
Variable Cost Living Sadly Doesn't Work - ivankirigin
http://drop.io/swl/asset/variable-cost-living-sadly-doesn-t-work
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ccollins
When you read this, keep in mind I work at Airbnb :)

I think this failed because it was so contrived. Here is a more realistic and
reproducible example of how my girlfriend is living variably in NYC. She
currently has a lease in Brooklyn for about $900 / month but doesn't need to
be there all the time. This weekend she will be house-sitting in NJ, next week
she is visiting me in SF for a week, and in December she plans to stay with
her parents for the holidays.

To continue to have occasional access to her apartment, not screw over her
roommates, and make this lifestyle remotely possible, she listed her place on
Airbnb.com. She so far has booked about $700 that will go towards October
rent. When she needs to be in Brooklyn, she simply marks her dates as
unavailable. Her place is still open for December, but has enough interest
that she'll be fine.

Using Airbnb absolutely reduces the friction for these short term stays. If a
listing is dishonest, we'll drop it like it's hot. If your host bails on you,
we'll find you a new place to stay. SO, sam lessin - Despite having a new
lease, don't give up on variable cost living! -Chris

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mikeryan
her roommates are okay with people using a room as a hotel?

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ccollins
It's definitely a point of contention, but one that can be solved easily by
paying for utilities for a month & buying a 6-pack or two.

~~~
scott_s
Maybe with her roommates, but that would never fly with me.

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jeremymims
Of course it doesn't work.

The time cost of finding a new place every few days must be considerable.
You've got no guarantee that demand at certain times wouldn't price you out or
that there will be any inventory at all that suits your needs. There are costs
associated with moving your stuff and there is an acclimation period while you
get settled. I might see this as an experiment to "try" a number of
neighborhoods before you settle on a place to live, but it sounds just awful
as a long-term method of living (Good choice with the East Village by the
way).

Reliability and predictability are two very important considerations when
picking a place to live. Throughout time, people have paid a premium for it.

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Xichekolas
I think part of the problem is that he was attempting to find sublets to
fulfill his space needs. This is a pain because each period of stay has to be
negotiated, which is time consuming... especially when you are moving around a
lot.

What you really need to make this work is a provider of living spaces with set
prices and set contracts for set durations. Think extended-stay hotels crossed
with a fast food joint. You can walk into any McDonalds in the US and know
what will be on the menu, and for roughly what price. Likewise, you need a
place that you can walk into with various room options and set prices/terms. I
guess you could call them franchise apartment complexes.

Well obviously the closest thing to what I'm describing is a hotel. The
problem with hotels is that they are too expensive, and (often) don't offer
kitchens or offices.

I'm going to pick $1500 for a reasonable Big City rent amount, which works out
to $50 a night. Throw in furniture rental and a maid, and it's probably more
like $70 a night. So really, if you could rent a studio apartment as if it
were a hotel room for $70 a night, you'd be breaking even but gaining all that
flexibility.

Of course, in most places rent is much cheaper, so in Kansas City, for
instance, the place would need to be more like $30 a night to make sense.

I wonder if it's economically possible to offer various apartment size places
on a per-night basis at those prices. Does the hotel industry just rampantly
overcharge, or is this an economic pipe dream?

If you did away with daily maid service (only have maids clean between
guests), and things like complimentary laundry service, maybe it would be
feasible. Thoughts?

Of course, there are other issues, like carting around your wardrobe. Maybe we
can have franchise closet/changing rooms too. It'd be like a PO Box for your
clothes.

~~~
edw519
<http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule/>

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abalashov
That... is ... fascinating! And fascinatingly practical.

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tsestrich
I thought that was a very interesting experiment, but I thought of it more of
a proof of concept rather than a "I wish this could work for everyone".

The thing that will ultimately make something like this impractical is the
emotional attachment to the places that we live. It's likely the same reason
that you wouldn't want to live in hotels year round... at least not for your
whole life (if you're a contractor you might have some experience with this).
People, unlike data, like to decorate, have things set up a certain way, and
have a place they call home.

While it's interesting to imagine a world where people only used what they
needed when they needed it, we can see some of that today. That's why people
will rent a pickup truck for a day while they're moving, or pay to go to a
public pool. They don't need to own a pool or a truck year-round, just for a
bit of time, which is a little like utilizing server resources.

The part about living in a nice hotel for a day, however, was a good example
of something we don't see very often. I guess we really don't have a real-
world version of excessive "server load spikes" where you want to live
somewhere REALLY nice for a day or two, but analogies can only go so far

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toadpipe
It depends on your priorities. Many U.S. families move long distances every
few years, and many young single people move significantly more often than
that. Certain jobs can require someone to move almost daily. Part of it is
because people want to, and part of it is because the culture makes it easy by
providing technology that enables it. My guess is that the future will
probably trend towards even more flexibility in mobility, not less (especially
in the U.S.), although there will always be many people who want to settle
down.

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jlees
I really like the concept and I'm glad someone managed to try it out. I also
immediately thought of Airbnb (good job on ramming your brand into my brain
guys!), but there seems to be something missing that even Airbnb doesn't quite
cover: standardisation, perhaps?

If you're extending the parallel to cloud storage, sure, you can spin up and
spin down as required - but you (generally) stay within the same provider to
do so. So you know what your costs are going to be, you know what's available,
you trust it to be there when needed, and so on.

When it comes to living, everyone's their own provider. As the OP found out,
people have stupid bills; people change their schedules; people can be
fundamentally dishonest toward strangers; people aren't a consistent platform.
It's peer-to-peer, so it's like - instead of using Amazon to run your website,
and spinning up instances, you're relying on Joe Bloggs's spare server space
in Watford. What if Joe Bloggs changes his mind?

Would a solution look like a compromise between the standardisation of hotel
chains and the flexibility of crowdsourced space? Perhaps. You'd need a
trusted third party who could guarantee stuff. Guarantee that the living space
is fairly represented and scale costs depending on facilities and features
(location being a feature) - just as you pay more for 2 CPUs in the cloud, you
pay more for 2 bedrooms on the earth. Guarantee that the overhead costs are
totally consistent, broadband, cleaning, etc. Guarantee that if someone
changes their mind you still have somewhere to stay the night. And, you know,
that's starting to look an awful lot like an aparthotel chain.

I guess the difference is you could have one mega 'cloud' landlord who,
instead of building custom aparthotel buildings, leases apartments from
private landlords. The cloud-landlord sorts out checkin and checkout cleaning,
services, etc; it's kinda a distributed aparthotel. Hell, it's starting to
look a lot like the way some universities do accommodation now. Is it a step
beyond Airbnb's self-managed approach? Yes. Would it allow variable cost
living? Yes. Would it work as a business? Nobody's done it yet, so who knows.
I'd guess not, though. Costs and overheads and stuff.

~~~
pyre
What about something straight out of Snow Crash? Take one of those storage
space rental places, and rent out something like that on a daily basis. You
might have to do some work on getting things like plumbing,etc in there, but
it would be cheap space that could be rented quickly and for variable amounts
of time.

Of course, it would be relatively low-quality... but in Snow Crash he wasn't
living in a 'high-class' neighborhood.

~~~
billswift
I remember reading somewhere that there are hourly hotels in Japan, because of
the extreme hours many "salarymen" work. You pay by the hour, just for the
time you're there, for a shoebox barely bigger than the bed.

~~~
prewett
I thought the hourly hotels in Japan were "love hotels", due to lack of space
available for privacy?

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quellhorst
There is already variable cost living, its called hotels. They are properly
priced for the current market.

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scott_s
I like having a place I call "home." I want more than a roof and a bed to
sleep in. I want a place that feels like my base and is emotionally
comforting.

Also, the pop-up chat thing is amazingly annoying.

~~~
hussong
I was surprised the author didn't mention the (hard to quantify) emotional
cost of living out of a suitcase. Bits don't care where they live, people
usually do.

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iamelgringo
Some of us grew up like that, and we like it.

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nkohari
I don't think the metaphor works very well. Cloud hosting is much more like a
hotel (or a hostel), since you stay on the same "infrastructure", but you
don't have a dedicated physical location. Moving between infrastructure would
be a nightmare for computing as well.

~~~
arihelgason
Rather, cloud hosting is a commodity.

There is much less qualitative differentiation than there is in accommodation.

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RyanMcGreal
> the fiction around transacting temporary real-estate is just too high

Er, should that be "friction"?

Also, the right-click functionality on that site is infuriating.

~~~
gcheong
Variable Cost Living: A Tale of Fiction Due to Friction?

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Tichy
I don't see how you arrive at the conclusion. So the facilities are not there.
That doesn't prove anything. One time, there were only mainframes, and "home
computers sadly didn't work".

I'd like to see some innovation by architects, for stuffless living. Since
almost all of my personal things fit into a computer in the future, living
space could be a lot more generic.

~~~
einarvollset
"Since almost all of my personal things fit into a computer in the future,
living space could be a lot more generic."

To me that's a truly dystopian future. I'd rather my skis, surfboard, bike,
kites, hiking boots, etc were not virtual.

~~~
borism
Why do you have to have skis, surfboard, bike and kites just for you all the
time? It's not like you can use them all at once, is it?

Maybe I would understand if you used one item per day, but I don't think even
that's the case. Probably most of the stuff you mentioned is simply lying
around 90% of the time, taking space and amortizing.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
If you own skis (or any of the other items), you don't just own _some_ skis;
you own _those_ skis. They're sized to you, you've used them the last 100
times you went down a mountain, you're accustomed to exactly how they handle,
and the left ski boot's padding is a little more spacious because your left
foot is a little bigger, and has worn away the padding more.

Yes, you don't use them, but between the custom fitting and the emotional
attachment, they aren't fungible anymore. Which is, I suppose, the point of
the article: if you declare something to be freely exchangeable, then you can
have a much more freewheeling style of life.

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ExcilSploft
Reminds me a bit of this article:
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html>

(not because of the author's experience, but rather a pitfall I can see
occurring)

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JeffJenkins
I was without a permanent address during the month of June and looked at doing
this, but the overhead seemed way too much. Places were getting taken before I
could snatch them up for short term stays, and even then most people wanted
months.

If you _do_ need to do this, the YMCA has a number of locations with not-
terrible prices. I ended up staying with friends, thankfully.

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barrkel
Another reason moving around a lot is always going to be a painful because
your address, you being known to be available at a location, is important for
legal and financial purposes for lots of service suppliers. Any kind of
ongoing transaction will be made difficult by history of moving around a lot.

~~~
billswift
If you're staying in the same city like he is, all you need is a fixed mailing
address. Even moving between cities you can use a mail forwarding service
(paying a friend you can trust would probably be better than a commercial
service).

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doki_pen
eh? What? I don't get the relationship. When would you need more space and
less space?

