$700 a Month for a Bed-Sized “Pod” in Downtown SF? Techies Are Renting Them
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
Neither of those things are obvious. 700$/month is more than enough for an apartment with 1.5 bedrooms where I live. This seems nightmarish.
The biggest cost of living issue that software engineers face there is 1) not working for FAANG but competing for housing with people that do (double if you have kids; remember that both parents can have FAANG salaries, and they will spend them both to get their kids into a good school) and 2) trying to save 20% for a down payment on a house while also paying rent. #1 is kind of a San Francisco thing; everyone wants to live in downtown Mountain View so they can bike 5 minutes to work, and Google pays better than the other companies nearby, so... if you don't work there you probably won't live there. Apartments in Mountain View are more expensive than Manhattan. My take is that the Bay Area really suffers from existing to serve one major industry; everyone else has the same job as you, and gets paid the same for it. There's also some personal preference involved; "I won't do algorithm interviews", "I want a 4 day workweek", "I want to work remotely" are all going to reduce your earning potential. Whether the upsides are worth it is up to you to decide, but you will be bidding against people that work in person 5 days a week that mastered the software engineering interview. As for #2, it takes time. Save as much as you can and you'll get there soon enough.
We need to update the concept and bring it back in some fashion. If your life is online, you don't need that much space.
You don't need rows of bookshelves when you can download kindle books. Founders of online businesses are notorious for dressing down and often have no need to dress to impress.
I would like to see SROs updated. This is not that.
It works well in Tokyo. These are common housing for kids who might only have part time jobs at convenience stores.
By this logic, homeless encampments under freeway underpasses work well in the US. They are common for people who can't afford anything else so why fix what's not broken?
The moral instinct that opposes renting out beds like these, but has no reaction to people sleeping on the street (because no one gets paid) is fascinating!
It's known, at least by its opponents, as "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics".
This is a quirky neo-bohemian thing for techies now but I can see it becoming commonplace under a pay-as-you-go no contract rental system in the future. Although I also think homelessness is going to be normalized in the future as well so this sort of thing won't look nearly as bad as the alternatives for most people when the climate change apocalypse really hits.
If something like that happened it would start a movement.
Im in their discord and I think theyre onto something huge.
Theyre more targeted for remote though. I was thinking more along the lines of somewhere in the suburbs for people who need to go into the office.
You could have 5000 square foot property and rent 10 van spaces at 1000 a month each. OR have a duplex at 3000 a month each for 6000 total.
Plus for the landlord theres minimal maintenance.as vans are pretty off the grid.
You could credit screen and do background checks...etc.to help keep the riff raff out.
If the zoning would allow it I think it could be a real solution to housing.
I don't know the legal set up is but it's close to what you describe.
I want a more upscale van life experience where it's working people and nice facilities.
“A man doesn’t need a home. All he needs is a shelter. If we can sell him on the idea of a shelter, we’ll make millions.”
[1] https://youtu.be/FASvJF21yXU?feature=shared&t=70 (contains nudity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8
Just the trailer - it's a 5 hour film and hard to find the specific scene on youtube
Can you give a more detailed description? Was just a run-of-the-mill Japanese capsule hotel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel)? Those were already common in 1991 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/glenhsparky/4820691940), and would have been certainly exotically sci-fi to an early-90s American audience.
> Just the trailer - it's a 5 hour film and hard to find the specific scene on youtube
Wow. some time ago that film connected with me for some reason (why, I have no recollection), so I have a VHS copy (because it was unavailable in any other format). That cut is much shorter.
The motivation here was admittedly to respond to one arthouse film drop with another.
I'm kind of old and while not in the film and TV business I've been tangential enough to work as an extra, tech runner, location support etc for various productions - notably in Berlin for Wings of Desire and in Australia (where I live) for some of the central Australian location work for Until the End of the World.
( Australian band in Wings of Desire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPf6SWcENWo
)
Aussies get about, a classmate of mine from the time had a bit part in a Nicole Kidman film and ended up giving black hole lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain along with being twice in the running for the Lucasian Chair.
That sort of things does wonders for your Erdős-Bacon number!
That salary puts you square in the top 3% of wage earners in the country. Finding another comparable job becomes stupid hard so you end up trapped.
Granted if you're an engineer from a top school or have MS/PhD you'll be OK but that's always my fear - getting a good job and then losing it and not being able to take another because of that horrible lifestyle inflation.
I’m doing what I can with what I have.
Sailors who were too drunk to make it back to their ships after a long evening at the tavern would to a room in the back of the tavern,
In that room would be two ropes stretched from wall to wall:
1. about waist height
2. just below armpit height.
The top rope was slightly offset, horizontally, from the bottom rope.
Apparently the idea was that you would walk up to the bottom rope, lean forward and drape your head and arms over the top rope. The top rope would sit under your armpits and would hold you up while you slept off the night of boozing.
