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Dreaming of Digital Glory At Hacker Hostels
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has a story about a small chain of managed residences that has sprung up in the Bay Area to provide a cheap place where programmers, designers, and scientists can live and work. These 'hacker hostels' are a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to gather, share, and refine ideas. 'Hackers ... have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna. When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.'"
FTA:
"But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping."
$40/night * 30 days (month~) == $1200/month
Well, I guess it is San Francisco.. so maybe that's cheap for them.
We have done this for years here in Europe. Typically they are called hacklabs. Often they may be squatted houses converted into social centres, or a funded space (like a hackerspace) with people living on site.
Here's a photo of one from 2004:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/genjix/2169785087/in/photostream
A large factory with ~20 hackers living and working on projects. People would come and go as they please, and we held several hackathons there like the 2007 Crystal Space hackfest:
http://crystalspace3d.org/main/La_Fibra_hackfest_report
This has been going on for decades throughout major cities in Europe such as London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Spain, Italy, Austria and Prague.