The “sleeping pods” are stacked one on top of each other, about the size of a twin bed with four feet of headroom. Each one features basic creature comforts such as power outlets, a storage shelf, and temperature controls.
That’s the pitch from Brownstone Shared Living, a relatively new San Francisco start-up that is trying to solve the city’s ballooning housing crisis with an unusual form of habitation.
For $700 per month, Brownstone’s 20-odd residents get their own pod plus shared living areas, kitchens, and workspaces. It’s in the heart of downtown San Francisco, where monthly rents typically exceed $1,500, even for a studio, and where the runaway AI boom is driving living costs ever higher.
Now, after a parade of regulatory and legal problems that seemingly threatened to sink the whole project, Brownstone is expanding — into a newly-bought, long-vacant office building where it plans to build roughly 400 sleeping pods.
“We see demand for about ten thousand pods in downtown San Francisco… [and] potentially hundreds of thousands throughout the United States,” co-founder and CEO James Stallworth told The Independent. “At that scale, we will have revenue that supports a [company] valuation in the billions. Our goal is to grow to the size of the problem that we’re trying to solve.”
Admittedly, not everyone shares his vision. “I always thought the consolation to being in hell would be that you didn’t have to pay rent,” wrote one Facebook commenter on a recent news story about the company.
“F*** this into the sun,” replied a Reddit user, to a similar story two years ago.
Local news site, 48 Hills, called the pods “creepy” and “dystopian”, arguing that the entire concept might be illegal under city law. A 2022 article called them “expensive prison cells”. Online commenters compared the pods to coffins, or dark sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Sorry to Bother You.
Stallworth, a soft-spoken but voluble 33-year-old former government worker, is puzzled by these reactions. He says Brownstone’s mission is to solve San Francisco’s years-long housing crisis, and “eliminate housing as a barrier to opportunity.”
“There’s thousands of people living in their cars. I think that’s dystopian,” Stallworth says. “I think a pod, living inside a building with showers and other people, is a lot safer, more sanitary, and more human.”
And for all the kerfuffle, residents who spoke to The Independent hardly saw themselves as drones in some dehumanizing nightmare dormitory.
“It’s good enough,” says Sasha, a young AI entrepreneur from Eastern Europe, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. “In America we’ve got 2m people working in the military, and 1m of them are sleeping in similar conditions… It’s not a big deal. It’s just a bed.”
So what’s it like to live out of a sleeping pod? And could this really be the future of cheap housing?
‘If you’re looking for intimacy, it’s not right for you’
Brownstone has its origins in Stallworth’s years at Stanford University, where he was almost forced to drop out because he couldn’t afford housing.
Originally from San Bernardino, California, and lacking generational wealth, Stallworth found shelter in a Palo Alto ‘hacker house’ stuffed with cheap bunk beds, and maintained their computer systems in lieu of rent.
“There was no privacy, no comfort, but people still wanted to live there. The monthly price was actually $1,000 — and this was back in 2017,” Stallworth observes. He felt the same idea could be done better, with more community and humanity.
At the California state auditor’s office he clicked with Christina Lennox, who had also faced housing struggles and at one point came close to homelessness. By 2020, the pair were so “jaded” with authorities’ failure to fix the crisis that they quit and founded Brownstone.
This isn’t the first time sleeping pods have made headlines. Still, Brownstone’s real estate deal (backed by undisclosed investors) puts it at the heart of an ongoing debate about how to repurpose San Francisco’s many vacant office buildings.
Brownstone’s first 14 pods were inside an ordinary house in Palo Alto, hosting tenants between 2021 and 2024. Another house in Bakersfield had eight pods. In 2023, the company — which is still very small, with only three full-time employees — leased an old bank at 12 Mint Plaza and installed 30 pods.
Banish those thoughts of human beings confined like chickens in a battery farm. Brownstone tenants may sleep in pods — but they live in a large three-story building with lounges, workspaces, storage areas, bathrooms, and basic kitchen facilities (no proper stoves, though Stallworth says that will change in future).
No pets are allowed, and tenants are interviewed and vetted by Brownstone before admission.
“There’s positives and negatives,” says Sasha, who often works from home and sometimes yearns for a private office. Having so many people around makes it easy to get distracted.
For Ahmad Naggayev, a 35-year-old graduate student who lived at Brownstone for two spells totaling seven months, the main problem was lack of sunlight in the pod, which made it harder to get up in the mornings. “I could see myself doing this for years, but not full time,” he says.
One former tenant at the Palo Alto house, who asked to be anonymous, remembers a roommate over 6′ tall who would regularly wake up and bump his head on the pod until he got used to it.
