Dorm living for professionals comes to SF | Hacker News Reader

Dorm living for professionals comes to SF

nytimes.com

84 pointstarr11114 comments

“I feel like I’m in a relationship with everyone I live with,” Ms. Ndrepepaj said. “If their day is bad, your day is bad.”

Hardly a selling point. As an introvert it's just within my capabilities living with my wife and playful cat; living in such an environment would be a nightmare for me. The article fails to address the 'bad roommate' situation, which always happens sooner or later with these shared-living environments.

For the first 6 years or so after I moved to California I rented a room in a house where the owner lived (once in La Habra and once in Irvine). There were usually 4 to 5 total people living there. We were all professionals and there was pretty close to no drama.

We were friendly but not best friends. Everyone had their own circle of friends, interests, etc. At least once we had a guy we called the ghost because we almost never saw him. But no one minded that he was introverted and kept to himself.

Once I had a girlfriend privacy became more important to me but I enjoyed having some friendly interactions with others on my terms.

Nobody is so extroverted that they want to have other people peering in to their lives every moment of the day (unless they are walking so closely in lockstep with culture that there's literally nothing about them that could cause friction.)

There's a reason why people born in compressed, shared living conditions tend to buy houses when they can. If you don't live in a "dorm" you can control your environment, for example not seeing friends while you're sick with the flu and highly contagious (and no fun to be around).

To me this looks like a slide back in to 1800s non-rich living conditions sold as a step forwards.

Globalism is going to lead to an averaging out of the standards of living across the globe. People from wealthy nations are in for a rude awakening.

True story. I share a messy studio with my girlfriend in the Bay Area. We’ve both at times felt like it’s weird for us to live in a small cramped space, but any time I learn about life for poorer people the world over I realize that living in cramped messy places is the global norm. The fact that I grew up around clean single family homes is just an artifact of the wealth around me.

I will say though that I hope robotics can increase global wealth dramatically enough for everyone that no one has to see their quality of life go down.

The statistic that constantly rattles around in my head is that 70% of the world lives on less than $10/day. There's an awful long way down from here.

Per capita world GDP is about $16K/year. That's significantly more than $10/day, but it's also significantly less than anyone in the Western world is accustomed to living on.

$16,000 / 365 = $44 / day. And wealth and income are non-linear [1], so 70% of the population could easily be below the mean.

[1] citation needed

You can't calculate it like that. That's total revenue, not the amount paid out to employees.

That number can only be said to be strictly higher than average daily wage. But probably at the very least 50% higher than average wages.

If cities were only productive enough to hit GDP per capita of $16k/year, construction workers only expected to make $16k/year, and other potential buyers made close to $16k/year, housing would be dirt cheap.

If American urban planning were in line with global norms (i.e. not built around ubiquitous car ownership), transportation would be dirt cheap or free.

And outside of housing and transportation, $16k/year is a ton of money. I maintain a pretty bougie standard of living on half that.

Without adjusting for purchasing power, that number is meaningless. What is the PPP number?

> Globalism is going to lead to an averaging out of the standards of living across the globe. People from wealthy nations are in for a rude awakening.

In another couple decades, most definitely. Soon? Nah. China is rapidly aging, their economy is overheating, they're about to go through their own debt unwinding. Africa is just a mess. Maybe? I'll believe it when I see it. The United States, regardless of current events, is remarkably stable compared to the rest of the world. That has value.

SF and NYC are a microcosm of the first world. You would have a much higher quality of living in any number of cities or smaller communities in the US or Europe. I'm partial to Berlin, Barcelona, Prague, and most of Portugal, but YMMV.

I bang out comments on Hacker News while overlooking my backyard pool in Florida in a 4 bed/2.5 bath house for ~$1400/month. Why would I trade that for a dorm with shared bathrooms in the most expensive city in the world?

It's not just SF and NYC. The rust belt was gutted and what remains of those Union jobs are now slave wage jobs at places with suicide nets in China.

I agree, but for different reasons. Jobs went to third world workers, while the majority of the productivity went into shareholder pockets. That's an internal policy issue in the US, not a globalization issue (or rather, it's an unchecked capitalism issue). You can use policy to prevent unfettered blood letting of jobs to the cheapest labor sinks in the world. Globalization is not some foregone conclusion we have no control over.

