Launching an all female hacker house | Hacker News Reader

Launching an all female hacker house

enter-thegarden.com

20 pointstanishabassan24 comments

How does this circumvent CA fair housing laws?

> No landlord, and no agent, contractor, subcontractor or employee of the landlord shall do any of the following in bad faith: violate any law which prohibits discrimination based on actual or perceived race, gender, ...

[0] https://www.sfaa.org/Public/Magazine/10_2016/Fair_Housing_Fa...

I don’t know but if I were their target audience I might be put off by the Sorority atmosphere they seem to want to cultivate.

Maybe they are being genuine but I’d certainly do my due diligence qualifying them before diving in.

A quick search suggests that people looking for roommates (like this) can choose their roommates using any criteria they want even if it would otherwise violate the Fair Housing Act.

It's not clear to me (or comment parent, I'd guess) that this is applicable if they set up a nonprofit or LLC to manage the property, which they likely did.

Right, this seems much more like a landlady situation than a roommate search.

dont forget the age

> Young women with an entrepraneurial drive of ALL backgrounds between the ages of 18-25 are welcome to apply!

> RENT > $1,500 per month

I'm from a relatively poor European country but, uh, damn, is this a normal value?

From what I hear the Americans speaking about often, I believe it is even cheap in San Francisco.

hot damn.

National average is somewhere around a thousand dollars a month presently, that is very affordable for the area.

That's not unreasonable for a house with a few roommates in SF. A studio in the same neighborhood would be maybe $2k or a bit more, and a small, kinda-crappy 1-bedroom would start at $2.6k.

Depends on when we're talking about. If you asked 2 years ago, yes that was about normal. However, this last year, for downtown SF, it's expensive. You can find a private room downtown for about half that[0] if you sign a year lease.

For a short term stay, it's about on par w/ the price of an airbnb uptown.

[0] https://www.urbanests.com/

Congratulations on launching!

The "who can apply" - should be "entrepreneurial"

It's funny that this kind of overt sex discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable. I guess America is similar to my country where sex discrimination is banned except for flatmates, hiring domestic workers, safety, decency, private clubs, etc. In other words, it's quite acceptable.

Don't they know that women can have all the same bad traits they're apparently trying to avoid in men, such as abusing vulnerable people or not being able to make emotional connections? I'll bet there are some effeminate men who are more compatible with this group's ideals than some masculine women. It's like judging IQ by race. Kind of tells you something overall but there are so many exceptions that you still have to use some other measure anyway and it's unfair.

If they're concerned about sexual attraction, maybe they should allow gay men and exclude gay women?

It's only legal and socially acceptable in one direction. If there were a house for men only, in the current bizarre culture in the US, that would be considered misogynist, and Twitter would set about getting the founders fired from their jobs for even attempting it. However, an all female house is considered "progressive" and widely applauded.

The argument is that underrepresented groups (e.g. women in tech) should be allowed to discriminate because they are underrepresented. It's a very short-sighted argument, as the inevitable result is in an ever-increasing cycle of backlash and further discrimination on all sides. But Twitter mobs aren't known for their ability to think long-term.

Pretty sure the law is symmetric wrt sex/etc. Those human/civil rights laws were written at a time when disadvantaged groups were just gaining political clout and only bold enough to demand equality, not supremacy. Nowadays, it's different, and they're asking for more than equality but the laws are outdated.

Where on earth is it illegal to choose people you live with any way you like? How would that even work?

Housing discrimination law in the US, to my knowledge, apply only when you are not sharing living quarters.

The alternative seems unthinkable to me.

Your statement that "it's only legal and socially acceptable in one direction" is factually incorrect. There are hundreds of examples of male-only clubs in the US. Every Free Mason lodge, all Catholic seminaries, golf clubs, the list goes on.

For example,just a few weeks ago Pine Valley (the number one golf course in the US) just voted to allow female members for the first time in its 108 year history. They aren't legally obligated to allow female members, as a group they just finally decided to open the club to women. It took them 108 years. If that's allowed, I don't see why this women-only group shouldn't exist. Maybe in 108 years they'll decide to allow men.

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/pine-valley-women-members

Reminds me of a college dorm.

> Young women with an entrepraneurial (sic) drive of ALL backgrounds between the ages of 18-25 are welcome to apply!

[emphasis mine]

Do other "hacker house" arrangements typically ask for such a narrow age range (explicitly, even)? I'm a guy in my thirties, so clearly not the intended audience, but this sounds to me like: "If you ever tried going to grad school, we're not interested in you," which I find mildly distasteful.

Am I way off base here?

Yeah that does seem very narrow. If you want to focus on women that’s great but that narrow age band is kind of weird. Why wouldn’t they want age and experience diversity? That seems odd.

My hot take is that given the site says this a 14 room house w/ a one person per room arrangement, they are assuming they'll get more applications than they have slots available.

Which would be a reasonable assumption were it not for the mass exodus of their target demographic from downtown SF last year due to covid.

So if age is the only limiting factor for you, I'd say go ahead and give it a shot.

Though, with that said, there's plenty of other dorms/options around town that are probably just as fine if your plan is to be heads down working on your computer anyways.

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