I think we're turning Japanese. Capsule Hotels have been around forever. I stayed in one in the '90s. If you take their nightly rate $24 X 30 days it magically works out to $720 per month. Call it a hotel, sleeping pod whatever you want we are behind the curve on sleeping pod technology. We need to catch up.
Pods as a hotel concept seems like a “unique travel experience” where as pods as a living condition seems more like a city “code smell”
They actually have these type of “pods” at regular hostels in SF. I stayed in one for a couple of weeks once when I was new to the city. The noise, especially people coming in late, the germs (I got sick during my stay), and the lack of privacy is pretty bad. I can’t imagine living in one long term and I’m lucky I don’t have to, but if it’s your only choice (or you’re supremely cheap) then I guess it’s better than the streets.
Now if you double the price, exclude all the poor people, and call it a “cool invite-only hacker house”, that’s an entirely different thing!
Yes I distinctly remember all the drunk salarymen showing up at around 2 in the morning and waking me. I also forgot to open the air vents and woke up gasping for oxygen. On the plus side the hotel had a wonderful bath which was really relaxing after the 12 hour flight.
If the population of a society things "catching up" by making people live in a capsule hotel is a good idea, they're heading towards something very distopian future.
There will always be some level of stratification of wealth, but a society that is unable to provide individual housing for people is in a sad, sad state.
The idea that every single adult needs a single-family zoned space for themselves is something of a historic anomaly. The only reason these aren't more common or affordable is because housing like this got zoned to death.
> The idea that every single adult needs a single-family zoned space for themselves is something of a historic anomaly
Guess we should give up on smartphones, air conditioning, personal computers, more than one pair of shoes, more than one TV, among many new historic anomalies.
It is a historic anomaly in the same sense that most quality of life improvements are. Thing is, when and where those arrangements are common, people try to get out of them as fast as they can, and for good reasons.
Mind you, it beats lack of housing altogether as well as some other historic options (like say barracks). But I don't think we should consider this normal or desired when it's economically feasible to give everyone proper living space - which it is.
If this type of housing is considered just fine for college students, why should it be illegal to provide for people once they graduate?
I get that not everyone would want to live this way their whole lives, but part of the issue with the US housing market is that there are no entry-level housing options. This makes housing not just expensive for young people or poor, but drives housing prices up across the entire inventory.
Most quality of life improvements, especially in urban areas, have been driven by efficiencies and economies of scale.
So were incurable bacterial infections, high childhood death rates and even Human Rights.
In England, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has established the Nationally Described Space Standard [1], which specifies that a one-bedroom, one-person flat should have a minimum gross internal floor area of 37 square meters if it includes a shower room, or 39 square meters if it has a bathroom.
I guess anything significantly below that can be called outright poverty.
It's not more common because the US has a metric fuck ton of land and people want to raise families one day. The wiki entry even says that this is traditionally for the homeless. I instantly got Army barrack vibes from this, but at least that's usually for the early bootcamp days for the first few years, not an entire lifestyle choice.
I only really see it justified for single young people, but even then $700 for this is insulting (even for a place like SF) unless I'm missing something. Why not just rent a communal house at that point?
Because renting a room in SF costs more than $700.
I understand asking $700 for this feels icky, but the only reason they can do it is because of the insane scarcity of housing in SF. If we want this to not be a competitive option, the way forward is just to build more housing - like these people are doing.
Finally. I've been wondering how long before more companies get involved in the "tiny-sleeping-pod" business. Everything seems to be pointing in that direction.
Interestingly Moscow Mayor Sobyanin signed a decree banning apartments under 28 sqm, aiming to limit small-sized housing construction.
“The area of apartments (excluding the areas of balconies, loggias, terraces, cold storage rooms and apartment vestibules) should be at least 28 square meters for one-room apartments, including apartments in which the living room is not separated from the kitchen by intra-apartment partitions, and at least 44 square meters for two-room apartments,” provides the document published on the ConsultantPlus portal.
The decree came into force on August 1.
The fact that Moscow decided to abandon the construction of studios and apartments with an area of less than 28 square meters became known in May, when Moskomexpertiza sent out an information letter indicating that it would issue negative opinions on construction projects involving the construction of apartments with an area of less than 28 square meters
I wonder why they did this. I thought things were cheap over there and they had a huge amount of land?
