2. They built the Panoramic in the time it took WeLive to do their interior improvements. And when they were working on it, it was just a skeleton crew. The whole time I was thinking ... how are they financing the building? This is insane.
3. WeLive has a main floor common space, where they've had two? events since they opened. Both were modestly attended, but certainly had a college dorm feel to it. Not anything anyone over 30 would be interested in.
4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
5. They continue to putter around the building, putting a whole new set of scaffolding up, taking it down, putting it up again, doing some painting, taking the taping down, putting it up again, and I wonder ... what on earth are they doing? They had a year to get this right, what's the hold up.
6. Compared to the huge number of apartments going in across the street -- 1900? WeLive is a ghost town.
(ps. the Trinity has major problems going in to this as well. I see it as a huge bungle for the Planners. But I am waiting to see what the Market Street retail looks like. If it's anything like the Mission Street side, it'll keep that side of Market dead.)
So, in short, WeLive is some capital intensive problems, that a lot of smart people are trying to solve, just up the block and across the street, and nothing I see puts WeLive ahead of these guys.
Especially when landlords stop leasing to them at .5x, so that they can turn around and dormify the building and get 2x for it. Not with Panorama and Trinity right there.
> 4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
Value added? Maybe, I guess. It's really just another way to drain more money from the tenants in the name of convenience. Dorm room too small for a coffee maker? Just pay $4 per cup in our handy cafe.
I wonder where the threshold is for people who would live in a situation like this. Is living in SF such a necessity? If you're consumed most of the day with your startup to begin with, how much of the city's culture are you really going to take in? Especially if you're in one of these dorms, where they drop a cafe and juice bar right in the building "so you never have to leave!"
I love the first video. The apartments are lovely, lots of light, a lot of thinking about the usability and comfort went into it. If I was single in my 20s I'd love to live in a place like that (as opposed to same dingy 800sqf with nasty wall-to-wall carpets in a generic apartment complex somewhere in middle America, which is what I actually did).
Super interesting video! I love seeing entrepreneurship flourish within regulatory constraints. There is so much innovation going on with those micro apartments and public spaces, it's really exciting.
Farther into the video, he shows the common areas and mentions some of the psychology that goes into the planning of the space.
He's also experimenting with the living space to figure out what's best while being as small as possible. The level of thought that goes into it is impressive.
I have a wide variety of reactions to this. Some positive, some negative. On the whole, I think it is approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
In order of appearance in my brain:
1. So the infantilization (or at least very long childhood) of tech workers, that began with ball pits and video games and three meals a day served in the office, is complete. Tech workers may never become autonomous, functioning, adults at this rate.
2. This sounds kinda nice, actually. But, only for like a week. Then I would hate everyone I share a bathroom and kitchen with. I'm too old for room mates.
3. Oh! That's what's bugging me. Subtle age discrimination. People with families cannot possibly live in these things. People with families cannot possibly afford to live in actual housing in SF. So, older folks are pushed out of valley tech companies, without ever having to make ugly hiring decisions based on age. Younger workers are cheaper and will stay at the office longer hours (probably not more productive by doing so, but that's more difficult to measure).
So, yeah, this fits with what I know of the way a lot of VCs think about the problem of tech workers, as cogs in a money printing machine. This is a more efficient cog storage unit that happens to provide additional features, like filtering out older workers and people who want lives outside of work.
And, back to why this is approaching the wrong side of the problem: NIMBYs in SF and surrounding high rent areas keep housing prices astronomically high, by preventing construction of dense new housing. All of the valley has single family homes everywhere. Very tall buildings for housing are practically unheard of.
The VCs are also NIMBYs: they're in those $4 million bungalows in Palo Alto and they're loving the appreciation, so you could say they're working both ends.
I propose these dorms be called Nerd Storage Units (NSUs).
Apropos of not a whole hell of a lot: I remember my wife laughing at the neighbor who had his 11,000 sq ft house on 30 acres of land (fantastic view!) for sale at $4M because it would never sell for that much.
I really, really hope the $4M bungalow is an exaggeration, but I suspect if so, it's not by much.
Unlikely to be an exaggeration! I know engineers with 5-10 yrs experience having little choice but to buy homes that cost $1-1.5e6. Can they afford it? Probably so, but certainly at the cost of lesser savings.
Gibson was already alluding to these in Neuromancer.
> Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam.
I agree with a lot you say and also disagree. Yes it's infantilization (and then we complain about 'bro/frat maybe soon sis/soro culture?) but something has to give.
It's not that different from the factory housing of old, but with a modern twist emphasizing fraternity and sorority aspects as well as new modern, post consumer society.
In the end, if it takes off, the test will be better off. The new workforce will have their parties and music and other "entertainment" in their corner while those with families may be able to afford normal housing --again ic sufficient numbers take the pressure off housing stock...
I don't think they'll take off as a solution, people may see them as "transitional" housing you inhabit while single, but move on and into regular housing once coupled or reproductive.
What kind of factory housing are you thinking of? The brick houses that are sectioned into smaller apartments around the world (eg: London) because our modern society says that they're "too big" (implication being that while worker productivity has skyrocketed, that gain is for the business owners, not for the workers)...
The "factory housing" of old, found the factory worker to be so productive, that his spouse could dedicate herself to house work -- and the single salary would be enough to provide for the whole family. Now with more equal opportunity, even with both people in a household being "factory workers" -- suddenly giving people a flat suitable to raise children in isn't financially sustainable any more?
Or were you thinking about the Chinese factory "dorms" of the modern age?
I was thinking the same thing. For the just-out-of-college, it might be a nice thing. For a short while. Save up for a house while you're there and have the benefits of the high density of young people.
Nobody really uses the ball pits or the video games at these companies. Maybe some companies have foosball lunch tradition at most. Meals at the company although are a real time and money saver for everyone.
What most people do when the company doesn't provide lunch is walk (or drive) as a group to some local restaurant and have lunch out, every work day.
What people with families is commute from the cheaper SFH suburbs into work. It means shitty 30-1hr commutes, but that is life for many americans already.
Lunch at work is a great idea, for both company and employees, especially if the company is kinda far from food options. I'd probably rather work at a company that pays slightly more and is located near lots of good food in a downtown/walkable area than one that feeds me, unless their kitchens are as good as Google, but it's kind of a toss up. I'm always excited to get invited to Google for lunch, but I doubt most companies do it anywhere near as well as Google.
But, breakfast and dinner, too? I begin to question the motives of the company. If it is to enable/encourage a flexible schedule so that employees can make their commute at low-traffic times, awesome! If it is so that employees feel compelled to be in the office 12 hours a day, it's much less awesome. I think Google is a decent example of the former (while still having some traits of the latter). Again, it's easy for it to be used to enable age discrimination and discrimination against people with children and lives outside of work, without ever explicitly doing so.
Anyway, I'm not actually trying to say a company feeding their employees is a bad thing. I'm trying to say that there's been a trend of taking tech workers right out of college and sort of continuing their dorm life well into their late 20s and even 30s, and I don't know that it is particularly healthy (for the workers or society in these areas). It's easy to lack empathy when every interaction is with people just like you, which is why I think there's been a recent clash against Google and other tech behemoths in SF communities. There's a lack of engagement in the rest of civil society when you live and breathe work, and live surrounded by people who do exactly the same kind of work, and are living exactly the same kind of life.
> What most people do when the company doesn't provide lunch is walk (or drive) as a group to some local restaurant and have lunch out, every work day.
I feel like you're describing this as a negative when it sounds like a huge positive to me.
1. get car / gather people in 5m
2. wait in traffic for 15m
3. look for parking for 10m
4. wait in restaurant & eat for 1hr or get sandwich and eat in 30m.
5. get back to car in 5m
6. wait in traffic for another 15m
And 1.5-2 hrs later you're back at work. Nice to do for special occasions, not so good every day. If SV companies didn't provide lunch by default, the entire south bay would be in gridlock during lunch time.
If you're close to restaurants then this is far more practical since you just need to walk for 10m. But if your office parks at least a 15m drive from the restaurants, it isn't. What I do is go out for lunch with coworkers at the company cafe.
Unlike traditional investments in the real-estate sector, which tends to be a slow-growth market with moderate returns, financial backers including Fidelity Investments and consumer-focused venture-capital fund Maveron are betting on hyper-fast expansion and startup-like profit.
"Startup-like profit"? So they plan to lose money for as long as investors will continue to write them checks?
If I had to hazard, the profit being referring to is the type where the company has profit potential on razor thin margins and requires massive cash infusions to grow it to numbers where the margins are substantial and support an exit. As long as those "curves" work for those who have money, their money will flow.
