If you’ve heard nothing else about San Francisco of late, it’s that housing costs have gone completely crazy, with little available between sleeping over a heating grate and renting a miserable studio apartment for $5k a month. Or something like that. The average price of a home is over a million bucks.
I haven’t been in San Francisco in a long time. Maybe 20 years. But I’ve been there many times, and my memories are of a vibrant, interesting and beautiful city. The Sausalito Ferry on a sunny day. Drinks at the Carnelian Room (long gone), watching the fog roll in. Grabbing a cable car (because walking up those hills is killer).
Whether there on business or pleasure, I never had a bad time in San Francisco. Even the time I had some crazy allergic reaction to some tree or another, and lost my voice for a week.
Today, San Francisco sounds like something of a hellscape, with tech youngsters stepping around the bodies of the drugged out and over the piles of their scat, as they make their way to their $120K starter-salary job. This is, of course, a job at some mostly nonsense tech startup they hope will turn into a unicorn and yield enough walking around money to buy themselves one of those million dollar plus homes and retire.
But until they cash out (or retreat to Des Moines or some other place that’s affordable), those unicorn chasers can rent a bunk bed for $1,200 a month, in a bunk room they’ll share with 11 other bunkmates.
Sure, it’s a lot better than the bedbug squalor of the bunkhouse on the Ponderosa with a bunch of cowhands who took one bath a year, but, hell in a handbasket, should any twenty-something be living in a place where they have zero privacy? It’s been a long time since I was in my twenties, but isn’t one of the things you’re supposed to be having at that age a sex life, not lazing around in a bunk bed starting at your flat screen TV?
Podshare cofounder Elvina Beck tells Curbed SF that staying in a “pod” is a way for renters to “experience a neighborhood or community before pulling the trigger on a longer term lease.” (Source: SF Curbed)
If I had to spend a night or two, I’d be pulling the trigger. Only it wouldn’t be “on a longer term lease.”
This setup is worse than those Japanese hotels that are more or less a bed that slides into something that resembles a morgue slot. At least there you’ve got some privacy.
I can see the appeal of micro units, apartments with small square footage that contain all the essentials. In my twenties, I lived in a small studio apartment, with a tiny separate kitchen, a little alcove nook that I used as a never-used office, a small closed off foyer area, and plenty of closet space – especially given how meager my accumulation of possessions was at that stage in my life.
A single person really doesn’t need much more than 400 square feet to get along just fine.
But that’s if they can call it their own, and aren’t sharing bathrooms with 11 other folks.
My “micro unit”, of course, lacked the amenities of the places designed for millennials. There were no communal spaces to chill or entertain or find hang-out companions. When I lived on Lime Street, I was pretty much the only resident of the building who was under the age of 70.
Other than my nosy neighbor Babby, the old geezers in my building - Charlie, Mildred, Jim – were very pleasant and nice. Babby, who was in his nineties, and somehow related to the foundersr of Babson College, and his live-in housekeeper would open his door on the conjoined kitchen dumbwaiter that we used to send our trash down to the basement so that they could listen in on what was happening in my apartment. Babby was quite a hoot. His housekeeper once reported to the super that they were concerned that they had overheard “tickling” coming from my apartment. One of my favorite games was listening for Babby & Company to start listening in, and quickly opening my dumbwaiter door on them. Caught!
See what these millennials are missing!
Unsurprisingly, Podshare’s marketing materials try to put a brave face on the setup, branding it as part of a Millennial lifestyle:
The future is “access not ownership” so we are establishing “access points.” [...] Millennials don’t own a gym at home, they buy a membership. We don’t subscribe to cable television, we watch Netflix. We don’t buy CDs, we stream music. American car sales are on the decline because we Lyft or Uber. We can rent a bicycle, get a degree online, have our meals delivered to us, and document our entire lives on social media.
Okay. But what about access to privacy?
It’s one thing to leave a scarf or tie on the doorknob when you’ve got one or two roommates. But when there are another 11 folks sharing your digs?
If I saw these bunkbeds in a dorm room, I might be able to convince myself that they were cool. But as the way to live adult life? I just find this completely depressing.
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