EDIT: First world workers aren't competing against third world workers; they're competing against first world owners/shareholders/capitalists cramming down wages, working conditions, and living standards.

It didn't really go to shareholders. Maybe a little at first but a global market meant that prices of goods just dropped to compensate for the 'savings'.

> It didn't really go to shareholders.

Data does not support your claim. Consumer excess was definitely realized due to cheaper labor in China and retailers like Walmart exerting influence on vendors, but shareholders most definitely have been receiving the majority of productivity gains.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/top-1-percent-of-americans-rea...

http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/07/news/economy/compensation-pr...

http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1021787.shtm...

https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/22/...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/...

To the extent your list of links address productivity gains at all, they miss the most important contribution: Inflation, or rather the historically impressive lack thereof over approaching three decades of net economic growth.

When firms produce more with less, supply goes up and prices go down. Compare the median American household in 1988 with today’s and you’ll see exactly where all those productivity gains have gone: More and better appliances, more and better cars, more and better communication technology, cheaper clothes, cheaper food—even at comparable inflation-adjusted income levels.

Inflation was low due to lack of consumer demand....because of wage stagnation (and I concede, offshoring). The Fed can’t “push the string” with QE, and here we are 10 years later from the GFC, finally with an economy hot enough to push wages up (thereby increasing inflation).

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/hollowing-ou...

Why? You might if you really really really liked mild year round weather, a variety of food options, great mountain/road biking, diversity, and a couple of other things. But only some people are into these things.

That's only somewhat true. It will smooth out living standards as it crushes working people down by exploiting the lowest wages anywhere in the globe. Simultaneously, the wealthy bourgeoisie will become richer and richer until the internal contradiction in capitalism, that profits come from consumers that must work for wages, tears the system asunder.

The system that follows will likely be fascism, the seamless merger of corporations with the state to force exploited workers to work, or socialism, the people taking control of the government and using it to expropriate the rich in favor of workers. EDIT: Note that this doesn't require central planning, the rad idea these days are socialisms based on co-ops where employees own the organization they are a part of.

If the system is fascist, living standards will sharply drop for everyone subjected to that system. If the system is a form of socialism, then yes differences will even out. The GDP of the United States divided by its population is roughly 55k in today's dollars, though certain services like medicine and housing will have their profits expropriated so 55k will go much further. If we look at world GDP, the income of all people will be closer to 11k USD, which might be barely livable, but will eradicate extreme poverty across the globe.

We have a lot of work to do to treat humanity well and in a way the planet can survive.

If any of the previous experiments with socialism are any indication, fascism and socialism have the same approximate outcomes.

The old idea that occurred in the Soviet Union was not the only possible outcome. That idea was for a vanguard party to take control of the country and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Unfortunately, this dictatorship was exactly that... it concentrated power in the hands of a small minority and lead to tremendous abuses. However, it also lead to obscenely rapid industrialization in one of the poorest most besieged countries in the world. Russia, post WW1 and WW2 was not a happy place having lost millions of soldiers to invasions by Germany, Japan, the US, and others. It is an open question what would have happened had they not been besieged. However, that is counterfactual, and there were large abuses, especially in the Ukraine.

Other countries, like China, have produced significant abuses, but notably they are also rising economic powers. They are no longer strictly communist, but nor are they totally capitalist. China recently announced a plan to eliminate poverty within its borders (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/xi-jinping-pov...). While you might say that they won't be able to do it, that would fly in the face of their 6+% (!) GDP growth. Can you imagine a US politician ever making a statement like that? Not since FDR have we seen anything like it. The closest we had was MLK's Poor People's Campaign in the late 60s.

The new hip idea is for power to remain mostly decentralized to prevent this outcome. Hence, worker coops. If more stakeholders participate in decisions, hopefully fewer truly awful ones will occur.