I've hypothesized that technology bubbles are created by injecting large amounts of stored work (causality) into a system. Stock market, dotcom bubble, Bitcoin, fuses in your breaker box, etc. In some cases, this stored work allows for the creation of trust channels. These trust channels are not always trustworthy. Consider poker games.
I no longer trust VCs because I think their "game" is driven by a very small set of limited partner's desire to make even more money than they already have or need. That they are willing to stuff a whole generation into a dorm on the "ifs and buts" of an exit is ridiculous.
This "gotta have more" strategy isn't holistic and isn't scalable. When it pops, it's going to be messy.
Bootstrap it. Move home, if you must. Move to to a cheap Asian country and build your dream. Whatever you do, do it with your eyes open and your mind free of dissonance. And remember, profit puts you in charge, not them.
This is actually an amazing idea on so many levels. Everyone wins in this model: improved quality of life for the elderly, better housing for young people than they could afford on their own, improved density for city planners, increased social cohesion.
Unbelievable, I had exactly the same idea a few months ago. To live in a retirement home for a year as a young person, and spend time getting to know the residents, while also going to work at a regular job. I thought it could also make an awesome story for a book or a documentary.
Yes, but that has a decidedly Scandinavian twist of putting young people together with wise village elders. It has a kind of sheen of hopefulness that we just don't see in the States (because -- as clearly demonstrated with this dorm idea -- apparently profit here is worth cramming adults into Soviet-style people storage with value-add juice bars).
And here is another statement to confirm that no matter what sector VC is "reinventing", "disrupting" or "whatever is the latest buzzword" greed always comes first.
I live in 2 km² mansion, but you know guys I have these nice dorms for you to squeeze in...
I'm not usually one to appeal to classism, but it did make me laugh that Mr. Zuckerberg is buying up neighbouring properties around his multi-million dollar mansion, so as not to be disturbed by people in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Facebook employees are jammed into 200 square-foot dormitories.
Also, to be fair, Zuckerberg is likely a high-risk target from a security perspective. Famous and Rich? There's gotta be someone who wants to leverage that
This is related to a concept I've been thinking about for a while due to some trends I've seen in Boston.
Suppose you work for Acme Co. Acme Co is a multi national conglomerate.
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries operates the public transportation you use to get to work (The commuter trains in MA are operated by a private company)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries owns the building you live in (this is particularly interesting because the trend in Boston has been for real estate investment trusts to buy up large swaths of smaller multi family homes for their portfolio, homes that were typically used as owner occupied means of wealth generation)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the energy supplier you pay for electricity
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the cable company you pay for TV and internet
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the insurance company you use for your car/property/health insurance
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the charter school network you send your kids to
That we are very bad at remembering our history.
Another post mentions the company town. As a resident of Rochester, NY, I can not help but think of the housing developments that were built by Kodak for employees in the company's height.
Being completely dependent on a single company like this for everything is not something I'd want to be a part of. Not unless the company had a strong commitment to its employees. My grandfather was a clothes washer repairman for many years, but eventually, his job became obsolete. In today's economy, the company would have "thanked him for his life" and then seen him to the door like a robber. In his case, the company invested in training him for another position. Without a strong commitment, this situation sets up a dependence that reduces a person's ability to handle transitioning when he leaves the company.
The self-named village that the Kohler Company (you've probably used their toilets or back-up generators at some point in your life) headquarters resides in is a good example. From what I understand, even today if you move there, you rent the property your house is on from the company, and the company has authority over aesthetics of house and business changes/renovations.
Shuts down social mobility. Acme helps raise the children of coal miners to be the coal miners of tomorrow, etc. They know how much you make and how much you can afford to spend, etc. There are a lot of reasons this model is a historical footnote.
Welcome to South Korea, where you can be born in a chaebol-owned hospital, work for a chaebol subsidiary, live in a chaebol-owned apartment, carry a phone made by your chaebol, with service provided by your chaebol, and bank at the chaebol bank.
A Corporate Republic (from Civilization: Call to Power, one of the government types available in the Genetic Age).
"The Imperial Trading Companies such as the various East India Companies should possibly be considered corporate states, being semi-sovereign with the power to wage war and establish colonies."
I don't know, don't tenements generally have "familial unit" rooms? The rooms are shared, but usually not with strangers or on a large scale. Barracks or "worker dormitories" fit better.
I like your "worker dormitories". Alternatives include rooming house, single room occupancy (SRO), flophouse, communal apartment, and cohousing, depending on the details.
My favorite quote from the story: "Variants include rooming houses, boardinghouses and single-room occupancy hotels, all of which offered housing for new arrivals and others in the working class, often with common facilities like shared bathrooms and in some cases ground-floor dining rooms."
Think about that for a moment. This isn't a new idea, it is a recurrence of an idea that existed before when there was a huge gap between the "working class" and the "middle class". Think about all of the variables that make the system work that way, first you have to have a weak enough government that a small number of people can shut down the production of market rate housing, then you have to have a growing income disparity that can "freeze out" and separate the existing housing that spans the gap.
If I were a city supervisor I'd see the success of "rooming houses" as a failure of city management.
This is insane. You could literally live palatially in any of a number of different locales for a fraction of the cost. I probably make half of what I could make in SFO, but my cost of living is 80% less.
I've never lived in SFO, but I've visited. It's a really nice place. But not nice enough to need this sort of nightmare.
When the economy yo-yos, these will turn into nasty SRO units for crazy/addicted people and blight the neighborhoods. I can't believe the zoning people let this go through. It took NYC years and years to clean these types of units up.
The VC model necessitates throwing things that seem insane but have huge potential against the wall and seeing what sticks. On the off chance that they're right, everyone involved will profit handsomely.
Hey VCs, I have another idea for you: spread out a little. I'd have to get paid a completely ridiculous sum of money before I'd be willing to move to San Francisco. People are over it.
This country is massive and has plenty of open land. The U.S. is the 3rd largest country by land area (behind Russia and Canada), but excepting Alaska, virtually all of our land is quite habitable, something neither Russia nor Canada can say. There is no reason anyone here should be paying $4k/mo to live in a tiny apartment.
On top of that, California is one of the worst states for business in the country.
There are ~40 states that have a totally untapped pool of resources including people, housing and land and a business-friendly legislature. Get out there and use them. And developers, push back against companies that want to enforce an SV-centric working methodology.
The U.S. is the 3rd largest country by land area (behind Russia and Canada), but excepting Alaska, virtually all of our land is quite habitable.
That got me wondering: where does the US sit if Alaska is excluded? Turns out that Alaska is about 663,000 square miles (or 1.7 million square kilometers), which moves the US from #3 to #5, below China and Brazil.
This is always bizarre to me. California is the biggest economy as a state in the country. As such, for as many people say it's "bad for business," there are a lot of businesses choosing it for a destination.
California is the most populous state in the country; it has about 12 million more people than the next-biggest state (Texas). In general, people aren't really actively choosing it as much as they're either a) already there and using it by default or b) forced to be there to more easily access the market of almost 40 million people that reside there. This is in fact the only reason that California can afford to mistreat business owners -- they have a great deal of leverage.
However, tech hubs are draws in and of themselves, and they could easily be located in friendlier states. People will come out to them.
Again, California is NOT mistreating business owners. Not in the least. They're simply not screwing over workers.
As for those other tech hubs? Most are located in places where workers don't have basic rights, like the right to switch jobs (non-competes aren't enforceable in California) or the right to own the work they do on their own time (Employers in most cases cannot lay claim to work that someone does on their own time without company resources). Hence, they will never be popular as tech hubs or see the ecosystem of startups that Silicon Valley has.
I wanted to live in a dorm after college mainly for the social aspects, but now that I am in my thirties it would be miserable. I care more about peace and quiet, being settled, and privacy than about mobility or socializing. That said I think there's definitely a market for this, although there are apartment buildings in certain cities that are mostly filled with young college grads and I don't see how that's different. If competing on cost, then there's definitely a market for this.
I would worry about the safety and quality of such living arrangements, though. Buildings like this were built many years ago called single-room occupancy (SRO) residences. They eventually became havens for vagrants and other hard-luck elements. As a result, SRO residences were outlawed in many cities.
I've lived in houses with up to 4 other people. When I travel, I frequently use hostels. This sounds like an interesting concept if executed well. The main reason I eventually moved into a two bedroom apartment was more to have a better location and nicer place than to get away from people.
How many resources do we waste on underutilized space? The US is more extreme here than any other country I've heard of.
