The Shared Housing Startup Racket
Take a look at this. The cappies have found yet another way to exploit the problems and scarcities they created in the first place.
When young adults leave the parental nest, they often follow a predictable pattern. First, move in with roommates. Then graduate to a single or couple’s pad. After that comes the big purchase of a single-family home. A lawnmower might be next.
Looking at the new home construction industry, one would have good reason to presume those norms were holding steady. About two-thirds of new homes being built in the U.S. this year are single-family dwellings, complete with tidy yards and plentiful parking.
In startup-land, however, the presumptions about where housing demand is going looks a bit different. Home sharing is on the rise, along with more temporary lease options, high-touch service and smaller spaces in sought-after urban locations.
Seeking roommates and venture capitalA Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.
This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia. For this article, however, we’ll focus on U.S. startups. In the chart below, we feature several that have raised recent rounds.
The article goes on to point out that the rackets are all based in either California or New York, in addition to bragging about how these rackets will be around for a long time because this first-world shithole country continues to eat its young alive, as it has for several decades.
The chickens have truly come home to roost, ladies and gents. I would say that the assholes who run these rackets should be ashamed of themselves, but since when have cappies ever had any shame? These are people who would sell their families into slavery if it meant they could make a buck.
Comments
This is hardly a "new" racket
Seems we're going full circle again. The townhouses of the middle 19th century were cut up into cold-water flats to house the flood of immigrants of the later 19th and early 20th century, and so round and round the wheel goes.
Shared housing was a thing back when I was just out of college, and I hate to tell you how long ago that was. Seems they're just bolting rockets onto it.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
There's even an app to create homelessness, AirBnB
Using AirBnB is a vote for creating more homeless, the only vote that capitalists and their consumers understand.
Plenty of people still use Uber and AirBnB and PrimaFaceGooFlix or whatever the streaming propaganda services are dishing up, because they want to. the end
I know people who live in AirBnBs
...rather than getting a house or apartment of their own. They have to move every 30 days, of course. It's like living in a foreign country on a tourist visa. But they like it. One of them is a Bitcoin millionaire.
Your point still stands, though. I also know two roommates who rent out a room in their apartment through AirBnB because they must. And it's no picnic. They have a two bedroom apartment, so one of them sleeps in the living room and rents out his own room. And often the visiting guest is very demanding. They see themselves as a paid guest, not a "roommate." They expect the host to clean up after them and do their dishes and make them breakfast. These hosts definitely do it with a smile. If a host picks up even one serious complaint, AirBnB is quick to close them down and ban them forever from the service. They both have jobs, but without the B&B gig, they couldn't make the rent.
It's a jungle out there.
Carry a flame and share the light.
.
"because they must" sorry I think that's b.s.
nobody "must" use AirBnB to rent a room, that is crazy talk. Or just plain lazy. I guess you mean they have to sub-let in order to afford their own ridiculous rent, well yeah that's the problem. So your friends run a hotel service and pay none of the hotel taxes, that is not fixing the problem, it is making it worse I think. People use AirBnB "because they want to" or "because they don't know any alternatives" or "because people don't want to think about every single thing they do, YouOnlyLiveOnce".
peace
They won't be happy till we pay 90% of our income...
For a Japanese style Coffin Hotel.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0-oNv51j9o]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Silicon Valley story from way back
An engineering buddy from college lives and works in San Jose. He told me about a story he read about a Mexican immigrant making it America. When he came over, he rented space to sleep at night in an apartment. With bunches of other people. They had to leave in the morning and returned only at night to sleep. This guy was doing well. He managed enough money to rent his own apartment, and bring in night boarders. That was his dream.
Round about 2000 Intel set up a lottery to subsidize rent for new teachers in Santa Clara county as the schools system was losing teachers due to the extremely high rents. This was 18 years ago.
They call that hot-bunking
...and it's not just for immigrants anymore. I know a graduate student who's been hot-bunking this semester, and she only gets the bed for eight hours a day. The people who are renting the rooms out are selling three 8-hour shifts a day. At least they get the room to themselves for some cheap sleep. She spends the 16 hours before the room is hers again, studying in the living room, working her part-time mall job, attending classes, and what not. She's made major sacrifices to get to the finish line. Soon she'll have a massive student loan to juggle for the rest of her life. Who negotiated this one way contract for America's non-privileged citizens, anyway? Flunk a drug test or get a DUI and the already-thin dream all goes up in smoke forever. Late bloomers need not apply.
Carry a flame and share the light.
.
Rebirth of the extended family
One of the ways to keep all this bullshit going is to demean and destroy extended families. One of the ways families survived was by staying together as extended families where housing and other resources were shared. But today we have cliches about young people who are living in their parent's basement, as if it were a morally failing of course. I meant an asst. physical therapist who lived with her family. Why? She could not afford her own housing. The culture demeans the structures of an extended family to isolate people both economically and socially.
I have to rely on family because there's nothing left.
I got 2 degrees and have spent 6 years just trying to get a job. Nobody wants to hire unless you already have experience, a bachelors, a long list of certifications, a driver's license or some combo of the above. That's the case here in Flawer'Duh, at least. People with disabilities are invisible to employers in this shit state unless Voc Rehab is willing to pay them for temporary contracts.
I'll admit I considered getting my bachelor's, but I keep asking myself what's the use when employers won't give me the time of day anyway?
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
extended families
In very deed!
Moral failing? NO! The sole failing here is a failure to put the desires of our oligarchical masters over our own genuine needs.
Often times these days, families who stick together live better than those who don't. The oligarchs can't stand that, but it's the way it is -- and always has been, and always will be.
And where families can't or won't do this, friends must do it for one another.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
As Chris Hedges has written
People have to start building parallel structures to avoid being exploited and controlled. And yes, does not need to be just family as you state, but non-family related people doing the same.
The question, though, is,
"why aren't 'we' doing this ourselves?"
We've talked about co-ops on here often. The Oligarchs have just beat 'us' to it.
Still plenty of market share out there, though, as those Start Ups show.
Buy an entire city block in Detroit.
Knock down the old houses, build new 6-unit (704 sq. ft.) buildings. 3-story 50' x 60' footprint.
Two small shops (22' x 30') on the first floor. 4' entranceway.... "rec room" (40' x 18') in back.
three apartments on 2nd floor (32' x22' ea.) / three apartments (32' x 22') on 3rd floor.
Laundry service, other amenities.
Three properties on one side of the block, three on the other. 6 buildings x 6 units = 36 units.
One block at a time.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
The cappie pigs would shut us down even if we did.
Just like they did with Occupy, Bernie Sanders, single payer...hell, co-ops are practically outlawed in Flawer'Duh.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
We must! We must!
We must rely on
strong American individualism!
Or else!
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
why aren't "we" doing this?
The reason "we" aren't doing this, and the reason the Oligarchs have beaten us to it, is one and the same:
Most of us, being 99%ers, have no net worth. We have no dollars to invest in such a plan.
And only dollars, in large quantities, will do, at least to start. The Oligarchs know that. And they have the required dollars where we don't have them, and the Oligarchs know this as well.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides