300 people applied to rent $700/month sleeping pods in downtown San Francisco
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
They actually have these type of “pods” at regular hostels in SF. I stayed in one for a couple of weeks once when I was new to the city. The noise, especially people coming in late, the germs (I got sick during my stay), and the lack of privacy is pretty bad. I can’t imagine living in one long term and I’m lucky I don’t have to, but if it’s your only choice (or you’re supremely cheap) then I guess it’s better than the streets.
Now if you double the price, exclude all the poor people, and call it a “cool invite-only hacker house”, that’s an entirely different thing!
There will always be some level of stratification of wealth, but a society that is unable to provide individual housing for people is in a sad, sad state.
The idea that every single adult needs a single-family zoned space for themselves is something of a historic anomaly. The only reason these aren't more common or affordable is because housing like this got zoned to death.
Mind you, it beats lack of housing altogether as well as some other historic options (like say barracks). But I don't think we should consider this normal or desired when it's economically feasible to give everyone proper living space - which it is.
I get that not everyone would want to live this way their whole lives, but part of the issue with the US housing market is that there are no entry-level housing options. This makes housing not just expensive for young people or poor, but drives housing prices up across the entire inventory.
Most quality of life improvements, especially in urban areas, have been driven by efficiencies and economies of scale.
I only really see it justified for single young people, but even then $700 for this is insulting (even for a place like SF) unless I'm missing something. Why not just rent a communal house at that point?
I understand asking $700 for this feels icky, but the only reason they can do it is because of the insane scarcity of housing in SF. If we want this to not be a competitive option, the way forward is just to build more housing - like these people are doing.
Guess we should give up on smartphones, air conditioning, personal computers, more than one pair of shoes, more than one TV, among many new historic anomalies.
In England, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has established the Nationally Described Space Standard [1], which specifies that a one-bedroom, one-person flat should have a minimum gross internal floor area of 37 square meters if it includes a shower room, or 39 square meters if it has a bathroom.
I guess anything significantly below that can be called outright poverty.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/technical-housing...
You wouldn't passively benefit.
You'd pay premium to stay in a pod in a hotel and get the benefits.
“The area of apartments (excluding the areas of balconies, loggias, terraces, cold storage rooms and apartment vestibules) should be at least 28 square meters for one-room apartments, including apartments in which the living room is not separated from the kitchen by intra-apartment partitions, and at least 44 square meters for two-room apartments,” provides the document published on the ConsultantPlus portal.
The decree came into force on August 1.
The fact that Moscow decided to abandon the construction of studios and apartments with an area of less than 28 square meters became known in May, when Moskomexpertiza sent out an information letter indicating that it would issue negative opinions on construction projects involving the construction of apartments with an area of less than 28 square meters
I wonder why they did this. I thought things were cheap over there and they had a huge amount of land?
Maybe its because tiny apartments are often marketed as “affordable,” but the phenomenon can contribute to gentrification? Apparently when developers prioritize small units to maximize profit per square meter, housing becomes less accessible to larger families or lower-income residents, changing the socio-economic profile of neighborhoods. Larger apartments could potentially promote more diverse occupancy types, attracting families and potentially keeping communities more balanced. Dunno.
But I can't imagine comfortably raising a family in such a situation.
It works when you're young and single, but I can't imagine building "homes" and claiming 28sqm is anymore than a barrak to survive in, not a place to raise a family. If you're not building barraks with this structure (which these capsule hotels really are) a minimum space requirement makes sense if you want to sell people "homes".
In Berlin we had 60m², which was a ridiculous amount of space. Enough to host multiple guests.
Now we live on a 9.3m long sailboat. Square meters are a bit difficult to calculate. Maybe 16m² for the interior space?
Would that help you adjust to your new pod?
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2101034/
(They also show a cool new kind of bed designed by a chimpanzee expert to mimic the daily tree beds chimps make every evening.)
America fails its lower-income citizens by pretending they don't (or shouldn't) exist when making zoning and building codes and such.
Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter but drive up costs, and then act surprised that only "luxury" housing gets built.
