Hello everyone! I am Jon Dishotsky, the CEO and co-founder of Starcity. I would be happy to answer any questions directly about what we're working on.
Dorm living for professionals comes to SF
121–125 of 125 posts
Re: Dorm living for professionals comes to SF
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Middle class shouldn't be defined by what sounds like a lot of money. It should be defined by what sort of spending power you have in the area where you actually live.
Perhaps it shouldn't be defined at all, we can see here everybody has a different definition depending on the point they are trying to make.
Great point. I'm using it to compare the standard of living in one area against another. But there are lots of other valid questions to ask, like what constitutes the middle band of wealth in the microcosm that is the Bay Area.
Re: Dorm living for professionals comes to SF
#123Why can't the vast majority of these people work remotely yet? For a group of people who often praise the concept of meritocracy, regionally locking down your employee pool seems insane.
Most of the members of Starcity are local employees that work in service professions. We have nurses, teachers, flight attendants, baristas, writers, bartenders and many of these trades require proximity to work so they can't work remote. Unfortunately the cost of an average studio in San Francisco is $3,000 a month and forget about buying a house where the average price is around $1.3M. For median income earners making between $40-90k a year, the options are really bad. Many of them are forced to live with 4 people in a three bedroom, pay 50-60% of their income in rent or commute 2 hours. Those are bad options, so we set out to build something that allows more people to live comfortably.
Re: Dorm living for professionals comes to SF
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really appreciate your perspective. I'm still learning about all of this. My understanding is that most often these setups were started in relatively poor countries that didn't have enough housing to start with. That is not the case in the US where many houses remain vacant in the face of homelessness so that speculators can speculate. In China, they are building entire ghost cities and then filling them as fast as…
The problem in both cases is urbanization. Soviet central planners explicitly set out to industrialize their agrarian society; market forces are moving America's center of gravity from the Midwestern factory to the coastal R&D office. As populations move (or are ordered to move) to follow these changes, it creates blight and abandonment in the places they leave and a housing crunch in the places they head to. The emp…
What you say makes a lot of sense. My understanding of why people moved out of the urban core in the first place was "white flight". People are moving back now, and the people living in the cities, typically the wealthier inhabitants, resist building any tall residential buildings, though they are happy to build upscale homes and businesses that kick out the poor.
Re: Dorm living for professionals comes to SF
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only somewhat true. It will smooth out living standards as it crushes working people down by exploiting the lowest wages anywhere in the globe. Simultaneously, the wealthy bourgeoisie will become richer and richer until the internal contradiction in capitalism, that profits come from consumers that must work for wages, tears the system asunder. The system that follows will likely be fascism, the seamless merge…
Differences are sure evening out in Venezuela. Good thing we have options other than "facism" and the ultimately indistinguishable "socialism", which is called "fascism" once it gets poor enough.
Fwiw, any society that becomes suddenly poor will not look very good. My understanding is that Venezuela invested too much in oil and didn't diversify the economy. When oil crashed, it took everything with it. This is the resource curse at work. I'm skeptical that other economic systems would have not been tempted to make a similar choice.
That said, I am not a Venezuela expert.