I pay some of the cheapest rent in San Francisco: $400 a month. That doesn’t get me a nice bedroom, or a window with a beautiful view. If I could have those features for the same price, I would definitely opt for that. But I don’t have any idea how to get that. Instead I live in what I call a pod. You might call it a box.



When you live in a city with a housing crisis, like I do, you have to be creative about how to reduce the rent. A solution I came up with for myself was building (with the help of designer Stan Kim, woodworker Jeff Goodwin and others) a pod to sleep out of in my friend’s living room.



This probably sounds grim and makes me appear to be a pitiable character. As the blog the SFist kindly put it: “[I’m not] intending to get laid anytime soon … quiet masturbation will of course need to be very, very quiet”. While I’m glad my sex life (or lack thereof) and masturbation habits have finally made it into the public discourse, I don’t think I’m a martyr.

I love the pod we’ve built. As I see it, I have all the essentials and then some; privacy, a comfortable place to work due to a fold down desk, perfect light for reading and a tastefully calm place to be in.



I’m by no means alone in coming up with these kinds of fixes. I think container apartments and tiny homes are both examples of ways of living, that while not conforming to standard notions of what a proper dwelling should be, still provide homes that its residents are happy to take in place of the traditional alternatives.



Most importantly, these are improvements that individuals can largely accomplish unilaterally and don’t require difficult, coordinated, large-scale government action – of which the successful type can often seem elusive.



Economic challenges such as these seem puzzling to the layman. Computers have become vastly better and cheaper with time. Yet for other products, such as housing, the same process doesn’t seem to occur. In San Francisco and the larger bay area, housing is not becoming both radically better and cheaper. Rather, its quality appears to have stagnated and its price has skyrocketed. People are paying far more for far less.



Many smart, well-intentioned people take very different and opposing sides on what needs to be done. Is the answer in better zoning laws or just less of them? More subsidized housing, rent control or eviction control? Personally, I tend to be convinced that the more deregulatory efforts would be on average a better route to take, but I could certainly be wrong. I’m an illustrator, not an economist, and the world is more complex and nuanced than is my grasp of it.

Still, I hope people and governments can both realize the potential upside of enabling these fixes – they are quick, cheap and easy ways to improve many people’s lives. Of course, I’m not saying it’s ideal. That’s a farther away place than I know how to get to.