Rent in San Francisco is so dumb expensive that a man is willfully living in a tiny box in a friend’s home for $400 a month.
Peter Berkowitz, 25, refers to his living space as a “pod” and, according to The Washington Post (which notes that the average rent for a one-bedroom in San Fran has climbed to $3,670), the box is “no larger than a wide bookshelf and inconspicuously stationed at one corner of an apartment living room in the Sunset District neighborhood.”
Inside the pod, where the box man lives, there’s a twin bed, a desk and, most important, LED lights.
At 8 feet long and 4.5 feet tall, the wooden box requires Peter Berkowitz to duck to get inside, but he assured The Post in a phone interview Monday night that his new home is “honestly very comfortable.”
Word. “I really don’t feel like I’ve taken a hit in terms of my quality of life,” says Berkowitz, a native New Yorker. “I don’t really notice I live in the pod anymore.”
Berkowitz moved into the box two weeks ago, after an attempt to find affordable housing in the city proved futile. Fortunately, he had “very generous” friends who allowed him set up “this contraption” in their living room.
The box sits in an apartment where the roommates living in conventional bedrooms pay around $1000 for rent. For $400, Berkowitz lives in his pod and has full access to the amenities. Constructing the pod cost $1,300.
It’s no big deal. “It seems silly, and people have this dystopian take on it, like ‘Is this what it’s come to?’” says Berkowitz. “But I firmly believe that it makes a lot of sense. There should be some kind of middle ground between having a bedroom and sleeping on a couch.”
Just at that moment, an alien who’d been observing Peter on a glass-orb-shaped TV in his large spaceship shook his head, stood up, walked over to his window, absorbed the vast universe before his eyes and whispered, “Fools…”
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