They usually call college "the best time of your life," not dorm living. Most college kids don't stay in dorms past their freshman year, and the ones that do don't have nearly as much fun as the ones who find off-campus accommodations. (Dorms in many schools, especially state schools, often forbid alcohol.)
A bit like the problem dating apps have, the more successful you are, the more churn you create.
Once a group of friends come together they'll get a house share of their own instead of sharing with strangers. Probably be cheaper too. Have they modeled for high churn rates in their already thin margins?
A premium service leaves your very vulnerable to the tide going out on disposable income. The co-living space will be left with higher long term leases they can no longer service. I really want to figure out a way to short services like WeWork at a 16b valuation.
Speaking of dating apps, the worst part about dorm life was hearing people have sex or making sure your roommate knows not to walk in when they see a sock on the door.
If I were single and working 80 hours a week so my boss's boss can make billions on an IPO while I end up with barely enough to afford a Bay Area house, then maybe I would consider these arrangements for a little while. But instead I have a girlfriend and we value certain things more than money.
> Speaking of dating apps, the worst part about dorm life was hearing people have sex or making sure your roommate knows not to walk in when they see a sock on the door.
Wait, what? I always thought the sock on the door was the signal to join in.
I've noticed that it won't work for most sites (for me, in Chrome at least) unless I open the web link in an incognito window.
I assume it's related to cookies / referrer in some way
You mean every single company building electronics in China? "Companies like Apple" includes effectively every single company making electronics at a large scale.
UPDATE: I am hearing from many people in America, "this looks tough." I am hearing from many people who have seen other Chinese factories, "this looks pretty good." More on this too -- and while I'm saving "what it all means" comments for later, I'll say that I've seen enough other Chinese factories, rural schools, villages and so on to recognize that these are on the higher end of the spectrum.
It might seem bad, but Foxconn is actually one of the better choices for outsourcing in terms of working conditions. People in the US sometimes chose situations like that simply to send more money home.
PS: Or for the extreme version, hot bunking is still a thing for US subs. Where people on different shifts use the same bed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_rackingWith more than one crew member assigned to a rack, it is possible that a crew member returning from a duty shift will lie down on a rack immediately after it is vacated by another crew member about to start a shift. The rack is therefore said to be "hot", that is, still warm from the vacating crew member's body heat. The term could also apply to individuals who get into the rack right off of duty without showering and smelling like a "hot" mess.
I've always wondered if there's something inherently collegiate to the culture of tech, at least in SV startup culture. The veneration of youth, the alpha geek posturing, religious wars over languages/platforms/methodologies, work benefits being things like onsite bars and foosball tables, and the gender issues. I'm not saying that the media hysteria is accurate, but it seems like for whatever reason, software seems to have more of an arrested development culture than say, electrical engineering. Or other scientific and technological industries.
Could it be because software has a lower bar of entry, and with many young programmers starting work during college, right out of college, or dropping out entirely to start their own companies, there's less social development and growth than in other fields? In any case, having dorms be the solution to the housing crisis seems to fit with that college culture.
My personal opinion is that it has to do with the kind of people starting and running the companies (startups) that hire programmers in the first place. Company culture, after all, obeys the law of gravity like most things in a company. And I think it would be a useful exercise to study the source of the culture propagated in the stereotype you mention.
Given that the last few iterations of the computing revolution (Gates & co. to the Steves for PCs, Page & Brin to Zuckerberg for the web) have been shaped by bachelor university students or dropouts, all of whom embodied the code-until-burnout all-nighter lifestyle, I see what you mean. It's not just the people starting the companies- it's the people who started the fields!
Welcome to late stage capitalism, please enjoy your stay!
It's truly wonderful how the financial industry makes their money by inflating the price of things we need to live, through the mechanism of speculation, and then turns around to offer dystopian "solutions" like this.
I think 10 yrs of zero interest rate policy by the Fed has as much to do with it as the "financial industry".
I, for one, can't wait for a return to a more normal 2-3% fed funds rate. It'll give pensioners a chance at a reasonable retirement, and bring house prices down a bit, but we won't get it until the fed starts to see a bit of inflation.
In Japan's 1980s real estate bubble Corporate Dorms were a thing too. The major difference was that they were company-specific.
