San Francisco says tiny sleeping 'pods,' which cost $700 a month and became a big hit with tech workers, are not up to code
San Francisco says tiny sleeping 'pods,' which cost $700 a month and became a big hit with tech workers, are not up to code
The pods, which are 4-foot-high boxes constructed from wood and steel, made headlines after tech workers praised the spaces.
San Francisco says tiny sleeping 'pods,' which cost $700 a month and became a big hit with tech workers, are not up to code::The pods, which are 4-foot-high boxes constructed from wood and steel, made headlines after tech workers praised the spaces.
$700 for this is insane. I get why they’re doing it but there’s no reason anyone should pay $700 for a bed.
San Francisco should build their own get that shit up to code, make it about 30 stories, have spots for restaurants, stores, retail at the bottom and make it actually affordable and for everyone. There should be no market for 700 a month 4 foot tall boxes. Greedy fucks.
Shit should be like $50 a month max and yea it’s dystopian AF but if people want to do it I guess whatever. Just don’t rip them off.
I remember reading about, "pod hotels" in Akiharbara, "Electric Town", Japan in the late 90s or early 2000s. I recall them being marketed as a cheap way to see the neighborhood. Even back then, Akiharbara was the global epicenter of anime/manga, retro gaming, arcades, computer stores and repair shops.
Glad to see the concept has now evolved to, "dystopian hell" some 20 years later.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key.
The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall.
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer
Cyberpunk was supposed to be a dystopian vision.
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to see modern SRO-style buildings, noise proofed, with small individual bathrooms and kitchenettes. That sort of development would be a godsend to the housing shortage, perfect for young people, supercommuters, and recent transplants, as well as for stopgap homeless prevention.
This isn't that. This is horrible.
Crush this trend, now.
Tech companies that offer places to sleep, eat and play at work, only do so so they can keep you working as long as a possible. If you never leave the office they make boatloads of money and make yourself a free Eggo waffle. And if you try to work from home so you can live in a city you can actually afford, they make come into the office so it’s impossible. Not because you aren’t doing good work at home, but because you can’t won’t 24/7 at home.
They write "tech workers" but it's pronounced "tech slaves"
$700 a month?!
People don't want to live in this pods for the most part. The problem is NIMBYs in San Francisco constantly block new housing from being built. This results in insane housing rental prices for workers. Because housing prices are so insane, it makes $700 sleeping pods look like a steal.
The issue is the lack of housing, NIMBYs, and the local government.
Skipping permits is a way of life in SF. (I had work conversations about buying older gromex so the dates were before you purchased in case am inspector noticed. Inspectors were prohibited from noticing anything they were not specifically there for.)
I wondered at the specific permit they missed.
without a permit changing the building from a bank to a living space and illegally converting a toilet into a shower.
That seems important to do properly.
You get more space and amenities in prison. And much cheaper.
I have a friend that moved to Japan when he was in his twenties to work in a blue collar job. The pay was good, but he had to work a lot of overtime, sometimes 12, 14 hours. These jobs also often offered a place to live nearby the factory. Somehow it seems very similar to this, the difference is that he got an actual apartment and not this sad excuse for one.
One day he got sick of it all, so he started to just apply for these jobs, get free housing, and never show up to work. He could live rent free for a month, sometimes two in the time between getting fired and finally evicted. When that happened, he would move to a different city and then do it all over again.
In the meantime he was studying Japanese and doing side gigs. After doing that for awhile he landed a job as an English teacher in a school and he doesn’t have to do that anymore.
A boring dystopia
Lol this reminds me of the scene in The Complete Al from the 80s where Weird Al travels to Japan and stays in one of their hotels:
https://youtu.be/_Seufp4nvXQ?si=I3QrLETjVvbFA9lL
Edit: skip towards the end if you want to see the specific scene.
Those would be fucking coffin homes in China What
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tiny sleeping "pods," which have proved a hit with San Francisco's tech community, are not up to code, city officials said.
Representatives for the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.
The pods, which are 4-foot-high boxes constructed from wood and steel, made headlines after tech workers praised the spaces in interviews with ABC 7 News.
Brownstone CEO James Stallworth told SFGate the company had a lot of inquiries from people interested in artificial intelligence.
Earlier this month, Christian Lewis, a tech-startup founder, posted photos of his experience in one of the pods on X, formerly known as Twitter.
i'm just trying to stay within the city of San Francisco without paying $4,000 a month or getting stabbed, and i think this is a great solution so far," he wrote.
The original article contains 281 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Who are these tech workers who wants to sleep in office pods??
Ok hot take, this is a perfectly valid move, 700 for location and a box to sleep in is a welcome option for many renters in the city. If there are shared spaces like kitchen baths etc this works.
If you want your own space, ok, this isn't for you, but this alleviates a ton of rental demand which could lower rents in aggregate if enough of these are built!
The alternative is your whole paycheck goes to rent and you retire a week before death, i'd be all for this if I were single.
Is someone making a profit? Most definitely, but I get a better option to run my career in the city, I'm down. Not only that, I hope this model picks up so more people can have the option.
My gripe here is the city, bitching about no windows when this is a pretty tangible solution to many renter's problems. Either fix it yourself or get out the way when others are addressing it.
I’m so sick of the coverage on this. There is a shared living space and bathrooms and shower, so it’s essentially a dormitory. Big whoop. Actually we could use more of such shared housing.
But then we wouldn’t be able to combine our hatred of tech workers with our complaints about the economy to turn this into a horror story.