A new Silicon Valley startup is taking the charge put forth by the recent expansion of ADUs and other non-traditional forms of accommodation in the uphill battle to provide affordable housing to the millions of Californians struggling to find a way forward.
Business Insider recently took a closeup look at the San Francisco-based Brownstone Shared Housing, an eight-month-old company co-founded by former state auditors James Stallworth and Christina Lennox, that has designed a new stackable sleeping pod currently being modeled within single-family homes in Bakersfield and Palo Alto.
Similar to the sleeping capsules common to urban Japanese hotels and resorts, the four-foot-tall spaces can be scaled to hold up to 14 people and are being marketed by the company as an alternative to the high-rent, low-availability housing situation typical in the areas adjacent to Stanford University.
Lennox herself has been living in the design for the past year and says the plan is to expand into more Bay Area communities in the near future. The region is currently in the process of trying to comply with the state’s breakneck new housing mandates and has an estimated need of approximately 160,000 units as it currently stands.
Rentable pods start at $500 and are being leased on a month-by-month basis (with no security deposit) to mostly interns and students. In this regard, it has antecedents in the new BruinHub sharable pods for UCLA's commuting body that were debuted last year.
Very serious questions remain as to the chances such a product can ever be widely adopted, but the need for such radical measures, especially in the state's largest cities, and societal shifts towards co-living have both increased almost rather rapidly in the past few years. Brownstone will be banking on this as they look to provide answers in what has become an outsized challenge whose scale has never been seen in the annals of American housing history.
3 Comments
Overpriced again. AFFORDABLE means annual rent not to exceed 10% of annual income of minimum wage full-time or $300 when you are dealing with renting for low income tenants.. Rent also must not be more than $1 per sq.ft. per month to be affordable for rent and the cost for trash pickup and water/sewage. Metered utilities may be something that tenant pays. Per unit metered services paid by tenant separate from rent itself. Certain costs associated with certain services of common areas would be paid in the rent, collectively from all the tenants.
$800 is overpriced for this because you can get more space for free in a jail cell. This is smaller than a jail cell. Sheesh...
Welcome to Hong Kong lol
Bring back SROs?!
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