As long as the locations can be reused for other housing, I'm perfectly happy to watch VCs invest money in the area. More housing stock is good. If investors make money, great. If they lose money, that's part of the risk. If the price point is wrong, the place will go belly up, someone will buy it out of bankruptcy and make a go of it at a lower price point.
SF will never have a shortage of young people in dire need of cheaper housing.
Good idea. Bathrooms are under utilized, same for kitchens.
But it's a nightmare sharing with people who are strangers without some sort of authority to appeal to for noise / filth / shitty behaviour.
EDIT: seems people disagree. Well I've spent 2 years as a mature student living in that exact sort of housing in two different places. One with en-suite and one with shared bathroom.
Getting stuff clean and not having noise are constant irritations. Good luck getting the 6 friends sharing a dorm below you to keep the noise down.
Sure but it is the same challenge that exist with Road Congestion, Public Transport and countless of other services where there is a recurrent rush of influx at precise time. Trying sharing the same bathroom with three other adult working 9-5, whom aren't your friend or family members.
From experience I would say a room + en-suite bathroom is the only way to stay sane.
The grind of the kitchen wears you down. Where I am now my roommate cleans his plate when he is preparing his next meal so there is always one dirty plate on the side in the kitchen. The stovetop always has bits of food on it.
One gets tired of saying "Can you not?" because it is petty and you become a pain in the ass.
I've stayed in plenty of hostels too. People there will leave what they can get away with but the occasional member of staff is enough to keep things in check.
I would be all for this kind of living arrangement if the "can you not" was externalised to an authority figure to whom you could complain anonymously.
I also sleep with foam earplugs in. Thank goodness for health and safety at work :) The noise isn't enough to warrant real complaint - just people living and having fun. I guess plenty of people live with that. My actual home is silent so when I'm on the road I notice the bustle.
Top comment on the article:
FRANK DEUTSCHMANN
"Ah, the return of the rooming house - a fitting capstone for the Obama presidency. Yeah, he caused that."
I didn't know the rooming house had gone away, for one thing. For another, this sounds less like the boarding house my father lived in than the group houses my friends I lived in. Obama wasn't born in my father's boarding house days, and I don't think he was out of college when I lived in group houses.
I thought this was going to be about the Draper University of Heroes [1], which looks like a competing space for wantrepreneurs fond of close-quarters living spaces. That one looks even more prestigious, but apparently you also have to take an oath to gain entry. Maybe a great option if you're within the age limit (18-28) and you're long on dreams but short on self-respect.
Seriously VCs, what are you guys thinking? These poor kids.
Anyone else bothered by the misleading chart "Rent as a percentage of income, people age 22-34"? It claims 78% for San Francisco and 65% for New York, which is absurd considering that people pay taxes.
I suspect the graphic is really showing the ratio of "median rent in San Francisco" to "median income income in San Francisco for people aged 22-34", which is much less meaningful (though it does say something about how expensive housing is).
Does anyone have actual statistics on the percentage of income that young people pay on rent, i.e., "median ratio of rent to income for people aged 22-34 in San Francisco"?
I'd assume it's a percentage of net income. If the median 1 bedroom apartment is $3000 and that is ~80% of net income that means they make $3750 a month which is 45k per year net. Gross would be about 70k. That seems ballpark correct.
That means they have $750 a month for food, transportation, school loans, etc. If you don't have a car and your company provides weekday dinner and public transportation it's probably doable but clearly a terrible idea...
NYC recently changed regulations around apartments to allow for Micro Apartments. It reflects the changing demand from millennials (ownership vs rent, suburb vs urban)
Well the difference is that hippies were interested in communal living for the communal aspect, VCs are because they can't quite go full capsule[0] yet. If these pan out, I expect the next frontier will be capsule TEU[1] on rust buckets in the bay.
People associated with the hippie movement / sympathetic to its ideals have made massive, massive contributions to the history of personal computing. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
That being said, both legalized weed and communal living are perfect examples of how counterculture ideas can become co-opted and corrupted by establishment greed.
> to live in what is essentially an upscale college dorm or a retirement home for the young.
I take offense at this sentence. The author is criticizing co-living arrangements as if they were only for the young and poor, or the elderly who can't take care of themselves.