Disagree with that; the administrative city district outside the major ring road extends to the south west and has a huge amount of undeveloped land.
Maybe its because tiny apartments are often marketed as “affordable,” but the phenomenon can contribute to gentrification? Apparently when developers prioritize small units to maximize profit per square meter, housing becomes less accessible to larger families or lower-income residents, changing the socio-economic profile of neighborhoods. Larger apartments could potentially promote more diverse occupancy types, attracting families and potentially keeping communities more balanced. Dunno.
If they can keep the prices of apartments cheap or at least reasonable, then it could make sense. I'd have to know more about the law on that to really judge.
I lived for a few years in 21m². It was nice, very central Helsinki, well thought-out layout. When I wasn't living alone, we upgraded to 30m². Even better layout, in multiple levels. In effect you had a separated bedroom, living room, dining room, and bathroom.
In Berlin we had 60m², which was a ridiculous amount of space. Enough to host multiple guests.
Now we live on a 9.3m long sailboat. Square meters are a bit difficult to calculate. Maybe 16m² for the interior space?
9m2, for 9 months, two people, would have stayed too but something came up. We'd a bunk bed with no bottom bunk where I'd my keyboard set up for giving piano classes. We'd plastic plates and cups which we would hurl down into the sink from the top bunk when we were done. Absolutely loved that place, it was like Alice in Wonderland.
I've seen it. I've slept in it. I just wouldn't call them comfortable.
It works when you're young and single, but I can't imagine building "homes" and claiming 28sqm is anymore than a barrak to survive in, not a place to raise a family. If you're not building barraks with this structure (which these capsule hotels really are) a minimum space requirement makes sense if you want to sell people "homes".
Japan already had this goin on and I remember the 'coffin hotels' in Neuromancer being written about in the 80s so shieeeeeeeeet it's been a long time coming.
It's a waste of time and resources for hotels to have me stay for ten hours during a layover. They'll need to wash the sheets, vacuum the room, and clean out the bathroom for my six-hour nap. The airport is too uncomfortable but the hotel is overkill. Pods would be a nice in-between for <12-hour stays. I wouldn't even mind if the pods were in the hotel because then I get to passively benefit from the hotel's security precautions.
According to Brownstone’s planning application for 12 Mint Plz https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/?tab=Planning+Applications&sea..., the proposed use is Residential (which is Principally Permitted) rather than Hotel (which requires Conditional Use Authorization from the Planning Commission), and also I do not see an Intermediate Length Occupancy application (which would be Principally Permitted), so they are only permitted to offer year-long leases at this time.
There is an old saying about the future being here but unevenly distributed. The pods look nice and would be even nicer with some kind of daily meal kit for a few extra dollars.
I mean you're not wrong, do people not know how these drugs work? They're not magic, they make you never want to eat and take away the "feeling like shit" when you don't.
That's not the experience my wife has had. She's been on one of these drugs for a while and still gets insanely hungry, but she's able to feel "full" with a much smaller meal than before taking the drug. If she overeats, she feels like shit.
That's a little too sci-fi for me but I am sure many youngsters with higher risk tolerance would be happy to pay a subscription fee for more streamlined nutrition delivery systems.
On a recent episode of NHKOnline's Design Stories, about sleep, they tour an updated capsule hotel, with separate men's and women's floors, and built-in biometric monitoring to evaluate sleep apnea and such, anonymized and delivered a week or so later.
America fails its lower-income citizens by pretending they don't (or shouldn't) exist when making zoning and building codes and such.
Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter but drive up costs, and then act surprised that only "luxury" housing gets built.
College students can happily and healthily live in dorms on campus, and yet we treat it as unthinkable that someone working at McDonalds lives in similar conditions. And so we don't build the infrastructure and the McDonalds worker ends up with a far worse outcome, but at least it's out of sight and out of mind that they're sleeping on a couch or staying in an overcrowded illegally-sublet apartment.
It's absolutely not that some weird and unbelievable force is working to keep poor people from "existing". As it turns out, supply and demand can largely drive the cost of goods like homes, and you can't magically delete that value so poor people can live in the more desirable parts of town.