“If you are on the tall side, [the pods] are a bit tough,” the person said. “And if you’re looking for intimacy, it’s not the right time for that.”
Ventilation, they added, was sometimes an issue.
But all three tenants emphasized the strong sense of communal life and camaraderie, praising the eclectic range of people. Indeed, the community surrounding the sleeping pods seemed much more important for these residents than the size of the bedrooms.
“[There’s] a lot of really smart people, or just interesting people — the people that are not conforming. It’s very rare to find such people,” says Sasha.
Sasha’s neighbors have ranged from investors managing large amounts of money while scrimping on their own expenses through fellow start-up founders to “regular workers with low-skilled jobs”.
Naggayev likewise says: “Overall, my experience was great. I made a few amazing friends and learned about several tech events I would not have discovered otherwise… innovative people deserve space in their minds to focus on building, rather than dealing with the Bay Area’s extreme rent burden.”
In Palo Alto, too, tenants became very close, supporting each other through major life events and going on road trips together. Some began dating, the former resident said, and “ended up almost getting married.”
Both Stallworth and Lennox have themselves spent substantial time living in Brownstone properties. The average length of tenure is around six months, Stallworth says, with some staying as long as two years.
He recounts the story of one resident, an older man who was dying of cancer, who moved into Brownstone temporarily but liked it so much that he gave up his coveted place on San Francisco’s free housing waiting list. He lived his final months at 12 Mint Plaza.
A feud with the city — and a mail-hoarding tenant
Putting aside whether sleeping pods are good in principle, there is the fact that at every stage of its expansion, Brownstone has somehow gotten into regulatory trouble.
In Palo Alto, the company was forced to correct several building code violations. In San Francisco, it converted 12 Mint Plaza to residential use without the necessary permits first.
“Technically you’re supposed to have the permit before you have people live in the place,” admits Stallworth. “That’s something we learned in the process.”
The city ultimately approved this illegal conversion, only to revoke it after deciding the pods were too small to meet its “affordable housing” criteria and demanding $300,000 in offset fees.
Both sides accused each other of stonewalling and misrepresenting. But in the end, the city council slashed regulations to incentivize the conversion of empty offices, allowing Brownstone to continue.
“The problem, I feel, with James is that he does really well when he is getting a constant flow of money, but when he gets short of money, he has a lot of issues,” says the former Palo Alto resident.
They recall sometimes struggling to get Brownstone to do maintenance, at one point forcing tenants to “literally hack into” the heating system to stay warm.
Speaking to The Independent, Stallworth acknowledged those troubles, saying they were “part of the difficulty of being a lean startup” that was still experimenting with its business plan and had “underestimated” some of the complexities.
As for Brownstone’s legal woes, the founder insists that none were the result of deliberate lawbreaking. “We’re not Uber!” he says. “We believe in following the laws, and we do.”
The real culprit, he argues, was Brownstone’s “naivete”, coupled with the previous city government which Stallworth believes has been hostile to disruptive housing schemes in the past.
“I guess I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but if you [deliberately break housing law], you can disappear and move on, and they’re not gonna chase you or fine you, and you get to live off your ill-gotten gains,” he says.
“But if you try to do this the right way, then they drag you through the mud. They make your life difficult, and invent different fines to assess you, and call it illegal, and say all sorts of things… We know we’re doing the right thing. And if we just stop, then the future where people have a place to live is in jeopardy.”
Asked for comment by The Independent, San Francisco Planning spokesperson Daniel Sider said the city has a place for pod housing, but that Brownstone remains out of compliance.
“We’re all-in on new housing so long as it is constructed safely,” he said. “Our priority right now is just to help Mr. Stallworth finish this process. We’d like him to take ‘yes’ for an answer.
”There’s nothing wrong with a bright-eyed Stanford graduate trying to disrupt the city’s housing market. Frankly, it could use a little disrupting. But we draw the line when anyone risks tenant safety, especially in a case where a builder decides to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and then fails to accept accountability.”
And what about that time where Brownstone’s landlord sued for more than $150,000 in allegedly unpaid rent? Crossed wires, says Stallworth; one person at the real estate company didn’t realize that another person had already agreed to a rent renegotiation.
Brownstone didn’t get the angry letters due to a paranoid tenant stealing and hoarding all its mail. Indeed, the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, and Brownstone is not being evicted.
“If we could do this without any of the drama, that would have been preferred by me, for sure,” Stallworth concedes.
For Sasha, pod living is worthwhile for one simple yet powerful reason: San Francisco is where the future is being built, and cheap rent lets more smart and talented people join the “unimaginably” competitive race to make it happen.
“[Brownstone] is not the best place,” Sasha says. “But without this place, people might not even be able to be here.”