I think human connection is the key to happiness, and I hate the idea that a responsible adult must live alone, or only with their SO and family. I think living in a community can make life so much better. Whether that's a dorm at college, a retirement home, a coliving space in an expensive city, or an eco-friendly housing project where families live together and share common areas. They're all great. Don't bring in this ridiculous stigma against a new idea, when people living in the suburbs don't even know their own neighbors.
For some of us, the dorm life wasn't rainbows and sunshine. We were the ones who moved 'off-campus' as soon as possible. I'm sure there're better arrangements, but once burned twice careful.
Every time something like this comes up I keep asking.. which will happen first:
1) People with ideas will start refusing to move to that area, because of expense.
2) The capital will FINALLY start seeking other locations where they get more output for their funding.
3) With #2 the capital can come from SF, but allow the company to 'live' outside the valley, or even outside the state.
I've been seeing recent articles comparing the dying/aging VC scenes of Austin, Seattle, etc.
I just don't get why the head isn't being removed from the sand on this. It feels like when a founder gets funded their first concern is living expenses and food, not "how many people can I hire".
It's getting crazy, it's a race to the bottom it feels like.
I think the endgame here is having the business end of your company near capital/partners/customers and the operational/R&D end in a lower-cost area.
I'm all for moving to a lower-cost area, but you can't deny the huge benefits that come from being near hundreds of funding sources and partners that SF/SV of today offers.
In time I believe innovation will follow the innovators (not the money guys) but that day isn't today.
This is already happening for SV startups founded by foreigners/1st gen. It's much cheaper to keep engineering in India or E.Europe, save about 50-75%. I worked at Prezi, founded by Hungarians, and 2/3 of the company is in Budapest, with a smaller office with mngmnt/marketing/finance in SF. I believe GoodData (founder is from Czech Rep. I believe) is doing something similar.
I’ve been trying to figure out some kind of way to get out of New England every winter — I have wicked bad seasonal affect disorder, and lack the kind of funds to do a long term AirBnB or hotel. If this is available for short periods, I would totally try it.
Um, most Soviet-era apartment buildings in Russia are setup like this. Many isolated bedrooms sharing a shower-room/bathroom and a kitchen.
I have to give it to VC's in the Bay Area. If anybody can take Soviet-style housing arrangements and sell them as "the next big thing", it's these guys.
So the soviets were short on industrial building/transportation resources and had plenty of space versus the san franciscoans who are 'short' on space and have plenty of industrial resources. the soviet constraint was about as or maybe less centrally imposed as the san francisco constraint...
I think Soviet functioneers understood that when everybody earns more or less the same tiny salary, they needed to create some other stimulus to control masses.
Although USSR had a lot of free space to build, I think new apartments made artificially scarce, especially with the start of the industrialization, when many people migrated from a villages to a cities.
People had to work many years at the same workplace in order to advance in a queue for a new private apartment.
I live in Poland, was born in 91 (pretty much right after the soviets fucked off), but my family grew up in those times.
I think you don't realise just how ineffective and broken the system was. Housing shortage came from shortage of everything else, the workfoce didn't give two shits what they made (horror stories about freshly built budings needing an overhaul, etc
You can have dense apartments with your own bathroom.
I guess this is all a bit of a broken record but Tokyo has all the same potential problems as SF (Namely earthquakes), yet somehow has no housing shortage despite being denser. It's all a manmade issue.
Accepting this is acting as if there's no reasonable solution of just building normal apartments on more land. But of course that runs into social barriers.
In most places, suburbs are not the problem. There is plenty of land open for sprawl and with modern telecommute technologies, there's no need to clog up the roadways with traffic. TinyVillages looks like a well-meaning concept but it neglects the key reasons suburbs exist: people really like having a lot of space to themselves. Things that ignore what people actually want usually don't do well.
You are ignoring the big issue of over-priced urban centers. In cities people live in apartments happily. So not everyone needs a large home.
There is plenty of room for suburban sprawl, but many cities desperately need an alternative to large houses and suburbs. I have provided it. You and others are not able to recognize it because it is actually a novel idea.
Some people may live in apartments happily forever, but most humans intend to pair off and reproduce at some point or another. Units like this may be suited to the types of people who already live in dorms, but on top of the fact that people prefer to have a lot of space, they're not a good solution to the type of housing that's needed to accommodate most human families over the long term. That means the populations that rent will be transient, making it even less desirable as no real sense of continuity or community history will exist there. Now there are 3 big factors working against it: it's too small to start with, it won't accommodate people as they form families, and because of 1 and 2, it will have a high turnover rate, which makes for disinterested and fatigued neighbors. It doesn't work.
