Let’s fix the rents.

It really is tough to rent in San Francisco. If you want to live near the city, rent starts at about $3,000 per month. If you have a job downtown that you need to be at every day, but can only afford up to $2,500 each month in rent, what are your options?

• Pay it, stay inside, eat ramen.
• Live in South Bay, commute every day.
• Get a higher paying job.
• Get two jobs.
• Share a two-bedroom place.

The sharing option brings the cost down to about 2/3 of the cost of living alone, but still usually comes out to be near $2,500+ for a nice enough place.

We’re in the middle of a housing crisis, and San Francisco’s response is to build luxury apartments as fast as it can. But the vast majority of working people can’t afford to live in them. Those pools and rooftop sky lounges are expensive. But there are enough people who can afford $4,000+ each month on rent, so they keep building them.

What is the city to do? Just drive out the middle class? Apply a tax to tech companies to stifle high salaries?

The city and housing developers aren’t going to fix the problem any time soon. So, why don’t we do something about it ourselves? Let’s take back our San Francisco; the San Francisco where we can afford a nice place to live while working in normal jobs like customer service, retail, support and hospitality.

Our plan for fixing the housing crisis is a crazy one, but bear with us on this: we’re taking the housing that is currently being built — luxury apartments that cost $3,500-$4,600/month to rent— and repurposing them so that everyone can afford them.

We take ordinary room dividers:

And divide the rooms into more rooms.

Crazy concept, I know.

That way, your $4,600/month luxury apartment becomes $1,200/month per person. Quite affordable. We’re converting luxury apartments one at a time, so that people who can’t afford $3,000/month have a great place to stay.

So come join us! We’re real people with real jobs, and best of all: we’re part of a growing community of people who aren’t throwing away money away to landlords in rent!

Tom