NEW GRADUATE STUDENT HOUSING COMES TO MY NEIGHBORHOOD.

The apartment house at 2711 Shattuck Avenue is nearing completion and will be ready for occupancy soon. The entire building has been rented to the university, which will sublease individual units to individual graduate students. The apartments are all 310 square feet, which is very small. These apartments were built in China and arrived at the Port of Oakland in standard 8′ x 40′ shipping containers. The apartments came fully furnished and ready to move in. Each studio apartment will rent for $2180 a month and are all single occupancy (one student per apartment). This apartment house has no amenities aside from a coin-operated laundry room on each floor. There is no lobby, no yard, and no elevator. That means that if you live on the 4th floor of this building and have 4 or 5 bags of groceries, you have to shlep them up 4 flights of stairs as best you can. There is only one parking space (that’s not one parking space per unit. It’s one parking space for the whole building.) Pre-fab apartments from China are popping up in San Francisco and more are planned for Berkeley. Try to imagine what it would be like to live in an apartment that is only 8 feet wide.