Why we should live in a hotel

In this article, I write about why we should live in a hotel, which could help solve many problems. Not only in the housing crisis, but system-wide problems. I don’t mean a normal hotel, as we know it now, I mean a new kind of hotel. Let us imagine a new way of living together.

The problem with space

The problem with space, there’s either too much or too little. It is hard to find a home, that is perfect sized for you. And of course the size of the space you need varies through your life.

Your life in spaces

Your first own flat may have to be small, because you don’t have much money and you are alone.

Then eventually you find a partner and want to live together in one place. You may need something bigger. A new problem occurs. What do you do with your furniture? It may not fit in your new place, and your spouse may also have some pieces. A problem I will get to further down this article.

Someday you may have kids, and you think you need a big house in the suburbs. Luckily, you have enough money to buy one, but you also need a car. Which is also expensive. 

You now live in a new community, leaving your old friends behind, and you have to commute a lot because your job is still in the city.

Eventually you will settle into your new neighborhood. Your kids will find friends and grow up. Then one day they leave the house to live on their own. 

You stay behind with your partner. In a house that is too big for you.

You still commute daily to your job, till you don’t because you retire. 

You live in the big house, which gets harder to maintain every year and which costs too much for just two people. One day when you finally paid your last mortgage, you realize you’re too old to drive a car. Since there is no public transportation available you are stuck in your home. 

Your kids only visit you twice a year, and after you died, they fight over the inheritance.

This is just a made-up example, but it is not an uncommon one. As your needs in a home change, it gets harder with time to adapt to your needs.

Different space for different needs

You have children and don’t want to tear them away from their familiar surroundings. 

You need space for your home office, but in your neighborhood you can’t afford a bigger apartment.

You invested so much into your house, you do not want to move, when your children left.

When your kids are young, you need schools, playgrounds and other amenities in your neighborhood. When you get older, it’s more important to have spaces for elderly people around you. Your home may need to be rebuilt to be handicapped-accessible.

Single households are a problem, because they take away spacious apartments from families, who need more space. Also, it is expensive for only one person to live in such a big home. Poverty in old age is a thing.

Another problem with too much space, you have the need to fill it, so you buy many things, you don’t need. Maybe you buy even more, then you can fit into your home, and eventually you need to rent a storage room. A place for things only, which takes away space from people to live in.

It is highly unsustainable to live in a space that is too big for you, because you use more resources than necessary. Detached houses are specially bad.

Costs of living

As already mentioned, big spaces are expensive. Not only for those, who live in it, but also for society, because they have to provide the spaces and all the infrastructure, which is more expensive per capita if people don’t live dense. 

But, of course, the bigger cost is land, since it is finite. That means that in our system of supply and demand, space gets more expensive. Young families nowadays often can’t provide a bigger space. It’s too expensive. 

You do not only pay for the home itself. There are more costs you have to calculate. Furniture, electricity, internet, water and the infrastructure as well. You pay for the use and for the provision of the infrastructure as being part of the community. The bigger your space and the less sense the neighborhood, the more you pay.

The problem with furniture

The problem with furniture is that you bought it for your first flat, or you even had it already in your room in your parent’s house. Whenever you move or your needs change, it doesn’t fit anymore.

There are two ways to handle this. Either, you buy new stuff. Then you are stuck with too many things. Well, you can try to sell the old things on Craigslist or something similar. But this is a pain in the ass.

The other thing you probably do is to rearrange your stuff to meet your needs. And it will never fit, you always have to make sacrifices and you will hate it.

I question the concept of ownership, particularly of land and real estate. I will write about it in another article. But in the case of furniture, for example, it often makes sense to not buy furniture but to rent it or any other form of sharing. Most of the time you don’t need furniture the rest of your life because it doesn’t suit your needs.

Yes, there may be some stuff you have had for many years—a table or a closet, for example. But when you have kids, you need stuff only for a few years, and most of the other things you can throw away. A couch, for example, which has been rebuilt into a cave or a castle several times and which has seen every body fluid a child can produce, you have to burn it.

So renting furniture is good. Renting a fully furnished apartment is even better. You don’t have to think about where to put the furniture, that doesn’t fit. You don’t even have to move it, so you save even more money.

Social factors

You can have a very good neighborhood in a suburban area. If it isn’t just an agglomeration of boxes, where people get in and out of smaller boxes made of steel.

Often, when a new suburb is developed, many families in the same stage are moving there. And if it is well-made, you don’t have to drive hours every day to take your kids to kindergarten and school, buy groceries, commute to work or get literally anywhere.

All the amenities you need in your everyday life are right there.

But when the kids grow up, the parents stay behind, and there is nothing there for them. Maybe the school and the kindergarten will be turned into a community center since no young people are around anymore, but that’s it.

What you have to do is move. But maybe you don’t want to because you are invested in the house, or don’t know anyone in the new neighborhood. Or you simply can’t afford it.

Maybe you just don’t want to move because you have so many good memories.

Many elderly people get lonely. One is because many of their peers die and second because they live in an environment, that isn’t made for them. Even in cities you get lonely, when you can’t leave your home, because there is no elevator, or you have to use a car to get anywhere.

And if the public places like restaurants become more and more expensive, you will have fewer opportunities to meet people.

Climate crisis

Like all parts of our system, the climate influences our housing, and how we live influences the climate. 

Living in smaller homes and using less resources is much more climate friendly than settlements of big detached single-family-houses in the middle of nowhere, called suburbs. 

Since we have to adapt to a changing climate, we need to build the houses to protect us from weather extremes like heat waves and increasingly severe storms, which is expensive. We save money if we build the houses for more people, so we can spread the costs over several people.

