Stay Open aims to transform unused commercial space into pod hotels and co-living centers

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/17/stay-open-aims-to-transform-unused-commercial-space-into-pod-hotels-and-co-living-centers.html

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Affordable housing would be better

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SRO hotels for hipsters?

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The Melbourne CBD is quite empty due to remote working right now and at best about half of those workers will be able to come back, due to social distancing.

Changing land use won’t remove the distancing requirements. Pod hotels will become fixed cruise liners. Covid hazards.

So no. I really don’t know what to do. Our high rise CBD may just not be usable anymore.

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Also, instead of taking kids from poor parents and placing them in foster homes, we could just give the assistance money directly to the poor parents, but that would cut out the middle man. Why do you hate America and capitalism? /s

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Thank you for posting this press release.

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Its flashier to cater to wealthy young tech workers than to help struggling families and individuals. Gotta sell that American Dream right?

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Projects like that are in the works - some championed by Ben “Costly Credenza” Carson. Hopefully, success will lead to more:

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Wow the next super spreader moment!

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I’m trying not to be pessimistic, but it is 2020 after all. This sounds like the next step towards the Snow Crash future where you need to have a roommate just to be able to afford to live in a storage unit.

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Can’t afford an apartment? Come cohabitate with 4-8 potentially ratlicking strangers. No thank you.

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I guess we already have the VR and the amazing electric cars (mostly not probably used to deliver pizza).

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With the added thrill of would be tennants subject to bidding or Uber style surge pricing in a manner Neal never dreamed of.

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Marketed at hipsters maybe, but will end up being used by poor people like all those shitty startups concepts.

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integration with STAY OPEN’s custom app that helps match guests and residents

Does this suggest some sort of tinder for the hotel visitors?

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Let me guess, their press package talks about how they are “disrupting” some other market, maybe chain hotels, and how this is a revolutionary new take on housing (despite it not, actually, being all that revolutionary, and certainly not remotely new… they DO know about boarding houses, right? probably not…). Meanwhile, the poor who work in these cities are priced out of housing, forcing them into longer and longer commutes from places that are being neglected at the same time various other libertarians are trying to undermine mass transit systems that they rely on, and this is all just a fucking hellscape of stupidity, isn’t it.

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“Swipe right for No Blacks, Dogs, or Irish.”

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WeDontWork

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Sweet, the techbros figured out how to gig-economize tenements. The Glided Age is truly back again.

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This is one of those “these people are doomed to failure” kinds of things.

  • I figure coming out of this pandemic, more people are going to be more concerned about having their own spaces. More communal housing is not going to be desirable in the near future. People are going to want their own spaces which will be safe to live and work in.

  • Downtowns are going to change, a lot. All this space is available because people aren’t going to be working there. If they are not working there, a lot of them won’t be there nearly as much. This means a lot less demand for housing downtown. This means a lot fewer amenities in a lot of downtown areas, as they transition to being more residential.

  • There will probably be less demand for housing downtown since it will be more about wanting to live there instead of wanting a shorter commute.

If I were a betting man, chunking that ex office space into 1,000 foot 2BR / 2BA private apartment chunks would seem to be more of a winning strategy to me. And I would probably base my chunking off of them being reasonable / low rent units.

And this is good. Living downtown is too expensive now; they will thrive once it becomes more affordable and the people who live there are there because they want to be there and they don’t have to sacrifice as much to do it.

As much as I hate to say this- the pandemics of 1918 and the Polo epidemics may be more responsible for our suburbs than we have previously thought. With work from home, suburban low density housing makes even more sense.

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