The master bedroom is huge; a king-size bed would have taken less than 30% of the floor. There are two walk-in closets and a private bath. Downstairs, there ar

The master bedroom is huge; a king-size bed would have taken less than 30% of the floor. There are two walk-in closets and a private bath. Downstairs, there are 2 bedrooms that could have easily held 2 twin beds each, and another small room that could have taken 1 twin bed. As a single-family home it would have comfortably slept 7. It's probably 2-3x larger than my childhood home and would have fetched $750,000+ in the suburban Midwest. Convert all those twins to bunk beds (as my landlord did) and you've got 10 people across the downstairs bedrooms. Replace the king-size bed with 2 bunk beds, you've got 4 beds in the space where 1 was. 14 people sleeping in the same amount of floor space that 7 previously occupied. Now take the vast empty floor space in the master bedroom and add 2 bunk beds, and you're at the 18 that I live with. It doesn't feel crowded. It has the same drawbacks that any room-sharing situation has - you're never alone, you have to hear people breathe and snore and shift around in bed, there's no possibility of having sex (you can sexile one person - not 7), you have to smell people's smells. But it's no worse than living in a double in college, summer camp, etc. I had no chance of bringing a girl home anyway, the sounds are drowned out by the city/wind when you've got a window open, and everyone is polite and sensitive to the fact that we're sharing space. A portion of that price also goes to Airbnb, which gives me trust/reputation, escrow, precisely the dates of stay I wanted, and no monthslong Craigslist game as is usually necessary to sublet in SF.