That makes these "capsule" rooms seem not so bad.
When I was an intern at Goldman Sachs me and my roommate rented an apartment in the Tenderloin for $600 a month. I slept in the closet. We stayed at the office 24/7 and focused on work. My former roommate is now a GP at a major growth equity fund.
I opted out of finance and instead of getting a banker salary I lived in another closet for a bit and a shed with no shower or bathroom (I had to walk to the main house).
I lived off $700 a month and pieced together a seed round in 2009 and things slowly got better from there.
Now I have a public company and can say I’m one of the few founders to get my investors a unicorn exit.
I know I am the outlier of outliers and had more luck than anything else, but god damn don’t disdain others who are willing to sacrifice to give it a go.
50 years ago, in most places in the US, people shit into pits in the ground covered by a shed with a crescent carved into the door. They had lots of land, and they lived in drafty wooden shacks with, at best, a wood stove to keep them warm. 100 years ago in cities like new York most new immigrants lived in rickety stick buildings and took a shit in shared privies. The fact that it is considered the norm today for every individual to have their own toilet and closet full of clothes is a borderline miracle. A sanitary bed to sleep in, air conditioned, and a living area, that's not good enough for a single person because the bunk isn't queen sized and the living area is shared? I'm not convinced that this is some travesty.
This is a red herring. Nobody is showing disdain for people who are forced to sleep in capsules for a chance at winning the lottery. It's profiting off pushing lottery-players to the brink that is coming across as problematic.
And another reply to your comment is justifying it for minimum-wage workers, who clearly don't even get a ticket.
Amazing how much a person can be conditioned into accepting a terrible situation. And no, there are ways to fix this, there is just no will to do so, partly because of the people who see nothing wrong with it.
If the housing situation in a place got so bad that a person has to pay nearly 1/3 of their monthly income just to get a closet to sleep in, it is not a livable place. A slum has a big mix of people but would you really consider it a great "metropolis" where you can have a life and raise a family?
Again, this is 1/3 of minimum wage for as much space as a closet. It is basically priced as high as it could to best exploit the poorest among us. Maybe it is a different in value between me and those who grew up in SF but I consider it inhumane to treat someone who is working full time like this. If you don't think so, let me ask you this: would you let your family, your spouse and your children, to live like this? In a box? Or would you do all you could to get them something better? Not everyone can do better than minimum wage, but it doesn't mean they deserve to live like this. That is what I mean.
There are solutions to the housing problem that is not this band aid on a festering wound. But it seems this kind of situation is perfectly fine to SF people. To which I have nothing else to say but amazement at how can a city priding itself on economic abundance and human right progress can also be utterly indifferent to the suffering of its fellows and even justifying it.
Do you think it should be illegal to sell housing smaller than a certain minimum size? Do you think the price is too high? Do you think the location is awful?
A box is not a proper living condition. For a minimum wage worker, $700/month is basically at the limit of what they can afford for rent. And yet this is all they can get? And people are cheering for it?
Someone has a backpack full of belongings and that's all they need, many of these people don't even need a kitchen because they never cook. They're social, they want their days spent in shared spaces. How is this worse than a hostel?
I think the idea of "proper living condition" is as varied as the number of people you ask. I wouldn't live in one of these shared spaces, but I do live an equally unorthodox lifestyle and my housing situation would be considered inadequate by many, and I love it. I can understand why someone would want the minimum private space to sleep and a shared space bustling with activity and full of like minded people. As long as people have sanitation and aren't sharing diseases and bedbugs and what not I don't see a problem with any mode of living and sheltering, and that's what it really is all about, shelter.
Also living in a dorm is not the hardship you seem to think it is. It’s better accommodations than 90% of people in history have ever lived. Watch Les Miserables for a reality check.
Better to direct anger at the landed gentry who made this possible.
Make no mistake, I see this as a terrible living situation. Just because some war time refugees 100 years ago lived worse doesn't mean one of the richest cities in the world should have the same. It is a terrible and dishonest comparison.
I've done a fair bit of backpacking with maybe even more annoying sleeping arrangements and it's great fun at times.
And we don’t have to go 100 years, still probably better than 50% of people living in the world today.
This is eye opening to me how the housing situation is viewed by the SF upper class. I have always considered it a dystopian nightmare when the workers have to sleep in a coffin and work full time. It seems not many people in SF share my view.
As to what he deserves, I think he deserves to decide for himself without other people second-guessing it, and also to be able to change his mind and do something else if it gets old.
It seems like you're going off-topic, since the article isn't about minimum wage workers in general. But to address that, yes, rents are very high in San Francisco and it's no place to try to live solely on a minimum wage.
Why do you think minimum wage workers should not be allowed to live in SF? If everyone is writing code, who would make the food? Who would deliver the packages? Who would clean the workspace in your office? They don't deserve a place to live near you even though they are providing you with all kind of services? Genuinely asking here because I can't fathom what you were saying when you said SF is not for minimum wage workers.
