People living in storage units in order to avoid paying Boston rents | Hacker News Reader

People living in storage units in order to avoid paying Boston rents

bostonherald.com

42 pointsilamont50 comments

Just another real symptom of a supposedly booming economy.

I did this myself for 3 months.

Saved about $4k doing so.

You start to appreciate simpler things and realize how cluttered your life was before

Did you do it out of choice or necessity? This sounds so out of touch. Most of these people aren't doing it as an experiment to bolster their savings and achieve some kind of minimalist zen, they're doing it because real affordable housing is out of reach.

Like I'd love to imagine that Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl are somewhere in Boston, but our current cyberpunk reality is mostly very sad.

Why does it matter why he did it? It's a more efficient alternative. If affordable housing is out of reach, adapt your housing. Live somewhere else, or find a way to live where you want more cheaply - like living in a storage space.

This is, again, out of touch with the actualities of poverty. How does someone with no money "live somewhere else?" When someone who is impoverished is evicted, they take their children on a trip to a shelter and go to work the next day for 12 hours physical labor, skipping a few meals to feed their children as needed.

Take a bus. Buses are cheap. Nobody gets evicted without warning. You have time to prepare.

I do not know why you insist down this line of thinking when I am talking about _impoverished_ people. If someone is skipping meals to feed their child, what funds are they using for the bus? And what are they going to do when they arrive at some magical "cheaper COL" and they have no job?

I implore you to go volunteer at your local homeless shelter. After talking with several perfectly sane and working homeless individuals you will realize some people really have no money leftover to better their plight. They really are trapped.

If you don't feel like actually meeting people whose life and privilege is drastically different than yours, at least read Matthew Desmond's Evicted to round out your knowledge on the America in which you live.

I haven't done those things, and i'm not going to any time soon. However, you apparently have, and i'm more than happy to listen to what you have to say on the matter.

I don't really buy the idea that someone who is employed can't scrape together a $19 bus fare. Buying the bare amount of food and water necessary to live can be done for $1-2/day, even in a developed country. If you're employed in any sort of regular way, you're making more than that, so I don't really understand the argument that these people are financially incapable of saving up that much money.

That being said, i'm more than happy to be wrong if there's some aspect of the issue that I don't understand.

You seem to be unaware of the multitude of areas where there is no affordable housing for all sorts of local reasons.

I've been homeless before. When your income can't make basic rent+utilities+everything else, there's no good alternative. Either you're squatting in illegal conditions, truly homeless and migrant, or somehow be the 1% that get a complete change of life circumstances and get more money coming in. I enlisted based off by prior job history. Not everybody can do something that drastic.

And no, not more efficient. Simpler, maybe, cause no toys or excess possessions, but everything costs more until you can afford to stock up on basics, and get transportation cheaper then buses and taxis, etc etc etc.

All around, a hard problem, stepping up out of that economics into even "I have a few bucks in my pocket left over" economics.

I'm aware that some areas have very little to no affordable housing. But i'm also aware that if you move to a city 30 miles or so outside of those areas, housing gets affordable again. Can't afford SF? Go to Fresno. There's jobs, housing, and bus tickets are less than $20.

I'm totally willing and interested to listen to arguments that this sort of poverty is a real trap and in some cases i'm sure that it is. But in the argument you make, you yourself saw an exit route (enlistment) and you took it. That sort of resourcefulness is exactly what seems to be missing from most of the arguments that I see about people being trapped.

> I'm aware that some areas have very little to no affordable housing. But i'm also aware that if you move to a city 30 miles or so outside of those areas, housing gets affordable again. Can't afford SF? Go to Fresno.

That's...a lot more than 30 miles.

You're absolutely correct. Is there some sense in which that matters?

Current zoning laws prohibit a commercial solution, which is a warehouse style dorm of 100sf 'apartments' for minimal cost.

It's weird you see this as a good thing. Poor people aren't doing this to de-clutter, they're doing it because they have to.

Developing an appreciation/perspective due to adversity is mostly unavoidable. It can be good, or bad. Learning that you don't need so much stuff is probably good; becoming a hoarder because you developed a fear of losing your possessions is bad.

