What it’s like dwelling in a San Francisco resort full-time

It’s like “Eloise at the Plaza”, but maybe a little more dystopian. New York-based Common has started renting hotel rooms for three-month and long-term stays in San Francisco.

The downtown BEI hotel serves as Ground Zero for Commons operations in San Francisco. It rents 120 hotel rooms from $ 1,650 a month. (General would not say how many rooms are currently occupied).

Common, which describes itself as “a global home brand,” announced its partnership with BEI Hotel this summer. It does business with hotels in Seattle and New York and plans for further expansion.

Its San Francisco operations were “briefly managed by another company that we acquired earlier this summer.”

While Common’s rooms are barely cheap for a studio apartment – without a kitchen – they are slightly below the average San Francisco studio rent, which Zumper says averages $ 2,095.

New York-based Common rents rooms for short and long term stays at the BEI Hotel in San Francisco.

With kind approval

Mosiuwa Tshabalala, a data analyst who works for an insurance company in South Africa, has been staying at the BEI Hotel through Common since March. He said he chose Common after routinely disappointed with the San Francisco rental offers.

“I’ve been to a lot of bad places or places that looked bad to me,” he told SFGATE. “Bad use of space, bad money supply.”

Tshabalala saw the BEI hotel on Zillow and decided to take a tour.

“It looked like this all-in-one bachelorette party,” he recalled.

The common areas have utilities and basic furniture, as well as access to hotel amenities such as a gym and rooftop terrace with city views. The standard room is equipped with a bedside table, a bed and a flat-screen TV.

Tshabalala said he gets lonely from time to time when he lives alone, but he found a lively community in the hotel that even hosted a silent disco for residents.

New York-based Common rents rooms for short and long term stays at the BEI Hotel in San Francisco.

With kind approval

Is Common Right For You? Tshabalala said it depends on the type of person you are.

“I had to make adjustments. You’re in a hotel, you can’t really cook (I have a slow cooker and a microwave), ”he said.

Common is hardly the first company to try to address the housing problem in San Francisco. Starcity tried to do something similar with dorm-style dorms. WeWork launched a program called WeLive in 2018, which allows residents to rent apartments for short-term stays. And then there’s Anyplace, an online housing platform that allows people to rent out spaces, including hotel rooms, for short periods of time.

The concept of long-term hotel stays is not new at first. There are many single rooms (SROs) in San Francisco that offer vulnerable people below-market housing.

The city’s SRO collaboration program “aims to support tenants through contacting, tenant stabilization including (but not limited to) needs analysis, housing maintenance planning, general advocacy, placement and housing advice, as well as community workshops and meetings,” says the website.

During the COVID crisis, the city also made hotel rooms available to street residents in a program known as SIP, or shelter-in-place hotels, that began in April 2020. The program set up more than 25 SIP hotel locations that have more than 2,500 people susceptible to COVID, the city said.

Will Common solve the San Francisco real estate crisis? This is dubious and has been tried by global companies. But for someone like Tshabalala, who only stayed in San Francisco for a few months – he returned to South Africa on Thursday – Common was the short-term choice.

“I think people need to have this experience, even if it only takes three months to see how it would change their lives,” he said. “We don’t all have to be in villas. Sometimes you only need what you really need. You can have a good quality of life. “