In Los Altos, Brandon Williams crams 14 tenants into a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house -- where monthly rates for a bed start at $1,000. He leases the bungalow from a Chinese venture capitalist for about $6,800, which he can more than double when all the beds are occupied.
“This is scalable,” said Williams, 28, a freelance electrical engineer. “I know a guy who has about 12 of these.”
I live in one of these in San Francisco, and honestly I love it. For $1700/mo I can live in a nice residential neighborhood with a <10 minute commute. There's a full kitchen and a very spacious common area with couches, tables, a TV, and plenty of power. I sleep in one of the eight bunks in the master bedroom, right next to a balcony with a beautiful view of the skyline. Most of us are interns and temp contractors, with an occasional "adult" passing through while looking for permanent housing. Honestly, it's a lot nicer than my University housing and not much more expensive.
Without it, I'd have to either live somewhere where I fear for my safety, add 1-2 hours of BART commute onto my workday (and lose easy access to SF restaurants/culture), or spend $2500-$4000 for a studio in a comparable neighborhood.
I'm not contradicting you, but $1700/mo for an incredibly overcrowded dorm room? Undergrad, doubles converted to triples were considered overcrowded. Wow. Maybe that's the norm in SF these days but it's not something I would have ever considered post-school.
The master bedroom is huge; a king-size bed would have taken less than 30% of the floor. There are two walk-in closets and a private bath.
Downstairs, there are 2 bedrooms that could have easily held 2 twin beds each, and another small room that could have taken 1 twin bed.
As a single-family home it would have comfortably slept 7. It's probably 2-3x larger than my childhood home and would have fetched $750,000+ in the suburban Midwest.
Convert all those twins to bunk beds (as my landlord did) and you've got 10 people across the downstairs bedrooms. Replace the king-size bed with 2 bunk beds, you've got 4 beds in the space where 1 was. 14 people sleeping in the same amount of floor space that 7 previously occupied. Now take the vast empty floor space in the master bedroom and add 2 bunk beds, and you're at the 18 that I live with.
It doesn't feel crowded. It has the same drawbacks that any room-sharing situation has - you're never alone, you have to hear people breathe and snore and shift around in bed, there's no possibility of having sex (you can sexile one person - not 7), you have to smell people's smells. But it's no worse than living in a double in college, summer camp, etc. I had no chance of bringing a girl home anyway, the sounds are drowned out by the city/wind when you've got a window open, and everyone is polite and sensitive to the fact that we're sharing space.
A portion of that price also goes to Airbnb, which gives me trust/reputation, escrow, precisely the dates of stay I wanted, and no monthslong Craigslist game as is usually necessary to sublet in SF.
Oh I understand it may be preferable to the alternatives. I just find paying that kind of money to effectively live in a hostel as a working professional to be pretty mind blowing. I'm glad I was never personally in that sort of situation.
You could easily live in Berkeley/Oakland in a nice 1 bedroom for 1700/mo and have a <20 minute commute. No roommates, nice neighborhood, probably even a washer/dryer if you're a little lucky.
If you work near a BART station, it's a faster commute than many parts of SF.
It's clear that the downsides are minimal to you, and the upsides worth it. I understand that. But you're freaking crazy thinking you have to live 2 hours away to find more reasonable prices. There are hardly even 2 hour lines on BART. Ditto on the safety issue; just know what parts of Oakland to avoid and you're all set.
I wouldn't say it's his fault. He's not doing it for charity, sure, but it's not his fault that the prices are insane. He's not forcing people to live there.
People double their money where I live renting places for $350/bed. People either can't afford a whole place to themselves or don't want to risk the hassle of renting an entire place and subleasing it, so they rent, realizing their combined rent is making a profit for the owner. It's just arbitrage.
> He leases the bungalow from a Chinese venture capitalist for about $6,800
I don't think that's fair. You're assuming that because the rent is $1,000/month he's a douchebag. The bay area has prices that are higher than Manhattan's. He's trying to provide cheap housing in an area where the prices are absolutely insane (try to find a room cheaper than that in Los Altos). He makes a profit from doing so - I don't think that makes him a terrible person.
Again, no one is forcing them to live there. They can come live where I do and get a three-bedroom house for $750/month, but they apparently want to live there. He gives them that chance.
What of that? Profiting from people's misfortune is not in and of itself wrong. (If it were, we would have to start by condemning every doctor in the world.) What's wrong is causing misfortune. If anyone is to be called scumbags, it should be the people who vote for laws restricting the construction of new housing. That's what creates these conditions.
