$700 for a bed? San Francisco startup plots ‘sleeping pod’ expansion | San Francisco
Can’t afford to rent an apartment in San Francisco? No problem. You can now rent a bed.
Brownstone Shared Housing, a Bay-Area-based “sleeping pod” startup, recently purchased a six-story building in downtown San Francisco with plans to house up to 400 pods. The deal, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, represents a huge expansion for the company, which currently operates about two dozen sleeping cabins in a much smaller location in the city.
The company, which transforms commercial offices into residential spaces, charges $700 a month for the modules. Each pod contains a double bed and can be stacked on top of each other, in the same vein as Japanese sleep capsule hotels. Tenants in brownstone buildings also have access to a shared kitchen, bathroom and workspace. The pod price contrasts sharply with the $3,065 median rent for an apartment in San Francisco and has become attractive to those looking for cheap housing.
Just a few months ago, Brownstone was facing an eviction lawsuit over nonpayment of more than $150,000 in rent, attributed to a “misunderstanding” with a landlord whose mailed notices did not reach the company. The case was finally dismissed. Brownstone Shared Housing Managing Director James Stallworth said he intends to continue operations in the original building at 12 Mint Plaza in addition to the new location at 1049 Market.
“We received hundreds and hundreds of applications” from potential tenants, he told the Chronicle. “We have seen it even on a small scale [at 12 Mint Plaza] …we will see our residents walking the streets of downtown. It’s just radically different from when this building was empty.
The demand for cheap, temporary housing from companies like Brownstone suggests that people are willing to give up the finer things in life (or even the not-so-nice things, like walls) in a city that has driven out many of its workers. San Francisco’s median rent increased 12.2% year-over-year, far outpacing California’s 1% increase in average rent and the national average which declined 1.1%, according to online marketplace Apartment List.
The AI boom is the latest player in the city’s real estate market, with an influx of demand for housing from wealthy founders. Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Compass, told the San Francisco Standard that “if the global AI economic tsunami continues, I would expect an accelerated explosion of wealth in San Francisco.”
With limited supply to meet high demand, the rest of the city’s middle-class workers are fighting for what’s left — and heading to the sleep huts.
