U-Stor-It
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
Stephensonia
"It is whispered that in the old days, when the U-Stor-It was actually used for its intended purpose (namely, providing cheap extra storage space to Californians with too many material goods), certain entrepreneurs came to the front office, rented out 10 by 10s using fake IDs, filled them up with steel drums full of toxic chemical waste, and then abandoned them, leaving the problem for the U-Stor-it Corporation to handle. According to rumors, U-Stor-It just padlocked those units and wrote them off. Now, the immigrants claim, certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter. It is a story they tell their children, to keep them from trying to break into padlocked units. No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal, and at this point in their lives, neither one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate...."
Living La Vida U-Stor-It
Standard U-Stor-It facility
As they say, it isn't camping if you have no home to go home to. Hiro and Vitaly at least can still go camping, and come home to their storage unit in the franchise ghetto, living under the loglo and the flight path of LAX. A 10 by 10 storage unit is dubiously a step up from a body locker at Spectrum 2000 for those of the Do-It-Yourself set who don't mind a milk crate and cargo pallet furniture theme with corrugated steel wall patterns.
Hiro, being a hard core hacker and the world's greatest swordsman (which world, exactly, is left vaguely unmentioned on his business card) fits into this locale quite nicely, as does his Russian fuzz-grunge rocker roomie, who at least has the option of living in his van when 'camping'.
Hiro generally doesn't care about the locale, because not many people get phased in this neighborhood when he is practicing his samurai skills with his length of rebar known as the Redneck Katana, and besides it saves his meager savings to pay for his bandwidth bill to access the Metaverse, where his real life is anyways.
As they say, on the internet, nobody can tell if you are a dog. In the Metaverse, nobody can tell from your avatar that you live at the U-Stor-It, so what is the point of keeping expensive digs in reality if you spend all your time in virtuality? Of course, Hiro can get away with this because he has no girlfriend to make unrealistic expectations of him that he needs to be guilted into fulfilling.
In the Metaverse, Hiro is a Warrior Prince, and no amount of real world poverty can take away that sort of nobility. The poor noble was a common occurence once, back in the days of Quicksilver, they were "thick on the ground" across much of Europe then. Hiro's riches are stored up in his mother's retirement burbclave life in Korea.
Affordable Housing
In the 1990's, Silicon Valley and much of the rest of California saw massive escalation in real estate values. Rents, as a result, went through the roof, leading to many low level tech workers living in public parks, cleaning up at the YMCA, before heading off to their white-collar job at some dot com. Currently in 2005, technicians earning $50k/yr are in the 'living in crate' lifestyle.
Dotcommers with money to burn were widely known to walk up to the doors of homeowners and offering $750k-1.5m dollars for a run-of-the-mill tract house or bungalow, when the homeowner had not even inkled of putting the house on the market. Massive borrowing on one's dot com stock portfolio was commonplace. Getting that borrowing paid off before the crash with cashed out stocks was a gamble.
Valley tech workers seem to have been prevented from turning self-storage units into suburbs only by the presence of a strong governmental building bureaucracy.
There are now several housing developments that are stacked, prefabbed containers built as apartments, going up in several european locales, primarily on college campuses. The dutch firm SpaceBox designed and produced these stackable modular studio apartments. This technology was recently featured in the Treehuggers blog.
Specifications for Spacebox unit; 18 m² mode1
Living Pods being stacked in Holland
Outside measurements * length 6500 mm * width 3000 mm * height 2824 mm
Inside measurements * length 6324 mm * width 2824 mm * height 2634 mm * Gross floor surface including outer walls: 19m² * Net floor surface inside the outer walls: 17m² * Indoor volume: 42m³ * Total weight empty: ca. 2500 kg
Construction characteristics: * Wall and roof panels form a sandwich construction with a thickness of 88 mm, which are produced in moulds. Going from inside to the outside, the sandwich consists of: a Spac' interior finishing layer, Cempanit fire-resistant panel, Meranti multiplex panel, Pir Styrofoam panel, and an outer polyester glass fibre laminate. The panels are glued to each other to form a self-supporting unit. * The floor panel consists of the same sandwich construction as above, but is fitted with extra wooden beams and can support a load of 175 kg/m². * Thermo-galvanized steel columns are included in the wall panels so that the units can be stacked on top of each other.
Interior View of a SpaceBox, looking out.
Arrangement: * Kitchen 1400 x 500 mm, equipped with counter and kitchen sink unit, mixer tap, 60 l refrigerator, two-piece ceramic cooking ring, upper cabinets. * Wet area 1400 x 1400 mm, fitted with pre-shaped epoxy floor, toilet with low hanging reservoir, shower on slide rail, mixer tap with limiter, wash basin with mirror. * Living/sleeping area with raised section 1530 mm wide, equipped with two light fixtures with switch, two double wall sockets and a smoke alarm. * Storage space above kitchen and wet space and beneath the raised section of living room.
Frames, door, window: * Door: wood, button cylinder on the inside, half cylinder in the lock, mechanical bell. * Door frame: hardwood, clear width 780 x 2150 mm. * Glass front: plastic frame 2300 x 1830 mm, fixed glass surface plus a window that can be opened vertically and horizontally 585 x 1740 mm, total glass surface 3.20 m², soundproof safety glass. * Section that opens is fitted with anti-fall safety feature and ventilation grill; * An outer screen' sun blind is available at extra cost.
Interior View of a SpaceBox, looking in.
Technical facilities: * Heating: the standard unit is equipped with a 1300 W electrical convection heater. If desired, the unit can also be supplied with a radiator and prepared for connecting to district heating. * Cooling: air conditioning can be installed as an option. * Hot water: electric boiler 50 l. * Electricity: The unit is dimensioned for a power connection of maximum 4000 W. Group box with two groups, earth leak switch and an automatic switch between boiler and cooking unit. * Living area: 2 light fixtures with switch, 2x double wall socket grounded, connections for cable antenna and telephone, smoke alarm. * Kitchen: 1x TL light fixture; 2x double wall socket grounded, mechanical ventilation max. 250 m³/hour with variable speed switch, linked to lights. * Wet area: bulls eye' watertight lighting, mechanical ventilation max. 500m³/hour with variable speed switch, linked to lighting. The unit is equipped with outdoor lighting with low light level activated switch or motion activated switch. * Ventilation: a ventilation ratio of 0.6 via natural ventilation (grill in glass front), combined with continuous low-speed mechanical ventilation in the wet area.