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There are a lot of people - there are probably incredibly tragic mountains of people - who just need one or three or six no-pressure months on someone’s couch, and meals during that time, and then they’d be okay. They’d spend this time catching up on their bureaucracy or recovering from abuse or getting training in a field they want to go into or all three. And then they’d be fine.
There are empty couches, whose owners throw away leftovers they didn’t get around to eating every week, who aren’t too introverted to have a roommate or too busy to help someone figure out their local subway system.
And while sometimes by serendipity these people manage to find each other and make a leap of trust and engage in couch commensalism a lot of the time they just don’t. Because six months is a long time, a huge commitment for someone you haven’t vetted, and a week wouldn’t be enough to be worth the plane ticket, not enough to make a difference.
I think there might be a lot of gains to be had from disentangling the vetting and the hosting. People are comfortable with different levels of vetting, ranging from “they talked to me enough that it’d be an unusually high-effort scam” through “must be at least a friend of a friend of a friend” through “I have to have known them in person for months”. And you can bootstrap through these.
Here’s a toy example:
My household has been informally couching (or bedrooming, as the case may be) itinerants for a while. Sometimes they get jobs and move out, or get jobs and don’t move out. Sometimes they find other households they fit into better and move into those. Sometimes they wind up staying for a while and not really improving their prospects and going back whence they came; this is just the sort of thing that happens sometimes.
And I think more people could accommodate this fine from the hosting end, and just don’t have the networking to find would-be couch occupants on a routine basis.
I propose a minimum viable product, low tech, Y Couchinator, to gauge demand and work out kinks before I try to make a technical person build me a website and expose us to liability and all that exciting stuff. Here’s how I’m imagining it will work.
I want to emphasize here that there do exist people who have couches they would be willing to offer. This came up in a Discord chat and two people I didn’t even know about before mentioned that under certain constraints they could offer couches. My own household (which currently contains three different people who have at different times lived with us, paid no rent, and stayed on to the present day, and that’s if you don’t count my toddler) can fit people short-term, medium if we really click.
How to get ahold of me: You can put out initial feelers via Tumblr ask (I will assume this post is not getting enough circulation until at least 3 depressed anons have wondered at me whether they really deserve couches) but it is a bad way to do anything long form. My email address is alicorn at elcenia (dot com). If you share any Discord servers with me, Discord works great too.
pilfered-words liked this
l-ion-heart liked this I mean, hostels still exist. Two minutes of googling suggests you can get a hostel in downtown San Francisco for under...
Yeah a major part of the problem here is that we went and banned boarding houses D:
zexreborn reblogged this from drethelin and added: Never, ever, ever allow a couch surfer to stay long enough to claim squatter’s rights. Maybe this works under an...
This is a little off-topic but it would be really nice if we could bring back cheap hostels/bed&breakfasts/etc...
sang-the-sun-in-flight liked this
23rdhunter reblogged this from risingape