I could go on, but there is a lively debate going on right now that much of the US public is asleep to having been lulled into a zombie like state by Carter, Regan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. It's acceptable to think about the shape of the new world that is coming and have a hand in shaping it. Otherwise the same old, frankly evil, behaviors will continue until something unimaginably terrible happens like a nuclear war or the seas and changing weather sweep our civilization away.

Years-long waiting lists for apartments shared with many strangers are the historical norm under socialist housing schemes and the only evidence-based expectation were we to implement one today.

This despite central-planning allocation of graduates to work assignments and no freedom of internal movement. This alone would probably "solve" the housing crises in major cities today: just stop letting people move to them in such massive numbers.

A coworker who grew up in Soviet-era Moscow remarked that it wasn't all bad - homelessness basically didn't exist - but each nuclear family (let alone individual) getting their own home is a development of the contemporary West's uniquely hyper-capitalist and hyper-atomized society. Embracing collectivization is not going to make it easier to get your own home.

I really appreciate your perspective. I'm still learning about all of this. My understanding is that most often these setups were started in relatively poor countries that didn't have enough housing to start with. That is not the case in the US where many houses remain vacant in the face of homelessness so that speculators can speculate.

In China, they are building entire ghost cities and then filling them as fast as they can. In the Soviet Union, my understanding is that the economy was out of wack because of the need to build the military to defend against Western aggression. If those resources were diverted to the civilian sector, perhaps there would have been more and nicer housing?

EDIT: Even in a capitalist country I'm still living with roommates, and this is part of a trend for younger people. That kind of takes the bite out of the criticism that capitalism offers more freedom in that regard. Such freedom once existed, but it has been declining.

EDIT2: I like my roommates. Not dissing them at all. :)

The problem in both cases is urbanization. Soviet central planners explicitly set out to industrialize their agrarian society; market forces are moving America's center of gravity from the Midwestern factory to the coastal R&D office. As populations move (or are ordered to move) to follow these changes, it creates blight and abandonment in the places they leave and a housing crunch in the places they head to.

The empty houses are in the places that are no longer economically relevant; the housing crises are in the places everyone is moving to.

The Soviets responded by building space-efficient housing in cities as fast as they could, which was just not fast enough. American cities are actively refusing to let this happen at any significant scale.

We would first need these cities to decide to want enough housing for their ballooning populations. Then we could argue over whether the state or private developers should build it.

What you say makes a lot of sense. My understanding of why people moved out of the urban core in the first place was "white flight". People are moving back now, and the people living in the cities, typically the wealthier inhabitants, resist building any tall residential buildings, though they are happy to build upscale homes and businesses that kick out the poor.

Differences are sure evening out in Venezuela. Good thing we have options other than "facism" and the ultimately indistinguishable "socialism", which is called "fascism" once it gets poor enough.

Fwiw, any society that becomes suddenly poor will not look very good. My understanding is that Venezuela invested too much in oil and didn't diversify the economy. When oil crashed, it took everything with it. This is the resource curse at work. I'm skeptical that other economic systems would have not been tempted to make a similar choice.

That said, I am not a Venezuela expert.

I don't think masses in western societies will accept that. There was already revolt against TPP by both left (Sanders) and right (Trump) in 2016. So much so that even Hillary had to renounce the pact she once praised as "gold standard".

If globalization continues to decrease standard of living in the West, I will expect a massive political backlash (which I believe is already under way).

My thoughts exactly. A day of reckoning is coming.

Tons of young adults live in "family" housing with friends or Craigslist strangers. It's standard in SF to convert the living room to an additional bedroom when doing that, so there's really no common space.

Although having my own studio is ideal, I'd vastly prefer a relatively impersonal dorm with generous common areas to a traditional 2-3 roommate situation.

Also this article fails to point out the insanity of the housing market where a sane person living for $2000 a month would be living in a fairly comfortable space even in New York (okay maybe not middle of the city) but out there you get a room and a shared bathroom, with a private sink as a selling point?

And they wonder why smart people don't have kids. Imagine even thinking about having a family.

This article says it's "an unusual experiment", but how is this different from an SRO?

http://www.ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/

Description from this article of the "experiment": "Shared bathrooms at the end of the hall and having no individual kitchen or living room".