College students can happily and healthily live in dorms on campus, and yet we treat it as unthinkable that someone working at McDonalds lives in similar conditions. And so we don't build the infrastructure and the McDonalds worker ends up with a far worse outcome, but at least it's out of sight and out of mind that they're sleeping on a couch or staying in an overcrowded illegally-sublet apartment.
A college town is, really, only desirable to college students and the businesses that cater to them. Thus, the demand is very low, and almost nobody stays particularly long. The exceptions to this are colleges in or near very large towns, but even housing near the college tends to be much cheaper than housing in the city.
If McD's was a self-contained economy, it too would be surrounded by cheap housing.
I wish we could have conversations about things like this which are based in reality and not some fear of a macguffin enemy trying to "keep the poor from existing".
Historically, zoning laws were established to prevent cheaper forms of housing from being built in order to keep poor people out from a region. The existence of these laws is precisely because the lawmakers recognized that more dense forms of housing would be built and lived in by poorer residents unless it was made illegal.
It's hard to describe how little I care about why something was originally created, rather than how it plays out today.
It's also hard to describe how discouraging it is that social progressiveness is the only factor of any issue I see anyone have any knowledge on.
A. There is no more debate about it
B. Suppliers are motivated to catch up to where the supply chain needs to be at.
You may need a permit to build, but it’s not nearly as impossible as Reddit would have you think.
What are my odds of hitting at least 10 places where I'd get a permit?
There is no other explanation for what exclusive zoning is. By banning the only form of housing poor people can afford you are attempting to "keep the poor from existing". Sure, land prices follow supply and demand so land in expensive places is expensive. But it turns out that we can build many housing units on not much land and amortize the land cost so that even the poor can afford expensive areas, if only it were legal.
One to get you started: even the poor have a right to a home that isn’t infested with the fumes of manufacturing. You don’t need to be rich to see the benefit of not allowing slaughterhouses in the middle of section 8 housing, surely?
And no. I do not believe it is moral to ban certain types of housing, other than unsafe. If you want to build safe housing on your land and your neighbors stop you they are saying poor people are not allowed to exist in their neighborhood.
> Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter
Many of these mandates exist because retrofitting is impossible. Got three new tenants with cars? Get the backhoe; it's time to build the underground car park. Can't get to the crapper because the doors and bathroom are too small for your wheelchair, and you won't take a dump in diapers? No apartment for you! Low income, have kids and need 3 bedrooms? No room in the boarding house. Go somewhere else.
Universal design is not expensive and makes living spaces more inclusive.
The availability of boarding houses makes this far more possible. If single able bachelors without cars are living in massive accessible apartments with parking spots, that makes them unavailable for those who really need the accomodations.
> Universal Design is a concept that proposes the creation of spaces with democratic use, guaranteeing egalitarian conditions in terms of quality of service. The main goal of Universal Design is to allow everyone to use them to the fullest extent possible without the need for adaptations. Considered a concept that applies to architecture and other areas such as product design, Universal Design serves people considering their characteristics, age and individual abilities.
Notably, the design website that you linked doesn't mention anything about making housing cheaper or more affordable.
I think that the cost floor for housing (labor, land, materials) is high enough that "affordable housing" cannot be made without state funding. Helsinki is a good starting point.
I understand the exclusion problem. As you said, inclusive space excludes those who can not afford the space (ghetto by income). Non-inclusive space excludes by physical ability (ghetto by the degree of handicap).
Now imagine a forward thinking municipality that subsidizes development of such pods, both construction and renting. Alongside dense walkable areas. It'd be great for business. And I'd wanna live there!
That's basically what is intended. Since people live in a pod, they'll eat out more often so that's more money extracted from them. Gotta keep the economy going, right?
Imagine paying $700 and not having personal toilet, kitchen, bathroom, a place to keep your things or even a place to comfortably sleep/sit. This is pure exploitation unless it's an exotic tourist attraction.
Practically nobody can afford to do this. Everywhere is about nickel and diming people to be present there. Society has a very terribly serious rent-seeking problem.
Expected value for most people's interactions economically is negative, meaning they pay more out than they receive for their other inputs. How else does the casin... err social entitlement ponzis, do-no-work bureaucracies and administrations, etc, survive? Somebody pays the house.
