Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/13/expensive-underground-sleepi.html
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It looks like Albania is pretty open about registrations on its TLD; so this project has the priceless chance to snag the perfect domain name: eusoci.al
If you’re living in a shiny new underground flophouse and paying $1000-1375/month for the “privilege”, then yeah, it’s time to leave San Francisco. Maybe the goal here is to get people to move to the developers’ hometown Manhattan, KS, where you can probably rent a mansion for the same price.
Not antisoci.al?
This reminds me of a cyber punk novel (but then everything does these days) where the protagonist runs a porn hologram in his tiny bedroom, because it makes his living space look and feel larger. Now, if only I could remember which book that was? Classical Cyber Punk? Maybe Gibson or Stephenson?
And just like that Us makes more sense.
The rent was just too damn high…
I figured the goal was to get people to move underground, and prepare a somber statement of regret to be used after the unexpected quake, flooding, or mudslide occurs. Maybe I’m too cynical, but there’s a nearby town with a big swamp where they’ve built housing at least three times in the past 50 years. Each time the buildings sink, the houses are condemned/razed, and the people are forced to move all of the local officials express shock and dismay that it happened (again).
Is Elon Musk somehow involved? This sounds right up his survive-the-apocalypse alley.
Shh! He’s tunneling from there to New Zealand. His personal pod will be a lot more underground than everyone else’s
You want morlocks? Because this is how you get morlocks…
The Hamsterdam concept from the Wire seems to be the most realistic/effective way of dealing with homeless issues. They would still have autonomy, but able to easily access health services.
I kept hearing that San Francisco rents are insupportably high, but this kind of estimate really puts things into focus.
Isn’t this a potential evacuation hazard in the case of a fire or earthquake?
The rents go high, they dig low.
His plan is for everyone to sleep in their Teslas on the freeway.
So they are renting out pods at $1,000 a month and they expect to be able to control what people do in them?
Deny them their permits and condemn any property that they own in San Francisco. Shut them down and sue them until they are bankrupt. They don’t get to tell people what they can do in their own homes.
These below-grade sleeping pods meet the building codes, but there’s this perception from the Planning Department that it’s not something any human being should be exposed to or allowed to do.
That’s for the market to decide! /s
They’re disrupting housing. Don’t stand in the way of progress with regulations, you soshalist luddite.
Expensive underground “sleeping pods”?
Come the glorious day!
Oops, I’ve just triggered my Stone Roses’ memory circuit.