Can’t afford to rent an apartment in San Francisco? No problem. Now you can rent a bed.
Brownstone Shared Housing, a Bay-Area based “sleeping pod” startup, recently bought a six-level building in downtown San Francisco with the intention of housing up to 400 pods. The deal, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, represents a huge expansion for the company, which is currently operating about two dozen sleeping pods at a much smaller location in the city.
The company, which transforms commercial office space into residential space, charges $700 a month for the pods. Each pod contains a twin-size bed and can be stacked on top of one another, in a similar vein to Japan’s sleep capsule hotels. Tenants of Brownstone buildings also have access to a shared kitchen, bathroom and workspace. The pod’s price tag is in stark contrast to the $3,065 median rent for an apartment in San Francisco, and has become appealing to those seeking cheap accommodation.
Just a few months ago, Brownstone was facing an eviction lawsuit due to a failure to pay over $150,000 in rent it attributed to a “miscommunication” with a landlord whose mailed notices did not reach the company. The case was ultimately dismissed. The Brownstone Shared Housing chief executive, James Stallworth, said that he intended to continue operations at the original building at 12 Mint Plaza in addition to the new location at 1049 Market.
“We’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of applications” from prospective renters, he told the Chronicle. “We’ve seen it even on a small scale [at 12 Mint Plaza] … we’ll see our residents walking down the street downtown. It’s just dramatically different from when that building was empty.”
The demand for cheap, temporary housing from companies such as Brownstone suggests people are willing to give up the finer things in life (or even the not-so-fine things, like walls) in a city that has pushed out many of its workers. San Francisco’s median rent has increased 12.2% year on year, far outpacing the 1% increase in average rent in California and a national average that has decreased 1.1%, according to online marketplace Apartment List.
The AI-boom is the latest player in the city’s housing market, with an influx of demand for housing from wealthy founders. Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Compass, explained to the San Francisco Standard that “if the worldwide AI economic tsunami continues, I would expect an accelerating explosion of wealth in San Francisco”.
With limited supply to meet the high demand, that leaves the rest of the city’s middle-class employees fighting for what’s left over – and heading to the sleep pods.
