For $700 a Month, Sleeping Pods Make SF More Affordable, but at What Cost?

This story is part of How We Get By, a KQED series exploring how people are coping with rising costs in the Bay Area and California. Find the full series here.

For some San Franciscans, giving up space and privacy is a worthwhile trade for affordable rent. At Brownstone Shared Housing, residents take that tradeoff to the extreme, paying $700 per month for a bunk bed in a room with 30 other adults in the heart of downtown.

Brownstone is a sleeping pod company. Pods have been around San Francisco for over a decade, but they are having a moment as droves of tech workers flock to one of the world’s most expensive cities, chasing AI fortunes. They have been characterized as everything from dystopian and potentially illegal to an affordable housing solution — and they have proven popular among some young professionals, who say pods offer them an efficient, simple housing option.

Some housing experts are skeptical that sleeping pods can provide anything more than a short-term stopgap for a narrow group of residents navigating the housing crisis in San Francisco.

“It’s kind of silly to think we’re going to need a single-family home at every point of our life, from birth ‘til death,” Brownstone CEO James Stallworth said. “So that’s how I see the pods, more as a utility to fill in the gaps in life, understanding that we’ll always need shelter.”

At his company’s Mint Plaza location, people are sold on the simple offer. For $700, each resident is guaranteed a twin-sized sleeping pod with a privacy curtain, a thermostat and a light, as well as access to a central common area with a small kitchen, workspaces and bathrooms split between roughly 30 roommates. No deposit. No one-year lease. No background checks or proof of income.

The city has long been known for a variety of group living quarters, from hacker houses to hippie communes to residential hotels. But as the cost of living and a tech-fueled economy have drawn young people from all over to San Francisco in more recent years, various models of dormitory-style housing have entered a new iteration.

One of the earliest pod sites to arrive on the scene was PodShare, a co-living company founded in 2012 that has properties in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Other companies attempting something similar, like Haas Living, have come and gone. But Brownstone is the only one looking to dramatically expand into the market with a massive 400-bed super dorm downtown. Stallworth sees the current AI boom as a potential funnel of new residents for whom pod living might be ideal.

“Our goal is still thousands of spots in the city, and potentially hundreds of thousands in the nation,” Stallworth said.

Tech workers embarking on their careers, and especially students, say they’re feeling the squeeze and looking for creative housing options.

Life inside the pods

Haseab Ullah first tucked his tall, broad frame into one of Brownstone’s sleeping pods, located in a former bank building in Mint Plaza, while participating in a tech incubator program in 2023. After bouncing between San Francisco and Toronto, his hometown, he’s spent about two years living in the pods and is still there.

He said he’s stayed because he has an “aversion” to spending the money he earns inefficiently.

“When I first came to San Francisco, I wasn’t ready to stay. I just came for the incubator. I didn’t feel ready, and I didn’t think I had enough money,” he said recently, in a conference room in the back of Brownstone’s main common area, a modern space with exposed brick walls, a projector screen and large cushioned chairs. Elements of the building’s former bank still remain, such as a teller counter that now functions as a row of stations where residents can work remotely.

After seeing Brownstone online, he said he messaged the owner on several different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist to lock in a bed.

This reporter spent several nights and days living the pod life at Mint Plaza and met several residents who told KQED they arrived at Brownstone for reasons similar to Ullah’s. They were moving to the city from out of town, or out of the country, either to start or find a job, and needed a cheap place to get their footing.

For the most part, residents go about their days quietly and IRL interactions are friendly but brief, while the house WhatsApp group buzzes with recommendations for local tech events or occasional complaints about missing food or clothing. From what this reporter observed, the common areas were sparsely populated, with the exception of one or two people clicking away at their laptops.

“Of course, you do have people who only need a month, and then they’re out. And then you have some who are more social and interact with people, and then you have people who just kind of keep to themselves and you never really hear from them,” Stallworth said.

