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Comment by xor1 | Hacker News Reader

Los Angeles though... :(

One of my friends just moved here and is sharing a 5-bedroom home with 25 other people. I thought he was bullshitting me, and I still couldn't believe it when I went over. He's paying $600 a month to share a bedroom with four other guys. He told me it was the best thing he could find on 1-day notice. He pays for rent online, and he has no idea who the actual owner is, nor who is actually receiving the money.

I thought that kind of living arrangement only happened with undocumented workers (barring SF and NYC, which I've always considered to be ridiculous), who can't easily exercise tenant rights.

Now I really wonder how many of the apartments and homes around me are just completely packed with people who are splitting rooms.

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Isn't this just called a hostel?

That just sounds like your friend is living in a hostel dorm. $20/day actually sounds cheap now that I'm looking at hostel rates in LA:

http://www.hostelworld.com/search?search_keywords=Los+Angele...

The loan repayments on my three bedroom house are AU$47 a day, or about US$35. ($215,000 purchase price in 2016).

It sounds like you have a mortgage... What is your point?

I suspect he's saying that his daily payment on his house is roughly on par, or less than the daily rate of a high priced hostel.

You could have figured that out yourself without the attitude, right?

Except that's not really saying much. If there was nothing more to owning a house than paying a mortgage instead of rent everyone would own a house and never rent.

The cost to live in the hostel when you include all factors is lower even if the daily rates were the same.

i thought it was common knowledge that real estate prices vary around the world. a lot. if Proud Aussie saying anything more than that? and that Proud Aussie has a mortgage?

GP's point was that their friend had to find a place to stay with one day's notice which seemed to be the limiting factor.

A mortgaged house, and short-notice, temporary housing are not in the same category. I was asking if there was some point that the person I was responding to was trying to make that I wasn't seeing.

Is your $215k Aussie house in close to town in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane? There are plenty of cheap houses in America too, living in LA/SF/NYC is a luxury that people pay a premium for.

There are no decent houses anywhere near the major cities of Australia to be had for anywhere near $215k. The median house price in Australia is $659k. The apartment median is $518k.

No, no it's not. I live in Launceston, Tasmania - population approx. 100,000 people.

living in LA/SF/NYC is a luxury that people pay a premium for.

Yeah nah. I don't really follow this. Unless you consider terrible traffic and less than idea air quality luxuries. Having said that, I did live in Adelaide for 13 years.

Okay, I'm being too critical, too inflammatory. Big cities bring people together in a pretty special way that enables all sorts of culture to arise that doesn't happen here, in these big country towns, or struggles to exist on the fringes as a caricature of it's big-city counterpart. And I definitely miss that.

Choices, I guess. I can't afford to buy a house in any suburb I'd like to live in in the big cities in Australia. And I'm getting too old to rent or sharehouse. It's good here, 800 rock climbing routes within an hours drive of my house; kayaking and surfing; high-speed internet and Hacker News; a dog; business opportunities we're putting in to action.

Yeah nah. I don't really follow this. Unless you consider terrible traffic and less than idea air quality luxuries. Having said that, I did live in Adelaide for 13 years.

It's a fact, not a matter of opinion. People definitely do pay a premium for the luxury of living in LA/SF/NYC. Just look at the rents as you move further away from the center of the cities.

You and I may argue whether it's worth paying that premium, but that's a separate conversation. Location is the most important valuation metric in real estate. A one acre piece of land in rural America could be worth $5,000. An acre in Manhattan is worth $90M+.[1]

[1] http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/2100-a-square-f...

living in LA/SF/NYC is a luxury

Definitely an opinion.

that people pay a premium for.

That's a fact.

People definitely pay a premium for living in or close to big cities. Whether it's a luxury is entirely a matter of opinion.

So you don't agree that 6-bedroom mansions, expensive sports cars, and having a high-paying job are luxuries?

Well now the goal posts have moved. Is living in a big city a luxury? I'm doubtful. Is having those other things a luxury?

Sure they sound luxurious until you realise you have to pay for them, which is why you'll need the high-paying job.

I'm just saying that it is possible to be comfortable outside a huge city and not owning cars I'd be worried about scratching.

People have different tastes.

It's interesting that a lot of people act like living in those big cities is a necessity rather than the luxury that you've pointed out it really is.

What about better career opportunities?

What about them? This is a question that deserves a long, complicated, reasoned answer, but it's generally asked as though it's already the answer.

I'll just say for brevity that people (especially young professionals) drastically underestimate 1) the amount of opportunities there are in other, smaller cities and 2) the quality of life that's possible on lower salaries in those cities.