Description from the SRO web site link above: "A typical S.R.O. is a single eight (8) x ten (10) foot room with shared toilets and showers down the hallway."

As the SRO web site points out, these have been around in San Francisco "throughout the city’s history".

I suppose SRO's are somewhat stigmatized as being for the extremely indigent, although I think this wasn't always the case:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-sro...

Nothing wrong with them in principle (assuming they're well kept / safe). If you're single, it might be a better option than renting a random place with roommates.

It's not materially different from how I've always lived -- sharing a house or condo with 1 or 2 roommates. I currently share a bathroom, kitchen, and living room with one other person, and I have my own bedroom. We're both well-paid professionals in our late twenties who are friends and happen to be single right now. It's way cheaper and less lonely than living alone.

I don't think there's anything unusual about this. I guess the difference is this company will pick your roommates for you, which sounds worse to me but I guess it's easier for some people.

Plus, back in the 40s-60s, there were boarding houses in big cities for single women. Not an unusual or experimental concept at all.

Last time I was in SF I stayed near the Tenderloin area: I've never seen anything like that level of homelessness, neglect and dysfunction in any other first world country.

The existence of such conditions in a city of billionaires is shameful shit.

The US economy generates over $100k per household, and people are living on the street, or crammed into dorm rooms? It's a cruel, obscene disgrace.

Same here. I grew up in Seattle and thought that was bad, but the number of downcast and desperate characters I saw in downtown SF and how closely they were pressed up against areas of impressive wealth (like at Mission & 16th) was extremely depressing.

just wait and see what happens when full automation is achieved

the expensive software engineers will be replaced by AI and will join the homeless on the streets of SF?

I was shocked as well. All these leading tech companies, some of the richest people on Earth and can't fix the house they live in?

It is such a bizarre contrast to see so much wealth and people living in card boxes on the streets.

No body cares enough to actually get it fixed.

Does anyone actually want to see Big Tech "disrupt" homelessness policy/services?

The problem is that you'd have to resort to involuntary commitment and/or lifetime arrest of some form to get them off, and no one likes opening that can of worms. You can build all the apartments you like, and run all the job programs you can; if the person wont take his meds, or can't stay off drugs of his own volition, he will end up back on the street.

What a depressing article. It almost reads like a satire. 10 years ago, this would be an article in the Onion instead of NYT.

> to turn into dorm rooms for the middle class.

let's be real here, the middle class in the bay area/SF makes $250k+ per household.

there's nothing wrong with living in dorms, but there is something disturbing about calling this the 'middle class' in SF.

Agreed. Middle class shouldn't be defined by what sounds like a lot of money. It should be defined by what sort of spending power you have in the area where you actually live.

Perhaps it shouldn't be defined at all, we can see here everybody has a different definition depending on the point they are trying to make.

Great point. I'm using it to compare the standard of living in one area against another. But there are lots of other valid questions to ask, like what constitutes the middle band of wealth in the microcosm that is the Bay Area.

Median household income in SF is $78k.

i'm seeing some different information.

on wikipedia- it says $78k, but that data is apparently from 2010-2014.

https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_...

newer data suggests it is at least $87k, with some sources suggesting $92k+

>California Association of Realtors also estimates that the minimum qualifying income to buy in San Francisco is $254,000 annually.

i think being in the 'middle class' should mean you have some hope of escaping rent and actually own something reasonable.

Should, but sadly doesn’t at the moment.

We need more housing.

This is a useless semantic game: do you define middle-class as however median-income earners live locally, or do you define middle-class as an objective standard of living (based on national norms) and then check what income is necessary to obtain it?

Housing is also sticky. Many (not all) $78k earners locked in mortgages or rent control back when that was a lot of money, and live much better than any newcomer could on 2x that today.

Lower/middle/upper class is not equally populated, so a median income is useless when trying to define a "middle class" income; going by that would put folks in poverty in the "middle class" in a lot of the world.

According to Pew, 67% to 200% of the median income defines middle class. For a $78k median income, middle class is $52k to $156k. For a family with both parents working for identical salaries, middle class starts at $104k.