A recovering economy. By most measures, it's healthier than it has been for years.

Let's hope it keeps improving.

By the time it's done "improving" I will be making 150k a year and still won't be able to afford a house or to have children. Great! At some point we're going to have to admit that everything is simply getting wildly more expensive than our wages are keeping up...and for whose benefit? Certainly not yours or mine.

God bless people who haven't been as fortunate as you or myself, for in addition to not affording these things they find themselves in shipping containers, or worse.

Interesting that the article mentions why people would do this (much, much cheaper) but avoids talking about any possible solutions to rising rent costs in urban areas.

That's because the city has no solutions.

So far they've only tried telling the universities to build more dorms and give up some of the housing they have.

I mean, there's plenty of new apartment buildings going up around Boston, but they're all luxury.

Live in the van hacking is on the rise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG4kJrhjzaY

Eh, there's plenty of videos on living inside storage units: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=living%20in%20s...

Most affordable housing today was once the luxury housing of the past. Since WWII we went from 1 billion people to over 7 and no one could plan for that. The housing crisis is a population crisis.

It's stronger than that. People moving into luxury housing are generally moving from mainstream housing, freeing up capacity downstream.

I see your point. However I don't agree that nobody could plan for the increase in population. They can absolutely plan for that. The failure is in planning modes of housing that nobody in the city wants(single-family detached housing with a 45 minute commute by car), and in blocking the increasing densification of neighborhoods in desirable areas. Because the density and housing type of a district is controlled by government, the zoning lags behind how people actually want to live. That's the source of the housing crisis.

It's shameful that our local governments continue to allow people to block the construction of housing when it's clear how much the NIMBYs contribute to the homelessness and impoverishment of their neighbors.

You have to remember that in the time when suburbs were being created, most people in the city did want to escape it. The white flight was a huge change. And once the whites left cities, cities drove out poor people and put them into Projects. For a while later, in the last century, downtowns were pretty much deserts with the wealthy living in pent houses and everyone else either suburbs or the streets. It is only in the last couple of decades that cities have become able to attract the grand-kids of the suburb generations back to the cities. Largely because that is where profitable work is located. It is a feedback loop.

Also humans don't work well on the larger scale. Nimbys exist because that is the scale human people can operate at. A million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. Maybe IBM could use Watson to figure out the housing crisis. A few less variables there to work with than cancer.

There is a belief, with a number of associated caveats, that "Today's luxury apartment's are tomorrow's affordable housing" [1]. They are one piece of the puzzle, and I don't think it's helpful to block their construction. That said, they aren't the only thing that's necessary for affordable and equitable housing, but I've become less hostile towards the luxury condo/shopping complex projects near me, even if I can neither afford them nor have much interest in living in one.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/todays-luxury...

luxury units can create affordability immediately.

if 100 thousand luxury units suddenly came online at a cost of 1.5M each

Here are a few possible outcomes: 1) 100K people can afford them and decide to move from their current homes into the luxury homes. Homes that were 1.5m get downward pressure. As every level moves up it puts downward pricing pressure on the level below. Luxury housing will impact entry level housing if enough is built.

2) 100K people choose to not buy the new luxury housing a) the owners go bankrupt and the price of the luxury housing goes down. Then see 1) b) the owners lower the price of the new luxury housing. then see 1

The point is that any inventory puts downward pricing pressure on existing inventory.

You generally don't see the effect so obviously because the new supply of luxury housing rarely keeps up with demand in hot markets. You can see the impact in flat markets where new housing dries up demand for existing houses such that agents recommend you not buy existing homes in areas that are being actively developed.

I wish SF would listen to this way of thinking. I'm no urban development expert, but this seems pretty cut and dry to me. Unfortunately I've seen it being coupled with "trickle down economics"

Personally I would love to move into a more luxury (some call cookie cutter) apartment which would free up my existing dwelling and potentially lower housing costs.

