Got $4500 a Month to Spare? You Can Rent a Room in a San Francisco Mansion

Searching for housing in San Francisco, and want to channel your inner Erlich Bachman? For $3600, you can rent an ordinary one-bedroom apartment—but if you’re willing to share living space and shell out an additional $900, The San Francisco Business Times reports that you can score a room in a real-life mansion.

Tech startup Roam—which, on its website, describes itself as an “international network of co-living spaces”—recently opened its first San Francisco location. The 13-bed, 14-bath home is located in the city's Alamo Square district, and was originally built in 1904 for the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco. In later years, it operated as a bed and breakfast.

Roam customers pay $4500 a month (or $1200 per week) to use the mansion’s common rooms, co-working spaces, kitchen, and laundry facilities. When they're not busy "disrupting" existing industries and creating new markets, they can unwind in a yoga and meditation room and host soirees in either a sake room or 40-person dining room.

As one of the nation’s most expensive cities, San Francisco has pushed the luxury housing market to new heights in recent years.

"When affordability and quality didn't seem available to us, we thought why don't we just find a way to go over the top and be a part of the most gorgeous communal living experiment we can think of?" Roam spokesperson Jessica Tran told the Business Times. "What if we start small but open up a testing ground for how far co-living can be taken?"

Don't live in San Francisco, but want to experience the Roam lifestyle for yourself? The company is slated to open anywhere from eight to 10 more co-working residences by 2017, in locations including London, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.

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