Half an illegal sub-let for $2k? That’s friggin’ expensive. A bunk-bed for $1K is also very expensive by my standards. Last time I let an apartment (I left it two weeks ago :-)) I paid $1K for an 82 M² terraced house. But well, yes: It isn’t San Francisco. I imagine SF must be a very expensive city to live in.
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Let’s compare this to my Berlin, a city of four million in the heart of Europe.
My 72 square metre (775 square feet) penthouse on the 8th floor looks directly onto the Reichstag, is five minutes walk to the centre of new Berlin, has triple-glazed windows in two directions, wooden flooring.
It’s very quiet.
US$850 monthly (€650)
Heating included.
And people wonder why Berlin’s startup scene is exploding.
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Wow, that’s cheap! Remind me to go live in Berlin when I get the time. I was there in September and found it to be a wonderful city.
Is this guy the landlord?
Your roommates like to drink and then sleep in
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Also, if you trying to stabilize a shelf unit or similar free standing framework, attaching a sheet of plywood provides greatly improved stability without the effort of cutting and fitting braces or trusses.
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Reminds me more of China. Across the street from me in central Beijing was such a dormitory, full of young women of about 20. Amazing how well-groomed they looked as they set out down the dirt road to work each day.
That’s a beautiful replica of a 1980s era Huber Law dormitory.
The rates sound reasonably comparable (though it depends on which neighborhood in SF you’re in), but until quite recently, very few people were building micro-studios. As such, you tend to have numerous people sharing a medium to large apartment instead of tiny apartments.
That’s an increase of roughly 50%, and would help substantially. Not enough to live off of even then, but still.
odd that that is the case and nothing much done about housing costs. how many people want to live in S.F. perhaps?
Again, this is for visitors. An equally accurate yet less-inflammatory headline might read “Live in a single room with no kitchen within walking distance of Norman Mineta Airport for a mere $2650/mo.”
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Don’t tell everyone, or rents’ll be up even more than they are already these past years!
Yeah but you have to live in Kansas City.
I remember staying in the cheapest youth hostel in Manhattan 20 years ago for $40/day, which works out to more than the monthly cost of this place. The funny thing was several of my bunkmates unsuccessfully tried to convince the management to allow them to install private phone lines while they were looking for jobs. Somehow I suspect that wifi is included in this deal.
It still amazes me how many of these tech firms rely on people living in clusters near the workplace. I wouldn’t know the details, but I’m told that there’s this new technology that allows one to bypass the physical commute entirely. So, theoretically, the microserfs jammed into this overcrowded prison model could be doing their jobs from Kentucky.
Back in the 1980’s, I used to rent out a closet with a window for $80.00 a month to a local poet. That made sense though: You have to be here for poetry.
I lived in SF for a couple of months back in 2006. I was able to get a room to myself for only $600. There’s definitely some value in a “live-in startup environment” if that’s what you’re looking for. But it still seems a little pricey.
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Bunk beds as homes are bad but it’s even worse in Tokyo where traveling salesmen sleep in drawers. While there may be over population in some metro areas and too little shelter, there is also wasted land — vacant lots and under-used lots — and abandoned or near-empty buildings.
Why do owners do that? Many are speculating, waiting to get an even higher offer. But there is a way to prod them to put their land to best use. It’s a method Pittsburgh used when it had the most affordable housing of any major US city (and the by-far lowest crime rate) and even closed its homeless shelter not from lack of funds but from lack of guests, housing was so affordable.
What Pittsburgh did and any city, state, or nation could do is shift their property tax off buildings, onto land. To afford it, owners get busy developing. That increases the housing stock and decreases the housing costs.
That was in the old Steel City, in the Rust Belt, but in the Sun Belt this property tax shift could work even better, precisely because location values are higher. The local government would recover those socially-generated values and distribute the lion’s share to residents. As site values climbed, one’s share of this pie would grow. People could always afford to live where they love, and love where they live.
Shuttle vandalism is mindless. Shelters are helpful but still dealing with symptom, not system. Better than vandalize buses is to geonomize localities at progress.org.
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