It’s worth knowing that the linked code says: ” This section applies only to owner-occupied dwellings where a single lodger resides. Nothing in this section shall be construed to determine or affect in any way the rights of persons residing as lodgers in an owner-occupied dwelling where more than one lodger resides. ”
That’s an important point to clarify: the above only applies to single family lodgers. It looks like if there is more than one lodger (such as a mother and child) then the usual eviction process must be followed. I also found out that some local police departments don’t get involved with lodger disputes as a matter of policy. If you’re really concerned that potential lodgers will abuse the rules, then maybe it’s safest to take on a single lodger at a time, after finding out whether your local police will deal with any problems? Extra precautionary measures for the paranoid: make sure you meet, get a contract drawn up, and get some candid character references.
BTW, I’m interested if anyone around Berkeley, CA, would be willing to do something like this for me. I’m visiting for a few months (Oct-Jan) to help out with the Secular Solstice but I only know one person well enough to ask around for accommodation.
These are good suggestions, I think, but they reveal a problem: “candid character references” are likely to (often though not always) anti-recommend taking on exactly the sorts of people who are intended to benefit from the OP’s plan.
To be clear, I say this not to argue against your suggestions, but rather to point out a fundamental problem with the plan in question: that the personal qualities that make one a risky couch-surfer candidate either are, or are highly correlated with, those qualities which make one a couch-surfer candidate at all.
Yeah, I agree; still, if you decided that being a host is something you really wanted to do, you’d probably want to do some basic asshole proofing beyond setting the terms of the background check with Alicorn. Just in case Mark’s scenario comes up.
Also want to add: I’ve already seen Mark’s scenario come up at least once (at least, the general version of “person doesn’t leave when they say they’re going to”)
[ramble that I don’t think makes sense but don’t have time to word properly]
I think there’s still a bunch of value left on the table in terms of people who could benefit from staying on a couch for a bit and people who are (usually) willing to do so, but the tail risks are nontrivial. I’ve gone from being willing to host random people on my couch to no-longer-willing-to (although I think I mostly endorse having originally been willing to. This doesn’t feel very consistent of me and I’m not sure how to disentangle that)
I’ve gone from being willing to host random people on my couch to no-longer-willing-to (although I think I mostly endorse having originally been willing to. This doesn’t feel very consistent of me and I’m not sure how to disentangle that)
Well… there is a fairly obvious account of your apparently-inconsistent view, but it’s not a very complimentary one (although just how uncomplimentary depends on whether you consider hypocrisy to be a mortal or a venial sin).
I don’t say that said account is the correct one—I have no way of knowing that, after all—but it does neatly account for (and, indeed, predicts) everything you observe.
It is to your benefit to be known as the sort of person who’s willing to host people on your couch—it makes you appear selfless, generous, altruistic, etc. Because talk is cheap, simply saying that you’re willing to do this doesn’t suffice.
On the other hand, actually hosting people on your couch is risky and inconvenient.
How to get the best of both worlds? That is, how might you most effectively get the benefit of being known as someone who’s willing to host people on his couch, while avoiding the downside of actually hosting people on your couch?
Your solution would seem to be a fairly elegant one: host some people on your couch for a while, then stop doing so. After this temporary sacrifice, you then continue to be known as someone who was willing to do such things (and therefore as someone who’s selfless, generous, etc.), while no longer having to endure the downside. (If an explanation for the change is needed—and it isn’t always—you can blame the disconnect on any number of things: anything from inexplicable-even-to-yourself inconsistency in preferences, to some variation on “I’m getting too old for this”, etc.)
(Note the parallel with a variety of structurally similar, and well-documented, behavioral shifts: “I did all the drugs in college”, the “lesbian until graduation”[1] phenomenon, etc. In each case, we can take the person to be making an “investment” of sorts by engaging in a risky behavior, which then allows them to receive reputational “interest” long after terminating the behavior.)
[1] Note that the backlash, in the LGBT community, against this sort of behavior, can then be seen as a way of punishing this sort of “collect reputational interest on an initial investment without continuing to re-invest” strategy. But now we’re getting into the weeds of speculation, of course.
Ah, gotcha. Yup – certainly seems like a plausible facet of my motivation.
The less cynical version of that I was vaguely thinking about was “if _nobody_ hosts anyone, that leaves at least some value on the table. If everyone implements “host people until they get burned enough to no longer want to, while implementing at least minimal precautions against getting burned”, you get at least some people getting hosted (as well as some of the positive benefits of hosting, like meeting more people, variety, etc).
