Sounds interesting. I was actually just thinking about writing a post about why there aren’t more dormitory-style houses.
Living in a cage, is still not acceptable. This strikes me as lowest common denominator solution.
I loath that we might normalize this sort of arrangement. I’m sure the extroverts in the house are totally in love with the idea, but for me: no. Just, no.
A place to call your own isn’t too much to ask. It’s not aiming to high to have a spot that is yours- just yours. A door. A lock. Sanctuary.
Normalizing what, to my eye, is really just a throwback to the era of flophouses isn’t either innovative or ok.
Do we really want more of this?
I dunno if it’s the focal plane or what, but in that picture she looks four inches tall.
Hmm. The focal plane plus the unfinished wood. Looks like an unpainted dollhouse.
This article makes it look like the residents all live in baby cribs.
Not that there’s anything uh, wrong with that.
Was the defocus added (or accentuated) in Photoshop. Unless this was taken with a swing/tilt lens, the focal plane seems off… Dunno.
LA, where you can make $200k+ a year and still end up with a standard of living far lower than a southern trailer park home maintained on salary doing practically any job for any pay. Or… ya know, take a tech job for half the pay and live like a king in a large country home with far more disposable income.
If that’s what’s happening to anyone you know, they’re doing it wrong. My wife and I make around $120k, combined. We have two kids and three cars. We just bought this house in Altadena, 17 minutes away from Warner Bros in Burbank:
L.A. has gotten pretty expensive, it’s true, but if you’re making $200k a year, you can live well indeed if you don’t choose a stupid house in a stupid neighborhood.
Not a hotel, not a dorm, not quite a hostel, open by design and communitarian in spirit…a barracks?
If your interested in the topic, https://www.amazon.com/Living-Downtown-History-Residential-Hotels/dp/0520219546 provides an interesting history of “flophouses” like those in the bowery, and SROs as seen in “The Blues Brothers.”
[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:10, topic:80399, full:true”]
If that’s what’s happening to anyone you know, they’re doing it wrong. My wife and I make around $120k, combined. We have two kids and three cars. We just bought this house in Altadena, 17 minutes away from Warner Bros in Burbank[/quote]
Apparently they’re doing it quite wrong! I’m down here in neat little Huntsville, AL working in software. Every so often, I have a coworker leave for much higher paying jobs mostly to LA or SF. Many of them return within a few years after trying to squeeze into tiny little apartments and realizing it’s not worth it. The ones that stay latch on to the culture and just cope with the sacrifices. I haven’t known a single one to end up in an actual house yet. It looks like you’ve figured out the trick to it. Nice looking place!
To be fair though, none of my former coworkers have resorted to anything resembling pod living either, unless you count a roommate in an apartment.
When I travel I want a clean place to safely store my stuff, to sleep soundly, and to wash up. This set up does not look conducive to the sound sleeping part, not at all. That’s a deal killer for me.
I grew up in a 9 bedroom house with ONE FUCKING BATHROOM, this would never fly with me. I earned my rights to privacy and silence! Thank you and my rant is over, for now.
It’s not conducive to ones dating life either. Unless you only date exhibitionists.
The funny thing is that it looks exactly like the cheap hostels I stayed in when I backpacked around the UK in the late 90s. Usually around £10 a night if I remember correctly for use of a bunk, the washroom, a common kitchen area, and a place to lock up your stuff. And they were perfectly fine – for one night. Can’t imagine living in one full time, more or less.
Y’know, I have heard a surprising number of people make that claim, though: that even $250k per annum isn’t a livable wage in certain desirable parts of L.A. Definitely the cost of living has risen since I moved to L.A. in 1991. My modest studio apartment in an old but not quite shitty building behind the Chinese Theater in Hollywood cost $385 a month back then! A studio of comparable size in that neighborhood now goes for $1500-$1900 a month.
But now it’s gotten ridiculous. When we bought our previous house ten years ago, we had a sizable down payment, and were carrying a $400k mortgage, which came out to around $2200/mo at the time. Now we’ve “moved on up” to a larger house, but between 10 years of equity and better interest rates, we’ve kept our monthly payment the same, for a house with almost 2,400 square feet and buckets of charm.
Seems to me that someone making $200,000 a year might be able to manage a $4,000/mo mortgage payment (which is slightly under 25% of their monthly gross pay), and for that you could put 10% down on a $700,000 house, and at 4% your monthly payment (including taxes and insurance) would be right around $4k. And then, assuming you give up 30% of your gross pay in taxes and deductions, you’d have around $7,500 a month for food, utilities, clothes, toys, car payments, and whatnot. Doesn’t sound like undue hardship to me.
Of course, $700K gets you this in Burbank, but would get you this in Amarillo TX or maybe this in Mechanicsburg, PA or maybe this 638-square-foot hobbit hole just outside Palo Alto.
That said, we bought our 2,364 square foot house for $765,000. We would have had to pay more (or live in a smaller, dumpier joint) if we lived in Burbank. And god help the fools who want to live in, say, Silver Lake.
The equity in my old tiny crackerbox house (2 br, 1 ba, ~700 ft2) in Daly City, which I owned for five years and sold when I left in 2001, paid for my current place in the foothills east of San Diego. That exact same house in DC, exactly the same as it was when I sold it (and now with a falling-down garage) sold last winter for $815,000 after a bidding war. Crazy.
Hey, “foothills east of San Diego”? I grew up in El Cajon and Lakeside. How 'bout that!