While this somewhat smells as "submarine" for Starcity, I welcome these kind of innovations (or reinventions of wheels, if you prefer). For introverts or families or elderly, we should of course have other types of housing. But variety of options is the key for a diverse society. Not everyone needs a single family of a giant townhome straight out of college. Having this kind of housing is a great option for new grads who don't have to waste tons of money on living spaces they don't really need. It also opens up socializing avenues, which is good for normal people.

These are SROs in the Tenderloin. Funny how this article never mentioned the word "SRO."

I wish there was some way to reduce the randomness of finding people to live with, and increase the odds of compatibility.

Maybe something like Ok Cupid for roommates.

I agree. Moving is a big decision, and it's hard to gauge what a person is like after only one meeting. Also, as I've learned the hard way, many people have different understandings of what it means to be "quiet."

Hello everyone! I am Jon Dishotsky, the CEO and co-founder of Starcity. I would be happy to answer any questions directly about what we're working on.

Why can't the vast majority of these people work remotely yet? For a group of people who often praise the concept of meritocracy, regionally locking down your employee pool seems insane.

The article makes it sound like a lot of them are service and retail sector type workers not exactly remote job material

Most of the members of Starcity are local employees that work in service professions. We have nurses, teachers, flight attendants, baristas, writers, bartenders and many of these trades require proximity to work so they can't work remote. Unfortunately the cost of an average studio in San Francisco is $3,000 a month and forget about buying a house where the average price is around $1.3M. For median income earners making between $40-90k a year, the options are really bad. Many of them are forced to live with 4 people in a three bedroom, pay 50-60% of their income in rent or commute 2 hours. Those are bad options, so we set out to build something that allows more people to live comfortably.

Seems like this could be avoided if they just change the zoning laws to allow more vertical development. People talk about earthquakes but Japan has managed.

I sincerely hope this doesn't start a precedent for our industry or for other places in this country. Stuff is hard enough as it is...

I do feel like this is the future trend of things for urban workers, either gradually work remote from a faraway affordable location, commute all day or live in an affordable dorm-like room with a community.

Ah,the American dream. Go through four years of college and 100k of student loans so you can live in a $2400 dorm room while barely making ends meet.

I'm moving to the Bay area in a few months and these sorts of stories make me question whether it's the right move.

Read your own comment again. It seems you already have your answer.

You go to SF to launch your career then GTFO ASAP to a less 'enlightened' part of the US where you don't have to worry about hyper sensitivity and your dollar actually counts for something.

What nonsense. Sure, the valley can teach you some new JavaScript frameworks and how to best invade your users privacy to sell ads, but real programming happens everywhere. There’s plenty of ways to launch your career without working for Zuckerberg or Bezos.

I ask for one (1) example, that does not include any software hubs that mimic the valley (this includes Austin, New York, Boston, and Seattle, but is not limited to), that has an equal, or close to equal, impact on your career in comparison to the Bay Area.

The only thing the valley has going for it is the saturation of talent and people who hire talent. The bad, is that without it it's got nothing to really show for itself (save a few niche items). The good, is the lack of any other notable qualities is overshadowed by the overcompensation of the only ones it has.

I never said SF was the only way to launch a career and tend to agree with you. Still, there is no denying the power of having a big name on your resume when looking for the next job.

Eh, I don't think it is required. Probably better to work on being likable so people think you're more than just a skillset in the interview.

I don’t know about you, but when I review resumes I look at what they’ve done, not what brand names I recognize. Frankly, when I see a name from the Valley such as Facebook, I assume it’s a script kiddie web developer who’s primary experience revolves around NodeJS.

It depends. The big X tech companies, and hot unicorns in the bay area pay crazy salaries for engineers.

3k a month doesn't seem too bad when you are making 200k+, which is close to ~triple what you'd make in some rando mid sized city.

Working for the average SF startup though? Yeah, you'd be better off somewhere else.

And yet, the housing market still makes buying prohibitive in that same region.

Are that many SF tech workers making over 200 grand a year?

The ones at the big tech companies and hot unicorns are.

The ones at your rando tech startup are not.

I hope so. If they aren’t then they would be better off finding work in some other part of the country.