What is needed is very high corporate taxes, and high taxes on any rent-based (interest, service fees [Netflix, Spotify, your ISP], etc) income after deductions but before dividends or buybacks. We must realign our society back to production if we want to return to material wealth and not end up navel-gazing in poverty like S. Asia.* We can do each others haircuts and oil changes until we're out of clippers and oil, but if not enough clippers and oil are being produced then we're all going to be materially poorer as GNP rises.
(* Spidey's conspiracy-sense: I wonder if some of the push for mindfulness and other S. Asian esoterism lately isn't an attempt at a civilizational software patch on the West, using memetic components evolved to deal with abject poverty in the S. Asian continent over centuries, in preparation for an upcoming sundowning of western economic hegemony. Statecraft has as one of its requisites maintaining order and decorum of the citizen-human livestock.)
Spend a few days in the city, but have a larger more affordable house elsewhere away from the madness.
also, this could be a way people "return to office" possibly until a job with sane policies comes around.
(of course the curtain bit is unsettling and not sane)
> the facility has had 300 people apply for its remaining 17 rental beds
If I recall, the 1950's record for stuffing people into a phone booth is about 22.
You can rent an apartment for that in lower cost of living areas. Like, 500-700 square feet. And won't have the risk of city zoning being upset about it lurking over your head, which seems to be the case here.
> The approval was rescinded over a misrepresentation of how many of the beds in the facility were deed-restricted affordable housing, Sider said.
> “The building remains in violation of the planning and building codes, and while we continue to work with the proprietor to move his applications forward, we expect him to honor his agreement not to have new tenants move in until the issue is resolved, which should happen very soon,” Sider said.
You mean elsewhere in SF, or elsewhere in the planet?
In a *city* of population > X?
Even in Ames, Iowa (home of Iowa State University, 65k people per the 2020 census and I'm not sure how many of ISU's 30k students that counts), I'm finding a range of apartments in the $700-$800 range that are 500+ sq ft. On Zillow, so hardly the best pricing one is likely to be able to arrange.
Now, it's not San Francisco, but the point is that even in a not-tiny-town, an apartment (or even some smaller standalone homes!) for the cost of a twin mattress sized sleeping pod is totally doable.
I looked here to find other places I'm familiar with: https://gist.github.com/Miserlou/11500b2345d3fe850c92 and found that Ames is somewhere near Cupertino haha.
I wonder how it compares to other places in the USA in terms of affordability and what the other dimensions of price are in the same price range. (For example Cheyenne WY also similar in population.)
Ames, IA I would say qualifies as n tier in the sense that it seems like it's a suburb of Des Moines? And Des Moines is probably a fourth tier city?
It's not really a "suburb of Des Moines" - though eventually, as they grow, it may be considered that. It's 30 miles north of Des Moines, through an awful lot of rural Iowa. I'd consider a "suburb" to be "generally built up when traveling between A and B," though there's some flexibility in that definition. But Ames is its own place from Des Moines.
Editing to add: If you vote in SF and this bothers you, vote against every incumbent who caused this.
Is San Francisco still failing to approve housing in a timely manner, or did the Brownstone drag thier feet?
- full soundproofing - your own microclimate with always perfectly fresh air and precise control over temperature and humidity - huge screen like right above your head, so that you can stare at it while lying on your back
But in reality they always just look like bunk beds with some extra walls, that's it.
Disappointing.
Or, look at some favelas, or perhaps how poor in asia live
Holy crap, what a horrible horrible idea.
And you can't easily get rid of them due to eviction laws.
Accomodations like this are common for low cost travelling, the only difference is that these are for medium term stays.
It's literally bed with curtains stacked together, there is no "room" involved.
This type of thing can only work for short term stays, the jerk moves out after 2 weeks so it's a non issue. Or in tight nit communities( you figure out what's actually up with the jerk and help them out).
It's going to be a nightmare with strangers.
Marc Andreessen @pmarca
I will not live in the pod, I will not ride on the bus and pretend it’s an airplane, and I will not eat the bugs on the fake plane.