Thank you.

As a software contractor, yea it's a necessity for me.

90% of software developers work outside of the SFBA [0]. On the one hand: holy crap a full 10% of software engineers work in just one city!

But, on the other hand, the vast majority don't. I'm sure there are certain people who really need to be there, but not everyone does.

[0] http://qz.com/729293/90-of-software-developers-work-outside-...

I wouldn't even consider it a luxury.

In my opinion it's a trade off between quality of life vs. the opportunities that exist in big cities.

Of course, quality of life is subjective.

The all-in daily cost for my mother's South St. Louis City bungalow is $16.50. That includes mortgage repayment, property taxes, and insurance on a conventional 30-year loan with 20% down. She lives in a structurally intact, solidly working-class portion of the city.

The point is that a lot of people don't want to live in a South St. Louis City bungalow. (By the way, I think a lot of the snobbery around this is misguided, but it is what it is.)

Yep, that's it. I think I'm just taking pot-shots at my younger-self for being a misguided-snob.

I've been to the Adventurer Hotel which is the first on that list a long, long time ago. I would not recommend it. I had a layover at LAX, their bus pulled up right in front of me, and some kids said get on. The staff, all the girls were from Russia or Poland and the guys were from New Zealand, Australia, and one bloke from England, on the bus made a pit stop at the liqueur store. They bought at least 12 liters of booze. There wasn't a bar by the pool like in the pictures. They just set up a table by the pool. When the bus rolled in there was a prostitute on roller skates across the street and one prostitute half a block up 6 or 7 months pregnant. One guy says looks like roller girl is working tonight. The staff lived in the hotel rooms. This was during the Gulf War and the bus picked up two kids serving in the British army who just got a couple weeks leave. The Australian guy who worked at the front desk set up an elaborate plan to hook the soldiers up with a couple of the Russian girls who were waitresses in the bar. Early in the night he rounded a few of us up to pretend the party was in one of the empty hotel rooms. The staff were just people travelling from other countries working under the table. They just partied and partied with everyone who stayed there. He invited two Russian girls and the soldiers to join all of us in the room. As soon as they all got there the rest of us left. It worked because they ended up hanging out together all night. It just kept going on like that. It was wild and out of control. Frat parties are tame compared to what was going on there that night. There is no reason ever to stay there. If you do you will get bed bugs or hepatitis.

Man, life was a lot more colorful before we started spending all our time behind a screen.

Man ain't that the sad truth.

I'm with you right up to the point where you say you don't recommend staying at this place.

From your description, this sounds like every backpacker hostel, everywhere. Or at least what they aspire to be.

Sadly, everything moves upmarket, and "hostel" tends to now translate to giant soulless hotel where they have two or three bunk beds in each room and no real shared space or opportunity to meet other travelers (who realistically would now be staring at their phone the entire time they were in one of those shared spaces, so you'd never meet them anyway).

But what you describe used to be every night of your round the world trip. It was fun.

It seems like everyone's trying to move upmarket and killing everything that was fun, unique or interesting about themselves in the process. It's not just businesses it's people too. Everyone wants to get the same soulless desk job, parrot the same inoffensive opinions, Instagram the same stupid travel and gym photos to show how worldly and fit they are, and sit in their same stupid Ubers so that they can interact with as little of the world as possible while moving through it.

I live in a red light district and I get shit about it on a daily basis, but man, not once have I had a dull night and the stories people tell around here blow my goddamn mind. For sure you wouldn't want to live in this type of environment your whole life, but it's absolutely tragic to watch it all gentrifying and being replaced by lifeless condo developments and Au Bon Pain. I'll take the pregnant prostitutes and the alcoholic backpackers over Au Bon Pain any day because they have CHARACTER.

I've heard of "hacker house" type places in the Bay Area which sound exactly like this. I think the rate was something like $30/day or so.

I've also heard of operators of these places who will sign a regular rental contract with a landlord, "convert" the place to such a high density dorm, milk it until the landlord finds out, and when the landlord does, apologize, end the contract, then find another rental to rinse and repeat.

As I'm currently living in a hacker house in San Jose, I'm obligated to say that this is mostly true except that you make it sound shadier than I think it usually is.

Mine is a 5 bedroom that fits 15 people (one of the 5 bedrooms is for the guy who runs it + his gf). He himself is renting from a landlord who knows that it's a hacker house and is completely happy with that--the landlord gets paid rent while the host takes care of everything that goes wrong (when all utilities get 5x normal use, things break all the time). The host does all this and makes $27/day from each tenant. The whole setup is through Airbnb, and he's made sure he complies with Airbnb rules as well as San Jose rules for renting out houses.