As many other commenters in this thread have indicated, this is not a new idea by any means. There are many examples of tiny units and condensed urban spaces all over the world, and they're not popular.
Some 3 person families will be fine living in a 512 square foot home. That's not too uncommon globally. For a family we could also have double or triple sized units if that's what people want.
The units I portrayed are nothing like dorms and they are not apartments, so you probably didn't actually read it. Anyway it really doesn't matter what you think. Since this whole concept is in fact a new idea, it will be quite hard to market and easy for the average person such as yourself to dismiss.
I think you need to work on taking criticism on your project. No matter how right you may or may not be, dismissing the average Joe and claiming that he's just too simple to grasp the concept is only going to keep things difficult for you. If you want to be successful, your average customer is going to be an average person, and you'll have to meet that person where they're at, not yell at them for being too dumb to understand your brand new concept. Doing that is a stereotypical sign of severe self-delusion.
If your site cannot explain the concept in an approachable way, saying "you're just too dumb to get it" isn't going to help. If you find that you have to say this to someone, it means that YOU'RE the person with the communication problem, not them. This is a very important principle to understand as you seek to gain traction for your concept. Instead of blaming people for their opinions, understand that this is a real, organic impression of the project and that it's likely representative of what at least some random segment of the population is going to think. You'd be wise to note the concerns and work toward addressing them.
I didn't read the full page word for word, no, but I did spend a good 3-4 minutes skimming it, and I watched the embedded video, which is much more than most people who come across a random website do. Please find a good mentor who can help you take criticism without being dismissive of a potential customer who is providing feedback.
You didn't take enough time to really understand it as evidenced by your comments. You were dismissive and disrespectful, and have continued that in all of your comments.
When I moved out of home I was renting a small, 1BR basement apartment for $200/mo (in 2002). "Real" 1BR apartments in my area were going for 3x that.
I'm pretty lucky in hindsight to have landed that place, there really are not that many basic rentals like that available. Being able to live so cheaply really helped me accelerate my life situation (I wasn't even a student then and was literally starting from nothing).
Given sites have started blocking people from reading the story, even if you Google the title, I think we should stop posting links to them. I can't read the article, and if someone else posts the content here, that's not a tenable solution.
I can't read this article because it's behind a paywall. Does this mean these dorms are owned by the employer in the same way a school owns the dorms that students live in? What happens when the employee is fired/let go? Now they are out of a job AND have no place to live?
How about sanely responding to price signals by looking for places other than San Francisco and the like to set up shop in? If your response to the situation is this, why should anyone take your business seriously?
In a better world, micro-units and housing structures like this would be affordable housing for homeless people. Those with means would not have to resort to this, and the needy would be off the streets.
Did for me. On Android, chrome. This is weird. Several times now I have either bypassed the paywall or got hit with it clicking the title link on different posts. Anyone know what's up with this?
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1. Similar models are popping up all over the city, including the much more sophisticated Panoramic just up a block. Beds starting at $1500. Yes Beds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LI0tqVmGtI
2. They built the Panoramic in the time it took WeLive to do their interior improvements. And when they were working on it, it was just a skeleton crew. The whole time I was thinking ... how are they financing the building? This is insane.
3. WeLive has a main floor common space, where they've had two? events since they opened. Both were modestly attended, but certainly had a college dorm feel to it. Not anything anyone over 30 would be interested in.
4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
5. They continue to putter around the building, putting a whole new set of scaffolding up, taking it down, putting it up again, doing some painting, taking the taping down, putting it up again, and I wonder ... what on earth are they doing? They had a year to get this right, what's the hold up.
6. Compared to the huge number of apartments going in across the street -- 1900? WeLive is a ghost town.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-planners-back...
(ps. the Trinity has major problems going in to this as well. I see it as a huge bungle for the Planners. But I am waiting to see what the Market Street retail looks like. If it's anything like the Mission Street side, it'll keep that side of Market dead.)
So, in short, WeLive is some capital intensive problems, that a lot of smart people are trying to solve, just up the block and across the street, and nothing I see puts WeLive ahead of these guys.
Especially when landlords stop leasing to them at .5x, so that they can turn around and dormify the building and get 2x for it. Not with Panorama and Trinity right there.