Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work

I think this failed because it was so contrived. Here is a more realistic and reproducible example of how my girlfriend is living variably in NYC. She currently has a lease in Brooklyn for about $900 / month but doesn't need to be there all the time. This weekend she will be house-sitting in NJ, next week she is visiting me in SF for a week, and in December she plans to stay with her parents for the holidays.

To continue to have occasional access to her apartment, not screw over her roommates, and make this lifestyle remotely possible, she listed her place on Airbnb.com. She so far has booked about $700 that will go towards October rent. When she needs to be in Brooklyn, she simply marks her dates as unavailable. Her place is still open for December, but has enough interest that she'll be fine.

Using Airbnb absolutely reduces the friction for these short term stays. If a listing is dishonest, we'll drop it like it's hot. If your host bails on you, we'll find you a new place to stay. SO, sam lessin - Despite having a new lease, don't give up on variable cost living! -Chris

The time cost of finding a new place every few days must be considerable. You've got no guarantee that demand at certain times wouldn't price you out or that there will be any inventory at all that suits your needs. There are costs associated with moving your stuff and there is an acclimation period while you get settled. I might see this as an experiment to "try" a number of neighborhoods before you settle on a place to live, but it sounds just awful as a long-term method of living (Good choice with the East Village by the way).

Reliability and predictability are two very important considerations when picking a place to live. Throughout time, people have paid a premium for it.

What you really need to make this work is a provider of living spaces with set prices and set contracts for set durations. Think extended-stay hotels crossed with a fast food joint. You can walk into any McDonalds in the US and know what will be on the menu, and for roughly what price. Likewise, you need a place that you can walk into with various room options and set prices/terms. I guess you could call them franchise apartment complexes.

Well obviously the closest thing to what I'm describing is a hotel. The problem with hotels is that they are too expensive, and (often) don't offer kitchens or offices.

I'm going to pick $1500 for a reasonable Big City rent amount, which works out to $50 a night. Throw in furniture rental and a maid, and it's probably more like $70 a night. So really, if you could rent a studio apartment as if it were a hotel room for $70 a night, you'd be breaking even but gaining all that flexibility.

Of course, in most places rent is much cheaper, so in Kansas City, for instance, the place would need to be more like $30 a night to make sense.

I wonder if it's economically possible to offer various apartment size places on a per-night basis at those prices. Does the hotel industry just rampantly overcharge, or is this an economic pipe dream?

If you did away with daily maid service (only have maids clean between guests), and things like complimentary laundry service, maybe it would be feasible. Thoughts?

Of course, there are other issues, like carting around your wardrobe. Maybe we can have franchise closet/changing rooms too. It'd be like a PO Box for your clothes.

The thing that will ultimately make something like this impractical is the emotional attachment to the places that we live. It's likely the same reason that you wouldn't want to live in hotels year round... at least not for your whole life (if you're a contractor you might have some experience with this). People, unlike data, like to decorate, have things set up a certain way, and have a place they call home.

While it's interesting to imagine a world where people only used what they needed when they needed it, we can see some of that today. That's why people will rent a pickup truck for a day while they're moving, or pay to go to a public pool. They don't need to own a pool or a truck year-round, just for a bit of time, which is a little like utilizing server resources.

The part about living in a nice hotel for a day, however, was a good example of something we don't see very often. I guess we really don't have a real-world version of excessive "server load spikes" where you want to live somewhere REALLY nice for a day or two, but analogies can only go so far

If you're extending the parallel to cloud storage, sure, you can spin up and spin down as required - but you (generally) stay within the same provider to do so. So you know what your costs are going to be, you know what's available, you trust it to be there when needed, and so on.

When it comes to living, everyone's their own provider. As the OP found out, people have stupid bills; people change their schedules; people can be fundamentally dishonest toward strangers; people aren't a consistent platform. It's peer-to-peer, so it's like - instead of using Amazon to run your website, and spinning up instances, you're relying on Joe Bloggs's spare server space in Watford. What if Joe Bloggs changes his mind?

Would a solution look like a compromise between the standardisation of hotel chains and the flexibility of crowdsourced space? Perhaps. You'd need a trusted third party who could guarantee stuff. Guarantee that the living space is fairly represented and scale costs depending on facilities and features (location being a feature) - just as you pay more for 2 CPUs in the cloud, you pay more for 2 bedrooms on the earth. Guarantee that the overhead costs are totally consistent, broadband, cleaning, etc. Guarantee that if someone changes their mind you still have somewhere to stay the night. And, you know, that's starting to look an awful lot like an aparthotel chain.

I guess the difference is you could have one mega 'cloud' landlord who, instead of building custom aparthotel buildings, leases apartments from private landlords. The cloud-landlord sorts out checkin and checkout cleaning, services, etc; it's kinda a distributed aparthotel. Hell, it's starting to look a lot like the way some universities do accommodation now. Is it a step beyond Airbnb's self-managed approach? Yes. Would it allow variable cost living? Yes. Would it work as a business? Nobody's done it yet, so who knows. I'd guess not, though. Costs and overheads and stuff.

Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.

Er, should that be "friction"?

Also, the right-click functionality on that site is infuriating.

I'd like to see some innovation by architects, for stuffless living. Since almost all of my personal things fit into a computer in the future, living space could be a lot more generic.

(not because of the author's experience, but rather a pitfall I can see occurring)

If you do need to do this, the YMCA has a number of locations with not-terrible prices. I ended up staying with friends, thankfully.