On the face of it this seems a bit incoherent (why not just have everyone implement the “exactly the right amount of couch surfing?”). Some aspects of it that seem at least somewhat defensible include:
If you’re younger, you have less of a network, and it’s actually just worth hitting the “explore” button on more things to make friends, meet people, build out your network.
Slightly cynical version of previous point (although I don’t think I’d hold it against people) that relates to your comment is “if you’re newer to a social network, you have fewer things proving your value to that social network. Providing couch space is a way to provide value. Later on, you may have demonstrated your value in other ways, such that you no longer need to do so in order to have a reputation as “person who is helpful to the network.”
When I used to host more, I lived in NYC where there were few other places to crash within my social network. Now I live in the Bay where I wouldn’t provide as much marginal value. There might be other versions of this applying at a more general level.
I think some amount of “getting wise/street smart about how to deal with people” actually requires you to get a bit burned in some way. You can hypothetically learn it from people who’ve already been burned and passed the wisdom along, but it’s harder to internalize. So, might as well spend the process of getting street smart on actually helping some people?
Oh, final point which I suspect ties more closely in with Alicorn’s original motivation:
People vary in how much they enjoy hosting guests (and how costly “bad” guests are to them). Before you start hosting people, you don’t know how much this benefits/costs you. Everyone implementing the algorithm “host people until they find that they have no longer want to, or slowly raising their standards on who they host over time”, gets you a mixture of benefits for hosters and hostees.
I do not think that this consideration is plausible unless the distribution of “guest quality” is very narrow (low–σ); otherwise the luck of the draw trumps everything.
My own distribution of guest quality has been quite large, and most of my “burned-ness” comes from 2 extreme cases, but I also would probably still be hosting people if
a) I lived in NYC where guest-crash-space was more important
b) I lived with roommates who weren’t particularly averse to hosting (by contrast, those roommates have correctly updated that even median-ish-but-below-average hostees are very costly to them)
Non-extreme cases seem to fall in a fairly regular spectrum from “actively good person to have around” to “costs a fairly predictable amount of tension in ‘how easy it is to get time using the show’, ‘having the common space to yourself’, ‘dealing with travelers who are in some kind of bad mood that makes the living room slightly worse’”, which I feel fits into my point.
The extreme bad eggs are quite bad and I’m not sure about their total frequency, but I also now think I mostly know how to screen them off now.
Indeed, I have no quarrel with most of your points (and your second bullet point—“do this until you have sufficiently proved your value and don’t have to”—is, I think, particularly worth considering for its wider applicability).
That being said, let me play devil’s advocate on one aspect of what you wrote:
If you’re younger, you have less of a network, and it’s actually just worth hitting the “explore” button on more things to make friends, meet people, build out your network.
…
So, might as well spend the process of getting street smart on actually helping some people?
This is, I think, counterbalanced (at least to some degree) by the fact that when you are younger and have less of a network, you face a greater risk that any given tail risk (such as finding yourself embroiled in costly, lengthy legal proceedings, or having all of your valuables stolen, or having your good name slandered, etc.) will “wipe you out” completely. Someone who has a dense, reliable social network, and a reasonable build-up of assets, has a “cushion” that can more easily absorb such tail risks.
(There is also the emotional analogue of this: when you’re older, more experienced, and more financially and socially secure, setbacks—especially direct personal betrayals—do not hit you as hard as they would if you were younger and, perhaps, more vulnerable. This is something to keep in mind especially for folks who are neuroatypical.)
An alternative, less cynical viewpoint, would be that it actually does cost more to host couchsurfers as you get older. You get more stuff. You get better stuff. You get more attached to your stuff. All of these things make it more costly to host couchsurfers since the expected cost of broken stuff increases proportionally to all three of those things. It’s one thing to host a couchsurfer when all your furniture is Ikea and all your dishes are plastic. It’s quite another thing when you’ve picked up a proper sectional, a nice coffee table and proper plates and silverware.
