I was looking at prices for a small room in Manhattan storage. The price of a room slightly bigger than a double-size mattress is $150/mo, for a pretty central location. YMCA membership for $40/mo for your running water, and bam, an apartment for < $200/mo in Manhattan. Sure, it won't be cozy, but I wonder whether it'd be feasible to have crazy-cheap housing like this.

I've seen lots of small businesses that use self storage units for workshops and inventory storage. Probably cheaper than office space.

Can you spend the night at the storage place? Are you worried about having the door locked behind you?

no, you are not allowed to live in storage units, but in the article many people spent the days there, ran businesses there or watched tv in it.

We found a room for $80/mo by the West Side Highway in Chelsea. The price was great because of the time of the year, maybe the beginning of the school year. If you can periodically, you can probably find a good deal at some point.

Sounds like the capsule hotels they have in Japan which are basically just a tiny cube containing a bed and a TV for about $20 a night

Quasi-related: There are some people in my neighborhood in San Francisco who have apparently been parking their junky RVs along the curb for years. Occasionally I'll walk past and they'll have a generator out on the sidewalk charging their batteries. Neighbors have complained, but I guess it must be legal, because they're not going anywhere. Though a really ghetto solution, I've often wondered about the feasibility of bootstrapping in an RV :) Or maybe a sailboat.

Unless your sailboat is tied up in a marina, actual sailing will take up too much attention. You can't just leave the radar on to warn of collisions, for example, it takes too much power and CBDR isn't widely available (tho' I suppose you could hack it up if you were running a laptop anyway) so you would need to visually assess every proximity alarm. Even anchored in a secluded bay you have to worry about being T-boned by a novice day skipper...

hey which neighborhood is this? My friend was looking for a place to park his RV :)

I take it you don't see the problem then. I thought it is related - these people pay to keep their record collections and what not around, because it is their identity. So how do you manage your identity, that was my question.