Pretty sure that not too many. Some do, but again, most are capped at about 180k (that if with 7+ years of experience) For some stock options make a difference, but again, that is if you're lucky

Whenever I look at cost of living comparison it doesn't seem advantageous to me to be in SV unless you get lucky on equity ( how do you even measure that? ).

$150k in Dallas is something like $265k in San Francisco. And I would think in SF your housing would be pitiful compared to the midwest at $3k/month mortgage.

Engineers at my company can make upwards of $300k in Dallas and that gives a standard of living thats comparable to making $1m in the valley which is probably pretty rare.

What sort of company pays engineers $300k in Dallas?

Oil and gas, and finance, to name two I’m familiar with.

What company in Dallas pays over $300k for engineers?

Not to make you question it further, but after living in the Bay for a long time, I can't wait to leave. I seriously don't think it's a place worth living.

No, it isn't.

Join an org doing something cool, then immediately start pushing to work remote. Or make sure that you'll see a good payout and cash out & gtfo.

Save as much as possible, and get out. Getting paid a lot means you will save a lot regardless.

Accumulating 100k in student loans isn't the right move, let alone the American Dream.

The "American Dream" isn't follow an exploitive option just because it's possible.

It is if your future job pays well enough and you can do the basic Math to figure that out.

Nobody here ever seems to bring it up, but in addition to all of the objections raised, I’d add the potential for a truly devastating earthquake.

I spent a couple weeks in the bay area recently, touring around, seeing what it's all about. I left feeling quite underwhelmed and pretty happy I don't live there.

Eh, compare relative costs/relative income and cultural factors. Most of the people I know here in the south bay, if they rent, get some place reasonably nice all to themselves for around that kind of money, and the south bay is better for tech jobs, and at least for me, a much better 'culture fit' - That's the thing; I feel at home here in ways I've never felt at home anywhere else, and I'll pay extra for that.

Things are expensive, but wages are also really high, (I don't know a lot of people in the computer industry for whom $2400 in rent would cause pain.) and I have a great deal of freedom because there are so many nearby employers. there's got to be at least 50 places that might hire me as a programmer or sysadmin within reasonable walking distance. I have to go further than that to get a decent burger! (which is my big complaint about this place; so little nightlife, so little food. But most of the employers feed you, and for weekends there are good delivery services, so it's not that bad.)

San Francisco (and California, to a lessor extent) is setup to charge newcomers way more than long time residents. The density of employers in the bay area means that you can find your place... and just stay there, through many job changes.

Those are some extremely skewed numbers. I live in a $1.7k one bedroom. Rent is like 10% of my pay and I'm just 2 years out of college. No student debt because my family is poor. San Francisco is an amazing place for technies if you're not bad with money

You're saying you make ~200k/year 2 years out of college? That is not normal.

Don't believe it! maybe salary + stock options + benifits - that's a possibility (even though a pretty rare one). But 200k cash, BS, no employer would pay that to someone with 2 years of experience... One exception is if that guy possesses some unique skills of some hype industry (blockchain, AI, VR), but that really a very unique situation. Most of people here make around $130k/year + some stock options/rsu's

No, it's $210k cash. Additional RSUs and bonuses up to $70+ depending on company and individual performance.

No hype. I work harder than anyone else and complete projects at least twice as fast. I constantly push for promotion and raises and hop jobs to get the raise.

You definitely hustling :) Can you share what kind of tech work you do? And how often you hop jobs?

Just because you found a good situation doesn’t mean that is typical.

Is this in San Fransisco proper or the outskirts? I've been looking around as I may potentially be moving and can't find anything reasonable under 2.3k that isn't roomsharing

20 mins fron downtown

I love this. I may start looking for jobs in the bay area if it has a decent jr-mid RoRails job market

this is absolutely fascinating. why cant these people just commute from pleasant hill or even lafayette? i had the same accommodations as these people and paid only 400 in pleasant hill.

Or Sacramento, as my dad and stepmom did when I was growing up, and as many of my friends and family continue to do.

Yeah, the length of the commute sucks, but taking AmTrak+BART gives you some downtime instead of sitting in traffic.

So...living like a student well into adulthood.

Doesn't sound very appealing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com