T alk to anyone in the Bay Area for more than four minutes, and there’s an exceptional chance that the conversation will turn toward the state of housing in the area. During a fleeting moment amid the pandemic’s height from mid-2020 and early-2021, there was hope astronomical rent prices and home prices could go down. And stay down.

Alas, that was only an ephemeral longing — that’s all but evaporated into record-high inflation rates, the pop of “pandemic pricing,” and real estate climbing to new, out-of-reach altitudes. In fact: Home prices in the Bay Area have gone up, on average, 12% across the board since 2021. Santa Clara County has seen the steepest increases at 26%.

As for rent prices? Those, too, have gone up by two-digit percentage points; San Francisco rents are up at least 18% from this same time last year.

But if you can’t afford, say, $2,400-a-month rents — which would require around an $84,000 annual income to comfortably afford — then there are always more affordable, dystopian alternatives.

Like… for example: Renting out an $800 a month pod in Palo Alto.

T he axiomatic idea behind the inception of Brownstone Shared Housing — an eight-month-old startup that bills itself as a “short-term solution for students or people working on temporary jobs” — is nothing novel or awe-inspiring. “Pod-living” and dormitory-style room rentals have grown into financial fodder across the Bay Area over the past decade.

In 2015, it wasn’t uncommon to see spaces that measured no bigger than a walk-in closet renting for over $1,100 a month on craigslist. Comparatively, this was also the time when cramped community living corridors (that read more like incarceration units than actual spaces to comfortably exist) began popping up across the Bay Area.

To this day, the notion of $1,200-plus bunk beds being rented out to people desperate for realistically affordable housing remains a pressing truth.

(Mind you: Most financial experts still agree to allocate no more than 30% of your net income on housing, which allows for a healthy buffer zone to pay for miscellaneous bills, various debts, food, retirement, and occasionally frivolous spending. As of 2022, the average San Francisco earner makes about $72,000 a year, before taxes. After those wagers are deducted from federal, state, and local levels, it leaves roughly $4,100 left on the table a month — with a little over $1,300 of that being able to responsibly go toward housing, per the previously mentioned financial model.)

Brownstone Shared Housing’s South Bay home, which can accommodate 14 people in a domicile with just two bathrooms and a single kitchen, isn’t innovative. It’s a dangerous normalization of the housing crisis at hand.

I nside the home, a collection of pods can be found, each of them measuring eight feet long and complete with, per the company, “a built-in fan, electrical lighting, a fold-down desk and charger for electrical gadgets.” Pods are stacked on top of each other in pairs like neglected betta fish containers found at your local Petco location.

Make no mistake here: There’s no room to stand up straight or lay in any position but horizontal. Or to even get into downward dog. Or to have any bit of realistic privacy… as just a single black curtain separates dwellers from the rest of the house.

Closet spaces are shared; there’s no designated fridge storage for renters in the kitchen; four stools sit around the kitchen island in a house that’s now designed to sleep upwards of twenty; there’s, again, just one bathroom for every seven (seven… seven!) people. If the latter figure was a reality in, say, a San Francisco SRO hotel, the building could be potentially fined for being out of alignment with the City’s Housing Code Enforcement that explicitly states no more than four people can share a single full bathroom.

B ut fuck it, right? Cramming people inside glorified “coffin homes” — a form of Hong Kong housing supply popularized in the late 1950s that’s now become one of the last viable means working-class residents of the city can eke out a living situation — is well worth the ROI… sure, go for it? Because overtly, brazenly, unapologetically putting a shiny veneer on a living situation that would otherwise be deemed inhumane seems despondently fitting in this current moment in time.

We’ve (again) come around to organizing the residential corridors of some human beings like filing cabinet systems, all under the guise of affordable housing solutions in a world turned upside down by out-of-reach rental and homeownership options. That, in and of itself, should strike absolute terror throughout every cell in your body.

Celebrating the free-wheeling spirit of the Bay Area — one sentence at a time.

SF transplant, coffee shop frequent; tiny living enthusiast. iPhone hasn’t been off silent mode in nine or so years. Editor of The Bold Italic.