When your domicile is strictly for sleeping (or at most laying down), guess where you spend more of your time? Out and about. Being a part of the community. Probably contributing more towards local business. I welcome this news because I expect it'll bring more life to the city.
Now imagine a forward thinking municipality that subsidizes development of such pods, both construction and renting. Alongside dense walkable areas. It'd be great for business. And I'd wanna live there!
“serfdom” is a good way to characterize it, since it’s a lot harder to save money (and eventually be able to rent/buy a real place to live) if you have to go out for meals, entertainment, and meeting your social needs.
Pods are trying to normalize bare minimum shitty living conditions with high rent.
Imagine paying $700 and not having personal toilet, kitchen, bathroom, a place to keep your things or even a place to comfortably sleep/sit. This is pure exploitation unless it's an exotic tourist attraction.
If you have to force people to "be a part of the community" by making their homes
useless aside from sleeping, don't you think that's a strong indication that something must be wrong with "the community"?
We're already in a situation where many Americans don't know a damn thing about providing food for themselves, and this even further takes us in that bleak direction. Hard pass. This is bleak and miserable.`
What do you have against people "more towards local business"?
That's basically what is intended. Since people live in a pod, they'll eat out more often so that's more money extracted from them. Gotta keep the economy going, right?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not but, plenty of cities (not large American ones) manage to provide affordable housing with private space without people sleeping in pods.
I would not consider "give everyone a hole in the wall" any kind of solution to the housing crisis whatsoever, and encouraging a society where everyone is dependent on businesses for daily essentials makes it even harder to resolve these problems.
I'd think that an average would go broke pretty quick, having to always eat out. Third spaces - particularly free third spaces - in the US don't really exist in most cities. At least not without facing accusations of vagrancy.
Same energy as those degrowth types who want to ban washing machines so that people forced to wash clothes by hand will do it communally to make it less boring.
>Probably contributing more towards local business.
Practically nobody can afford to do this. Everywhere is about nickel and diming people to be present there. Society has a very terribly serious rent-seeking problem.
Expected value for most people's interactions economically is negative, meaning they pay more out than they receive for their other inputs. How else does the casin... err social entitlement ponzis, do-no-work bureaucracies and administrations, etc, survive? Somebody pays the house.
What is needed is very high corporate taxes, and high taxes on any rent-based (interest, service fees [Netflix, Spotify, your ISP], etc) income after deductions but before dividends or buybacks. We must realign our society back to production if we want to return to material wealth and not end up navel-gazing in poverty like S. Asia.* We can do each others haircuts and oil changes until we're out of clippers and oil, but if not enough clippers and oil are being produced then we're all going to be materially poorer as GNP rises.
(* Spidey's conspiracy-sense: I wonder if some of the push for mindfulness and other S. Asian esoterism lately isn't an attempt at a civilizational software patch on the West, using memetic components evolved to deal with abject poverty in the S. Asian continent over centuries, in preparation for an upcoming sundowning of western economic hegemony. Statecraft has as one of its requisites maintaining order and decorum of the citizen-human livestock.)
Now imagine a forward thinking municipality that subsidizes development of such pods, both construction and renting. Alongside dense walkable areas. It'd be great for business. And I'd wanna live there!