gnuhouse The limitations of housing

gnuhouse

The limitations of housing today do not fit well with the e-lifestyle. The notion that we should sign up for a six month or twelve month lease, or buy a house is ridiculous. Employers can fire and hire on a moments notice. Our housing needs to reflect the same flexibility that our ability to eat and work have. The e-lifestyle is not bound by geography and it’s about time that our notions of housing catch up to that fact.

In William Gibson’s book Neuromancer he saw this phenomenon years ahead of time and he talks about the “coffins” that people would rent and sleep in as needed. I’m not advocating a Spartan, fluorescent bulb housing solution here though. What I have been thinking about is creating some sort of corporation that rents houses from someone, and then its “employees” can stay in the house and move about as needed. I’ve got friends in Huntsville, Dallas and San Francisco. It would be cool if the gnuhouse corporation had houses in those three places for me to stay in when there was work for me to attend to in those cities. Since the corporation is the only name on the lease the “employees” can move in and out with ease.

I’m not sure how the rent and utilities would be divided up. If you have a five bedroom house and three people are occupying it at the time it seems like the rent should be divided into thirds for that house. I guess you would need to be able to prorate monthly rents if people come in and out. Also people need to ability to store things, can they store things in one of the houses or do you force them to get a storage unit? Where would my book collection go? However, I must say that as one who has put most of his stuff in storage since January the only things that really need to follow you with regularity are clothes and toiletries. I think the only thing I would need to store in the houses would be clothes. I’ve been fine with making periodic visits to my storage unit to withdraw the books or things I need.

So who wants to figure out how to make something like this work?