Cannot possibly have the permits to make it legal. I know, I know, disrupting the paradigm blah blah blah.
Ad already craigsdelisted.
There’s something unnecessarily institutional about free-standing bunkbeds.
Why not screw light plywood, or “masonite,” on one side, so that there’s a partition?
For people moving there with uncertain income prospects theres probably a huge amount of value in the fact there is no requirement for a long term commitment.
Every now and then one of my old college buddies razzes me for still living in the “small” (quarter of a million people) town where I got my degree instead of moving to the west coast where the good jobs are.
I remind them that I’m paying $400 plus utilities for a thousand square feet with high ceilings and central air, right next to downtown. It usually does the trick.
I worked for a US startup for three weeks and in my experience those people never sleep.
Based entirely on this article, a quick and dirty calculation suggests that working 40 hours a week at minumum wage, it is impossible to afford basic rent in San Fran, much less food, clothing, transportation, healthcare, or anything else. At 60 hours a week my numbers suggest you can pay your rent, eat ramen, and buy clothes just often enough to replace your old ones as they fall apart.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? I already knew New York was a black hole of untenable housing for millions trying to scrape by on dead end jobs.
It’d be interesting to see if this complete ripoff is anything close to code-compliant.
I thought the Japanese solved this already?
This is nicer than some any of the SF hostels I stayed in when I was homeless, and those worked out to around $750/month about eight years ago. (More than I’m paying now!) Actually, now that I think back, I always sprang for a private room, but they had dorm rooms with multiple bunkbeds too for not all that much cheaper. I don’t remember the shared room rate but I recall thinking the extra $x/night was totally worth it.
This is obviously not meant to be housing per se, more like an extremely cheap hotel.
I pay less for a 1,000 sq ft house, including utilities and within a month I’ll have Google fiber to boot, which will drop my utilities bill even more. I could probably work from KC faster to a SF company than they can in the city.
A far better solution, but I would sleep in cheaper places.
i have a house with a pretty impressive basement for $210 a month plus utilities.
i also have the interwebs for ~$30 a month. i have a fancy camera as well, which sends “images” of my “art” to said interwebs.
hooray, wisconsin. hooray, art.
While I have chosen to stay in a town like this (though I grew up in 5-million-people urban area), it’s not only a matter a rent/mortage, but what you want to do. I like it at home. I’m reasonably close to my job (15 minutes bike ride), where I shop (200 m to where I get at last 95% of the food I prepare and consume), reasonably fast Internet and so on. Most of the other stuff I buy comes from Amazon and others and, more importantly, I derive little entertainment from shopping.
But services are not as easy to come by. Not very many theaters or museums, clubs and the like have, of course, a smaller selection and thus a smaller variety, because only the big middle part of mainstream is economically viable.
Again, stuff I very seldom need and am content to consume only sparsely, when I travel and halt at a bigger city, but that’s me.
You’re correct that it’s virtually impossible to live in in the city on minimum wage, but it’s also worth noting that at least the minimum wage in San Francisco is $10.74/hour instead of the Federal minimum of $7.24/hour.
Most of the people I know in SF share their apartments with multiple roommates in a web of sublets and substitutions and the landlord looking the other way as long as the rent gets paid. Lots of little apartments and subdivided houses and even if you did have a car there would be no place to park it. But to some people SF is like a big unending party and that’s where they want to be.
Here’s a question- asked in good faith, with no criticism intended (seeing as how I’ve never been to the US, but would like to visit some day):
What kind of standards do people in SF and NYC actually expect?
Here in Norway, it’s the same as anywhere; the bigger the city, the higher the rent.
In Oslo, it’s as high as $2,6k for 250 sq feet.
Or, you can buy an apartment 50 sq feet bigger for about $250K.
One then has a bathroom and a micro kitchen.
How does this stack up against SF?
What really intrigues me, is the fact that people over the pond seem to be much more willing to share their living space than they do here.
Folks still retain their absolute need for privacy here- I’m just fascinated by the different levels of priorities in different countries.
Sorry for the rambling, I’m just thinking out loud. …with my fingers.
Is anybody fooled that this is a trmendous way to make a great deal of money by making it such a high density area. Then again the generation after this one is going to pay twice that for the fifth bunk in the stack. Oh and one more thing.
“THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH!”
Gorgonaut, I just spent several months in Oslo, almost everything there is very much more expensive than even the most expensive US cities. I think condos in the very nicest neighborhoods of SF cost around the $250K/300=$833 per sq ft figure you quote, but they will be bigger so n practice more expensive. However, I don’t really believe you can find a flat in the Oslo equivalent of Russian Hill at such a low price per square foot.
