The article has something of an issue in that its ever-escalating apartment prices are never bound to any material costs--i.e., it doesn't directly acknowledge that some significant amount of that $900 initial and $1400 ultimate cost exist only because they're what the market will bear. More, it seems assume the premise that the only solution to increasing costs is to decrease size.

But do micro-apartments not just exacerbate the actual problem--that decent, reasonably sized homes for people in good locations are too rare or too expensive?

I can understand how these micro-homes might appeal to people in certain circumstances (I spent a while myself splitting a tiny studio in Seattle with a few other people--and that same apartment costs ~3x now what it did when I lived there 5 years ago), but I can't see how the problems these are trying to solve wouldn't be much better solved by building new desirable areas, increasing the supply of good housing, and driving the costs of all housing down.