I just moved to the bay area for work and I rented from Brandon for a week while I went apartment hunting.
I don't think he's a 'scumbag' or profiting off of others misfortune. I was able to rent a place to crash for ~$150 less per day than a hotel would have cost and I had access to a full kitchen, washer/dryer, fast internet etc, which I wouldn't have had with a hotel.
If somebody forces people of misfortune to pay more because they're stuck, just to make a buck, that's pretty inarguably unethical.
If somebody gives people of misfortune a significantly cheaper option, which has its fair tradeoffs in delivered product, while still being profitable, I don't see much of a problem.
Doesn't sound bad to me at all. I'd happily live in a shipping container to get rid of my one hour BART commute either way each day. My east bay rent is more than double that too. It seems better in every way that matters to me.
There are generally pretty strict laws about how many people you can cram into how big a single-family residence. Multi-family residences (read: apartment buildings) are regulated differently.
In crowded markets, the materials cost is rarely significant compared to the real estate it sits on - living in a tent is still prohibitively expensive if you have to lease the square footage it is pitched on. This article is more about breaking zoning laws to save money than it is about shipping containers vs traditional construction.
But as below comments mention, generally steel intermodal containers make pretty poor livable areas for a variety of reasons. Lack of insulation, hard surfaces, contamination from previous contents, weight and difficulty in handling without heavy machinery, lack of local sourcability, etc. etc.
Your ideal use case is probably a port area with extremely high population density and an advanced economy (for heavy machinery) but an extremely high wealth disparity, in a reasonable climate. So, maybe SE Asian port cities? With a sacrificial layer of containers on the outside to heat-sink?
This stuff is straight out of "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. What's next? Facebook powered Metaverse and bikers with sovereign status because they pack personal nuclear weapons?
I accept this future as long as rat things (robotic, nuclear powered creatures matching the form of a canine) become a thing.
"As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy."
Given that Facebook owns the premiere Virtual Reality company right now, which employs one of the greatest 3D programmers living, who has explicitly stated that he'd like to create Stephenson's Metaverse for real, I think we're already well on the way to that one.
Have seen numerous shipping container housing projects over the years and none of them really took off. To make containers truly livable long term (combining multiple containers, decent finishes, buildout etc) it seems to cross a price threshold where a person who can afford to do it would likely build a traditional dwelling.
This is more about creative subdividing to me. Whether it's a tent or a shipping container.
In Ghana they are used extensively as shops/storefronts, but no one lives in shipping containers. Even in the most rural areas, people make houses literally brick by brick (buying 1-2 bricks at a time) instead of using shipping containers for housing. I think it's for the reason you suggest, and for the additional reason that I imagine living in a shipping container to be somewhat akin to living in a big metal dumpster.
In this [1] excellent book, it is said that they do it as form of saving. Basically, they don't have bank accounts, and they know that if they don't buy those 1-2 bricks right away after they get paid, they'll spend the money on something else.
This is a large part of the reason. Money that gets earned gets spent pretty quickly on one thing or another, and it would be next to impossible for a family to save up enough to buy all the materials to build a house in one go.
Another reason is that they don't have easy access to credit markets, so they can't just get a mortgage and move into a home and start paying it off.
One more part of the reason is that they usually build the homes themselves, and its rewarding to see the house go up brick by brick - visual progress is being made.
I'm not an expert, but these are my informed observations and learnings.
But shipping containers do provide a structure to work from, and don't require knowledge of framing, masonry, etc. that building something de novo would. Also, for SF, they are pretty earthquake-proof (unless you stack them Ready Player One style).
I'm sure the biggest issue is that it's a lot harder to fly under the existing zoning/regulatory umbrella if you build a structure. Most "micro-apartments" are significantly bigger than shipping containers (which are 320 sq. ft.) but even so, at least in Boston, their rents are still in the $2K/month range. It's really about the land price and how much vertical building there is. This amounts to unofficial squatting on industrial land. Of course it's going to be cheaper but it doesn't really solve any problem.
It's a bit amusing to me that a concept originally envisioned to help provide housing for the destitute is now being pitched as tech worker housing in the bay area...
The Dutch have a thing for recycled architecture. You can see the colorful student shipping container housing off in the distance from the bungee jumping platform at the top of the luxurious Faralda Crane Hotel at NDSM ship wharf, at around 10:00:
San Francisco is already at an untenable population density. You can have a livable city by going light or going dense, but being in the middle is what kills you (which is where SF is right now).