I, too, first rented this place because it was cheap and available on 1 days notice, and while I had planned on moving out to find an apartment, I ended up staying for months because the community is good, the house is well maintained, and the rent really is affordable compared to the cost of most places on Craigslist (which would all be shared houses anyway).

I've stayed at 2 of this guy's (Vic) properties. The first time was in the sunset in SF and it was pretty great. The cops did come bursting into our bedroom at midnight on a weeknight once, but besides that I have fond memories of it.

I also stayed at Vic's hacker house in San Mateo, where the stoner host and his buddy were often up to no good... One guy actually decided to stop paying rent, and exercise his tenant's rights. Basically things were going horribly there so I was able to convince my fellow tenants to split a 3 bedroom apartment near by.

I get that Vic takes care of the house that he lives in. It's just not the case for all of his properties.

Same to us average people living in Beijing. I share a house with four other people,and one of the single bed room was just separated by boards.

I lived in Pasadena just 30 min out of LA and paid 1000/Mo for a 1 be below the 210. This was 4 years ago so I assume rates are up. Just checked CL and see 1br in a townhome for rent for 900 in a decent area. Why would you share with 4 other people for 600... Is it that difficult to put away an extra 300 and commute 30 min?

Woah, I knew about things being bad in the USA, but I didn't know living conditions are going towards third-world standards :/ Where I live (The Netherlands) there are laws that even protect foreign workers (i.e. from Poland) from all being stuffed in a single room.

At this point it's starting to look like even jail cells have more room and privacy.

This is in one of the most expensive areas in the US. I wouldn't call this third world status. In most areas you can easily find a 1BR apartment for that much.

well his example probably violates more than one regulation the issue being of course, someone has to report it.

...after which the people who lived there have even less of a roof over their heads.

That example is extreme. Most of the USA pays less, and usually one home or apartment is shared by just one family/couple, or a few friends.

Where I live (The Netherlands) there are laws that even protect foreign workers (i.e. from Poland) from all being stuffed in a single room.

How do those laws work in practice? Everything I've seen about these sorts of tenant protection regulations make them infeasible to enforce in the case where the tenants are migrant workers who might even be working illegally. The idea is that if a person is already running afoul of the law personally, they will keep quiet about the law-breaking of their landlord lest they upset the apple cart and cause everybody to get kicked out.

Poland and The Netherlands are both members of the EU, so immigrant workers from Poland are legal by definition. As for illegal migrant workers I suspect that it's just not that big of a problem, quantitatively speaking.

There's a plenty of legal migrants working illegally.

Polish people have the right to work in the Netherlands (or any other EU country).

Yes? You can work illegally in any country by getting paid in cash and not reporting your income. I really don't see where the EU or the nationality of the worker comes in here.

There's significantly less incentive to do that when you don't have to. Or, in other words - why would a Polish worker do that any more than a Dutch person, when both of them are otherwise there entirely legally?

The cheap migrant worker probably doesn't care if he pays the Dutch taxes or not, but his employer will definitely be very happy if he and his coworkers don't.

Unreported employment is super common.

Must be the americans downvoting me :) This isn't a new thing to anyone in the EU... I think?

http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_402_en.p...

Employers have every incentive to save that 30%+ by paying their employees in cash.

I skipped to the conclusions as I have no interest in reading over 100 pages, and there is no statement in the conclusions that migrant workers are more likely to perform untaxed work than local workers.

This is not representative of the US.

It's not even representative of Los Angeles. The "one-day notice" thing makes this person's situation different, but it's not hard at all to find 2 bedroom apartments for less than $2400, even in expensive areas like Hollywood. Split each bedroom two ways (assuming relatively "equal" bedrooms…) and you'd have < $600 rent in a much saner (from my POV) living situation.

If you expand the scope to Long Beach, the Valley, and South Bay, I'm sure you could find some 3BRs for < $2000 and pay around $600/mo to have your own room. For what it's worth, among my friends in LA — most of whom aren't well-off tech workers — none split a bedroom with anyone other than a significant other.

I don't think it is the "third-world standards" that is making everyone rush over to these locations.

> protect

Curious about what exactly does it mean in this content. Is it about banning full grown and consenting adults from signing a deal because government think it knows best what's good for them?

Your objection could apply against all tenants' rights laws, or against any workers' rights laws as well, such as maximum allowed work hours, rights to breaks every few hours, etc.

Correct. And I agree with him.

I'm reasonably sure there are laws against this in LA, too. It doesn't sound like an above-board operation at all. (Unless it literally is a hostel, as some have said, and the OP misunderstood.)

