With the rents skyrocketing in San Francisco, driven tech people are willing to live in linen closets. Communal living to share expenses and ideas is very popular. While often these places are broken-down Victorians like my hacker hostel AT 101 in the Mission, there are some fancy incubators in Pacific Heights mansions. I visited a hostel on Twin Peaks with 5-star views.  If you’re a bunch of single people with good jobs you can afford the nicer places, especially by pooling funds. But if you’re in start-up mode like most of them, it’s bare bones. By the way, AT 101 comes from my college apartment (if you could call it that). It was the basement of an old fraternity house at the University of Washington. Five of us girls lived there. The place was a dive—the P had fallen off of the APT 101 sign on the door and no one bothered to replace it. So we called ourselves “AT 101” or “Anytime 101.”  We had a big sprawling floor where we once had a huge party and a band—our rooms were tiny and we shared one bathroom and a kitchen that had to be from 1950, but we had a great time there.

Here’s a link to Click City episode 2:

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Click-City-Episode-2-Packing-em-in-4972883.php#photo-5445944