Don't forget 3) Foreign oligarch parks questionable money in the entire building and then leaves it unoccuped for a decade in the hopes that he could sell it to another foreign investor at double the price

I hear this a lot in Brooklyn. First, the reality is these units aren't very big (in fact, they are often smaller than cheaper units in Brownstones), so they're not significantly less efficient than "non-luxury" housing. Second, it's not like if the luxury buildings didn't exist the people who live there would just pack up and leave New York. Instead they'd just be moving into that renovated postwar that a lower-income person might have been able to afford.

Unfortunately the belief is false, since it is easily demonstrated that an old luxury building has such high HOA fees to account for the increased needs in maintenance and upkeep that it is anything but affordable.

Inevitably the costs for the building's aging infrastructure upkeep will be pushed on its residents, so the costs going forward (aka the esoteric 'tomorrow') are unlikely to down if at all.

I have actually seriously considered doing this in Belgium, instead of working ~4 months a year, I would only have to work ~1 month a year...

You only have to work 4 months a year in Belgium?

Sure, I've even worked ~3 months a year before, but that was very cheap, and no occasional electronics or whatever to keep myself motivated (oscilloscope etc)

I keep my food and fun expenses very low, and rent a flat with a friend, so its half as much as renting a flat on my own. Still rent and associated living expenses is about 2/3 of my expenses.

That's awesome. Jealous. Have a drink for us 60 hour a week people in America.

And i have a russian roomate, too.

I hear the scene's better in LA...

I would have expected this to be illegal! Can you really get away with it? It sounds like an easy way to handle crashing after a night out downtown without having to look for a cab/DD.

It is illegal, the headline is "Officials: People living illegally in rented spaces". Storage spaces are private, nobody is going to inspect it without good cause, so you can get away with it for a while by being discreet.

Yep, I know of several people who have done it when down on their luck. Beats sleeping under a bridge.

It violates the terms of all self-storage contracts.

But you are technically storing your "self". The product is literally called "Self storage"!

I moved back to Cambridge this spring after over a decade mostly in NYC. It was surprising to see that while cheaper it wasn't too much cheaper.

On the other hand, the job market here seems robust and I hear fewer tales of appalling living conditions and insane 2+ hour commutes like in NYC and California.

This is nothing new. People living on the street will often do this in Atlanta in order to have a safer place to live. Storage facilities do the best they can to keep people from doing it. - source. Have purchased foreclosed storage units off and on for 15+ years.

At that you would just buy a cheap rv and park it in south boston

Because then instead of some busybody having to call the cops to come harass you for living somewhere that isn't a house or apartment (that's a low bar, we take pride in being busybodies here in MA) like happened in the article they'll take the initiative and do it on their own because it's a vehicle parked somewhere and will be subject to far more scrutiny. Getting your house ticketed and towed because some concerned mother didn't like how it looked or some cop thought it looked suspicious is a massive PITA. It's kind of hard to ticket and tow a storage locker.

About the only way you could make it work would be to toss all the appliances from a rotted out camper in a UHaul van, park at bog box stores during the day and park at UHaul locations overnight and even then you'd always be looking for somewhere new. You would have to put a massive effort in to be invisible if you don't want problems.

You can get away with living in a camper or box truck in other cities in MA but if you do it east of I-495 it's gonna be an uphill battle.

It's not legal to park an RV for any reasonable period on most curbs.

Had a chat with someone who'd parked an RV next to my house (SF Bay) for a week. He said he was down on his luck (claimed to previous live in one of the nearby houses but got booted because his mom had to sell and he couldn't afford rent) and insisted it was his right.

I reminded him of the law (72hrs max for an RV in my neighborhood), and that I wouldn't take action if he would move around a bit. Next day he was gone.

I sympathize with folks in this situation but it's pretty weird having someone living in a vehicle that looks into your living room window from the sidewalk - esp if you have kids.

> 72hrs max for an RV in my neighborhood

You can rely on this being the longest possible time limit, for any vehicle, not just RVs, on any public street/highway anywhere in California.

At $100 a month, there is little up-front cost to a storage unit. I can't imagine a cheap RV would go for $100.

Wasn't that something that happened in Snow Crash?

Yes it was.

Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20 by 30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units and - this is a mark of distinction separating it from the neighboring units - a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times like this, when the sun is setting over LAX. But there are worse places to live… slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets.

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