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.
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!
$700 / 30 = $23.33 a day to sleep in a wood box… brilliant!
Yes, you are right. But no way in hell am I going to pay for my own coffin.
One of the other articles linked has a photo of the common room.
This is a dormitory style shared living space with living area and bathrooms / shower. The “boxes” are bunks for sleeping and actually roomy and private compared to every other dorm bunk I’ve ever seen.
Ugh. Bougie homeless. Just sleep in your car like normal people. 🙄 /s
I do want sleep pods at airports.
Shower pod at the Paris airport was the best layover I’ve ever had. You pay in 30 minute increments but so nice to get refreshed when you’re traveling across the Atlantic.
Well in San Francisco, a car is something that a robot learns how to navigate around the city streets.
As someone who’s not American and had a couple of job opportunities to move to San Francisco, I’m glad not to have done it.
What kind of hellhole is that city? I had an impression it was extremely expensive but also very wealthy. The more I hear the worse it seems.
had an impression it was extremely expensive but also very wealthy.
The trouble with these kinds of statements is that there are always going to be “bottom of the ladder” workers who are still poor in these cities, and being poor in am expensive city is a shit load worse than being poor anywhere else
Even then, salaries are high, but the CoL more or less cancels it out. Even the wealthy SWEs I know who live in SF are barely able to swing 2 bedroom apartments that they share with an SO. That’s why you hear about new grads making $200k/year right out of college working for Meta or Google, it’s true, but you’d be better off in a lot of ways working for a small company in Sacramento for $100k
It’s expensive because of the concentration of wealth, not the quality of the area. There’s a ton of crime, homelessness, car break ins, etc.
People often leave their car doors unlocked or their windows down to prevent their windows from being broken, but instead they find random people sleeping in their cars.
On the plus side, the weather there is quite nice.
You definitely should have done it for the resume and networking boost. San Francisco is expensive but you can definitely find deals the more you look for them. Plus the Bay Area is bigger than just San Francisco.
And regarding the other comment, $200K in SF is definitely better than $100K in Sacramento. More money is always better, unless it’s like a 10% bump. First of all, San Francisco is just more beautiful than Sacramento. Food is better. There’s more to do.
Second of all, Sacramento is getting more expensive because people are moving there from the Bay Area. It’s still cheaper, but prices are growing and you don’t live in a major city. People are paying $500K to live next to a cornfield.
Houses in my area (Ione, about an hour south ish of Sac) going for 550k or so when I bought, and again, an hour from the “big city” (sac isn’t much of a big city compared to actual metropolis but still)
California real estate is stupid. There is literal farm land right next to expensive ass homes. Building homes is like printing money.
The weather isn’t good enough to justify it, considering recent fires and the fact that you have to live in the Central Valley. Homes in hot-ass methlandia should not be that expensive.
A lot of problems coming together.
Nature is one, they’re warm year round so a lot of homeless folk are better off there.
Earthquakes prevent them from building tall. The surrounding hills make sprawl hard. Both the earth quakes and hills restrict the supply of housing.
And thats before you even start the leftist policies.
San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And these tech bro pods, which are not really a thing here unlike in Japan where it’s been a thing for a long time, are a gimmicky joke.
You would get more space and a better place to live in a nicer neighborhood for a similar price if you simply got roommates here. It might be $900 rather than $700 but if you were sharing a bedroom, which would STILL give you more space than these pods, you could easily get down to below $700. These things are preying on tech kids out of college who only know dorm-style life and have been hired into the new AI startups.
What kind of hellhole is that city? I had an impression it was extremely expensive but also very wealthy. The more I hear the worse it seems.
LOL start reading about Dubai sometime.
ugh, this is dysphorian THIS IS NOT FUCKING NORMAL. THIS IS LATE STAGE CAPITALISM
Late stage capitalism? They were doing shit like this in the 1800s. It IS capitalism.
Like, seriously. It’s always been a thing.
In the 1800s, you could rent a space on a rope overnight so that you could drape yourself over it and have a place to sleep that night that wasn’t on the freezing, urine-soaked ground.
This has long been an issue.
Speaking of the relative cost of housing, you can buy an actual whole house in other parts of the USA for that much a month. That could be a 30-year mortgage payment on a 100k house.
In San Francisco/Bay Area that doesn’t even cover a parking space per month.
In the US, the average home price sold was $495k. Where can you find a $100k house that doesn’t need a tear down or complete renovation?
This kid must be like 17-18 and has seen none of the world. This would be luxury to half the planet.
Ok obligatory fuck late stage capitalism. That said, 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.