A college town is, really, only desirable to college students and the businesses that cater to them. Thus, the demand is very low, and almost nobody stays particularly long. The exceptions to this are colleges in or near very large towns, but even housing near the college tends to be much cheaper than housing in the city.
If McD's was a self-contained economy, it too would be surrounded by cheap housing.
I wish we could have conversations about things like this which are based in reality and not some fear of a macguffin enemy trying to "keep the poor from existing".
“supply” is controlled by government regulations. When laws state that the only housing supply can consist of single family houses, then the number of homes will be limited to the number of legal building plots.
Historically, zoning laws were established to prevent cheaper forms of housing from being built in order to keep poor people out from a region. The existence of these laws is precisely because the lawmakers recognized that more dense forms of housing would be built and lived in by poorer residents unless it was made illegal.
This is absolutely a baby slice of the reason. Supply is controlled by a huge number of factors, a large fraction of which are tied to the 2000s housing bubble crashing. It created a large period of time where houses weren't built even as the population grew. This caused a large number of pine tree farms to slow down or shut down, which is why Christmas trees are randomly like $80 each lately. Combine this with large investor demand for the demand-side of housing, and it's clear to see that government regulations play an exceedingly small role in this.
It's hard to describe how little I care about why something was originally created, rather than how it plays out today.
It's also hard to describe how discouraging it is that social progressiveness is the only factor of any issue I see anyone have any knowledge on.
Supply is 100% constrained by regulation. SF (and every other city) requires a permit to build. Go try to get a permit to build something in sf. I guarantee you’ll find a hundred different blockers including if any of your neighbors would like to object. (They will)
Wrong, sorry. The construction costs have exploded in recent years for a number of reasons, not least of which is a constraint on construction supplies. This problem actually exists in more places than SF, and it will have varying levels of contributing factors depending on where you are, but as much as the internet loves to cry NIMBY, it’s simply not the primary factor here.
You may need a permit to build, but it’s not nearly as impossible as Reddit would have you think.
> I wish we could have conversations about things like this which are based in reality and not some fear of a macguffin enemy trying to "keep the poor from existing".
There is no other explanation for what exclusive zoning is. By banning the only form of housing poor people can afford you are attempting to "keep the poor from existing". Sure, land prices follow supply and demand so land in expensive places is expensive. But it turns out that we can build many housing units on not much land and amortize the land cost so that even the poor can afford expensive areas, if only it were legal.
There are dozens of explanations, and if you truly believe this is the one singular reason that can be true, you haven’t thought very deeply about this topic.
One to get you started: even the poor have a right to a home that isn’t infested with the fumes of manufacturing. You don’t need to be rich to see the benefit of not allowing slaughterhouses in the middle of section 8 housing, surely?
exclusive zoning is banning certain types of housing. Not slaughterhouses.
And no. I do not believe it is moral to ban certain types of housing, other than unsafe. If you want to build safe housing on your land and your neighbors stop you they are saying poor people are not allowed to exist in their neighborhood.
Boarding houses would work for a single person with no possessions. If you have a partner and/or kids, you need a different solution.
> Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter
Many of these mandates exist because retrofitting is impossible. Got three new tenants with cars? Get the backhoe; it's time to build the underground car park. Can't get to the crapper because the doors and bathroom are too small for your wheelchair, and you won't take a dump in diapers? No apartment for you! Low income, have kids and need 3 bedrooms? No room in the boarding house. Go somewhere else.
Universal design is not expensive and makes living spaces more inclusive.
The problem is that inclusive housing is expensive - if you build a inclusive space with parking or wheelchair accessibility or extra bedrooms, then you're silently excluding those who cannot afford those features. This was basically Hong Kong's government's rationale for why it didn't ban cage homes - doing so would benefit the winners of the public housing lottery but cause the "losers" to become homeless. Feels kind of like a trolley problem to me.
> Universal Design is a concept that proposes the creation of spaces with democratic use, guaranteeing egalitarian conditions in terms of quality of service. The main goal of Universal Design is to allow everyone to use them to the fullest extent possible without the need for adaptations. Considered a concept that applies to architecture and other areas such as product design, Universal Design serves people considering their characteristics, age and individual abilities.