I wrote about whether cities or the countryside were more sustainable. I think because of the higher density and the better usage of resources, the city wins. And the hotel is just a denser, more effective version of a city.

Why we should live in a hotel

So living in our current system is far from perfect. What can we do in our good system to make things better? My suggestion is that we all should live in a hotel.

But not a hotel like it exists nowadays. It’s a new kind of hotel for a new kind of system. Close your eyes and envision it with me together.

Ok, since this is written content, open your eyes, read it, and imagine it.

The rooms

Like in standard hotels, our hotel has rooms in different sizes. From simple ones with just a bed and a small bath up to suites with multiple rooms. What all of them have in common is that they are all smaller than apartments nowadays. 

Most of them don’t have any kitchen, some may have a kitchenette. You are not supposed to cook in your room. You eat in the dining hall. For those who really like to cook, there are kitchens you can use in the social areas I talk about later.

In the smallest rooms, you don’t have any living room. You may have a table and a stool, but nothing more. Your life exists mostly in the social areas.

This sounds like horror for introverts like me. But there are quiet spaces you can be by yourself all over the place. The public spaces are generally designed to make it easy to meet people, but you also can easily avoid it. And you can still do most of your stuff in the room, since they are totally equipped with internet and electricity. All an introvert needs.

If required, we can build even cheaper rooms, which is extreme. They are dorm rooms with bunk beds and shared bathrooms. These are very affordable, so anyone can have a roof over his head. But I guess most of the time, small single bedrooms should be affordable enough for anyone.

To avoid segregation, there will be a variety of rooms in every floor, from small rooms to bigger suites for families. The latter you have to leave, when your children move to their own room.

Social spaces

The first floor is the greatest social area. It is like a mall. Did I mention, that our hotel is huge? Well it is. It’s like a mall with rooms above.

I may have lost some of you here, but hear me out. Of course, it is not a mall like we have today. Imagine the advantages of a mall, protection from weather, a great variety of businesses, and everything reachable by foot.

In our mall, there are still shops, but since the economy is completely different from today, they look and work different. I will write an article about the economy another day. Building a new system is complex.

Back to the topic. The shops are small. There are no international chains that base their business models on exploiting people and the planet. There are also repair shops, barber shops, and so on. And we have an eating area.

People come together while eating

In the dining hall, you can select one of three menus for lunch and for dinner. For breakfast, there is a buffet. Like in a hotel. Snacks are also available. Depending on your rent, everything is included, or you pay a small extra charge if you only want to eat there once in a while. You know, like all-inclusive resorts. 

You can also order room service, perfect for introverts. You don’t have to clean the dishes, that’s done in the hotel kitchen.

If you want, you can cook for yourself in one of the shared kitchens. There is everything you need, except the food. You can use it without incurring extra costs.

For all those who have experience with shared kitchens, and know how disgusting they can be, don’t be afraid, there is a cleaning team, that makes sure everything is sanitary. They clean even your room, if you don’t want to opt out.

Space for everyone

There are much more social spaces available, shared offices, library, cinema, pool, and so on.

Schools and kindergartens are in the complex. So are doctors and an emergency room.

Not everything is in the first floor, some amenities are spread around the buildings, like common rooms where you can meet other people without the need to consume or can have small parties.

You can hold bigger events in the first floor, where there are special rooms.

There is also a reception. There you call if anything breaks, or they accept your deliveries. So you don’t need to be at home from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Shared resources

Not owning your own property and having mare shared spaces than private spaces may sound offensive in our society. You may feel like you have to give up a lot, but the opposite is true. Life is more luxurious because many amenities are cheaper as the costs are shared.

Like the cleaners or the pool. Also because electricity, internet, AC, etc. are provided it gets cheaper. A big solar park on the roof reduces emissions and costs for everyone.

There will also be the possibility of batch deliveries. Imagine holidays, for example, where many people need the same. They can order together and get a better price, because of the higher volume. Maybe they celebrate holidays all together, which is more fun and even cheaper.

Transportation

Nearly anything you need, you can have in the buildings. Shops, schools, kindergartens, entertainment, restaurants, social groups, sport. You don’t have to leave the building, except if you want to go for a walk in the park surrounding the hotel.

If you have a stroller or require a wheelchair, you can get everywhere in the buildings because everything is barrier-free.

If you need to leave the hotel, for work, for example, there is a train station in the underground which you can get to directly with the elevators. You will have the possibility to work in the hotel, like in a shared office or your room. Also, the receptionists, cleaner, cooks, janitors and so on live in the hotel.

You can also take the bike. Your own or a shared bike, which are both parked in a bike garage, also in the underground.

Our hotel is not accessible per car. Even all the goods are getting in per train.

Furniture

All rooms can be rented and are fully furnished. So if you need to change rooms, you take only your belongings with you, like clothes, a toothbrush, and pictures. Get in the elevator and move to the new room.

Everything there fits perfectly. You can even change furniture. There is a catalog where it can choose from, with no extra cost. Because the one piece of furniture you don’t like may be the favorite of someone else.

You can, of course, get your own stuff, but if it breaks, it won’t be repaired by maintenance.

Conclusion

This was only a sneak preview of why we should live in a hotel and why it is much better for us. At least in our new hotel.

There will be many hotels. And every hotel looks different, since there are different people in all of them and people form the hotel.

It helps us to save costs and space. It provides much more social exchange. Furthermore, it is better for the climate because we need less space and resources. The resources that are needed are also generated much more sustainably. A topic I didn’t really get into in this article, but will in a future one.

Because we share space, costs, and amenities, we can have a more luxurious life. A better life in a better system.

Ian DeBay

My name is Ian DeBay.

I am the founder of iandebay.com. I am a content creator, blogger, podcast, YouTuber. This is my blog where I talk about system change, sustainability and other fun stuff.