Living in San Francisco is expensive, that’s pretty much common knowledge at this point, but one local resident is going to extreme, bordering on comical, measures to afford life in the Bay Area.
The Washington Post introduces us to Peter Berkowitz, who has taken tiny house living to a whole new, and even smaller, level.
Berkowitz apparently couldn’t find any affordable housing options after he moved out to San Francisco, so he took it on himself to build a home of his own. But his home is barely more than a box. Actually, it is a box.
Berkowitz now lives inside Harry Potter-esque cupboard that rests in a friend’s living room.
The Washington Post report has more details on Berkowitz’s teeny tiny home:
This makeshift bedroom, which its owner prefers to call a pod, is no larger than a wide bookshelf and inconspicuously stationed at one corner of an apartment living room in the Sunset District neighborhood. Its exterior resembles a large crate, while its inside houses a twin bed, a fold-up desk and some LEDs.
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.”
It cost Berkowitz roughly $1,300 to build his pod and he pays his “roommates” $400 a month to park his pod in their living room.
Again from the Washington Post:
“For Berkowitz, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the box isn’t so much a sign of desperation as it is a creative solution. He isn’t in “dire straits,” and his decision wasn’t “fueled by poverty.”
“It seems silly, and people have this dystopian take on it, like, ‘Is this what it’s come to?'” he said. “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.”