Notably, the design website that you linked doesn't mention anything about making housing cheaper or more affordable.
A better take is Universal Design adds nothing to the cost of building at scale. Anyone charging more for using Universal Design is scamming you.
I think that the cost floor for housing (labor, land, materials) is high enough that "affordable housing" cannot be made without state funding. Helsinki is a good starting point.
I understand the exclusion problem. As you said, inclusive space excludes those who can not afford the space (ghetto by income). Non-inclusive space excludes by physical ability (ghetto by the degree of handicap).
> need 3 bedrooms? No room in the boarding house. Go somewhere else.
The availability of boarding houses makes this far more possible. If single able bachelors without cars are living in massive accessible apartments with parking spots, that makes them unavailable for those who really need the accomodations.
When your domicile is strictly for sleeping (or at most laying down), guess where you spend more of your time? Out and about. Being a part of the community. Probably contributing more towards local business. I welcome this news because I expect it'll bring more life to the city.
Now imagine a forward thinking municipality that subsidizes development of such pods, both construction and renting. Alongside dense walkable areas. It'd be great for business. And I'd wanna live there!
“serfdom” is a good way to characterize it, since it’s a lot harder to save money (and eventually be able to rent/buy a real place to live) if you have to go out for meals, entertainment, and meeting your social needs.
Pods are trying to normalize bare minimum shitty living conditions with high rent.
Imagine paying $700 and not having personal toilet, kitchen, bathroom, a place to keep your things or even a place to comfortably sleep/sit. This is pure exploitation unless it's an exotic tourist attraction.
If you have to force people to "be a part of the community" by making their homes
useless aside from sleeping, don't you think that's a strong indication that something must be wrong with "the community"?
We're already in a situation where many Americans don't know a damn thing about providing food for themselves, and this even further takes us in that bleak direction. Hard pass. This is bleak and miserable.`
What do you have against people "more towards local business"?
That's basically what is intended. Since people live in a pod, they'll eat out more often so that's more money extracted from them. Gotta keep the economy going, right?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not but, plenty of cities (not large American ones) manage to provide affordable housing with private space without people sleeping in pods.
I would not consider "give everyone a hole in the wall" any kind of solution to the housing crisis whatsoever, and encouraging a society where everyone is dependent on businesses for daily essentials makes it even harder to resolve these problems.
I'd think that an average would go broke pretty quick, having to always eat out. Third spaces - particularly free third spaces - in the US don't really exist in most cities. At least not without facing accusations of vagrancy.
Same energy as those degrowth types who want to ban washing machines so that people forced to wash clothes by hand will do it communally to make it less boring.
>Probably contributing more towards local business.
Practically nobody can afford to do this. Everywhere is about nickel and diming people to be present there. Society has a very terribly serious rent-seeking problem.
Expected value for most people's interactions economically is negative, meaning they pay more out than they receive for their other inputs. How else does the casin... err social entitlement ponzis, do-no-work bureaucracies and administrations, etc, survive? Somebody pays the house.
What is needed is very high corporate taxes, and high taxes on any rent-based (interest, service fees [Netflix, Spotify, your ISP], etc) income after deductions but before dividends or buybacks. We must realign our society back to production if we want to return to material wealth and not end up navel-gazing in poverty like S. Asia.* We can do each others haircuts and oil changes until we're out of clippers and oil, but if not enough clippers and oil are being produced then we're all going to be materially poorer as GNP rises.
(* Spidey's conspiracy-sense: I wonder if some of the push for mindfulness and other S. Asian esoterism lately isn't an attempt at a civilizational software patch on the West, using memetic components evolved to deal with abject poverty in the S. Asian continent over centuries, in preparation for an upcoming sundowning of western economic hegemony. Statecraft has as one of its requisites maintaining order and decorum of the citizen-human livestock.)
No one is talking about the inherent sexism in this. They're only talking to men. Only showing men living in these. This would very likely NOT work for women at all.
You can rent an apartment for that in lower cost of living areas. Like, 500-700 square feet. And won't have the risk of city zoning being upset about it lurking over your head, which seems to be the case here.
> The approval was rescinded over a misrepresentation of how many of the beds in the facility were deed-restricted affordable housing, Sider said.