And this is from the article to which I quote:
>I need quite a jump, really, in all honesty, in order to be able to afford the traditional apartment here.
So yes, it is not the typical housing in SF, because it is born out of the dysfunctional "typical" ones and many people have no choice but to take it. I criticize the system that let the situation get to this point and the people who are so apathetic and disconnected they saw no problem with this "atypical" condition even when they acknowledge that it is not typical.
What I’m doing here is refusing to speculate. Yes, other people go off-topic and speculate all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s useful.
It’s not particularly useful to speculate about other strangers who write comments on Hacker News, either. Are they apathetic or disconnected? Maybe, maybe not? I don’t know them.
Entrenched property owners and landlords have an incentive to not se see this fixed for a reason and it will be San Francisco's downfall.
Plus, if this guy's startup moons, he has an awesome "story" about how he slept in a coffin to chase that hustle.
It was inconvenient by conventional standards (had to vacate and rotate rooms every few days) but he enjoyed the lifestyle. In the winter time, he went up to Tahoe and became a ski instructor while still freelancing tech projects.
With all the extra money he sent home, he ended up buying a house there while in his 20s. I lost touch but heard through mutual friends he was doing well.
You can sniff at pod housing, but when you're young, footloose, and chasing a dream, it's a pretty good deal.
I think the reality of the number of homeless people, as well as the popularity of options like dorms or pods, especially in areas like California, demonstrates that the requirements for living space size that are intended to keep up people's living standards, are not working out.
I wish that truly micro-studios with balconies were popular thing in big cities. If I could have my own bathroom, small fridge, microwave, bunk bed with desk underneath, and just enough room to play a slightly restricted VR table tennis, along with a mini balcony. I would rather live in a city.
Literally like 12x16 feet could be adequate. It would be better than just a bunk for private space. And you could still have some nice shared facilities.
It’s important to understand there are two floors of working spaces and a private office that’s usually open. It’s not just the pod, and that’s just for sleeping.
This is the lowest-cost way for me to be in SF, and it’s been an insanely net positive trade so far. I was in central IL trying to build a startup before this.
And to be honest, it’s pretty cool waking up and knowing my friends will be downstairs, and I can talk to them about whatever I’m working on that day etc. I like it way more than I thought I would, it’s beyond “bearable.”
It’s not luxury living by any means but it’s not this awful thing that people are taking it as.
I had read that such transformation was costly in the past. Maybe the fact that rooms and water features are separate makes this feasible, where hotel room conversion would cost a fortune.
Lewis should be more concerned to find out if he/she/they had enough room at their place to accommodate two people comfortably.
Still not a bad idea to monitor just in case
And wow....it's like some sort of cyberpunk dystopian nightmare turned reality.
Both are, scientifically speaking, bugs.
How do you figure? What makes them not a bug? Generally the distinction I see is that people consider pretty much all arthopods bugs unless they're big and live in the sea and cognitive dissonance doesn't want them to think about that they like eating bugs. Sure, they're not /insects/ but neither are spiders or centipedes. Heck, I think most people consider "Pill Bugs" to be bugs, it's in the name. Those /are/ crustaceans. Don't know how they taste, though.
Contextually, we're downstream in a conversation caused by someone saying they will not eat bugs. If you had to guess, do you think someone yelling they won't eat bugs would eat fried crickets? Or popcorn pill bugs? Shrimp fried bees? Chocolate cockroach crunch cereal? None of those are hemipterans. I imagine those are all pretty well covered by the "I will not eat bugs!" statement.
Thank you for sending me down this crazy Wikipedia journey.
How long before tweakers and others start lighting fires in their pods?
When I came to the US to work in tech, I made sure that I'd never live in a worse situation than my supposedly 3rd World home country, but this is way, way worse than what I could have had working in tech back home.
I think something got lost in translation here. In SF online dating app culture, 5'10 is the minimum "not short" height. Note that it's specifically not considered "tall". Why 5'10? I don't know. How do I know this? Way too many overheard conversations with coworkers, housemates, and countless acquaintances of the above over the past eight years of living here as a tech worker. The result is lots of men rounding 2-3 inches up to reach 5'10. I hesitate to call it lying, because there's a reality distortion field that results from enough people doing it. Lots of people are convinced that they or their partners are actually a taller height. I can't find it at the moment, but I saw a post a while ago about how this becomes a real problem for things like ski rentals, where inches in height difference actually matter.
Then 5'10-5'11 guys who previously wouldn't have rounded up to 6' are forced into doing so, because the expectation is that a guy who puts 5'10 is shorter than he really is. Then the 6' guys have to put 6'2 for the same reason. At 6'2 it doesn't matter anymore, since it's officially tall. Yes, this is really dumb. But the point is that it's not about "boasting", which sounds silly.