This is the second part of a two-part story about one “hacker hostel” in the Mission. Read Part 1 here.
For interns at local tech companies like Twitter, Adobe and Google, taking on an internship means either commuting to the city every day or finding a place to stay for three months. One Twitter intern found his lodging on Airbnb, where his host has the most listings in the Mission and the third most listings in San Francisco, according to Inside Airbnb.
The intern ended up at a house near Bryant and 22nd streets, where he rents one out of six bunks in a house with some six bedrooms. The host there, Heigo Paartalu, runs at least two other houses in the Bay Area – an arrangement, he said, that his landlords there approved.
Neither tenants nor landlords are complaining, but others have raised questions about the hostel’s legality. And, across the city, tensions have risen over how many units – once meant for long term residents – have been taken off the market to accommodate visitors and make easy money for their owners.
Under legislation passed in October 2014, landlords or tenants renting to short term visitors must register with the city as a business and post their registration number on their listing page. Various analyses have shown that short term rentals impact San Francisco’s rental market, prompting activists to propose restrictive legislation in the form of Proposition F, intended to discourage landlords from removing units from the city’s rental stock to turn them into short term rentals.
Paartalu, however, said that his building doesn’t qualify as a short term rental, since the minimum stay is 30 days and most renters are interns who live in the city for several months at a time (on Airbnb the minimum stay listed was 3 nights. It now reflects the 30 night minimum). The city defines a short term rental as one that lasts fewer than 30 nights.
He makes the rooms available to interns at local tech companies by direct recommendation from the companies. He also lists the homes on Airbnb, bringing in mostly entrepreneurs and tech interns for about $1700 a month, or $65 a night. The rates fluctuate and can go as high as $90 a night. Planning records indicate the house is zoned as a 3-family residence and may have previously operated as a 2-family home.
Two complaints have been filed against the house on Bryant with the city’s Planning and Building Inspections department, one noting that the building is being listed on Airbnb and the other complaining of a fire hazard caused by crowded living conditions. A similar location in the Castro was shut down last month as the result of a lawsuit filed by a downstairs neighbor.
Paartalu said he began the process of complying with city ordinances for residences rented by visitors for 30 days at a time as soon as he purchased the building. That process, he said, is ongoing. It’s unclear what permits he is seeking, and this could not be confirmed with the city.
Paartalu said he doesn’t know anything about the complaints, filed in late July, and no one from the Planning Department or the city has been in contact about a violation. Gina Simi, a spokesperson for the Planning Department, said she couldn’t comment on an ongoing case, so it’s unclear whether the city is taking enforcement action.
Generally, the city also requires 170 square feet to accommodate four adults, as CBS Local reported yesterday in an undercover investigation of a similar home on South Van Ness. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development considers a dwelling to be severely overcrowded when occupied by more than 1.5 adults per room, noting also that “overcrowding can also accelerate deterioration of the housing stock.”
The Bryant Street shared living space, Paartalu said, doesn’t run into space or fire safety problems because it’s almost never at full capacity.
“We follow many guidelines that the zoning code and the city has written to us,” he explained. “This doesn’t mean that we are 100 percent full. We’re never 100 percent.”
Since tech companies see a glut of interns in the summer, Paartalu said, in winter months, the house can end up with very few guests.
“Four or five months of the year we’re pretty empty,” he said. “That’s the reason why I say we’re not doing it for the money.”
See the first part of this story, to see what life is like inside a hacker hostel shared living space, here.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Paartalu is the owner of the house on Bryant street. He is a renter there.