The Affluent Homeless: A Sleeping Pod, a Hired Desk and a Handful of Clothes

They do, that’s why they are behind all these PR/fluff pieces like this one that promotes the “affluent homeless” life style.

You to can live the homeless dream and own two pairs of clothes...working when you want and where you want. Best part is you won’t get any benefits, like health insurance.

It used to be any riff-raff could achieve the homeless lifestyle without even a job, but big tech is classing up the streets. Now everyone thank big tech making homelessness great again...just don’t shit on the sidewalks.

This is what's toxic, the idea that people who don't have the capital to buy an enormous asset must not care about where they live.

>Owning a house or an apartment might seem unnecessary in our modern society, until the next rent increase or some disturbance in your financial situation (assuming you're not sitting on a huge mortgage).

There's a large number of people (myself included) who are affluent but not affluent enough to own property without sacrificing standard of living. In a "steady state", you would expect the cost of renting and owning to be comparable, but in a bubble context owning is incredibly more expensive for the same unit because future rent increases are already priced in to the asset. That is the case for all of the top cities in the country.

Indeed, from my understanding many young people want to own property but have doubts they will ever be able to

> And why does nobody talk about how we have to pay every fucking minute, regardless what we do, in the share economy?

This is just an economic fact of life for everybody under capitalism, no matter how you slice it. If you invest capital to own something instead of renting it, you're constantly paying on the opportunity costs of another investments' dividends. This is in addition to the cost of maintenance and real estate taxes (for property), or the cost of maintenance, depreciation of asset, and cost of insurance (for cars), etc

> Who cares about the gearbox of a rented car? Just have a look at the interior of your average subway train. When the street I live in gets to dirty, why not simply move away?

I agree but these are collective costs, not individual costs (unlike the other points you made). Capitalism rarely factors in collective costs unless it gets to a certain breaking point for congress to act, like rivers catching on fire.

> While I love to be able to rent things that I cannot or don't want to own, I have the impression that this "share everything" paradigm is actually just a toxic mixture of permanent monetarization and centralised control.

"permanent monetarization" - that's just capitalism 101. Labor exists in a state of permanent monetarization because they don't have capital. If you have capital, see my above comment for evaluating whether you buy or rent+invest with said capital.

I don't agree with "centralised" - the long-term rental market is decentralized but should fall into the same bucket. There's no real reason you couldn't have a decentralized uber or airbnb, except that these services rely on technology for convenience, and there's all manner of problems with decentralized internet technology that makes it unlikely to succeed (I'd bet 10 bucks theres been an ICO for an uber-on-the-blockchain startup already).

And you don’t have to fix it or maintain it.

But how about it enables you to travel whereever you want whenever you want?

And you’re spending money on car notes, car insurance, and in major cities, parking, not to mention maintenance and repairs.

Owning a house or an apartment might seem unnecessary in our modern society, until the next rent increase or some disturbance in your financial situation

Most people have a mortgage who do have house. But if you have a financial situation, it’s much easier to relocate to find another job when you rent than when you own.

While I love to be able to rent things that I cannot or don't want to own, I have the impression that this "share everything" paradigm is actually just a toxic mixture of permanent monetarization and centralised control.

And owning everything is more to stuff to maintain and makes it harder to downsize when needed.

"And then maybe four days later, a week later, if I'm still hanging around as a reporter, that's when I hear about the foreclosure or the 401(k) that got wiped out, those other details. So people are eager to tell you that they chose this, but their options have narrowed quite a bit in recent years. So, you know, on the one hand, there is the I'm out there and I'm having an adventure. And on the other hand, this is sometimes the result of few options."

In the end, people are involved in complicated choices in their complicated lives. Still, it seems that most people would rather not be RV-ing their way through life, but make the best of it and put on a smile despite their situations.

A similar effect may be occurring with the OP.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553532591/nomadland-tracks-ri...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nomadland-Surviving-America-Twenty-Fi...

Maybe a first step is to legalize higher density constructions in general - allow using a larger percentage of the same lot, subdivided into more units, all by right without the need to obtain exceptions from your local zoning board and without the chance for your neighbors to veto the development.

If it were dirt simple to replace a single family home on a large lot with multiple homes on subdivisions of the lot, by right, for literally every single neighborhood in the state, we would avoid this cat and mouse game where everyone wants higher density until it comes to their neighborhood, because in their neighborhood the {traffic, schools, transit, lack of transit, sewer infrastructure, environmental concern, blocking sunlight, blocking view, etc} situation is too precarious to take the risk, so we need everyone to move somewhere else

Even if we want the government to take heavy action to spur more construction, part of the reason every developer builds luxury housing is because it's so damn expensive and risky just to get through the stuff that comes before construction even begins (and consequently, lots sit idle for years at a time going through approval). That idle capital needs a return, so the only viable construction is luxury. We can address this issue now, and so if we inject taxpayer dollars to address housing later they will be more efficiently used anyways

Luxury housing is built because it’s more profitable. But as new luxury is built, older luxury just becomes middle income.

Hell, in DC the luxury places are often smaller than older middle income apartments.

Also in some cities, middle income people cannot afford housing period.

Light sleeper here.

Apartments are a nonstarter for a lot of people, due to poor soundproofing.

Unless and until soundproofing gets better -- and I mean a LOT better -- apartments will never be practical for a nontrivial percentage of the population, as much as we might otherwise prefer them.

There is a difference between you, who has taken a conscious decision _not to own_, and has the means to drive around Africa, and someone who has no choice but to do that in order to support a precarious existence as a social media content producer in Hollywood.

I actually think what the author is doing is important. It is about reframing homelessness as something not for just destitute or lost people, but a way of life that can result in happiness. I think you are homeless as well, and I’m glad you are. What word would we use instead to describe someone without a home?

I do suppose at the end of the day you probably feel similarly to me, that a home is more than a McMansion or an apartment - maybe wherever you happen to be in Africa is your home? I’m not sure how to rectify the idea of a physical home with the abstract idea of home, definitely worth reflecting on.

It's totally valid to choose an alternate lifestyle, if that's what you want. It's great that there are more opportunities for people to do that, while retaining flexibility and access to different services.

But it's important to also be aware of the factors that might be forcing people into accepting alternate lifestyles when they don't want to. It's not about "choos[ing] not to own a 4,000 sq. ft. McMansion", but about being unable to own or even rent a modest living space, even if you'd rather not be sleeping in your vehicle or a "pod".

A movement towards corporate rentiership is something that we should absolutely critically examine the wider effects of. There is a cost associated with renting of property or services – and that's fine, if you're willing to pay the cost in exchange for increased flexibility. But it does seem like there's an issue where things like property ownership end up completely out of reach of otherwise affluent people, because capital is so concentrated in the hands of a rentier class.

Maybe you don't like the word "homeless", but I can't help but feel you're creating the stigma for yourself.

Podshare lists rates of $1,000/month in LA (not SF). I don't know what local rents are there, but my guess is that Podshare is below the rates of studio apartments, but at or around the rates of renting one bedroom in a house.