Personal space is hard to come by. The bunk curtains offer some semblance of privacy, and first-come, first-served unlocked storage cubbies give the illusion of security, while a small room in the common space can be reserved for calls or meetings. But other private needs, like changing clothes, take place either in the pod, a restroom or between the bunk beds — a practice that quickly became uncomfortable.

It’s also not an ideal home for someone who enjoys cooking. A small kitchenette offers a sink, a countertop burner, a toaster oven and an air fryer. The fridge and cabinets operate on an honor system and a “use the space you can find” approach. While the lack of rules and boundaries gives people freedom to do as they please, it also means pantry items go missing on occasion.

Stolen leftovers are not unique to Brownstone, of course. But what sets it and other sleeping pods apart from other group living setups like co-ops or hacker houses is not only the extremely tight living quarters but their very solitary, often transient nature.

The average apartment in San Francisco is 716 square feet, about 8% larger than a decade ago, according to a 2025 study from RentCafe, while rent on average in the city is currently at $3,650 per month, according to Zillow. Meanwhile, the pods at Brownstone in Mint Plaza have just enough space to lie down and sit up, but not fully extend both arms.

Pods clearly appeal to some people; they are often near capacity at Mint Plaza with guests moving in and out. But pod life was certainly not for this 32-year-old woman, who is candidly skeptical of AI and missed sleeping with her dog.

And it certainly would not be suitable for all kinds of people, like those with certain disabilities or who want to live with a partner. (One Brownstone resident said he books a hotel when his girlfriend is in town, which is starting to outweigh the savings from staying in a pod.)

“It’s certainly not a permanent home in the sense that you expect to come and stay here for the rest of your natural life. We see it as a utility to satisfy that need at different points in life that currently aren’t served by the existing housing stock,” Stallworth said. “We have had older people use the pods if they are traveling for long-term work assignments or they got their visa, and their family isn’t here yet, so there’s all sorts of different points in life where you might need a pod.”

Rebranding an old concept

Fernando Martí, a housing activist who teaches at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the University of San Francisco, thinks pods are merely a rebranding of a centuries-old concept.

“Big cities have always had residential hotels. That’s where workers first came to the city and needed a place to stay,” Martí said. “I don’t think it’s anything new, other than the branding and the cost.”

Sleeping pods are not a new concept outside of California, but are often geared toward travelers looking for cheap short-term accommodations. Stallworth is trying to cultivate a longer-term clientele, whether it’s a few months or even a few years.

But while pods aren’t set up for seniors on fixed incomes and families with children, who bear the brunt of the housing crisis, according to Carolina Reid, a professor in affordable housing and urban policy at the University of California, Berkeley, single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels continue to serve them.

These short-term micro-housing units with shared bathrooms and kitchen spaces have been a common source of affordable housing for generations of newcomers to San Francisco, and, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report, were used to rent for as low as $100 to $300 per month in 2025 dollars. Today, monthly rent in an SRO in San Francisco costs, on average, around $900, according to the San Francisco Planning Department.

In stark contrast to the pods, SROs in San Francisco’s most densely packed neighborhoods have become de facto permanent housing for the city’s lowest-income residents, as the stock of extremely affordable housing has diminished.

“To me, there’s this question of, is [a sleeping pod] a primary residence?” said Malcolm Yeung, CEO of Chinatown Community Development Center, which manages a portfolio of SROs in San Francisco.

While SROs went from primarily serving as stopgap housing to a permanent place to live, Charlotte Sarfati didn’t think she could do the same in a sleeping pod. She reached her personal limit at nine months after staying in different pod buildings, like Haas Living, before moving to a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland.

“Especially with having a full-time job, it starts kind of getting to you just being around people and wanting privacy,” the nurse-turned-tech worker said. “Once you feel the drain of working a 9-to-5, it became a little too much for me.”

Riding the AI wave

With its minimalistic AirSpace aesthetic, Brownstone is actively catering to Safrati’s demographic: residents in their 20s to early 40s, with many current residents telling KQED they work in tech.

