Bay Area Living in Shipping Containers

Downstairs, there are 2 bedrooms that could have easily held 2 twin beds each, and another small room that could have taken 1 twin bed.

As a single-family home it would have comfortably slept 7. It's probably 2-3x larger than my childhood home and would have fetched $750,000+ in the suburban Midwest.

Convert all those twins to bunk beds (as my landlord did) and you've got 10 people across the downstairs bedrooms. Replace the king-size bed with 2 bunk beds, you've got 4 beds in the space where 1 was. 14 people sleeping in the same amount of floor space that 7 previously occupied. Now take the vast empty floor space in the master bedroom and add 2 bunk beds, and you're at the 18 that I live with.

It doesn't feel crowded. It has the same drawbacks that any room-sharing situation has - you're never alone, you have to hear people breathe and snore and shift around in bed, there's no possibility of having sex (you can sexile one person - not 7), you have to smell people's smells. But it's no worse than living in a double in college, summer camp, etc. I had no chance of bringing a girl home anyway, the sounds are drowned out by the city/wind when you've got a window open, and everyone is polite and sensitive to the fact that we're sharing space.

A portion of that price also goes to Airbnb, which gives me trust/reputation, escrow, precisely the dates of stay I wanted, and no monthslong Craigslist game as is usually necessary to sublet in SF.

Again, no one is forcing them to live there. They can come live where I do and get a three-bedroom house for $750/month, but they apparently want to live there. He gives them that chance.

I don't think he's a 'scumbag' or profiting off of others misfortune. I was able to rent a place to crash for ~$150 less per day than a hotel would have cost and I had access to a full kitchen, washer/dryer, fast internet etc, which I wouldn't have had with a hotel.

If somebody gives people of misfortune a significantly cheaper option, which has its fair tradeoffs in delivered product, while still being profitable, I don't see much of a problem.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Pove...

The reality is that the real blight on nature is the single family homes which are built on forests and farmland.

San Francisco is already at an untenable population density. You can have a livable city by going light or going dense, but being in the middle is what kills you (which is where SF is right now).

The light scenario is your classic suburbia, where you drive across the street. Dense is New York City, with many amenities in walking distance and copious public transportation. The middle (San Francisco) doesn't have enough people to support good public transit (buses/trains stopping every 5 minutes or less) 24 hrs a day, but has so many people that the roads are gridlocked.

SF needs to thin out or get dense if it wants to survive. What force do you think will decimate the population by 50%?

Visit Hong Kong and see what population density really looks like.

Async chat tools, file sharing, conference calls, video chats, etc. are the lifeblood of communication at remote companies. Without those tools it's very hard to make remote working work.

People who say remote work doesn't work often times still rely on things like email...that's just not how it works. If you're communicating internally via email you're doing it wrong.

That's not to say tools define remote culture, but they certainly help reinforce it.