‘I survived living in Silicon Valley’s own Animal House’
Ican pinpoint the moment I decided to leave the Tribe. Returning from a morning run, I passed three paramedics strapping an ex-housemate writhing and wailing on to a stretcher and into an ambulance that was parked by the door. Passers-by barely batted an eyelid. In San Francisco’s grotty Soma neighbourhood, witnessing psychotic breakdowns in a city where drug use and untreated mental health is endemic has become the norm.
The Tribe is a hacker house that I called home for eight months. Tribe is a co-living company that describes itself as an “instant social network”. It charges up to $2,000 (£1,540) for a room, sharing 10 bathrooms. Four of these are what can only be described as lavatory cupboards, comprising of a toilet roll and an antibacterial pump affixed to the wall.
Occupants share a kitchen, with three ovens and four sinks, utensils, cinema room, office space and a living room, which regularly hosts concerts, goal setting and consensual touching workshops, dubbed cuddle puddles.
Tribe is a glorified sub-letting “venture” that locals have accused of deepening the divide in a city that is at bursting point thanks to the influx of workers taking the bus down to Apple, Google, Twitter, Netflix and Facebook campuses an hour south in Silicon Valley. Last year, Facebook’s median salary was $240,430. Housing demand, coupled with San Francisco’s tiny housing stock, has made it the most expensive city to live in the US, with the average one-bed in the city going for $3,490 a month.
Developers Starcity have built several “dorm rooms” for the middle classes. In July a company called Podshare said it had sold out of its $1,200 bed pods in the city. It has become increasingly normal for professionals in their 30s to bunker down in army-style barracks.
For some, living in the house is a necessary career move in a city built on networking. Derek Pankaew, 32, was “digital nomading” before moving in nine months ago, working from his laptop and smartphone while travelling across Columbia, Thailand, Bulgaria and Bali. He now operates his artificial intelligence gym start-up that he founded from the house. It was during an artificial intelligence meet-up at the house that he secured $100,000 from an investor who had dropped by. Tribe’s Folsom Street location (it has a sister house that houses 20 nearby) is flanked by some of the most impoverished streets in the city. There are portable shower vans for the homeless and a clean-up team to remove human waste before the housed take a morning jaunt to work.
Yet residents become numb to the poverty. There have been numerous suggestions that the move towards dormitory room style living is a reaction to high rents. But Tribe’s popularity is largely down to its convenience, which millennials who arrive in the city, with the intention of working for a few years before moving on, place over privacy.
Finding a house share in San Francisco is like dating. Often, star signs are used to determine whether someone is a good fit. In contrast, Tribe’s Facebook adverts, promising ready-made friendship groups, no bills and cleaners for communal spaces were alluring. All that was needed was a quick web application and a five minute phone interview to be accepted.
Number 1040 was previously a low income hotel that offered subsidised rent of around $600 for San Francisco’s poorest. In 2013, the year that followed Facebook’s debut on the public market and when Google’s motto was still “don’t be evil”, Danny Haber, then 26 and his Google engineer friend Alan Gutman wanted to tap into the influx of young, wealthy tech “bros” who were willing to pay $1,500 to share. The house had been gutted in a fire in 2011, displacing the residents. No developer was incentivised to renovate because its previous tenants were, by law, to be offered first refusal on the rooms or units. Haber took on the lease and brought in developers despite the legal issues. He advertised it to high income tech workers with the promise of parties, networking with industry elites and a ready made “community”.
Six former tenants sued, claiming Haber had come to their temporary homes and offered them $500 in cash to waive their right to move back in.
Haber and Gutman later settled out of court. Following local outrage and articles condemning his actions, Haber later rebranded the house as Tribe, meaning many of the tenants know nothing of the building’s history.
Ryan Hunter, 26, a credit card fraud analyst, needed to find somewhere quickly after returning to the city after a break hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. “It is like a starter pack for friendship,” Hunter says. “I was looking for a community to move into, as opposed to a shared house.”
Like Hunter, most say they moved to Tribe because it was easy. This reflects the work culture created by technology companies that like to attract top graduates straight from universities. Three meals a day are served at work plus snacks, buses ferry to and from home and casual clothes the preferred fashion. But outsourcing home life is symbolic of the convenience economy that has consumed Silicon Valley and is fast consuming the rest of the world.
Tribe, which is no longer run by Haber (but he remains the lead tenant on the company’s leases) recently shut six co-living houses in New York. Haber plans to open eight new houses in Oakland, next to San Francisco.
“We learned that co-living is not the answer to the housing crisis,” he says. “You can make your arguments for or against however I think what we are doing with owow now, which is trying to drop development costs and target people living in neighbourhoods and being priced out.
“I understand where people are coming from [in response to criticism about Tribe] and I’m saying it is all true. It is fleeting. We are going to go after the real problem, which is development and construction cost and speed.”
Further afield, in London, similar co-living spots are popping up including The Collective and Urbanshared. Whether you agree with it or not, co-living is here to stay.