At the 400-pod megadorm that Brownstone is trying to launch, the same twin-sized pods would go for $1,200 per month, about $500 more than the Mint Plaza location. Stallworth said that’s simply a reflection of the market, which has seen rents go up this year in San Francisco.

“They’re making a lot more money per square foot than a studio would be,” Martí said. “And that’s always been the case, right? Developers make more money on studios than they do on two-bedrooms because if you can cram more little studios, you can earn a lot more.”

In other words, cramming more people into smaller spaces is a simple way to squeeze money out of more renters. The market for sleeping pods, currently valued at around $2.7 billion in 2026, is growing globally, according to Business Research Insights.

House prices have nearly tripled in San Francisco in the recovery following the Great Recession, according to Reid. As a result, households that are cost burdened have gone from those making under $50,000 per year to now close to $100,000.

“This is really making San Francisco a place that only the extremely rich can afford,” Reid said. “It means affordability pressures are moving up the income ladder, just because of the lack of both rental and affordable home ownership opportunities.”

Stallworth, 34, got the idea for Brownstone while he was a student at Stanford University, facing his own housing struggles in the 2010s.

“I was crashing on couches and trying to make it work, but it was extremely difficult,” he said.

Stallworth ended up living for free in the basement of a hacker house stacked with Ikea bunk beds in exchange for helping run the booking system. He met his co-founder, Christina Lennox, while working as an auditor for the state. She had experience as a landlord, and the two wanted to create an alternative to what they saw on the housing market.

“Housing is a barrier to opportunities,” Stallworth said. “In Silicon Valley, we like to pretend that it’s a meritocracy, but access to housing is mostly determined by money.”

Business hasn’t all been smooth, and the company’s relationship with the city has been rocky.

Last year, Brownstone was hit with an eviction notice after landlords of the Mint Plaza location said the startup failed to pay rent and allegedly owed more than $150,000. The case was later dismissed, and the company said it would pivot to a franchise model.

And, Brownstone is not officially approved to operate the 30-pod building in Mint Plaza, according to Dan Sider, chief of staff for the San Francisco Planning Department.

It’s now attempting to move forward with its 400-pod facility along mid-Market. Video renderings show rows of dozens of rectangular bunk beds in a cavernous office-like space. Sider said no permits have been sought or granted for the proposed new space, which has already faced criticism for serving more as a warehouse than housing and has raised questions about how such a site could safely and legally house so many people under one roof.

Still, Sider said the city is open to working with Brownstone on the project.

“At the end of the day, Brownstone is building new places for people to live. We support that wholeheartedly. Especially so in these cases because their projects would activate underused buildings,” Sider said. “It’s also worth noting that, regarding their Mid-Market proposal, we’ve had encouraging preliminary conversations with Brownstone that suggest a departure from the ‘ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ approach they used at Mint Plaza.”

New legislation that took effect last year in San Francisco waived impact fees for residential adaptive reuse projects like Brownstone’s buildings, meaning it does not have to contribute funding to the city’s overall affordable housing goals.

Whether Brownstone can scale up remains to be seen. One day in the Mint Plaza location, Stallworth himself was taking out trash.

Another key question: Is there enough of a market for the pods, especially at a steeper price, to sustain an enterprise like Brownstone long term? While the swelling AI industry has drawn workers to San Francisco, the current bubble could just as quickly pop.

“The housing crisis is so severe that we need to be experimenting with lots of different models,” Reid said. “But I’m not sure that it is a long-term solution to San Francisco’s housing crisis, just because my hunch is that nobody wants to stay in a pod permanently.”

For residents like Ullah, who spends much of his time working on the various tech projects he has brewing, saving money is worth giving up some space. He’s not actively looking to move right now, as rents have only gone up in San Francisco in recent months. But in theory, he said, he’d take a better option if something came along.

“Of course, if there was a better option, if the housing situation in San Francisco was better, I would pick that option,” he said. “But I thought about it like, will I compromise on my housing right now, temporarily, in order to be successful in the future? Absolutely.”