> “The building remains in violation of the planning and building codes, and while we continue to work with the proprietor to move his applications forward, we expect him to honor his agreement not to have new tenants move in until the issue is resolved, which should happen very soon,” Sider said.
That used to be the case for where I live, but no longer. And I live in a pretty damn cheap area (semi-rural Wisconsin). Cheapest apartments here now go for $950 plus.
Can you get a 500 sq ft apartment for $700 in the USA? My impression was that it’s gotten more expensive than that. Definitely for a 2nd tier city. Maybe not for an n tier city….
Sure. I found a handful in smaller towns in Iowa without any trouble.
Even in Ames, Iowa (home of Iowa State University, 65k people per the 2020 census and I'm not sure how many of ISU's 30k students that counts), I'm finding a range of apartments in the $700-$800 range that are 500+ sq ft. On Zillow, so hardly the best pricing one is likely to be able to arrange.
Now, it's not San Francisco, but the point is that even in a not-tiny-town, an apartment (or even some smaller standalone homes!) for the cost of a twin mattress sized sleeping pod is totally doable.
I wonder how it compares to other places in the USA in terms of affordability and what the other dimensions of price are in the same price range. (For example Cheyenne WY also similar in population.)
Ames, IA I would say qualifies as n tier in the sense that it seems like it's a suburb of Des Moines? And Des Moines is probably a fourth tier city?
... "near Cupertino" in population, not geographically. Okay, that makes much more sense.
It's not really a "suburb of Des Moines" - though eventually, as they grow, it may be considered that. It's 30 miles north of Des Moines, through an awful lot of rural Iowa. I'd consider a "suburb" to be "generally built up when traveling between A and B," though there's some flexibility in that definition. But Ames is its own place from Des Moines.
5 years ago in Alabama, I rented a 1200 sq ft apartment for $750/mo. This was in Prattville. No clue if it's still that cheap, but yeah, $700/500sqft is super believable.
How many high rise apartments are going up in San Fransisco? There are like five being built/renovated in my east coast, fairly small, hyper liberal city.
Construction in SF has been essentially zero for decades and remains that way. Last year the city completed only 2600 homes, the lowest total for any of the past 7 years. At no time in the past 50 years has SF created even half as much housing as Austin or Seattle.
Editing to add: If you vote in SF and this bothers you, vote against every incumbent who caused this.
SF is essentially on a small island with no quality bedrock under it. There's really nowhere left to build. Often when excavating dirt, they find old ships buried which then need to be examined for historical relevance. It's a nightmare to build there. It's truly the worst situation to be stuck in!
I think someone should investigate why it took a year to permit this change of use from Credit Union to Residential Group Housing, which should be Principally Permitted in the Use District C-3-G of the address at 12 Mint Plz. According to the sfchronicle article linked, “James Stallworth, CEO of Brownstone Shared Housing, said the city’s planning department was unresponsive for around nine months as the company sought to bring the project up to code.” But sfplanning disputed this: “Dan Sider, the planning department's chief of staff, said claims that the department was unresponsive were “utter nonsense” and said Stallworth only filed an application in July after “months of noncooperation.”” So which was it?
Is San Francisco still failing to approve housing in a timely manner, or did the Brownstone drag thier feet?
You know, when I first time heard about "sleeping pods" I imagined some of cool high-tech sci-fi shit, like:
- full soundproofing
- your own microclimate with always perfectly fresh air and precise control over temperature and humidity
- huge screen like right above your head, so that you can stare at it while lying on your back
But in reality they always just look like bunk beds with some extra walls, that's it.
This strikes me as just fine, but for one problem — other people snoring. I fear I’d have to wear earplugs or something, which always seem to fall out of my ears part-way through the night.
What happens when eventually a jerk moves in. After 30 days it's near impossible to get them out without a long eviction process.
This type of thing can only work for short term stays, the jerk moves out after 2 weeks so it's a non issue. Or in tight nit communities( you figure out what's actually up with the jerk and help them out).
Probably if the pods had a solid door, then each pod would be considered a room under San Francisco’s interpretation of the fire code and would require a separate fire sprinkler, like the WeWork phone booths https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/01/san-francisco-office-phone...
