Three hundred and fifty square feet.

That's about the size of an economy to mid-priced hotel room in Waikiki.

It's also 30 square feet larger than a 40-by-8-foot shipping container.

But for some, it's a new home.

A few O'ahu condominium developers trying to balance high land and construction costs with sale prices that entry-level buyers can afford are reducing home sizes to what many would consider economized extremes.

It's not certain whether these small condos, which include one completed last year in Waipahu and one slated to be built later this year in Makiki, foretell of a trend that would lead to Hawai'i becoming more like New York or Tokyo, with cramped urban condos.

But it's another "price of paradise" reflection of being a homeowner in Honolulu, which recently was ranked by the National Association of Realtors as having the highest median single-family home price among 153 major U.S. metropolitan areas.

"It's better than not owning," said Perlita Fontanilla, who last July bought a unit in a new condo that has 362 square feet of living space and is a tight fit for her family of four.

The unit at Plantation Town Apartments in Waipahu has one bedroom, but to live comfortably Fontanilla keeps the bicycles of her two young children in the car, and the living room sofa is a loveseat. Also, at night she typically sleeps in the bed with the kids, and her husband sleeps on a futon in the living room.

"This is an investment," she said. "It's better than renting."

Generally, small housing units under 400 or so square feet in Hawai'i are limited to rental apartments, the common stepping stone to becoming a homeowner. But increasingly, more young couples and families are making the leap to home ownership that doesn't give them much more area in which to live.

In some cases, new condo projects with very small units are being produced by private developers as part of state-sponsored affordable housing programs that have no limits on how small units can be.

SELLING VERY WELL

Some of the smallest new condos on the market today are in Holomua, a planned 23-story building in Makiki where the smallest unit is 354 square feet and priced at $245,000.

The 176-unit Holomua project at 1315 Kalakaua Ave. near South Beretania Street has 16 such one-bedroom units, which, if you include 32 square feet of lanai space, brings the total unit area to 386 square feet.

Holomua is being developed under a state program that allows the building to rise above the area's normal height limit in return for reserving 90 units for local residents at prices affordable on a moderate income.

Serge Krivatsy, a principal with project developer THM Partners LLC, said some units needed to be small to come in at a sale price targeted at the lower end of the moderate wage range.

"It's amazing how many people are saying 'we want those units' — because it's the entry price," he said. "The small units are going to sell very well. Maybe it's a function of the economy."

Under federal guidelines, the price of Holomua's 354-square-foot unit would be affordable to a couple earning $60,900 a year, or 80 percent of the median income in Honolulu, assuming a 5.25 percent interest rate on a 30-year mortgage.

Holomua's smallest units are modeled after Plantation Town, a 100 percent affordable housing project comprising two mid-rise buildings built on state land by a partnership headed by local developer Michael Kimura.

Plantation Town's smallest unit — 362 square feet plus a 23-square-foot lanai — was priced at $131,500 when sales began in 2006. There are 46 such units in the 330-unit project, and nearly all of those units were bought last year when the building was completed.

Peter Savio, whose firm Hawaiian Island Homes Ltd. acted as the sales agent for Plantation Town, said the smallest units received the most interest and sold out before bigger units, many of which are still unsold.

"The market is much more price sensitive, I think, than unit or size sensitive," he said.

Savio also said a 300-square-foot condo isn't unreasonable if you consider that Hawai'i developers in the 1960s were building 900-square-foot single-family homes with three bedrooms. "It's a livable unit," he said. "It's a place to get started."

MORE PLANNED

One condo project that offered pre-construction sales last year with units as small as 407 square feet had no government-required affordable housing component. That 120-unit project, called 1723 Kalakaua, near the Hawaii Convention Center, plans 24 of the small studios priced at $292,500. But problems obtaining financing have prevented the developer from breaking ground.

Another planned high-rise with some economized units is Halekauwila Place, an affordable-housing tower to be built on state land by local developer Stanford Carr with partial state financing.

As many as 136 units in the 201-unit project will be available for purchase as leasehold condominiums. Carr said the tower, which is still in design and has yet to hit the market, should have some roughly 400-square-foot studios.

"You have affordability and cost. Where do they go? You end up squeezing down the size of units (to maintain affordability)," he said, adding that construction costs run about $350 for every foot of space in a residential high-rise.

SMALL IS NOT NEW

To be sure, high-rise condos with units at or under 400 square feet are not new on O'ahu. Some developed in previous decades include Holiday Village, built in 1967 with 370-square-foot studios near what used to be Holiday Mart in Pawa'a, and Pearl City's Century Park Plaza, built in 1984 with 360-square-foot studios.

There also have been many rental buildings with similar sized units — such as Queen Emma Gardens in Nu'uanu — that have been converted and sold as fee-simple condos.

But in at least the past couple of decades, it has been more common for the smallest units in entry-level condo tower projects to be larger than 500 square feet.

Three examples of towers in Kaka'ako that had government affordable housing requirements and no units under 500 square feet are Royal Capital Plaza built in 1987, 1133 Waimanu built in 1996 and One Archer Lane built in 1998.

Condo towers built at low- to moderate-income prices without government affordable housing requirements in recent years include 215 N. King, a tower on the edge of Downtown with units starting at 507 square feet, and Country Club Village 6, a tower in Salt Lake with units starting at 502 square feet.

Ricky Cassiday, a local residential development consultant, said the size of new condo units tends to fluctuate with market cycles — contracting in phases when development costs are still relatively high and buyer demand is concentrated at the lower end of the affordable-to-luxury price range.

"You're into the era of smaller units," Cassiday said, explaining that developers are trying to deliver units at prices affordable to the biggest segment of the market — people earning around the median income.

Cassiday predicts that unit sizes will grow again when buyer demand broadens, if development costs allow it, because developers will have to compete among themselves and the inventory of existing units. "If they can do bigger units, they will do bigger units," he said.