The light scenario is your classic suburbia, where you drive across the street. Dense is New York City, with many amenities in walking distance and copious public transportation. The middle (San Francisco) doesn't have enough people to support good public transit (buses/trains stopping every 5 minutes or less) 24 hrs a day, but has so many people that the roads are gridlocked.
SF needs to thin out or get dense if it wants to survive. What force do you think will decimate the population by 50%?
Not only is this an issue of residential codes. The other problem is that they're doing manufacturing in a residential neighborhood that's not zoned for manufacturing. And it's disturbing the neighbors in the area with noise and even sewage spillover.
They sound so ridiculously tone deaf like the idea of having people move into your neighbor and build houses from the ground up, unregulated, out of shipping containers shouldn't bother anyone in the slightest.
Problem with shipping containers is that they should be decontaminated and sanded down prior to living use - the contents get gassed, leak out dangerous stuff and old insulation materials may prove dangerous, same for the paint.
It never is. That's why all camp stoves come with a warning not to cook in enclosed spaces. Just a few weeks ago I was out camping and a father/son duo died in their tent because it was raining out and they wanted to use the stove to warm up food.
These shipping containers are converted. The idea isn't to just take a shipping container and start living there. You convert it so it is safe to live in it.
High rent in the Bay Area is primarily due to poor land use. Not only are most buildings very short, but there's a ton of unused land near 280. It doesn't make sense to solve a political issue with technology.
Ummm if by "unused land" you mean open space preserves, parks, amazing redwood groves, etc...then yes, there is "unused land."
Building out on those areas because there's currently demand over on that side of the Bay (because it's closer to Stanford and Sandhill road) would be a big time shame.
It's not "unused", it's just not being used for human development. Wildlife and nature enthusiasts make very effective use of that land, and the fact that it exists is one of the things that makes living in the developed areas so desirable.
If you want to see vast spaces of unused land in the Bay Area, just take a drive from Fremont to Livermore via I-680 and then 84. Tons of open space, nobody living there...
Wow, so the response to squatters illegally living in a office building that is zoned non-residential is "you should figure out a way to make the office building legal to live in"?!
Either Ivy Lee's comments reflect a serious, willful, inability to see reality and enforce the laws, or it is simply a poorly thought through excuse for a willful choice to not enforce the laws. It reflects a deep dysfunction either way. A few precedents like that would make me very, very hesitant to purchase commercial property in San Francisco.
Reminds me of JG Ballard's Billenium where an overcrowded world has people living in three point five square meter rooms that were subdivided out of any space possible. Basically a world where to get more space you had to get married and marriage required three children, all furthering the population density problems
Maybe it's time tech companies let their engineers globally work remotely from comfortable places, instead of parking them into metal boxes and sweetening the deal with catered lunches.
+1 - However you'll find no love within the HN crowd. YC and many SV startups are vehemently against remote work. That's why I was stunned when YC allowed for new fellowship applicants to work remotely (so maybe it's getting better...?).
I think a lot of it has todo with ego, investor show-ponying and lack of solid culture. Beyond that many startups justify paying their employees like shit for small office perks like free lunch and couches. That type of stuff doesn't really work remotely.
I do understand the desire for co-located teams up to a certain point. Today, I certainly work outside an office more than inside. That said, I have a lot of trouble seeing how remote work would have been a net positive when I was starting out. Admittedly, technologies we had available for communication weren't as good then but that part of my career was so dominated by F2F interactions that it's hard to imagine I would have been as effective as a remote worker. (I was a product manager for mostly system hardware.)
I 100% agree. Remote working has really only worked for the past 5-10 years (probably less than 10).
Async chat tools, file sharing, conference calls, video chats, etc. are the lifeblood of communication at remote companies. Without those tools it's very hard to make remote working work.
People who say remote work doesn't work often times still rely on things like email...that's just not how it works. If you're communicating internally via email you're doing it wrong.
That's not to say tools define remote culture, but they certainly help reinforce it.
Today's tools are certainly better. We had conference calls (and internal-only email) but basically none of the other tools you list. And maybe if a company had a real remote worker culture, it would be natural to slip into it even as a new hire. It's just a bit hard for me to imagine based on my own experience. But, as I say, different time and different culture.
Exactly. I'm in the middle of a cross-country relocation because we decided that the bay area is just too damn expensive for its own good. Since I telecommute exclusively anyway, the move was a no-brainer once we sold ourselves on the idea of leaving the area.
“This is scalable,” said Williams, 28, a freelance electrical engineer. “I know a guy who has about 12 of these.”
What a scumbag.