American military housing complex with a completely free laundromat in the basement.

In the US, having only stairs without elevator access is typically a violation of ADA compliance and there may be limits to how long you can pretend you are grandfathered in due to the age of the building. 

I say that because my older son attended kindergarten in a historic schoolhouse -- the first school in the county, if I recall correctly -- with lots of stairs and no elevator and then they stopped using that building as an independent kindergarten and they were going to bus my younger son to a different elementary school for kindergarten and then have him walk to the elementary school you could probably see from my backyard for first through sixth grades.

Fortunately, we moved elsewhere before he started kindergarten because I was super unhappy with this news. One of the teachers or other staff told me once ADA compliance was a factor in this decision because if a child needing a wheelchair moved to the district in question, they could have been sued for discrimination.

I thought bussing kindergartners elsewhere was the absolute worst possible solution available of the ones listed on their potential options list. I think they put it to a vote. Maybe everyone in the neighborhood whose kids were older decided that option didn't impact them, so screw you poor unfortunate fools with kids younger than mine.

There are good things about having "lower standards" for housing. It can keep costs down if they don't require you to have a huge fridge, huge oven, huge kitchen to hold all your huge appliances etc etc.

And if you live someplace like the Latin Quarter in Paris, your overall quality of life may be high because you have amenities in walking distance that exist precisely because it's an old city with a dense population and it has taken hundreds of years of people living there to develop this mature fabric of a functional, walkable big city.

So a small refrigerator and no oven makes sense for most people living there who may cook a lot but may not necessarily bake from scratch because there is a bakery around the corner and they don't really care.

Baking from scratch takes not only time, space and adequate kitchen facilities, it takes skill some people don't have. 

When I was a teenager, I loved Japanese-style deep fried vegetables and tried to learn to make them at home from a packaged mix I could find in the store. This was before YouTube and I had no Japanese friends, so I didn't have any means to figure out what I was doing wrong, so I mostly just kept buying my deep fried Japanese veggies at a fast food place at the mall because what I was cooking was nothing like what I could buy, I couldn't solve it and the cost of treating myself occasionally to good quality, Japanese-style deep fried vegetables wasn't burdensome.

If you live alone or as part of a childless couple, the amount of baked goods you consume may not warrant feeling like you absolutely need a proper oven at home when for a small fee you can get something vastly superior in quality to what you can personally make just around the corner on your way to work or on your way home from work.

When my kids were in elementary school, I lived for about a year or so in a 1950s duplex designed for the 1950s lifestyle I was living decades after the 1950s. The elementary school was just up the street and we were in walking distance of three public parks, one across the street from my rental and one on the river that I was a block or two from.

Waterfront property is highly prized and typically insanely expensive. It's the closest to a waterfront I've ever lived and in many ways we had enviable quality of life for many, many reasons.

I moved because of my health issues. I have a life threatening respiratory condition and the old building I was in not far from the river had mold and mildew issues and I was extremely sick.

If the apartment is not literally threatening to kill you, location, location, location is the mantra of the real estate industry for a reason.

Project SRO grows out of my experiences with living in two different hundred-year old buildings in a walkable downtown in small town America.

So Project SRO is intended to solve the kinds of problems you have in a place like that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I've lived in old places in both Europe and the US. I've lived in old buildings and new. I've experienced the upside of living in old buildings in old neighborhoods and the downside.

Generally speaking, the majority of the upside is living in an old neighborhood in walking distance of shops, parks etc. The building itself likely has a lot of problems you wish you didn't have and countless YouTube videos can document the deficiencies in such apartments, such as horrifying kitchens or bathrooms, no elevator and a frequent lack of other modern amenities many Americans would freak out about having to deal with and some do on YouTube.

Project SRO tries to design in the good stuff about small apartments in old neighborhoods and edit out the problems.

For a long time, London was a powerful, important city not in spite of the Great Fire of London in 1666 but because of it. The fire destroyed some of the worst, most nightmarish structures in the city and then, as a consequence of the fire, they outlawed some of the architectural details that had fostered the disastrous rapid spread of the conflagration.

This made a rebuilt London the most modern city in the world for a lot of years and that helped make both the city of London and the country of England power houses.

I have fantasies of updating the US housing stock without waiting for a greater debacle than our current high rates of homelessness, people living in RVs -- remember that stands for recreational vehicles -- full-time, people fleeing to tiny homes and then complaining online about their deficiencies.

It's not just the US. The entire planet is having a housing crisis. 

We are generally living longer on average than in the past but this is partly due to miracles of modern medicine which may save your life but not fully restore functionality. And I'm part of that cohort of permanently impaired people who by all rights should have died except I was in the right place at the right time to get a cutting edge, life saving diagnosis from some of the best medical facilities in the US.

Among other things, I have mobility issues. I've lived without a car a long time in a country infamous for being pedestrian hostile and I prefer walking and taking the bus to driving, but I have joint issues that make stairs a problem.

I really NEED modern amenities like elevators and I was painfully aware of the lack of electric outlets in old buildings when I lived in such. They also had to run cable to one apartment in a hundred-year old building when I signed up for Internet service.

I wish I could just move someplace with wonderful housing that just works for me at an affordable price. I don't believe it exists.

If you are swimming in money, you can probably have satisfactory housing anywhere. For the other 99 percent of us, we're all muddling through as best we can with mostly unsatisfactory options that all still cost too much in spite of not really working for us.

I began reading about Tiny Houses in the US more than forty years ago when it was an exciting new concept of "What if I could spend less money on housing and be less burdened by the enormous upkeep involved with a big house in the suburbs and a vast lawn around it when I'm an unmarried, childless guy?" 

And the guy who came up with the idea quickly learned that it isn't legal to build a house that small. So he combed through the regulations and learned you could get around that by putting it on wheels as a little legal hack.

More than forty years LATER and it's still not legal to build in most places, you can't get homeowners insurance if it's on wheels instead of a foundation and on and on.

Tiny Houses are a dream of a tiny apartment in Paris or Tokyo or New York but without the city that makes those small spaces make sense. They make sense because your life is in a big city with endless amenities nearby. 

People in Tiny Houses don't typically have that sea of big city amenities around them. And they typically learn over time that it doesn't really work to try to live an American suburban lifestyle in a tiny home where there isn't room to have friends over and there isn't room to store enough stuff, etc. for the context in which they live their life.

Project SRO is a dream of a small apartment in a walkable historic downtown in a small American town. It's a project that potentially could also be adapted to other contexts but that's the context it was designed for.

It is a vision of a small living space in the kind of context where that makes sense because you can conveniently go daily to get a bite to eat or buy fresh groceries and meet with people without having a large residential space.

Historically, small town America had downtowns like a mini Paris where there was a bakery and grocery store in walking distance and you didn't necessarily own a car.

So Project SRO makes it feasible to live without a car while not making war with "car people." Because life moved on and car culture rose up and it gutted small town America.

And I believe if you want to breath life back into the hearts of American small towns, you need to make it possible to live without a car while accepting that car culture still rules this country and isn't going to die overnight.

Accepting that reality strikes me as our best hope of transitioning to something more people centered and less caring centered without undue pain and suffering.