Touring The Smallest Apartment In New York City
A2 English listening practice · American English · Curated for beginners
What is a “micro-studio” in New York City?
A micro-studio is an extremely small New York City apartment, usually under 300 square feet (about 28 square meters). The category took off after a 2013 NYC zoning waiver under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which allowed new buildings to include units smaller than the previous 400-square-foot minimum. The first micro-units were built in Kips Bay (the Carmel Place building, 2016). Since then, NYC apartment-tour content on YouTube and TikTok has turned micro-studios into a small entertainment genre, where renters compete to show how creatively they fit a kitchen, bathroom, and living room into a single tight square.
In this clip, a host walks through the kitchen, bathroom, and “living room” of an apartment that fits all three into a few hundred square feet.
Vocabulary frequency
How common is the vocabulary in this A2 English listening practice listening practice?
General English frequency
Spoken English frequency
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-US 2012 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.
- ▸In American NYC apartment-tour YouTube and TikTok (Cash Jordan, Caleb Simpson)
- ▸In American real-estate news (Curbed NY, The New York Times real-estate section)
- ▸In American architecture and small-space-design publications
- ▸In American sitcoms about NYC roommates (Friends, Broad City, Russian Doll)
- ▸In American moving-to-NYC vlogs from college graduates