The problem isn't: "We are an exploited underclass unable to live in reasonable conditions." The problem is more along the lines of a gold rush type movement of people. Where large cities are attracting a large influx of people increasing demand on housing faster than it can be corrected.

Plenty of inexpensive housing in Ohio. Not so much along the California coast.

That, plus a complete refusal on the part of government and voters to build any more housing.

not to mention all the environmental impact fees, taxes, and endless regulation which increase housing costs way beyond where it would be without. It's not just LA and SF (gold rush cities that have housing problems). In CA, even the rural areas with miles of space in every direction, housing still costs a lot more than the national average.

I'm not sure where you plan to build in new york for example?

Build even higher buildings?

Yes. New York doesn't even have that high of a density compared to European standards.

Umm, which standards?

Paris city area has a density (21000/km²) that is twice that of New York City (10800/km²), but is an exception. Many other major European metropolitan cities are less than half of New York's density.

(Berlin 4000/km², London 5500/km², Amsterdam 4900/km², Stockholm 5000/km², Helsinki 1500/km², Madrid 5400/km², Köln 2600/km², Lyon 10000/km², Brussels 7000/km²).

Sure, why not? If zoning regulations were relaxed, developers would definitely be willing to build more housing. Even most of Manhattan doesn't have very tall buildings, just look at Google Maps in 3D view.

That's mostly because of the geography of Manhattan though. The places with tall buildings (Midtown and Downtown) sit on a solid base of bedrock, in between this base is much deeper a lot harder to build to. Housing in Manhattan isn't the big problem anyways, it's Brooklyn and Queens. But there are a lot of political issues in there.

Personally, I don't want to live in these new developments because I find them ugly. You can't tell the difference between a new flat NYC, London, Amsterdam and Paris anymore.

> Personally, I don't want to live in these new developments because I find them ugly. You can't tell the difference between a new flat NYC, London, Amsterdam and Paris anymore.

This seems like a solvable problem though. Like if everyone complains about how ugly everything is, why aren't there regulations passed specifying how things should look (or should not look)? Developers mostly just want a consistent way to build and make money, if you specify how things should look most will fall in line instantly.

You can't walk a block in downtown LA without stumbling on a 20- to 50-story apartment building going up, and vacant/underused historic buildings are being converted into housing at a decent clip. New housing is going up in the Hollywood and Koreatown areas close to mass transit. It's true that Los Angeles has an extreme housing shortage (~3% vacancy rate), but the supply side of the housing market is catching up.

You can have a 3bd/2ba house with detached garage in an excellent school district for $200,000, as long as you do it somewhere designed for cars, cold, and economically stagnant.

Things are not that bad. The OP's post is kind of odd as many others have pointed out. Four adults sharing an apartment is something you would see broke college students doing. It is not the norm and has very little to do with Los Angeles which a huge place.

There are laws in many parts of the US forbidding more than a certain number of unrelated people from living in one house or apartment. How well they are enforced varies from town to town.

>one day notice

That's probably most of the problem...

Does your friend have a typical well paying tech job? He should save up first month's rent and move out. I don't quite get these hacker houses, if people are earning normal tech salaries they should only be temp solutions.

And piss away $3500/month just on rent for a one bedroom? No thanks. If I was single and living in SF I'd go for one of those hacker houses for sure.

The homelessness problem in LA is getting worse, too. There are something like 40 people becoming homeless every day; that's about 15,000 each year...

Sounds like your friend is a fool. I had a nicely sized studio in West Hollywood about 2 years ago. It was right on La Brea and Santa Monica, and that cost me $1000. With laundry and parking. The idea of paying $600 to split a room 5 ways is crazy. That is more representative of your friend than it is of LA housing market. WeHo is probably among the more pricy areas in LA(save Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and a few others), and I found and signed for that room in about 6 days. There is a paid rental listing website. It seems like a scam, but it's not. It was called Westside Rental I think, you'll see the name on a lot of signs. It's work the ~$60 for a membership to see all the listings, maybe you can sell your membership to someone else after if there's a few weeks left.

I ended up leaving LA because that place is a hellish shit hole, but not because of the rent.

>Sounds like your friend is a fool.

OP's buddy was looking for a place with 1-day-notice. A hostel is basically all you can hope for.

I would rather live in the woods and hunt for food...

only you can't, because civilization has decimated the population of wild animals.

I think it is still possible, at least in the USA and Canada.

many lower-income creative types are flocking to LA from SF and NY.

Is this place in Santa Monica? Think I know what it is.

Hollywood, but I'm sure there's plenty like it all throughout LA.

Out of curiosity, where?

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