It’s worth knowing that the linked code says: ” This section applies only to owner-occupied dwellings where a single lodger resides. Nothing in this section shall be construed to determine or affect in any way the rights of persons residing as lodgers in an owner-occupied dwelling where more than one lodger resides. ”
That’s an important point to clarify: the above only applies to single family lodgers. It looks like if there is more than one lodger (such as a mother and child) then the usual eviction process must be followed. I also found out that some local police departments don’t get involved with lodger disputes as a matter of policy. If you’re really concerned that potential lodgers will abuse the rules, then maybe it’s safest to take on a single lodger at a time, after finding out whether your local police will deal with any problems? Extra precautionary measures for the paranoid: make sure you meet, get a contract drawn up, and get some candid character references.
BTW, I’m interested if anyone around Berkeley, CA, would be willing to do something like this for me. I’m visiting for a few months (Oct-Jan) to help out with the Secular Solstice but I only know one person well enough to ask around for accommodation.
These are good suggestions, I think, but they reveal a problem: “candid character references” are likely to (often though not always) anti-recommend taking on exactly the sorts of people who are intended to benefit from the OP’s plan.
To be clear, I say this not to argue against your suggestions, but rather to point out a fundamental problem with the plan in question: that the personal qualities that make one a risky couch-surfer candidate either are, or are highly correlated with, those qualities which make one a couch-surfer candidate at all.
Yeah, I agree; still, if you decided that being a host is something you really wanted to do, you’d probably want to do some basic asshole proofing beyond setting the terms of the background check with Alicorn. Just in case Mark’s scenario comes up.
Also want to add: I’ve already seen Mark’s scenario come up at least once (at least, the general version of “person doesn’t leave when they say they’re going to”)
[ramble that I don’t think makes sense but don’t have time to word properly]
I think there’s still a bunch of value left on the table in terms of people who could benefit from staying on a couch for a bit and people who are (usually) willing to do so, but the tail risks are nontrivial. I’ve gone from being willing to host random people on my couch to no-longer-willing-to (although I think I mostly endorse having originally been willing to. This doesn’t feel very consistent of me and I’m not sure how to disentangle that)
[/ramble]
Well… there is a fairly obvious account of your apparently-inconsistent view, but it’s not a very complimentary one (although just how uncomplimentary depends on whether you consider hypocrisy to be a mortal or a venial sin).
I don’t say that said account is the correct one—I have no way of knowing that, after all—but it does neatly account for (and, indeed, predicts) everything you observe.
I’m actually not sure which cynical view you’re pointing at (and would be interested and comfortable with it being spelled out).
Sure. It goes something like this:
It is to your benefit to be known as the sort of person who’s willing to host people on your couch—it makes you appear selfless, generous, altruistic, etc. Because talk is cheap, simply saying that you’re willing to do this doesn’t suffice.
On the other hand, actually hosting people on your couch is risky and inconvenient.
How to get the best of both worlds? That is, how might you most effectively get the benefit of being known as someone who’s willing to host people on his couch, while avoiding the downside of actually hosting people on your couch?
Your solution would seem to be a fairly elegant one: host some people on your couch for a while, then stop doing so. After this temporary sacrifice, you then continue to be known as someone who was willing to do such things (and therefore as someone who’s selfless, generous, etc.), while no longer having to endure the downside. (If an explanation for the change is needed—and it isn’t always—you can blame the disconnect on any number of things: anything from inexplicable-even-to-yourself inconsistency in preferences, to some variation on “I’m getting too old for this”, etc.)
(Note the parallel with a variety of structurally similar, and well-documented, behavioral shifts: “I did all the drugs in college”, the “lesbian until graduation”[1] phenomenon, etc. In each case, we can take the person to be making an “investment” of sorts by engaging in a risky behavior, which then allows them to receive reputational “interest” long after terminating the behavior.)
[1] Note that the backlash, in the LGBT community, against this sort of behavior, can then be seen as a way of punishing this sort of “collect reputational interest on an initial investment without continuing to re-invest” strategy. But now we’re getting into the weeds of speculation, of course.
Ah, gotcha. Yup – certainly seems like a plausible facet of my motivation.
The less cynical version of that I was vaguely thinking about was “if _nobody_ hosts anyone, that leaves at least some value on the table. If everyone implements “host people until they get burned enough to no longer want to, while implementing at least minimal precautions against getting burned”, you get at least some people getting hosted (as well as some of the positive benefits of hosting, like meeting more people, variety, etc).
On the face of it this seems a bit incoherent (why not just have everyone implement the “exactly the right amount of couch surfing?”). Some aspects of it that seem at least somewhat defensible include:
If you’re younger, you have less of a network, and it’s actually just worth hitting the “explore” button on more things to make friends, meet people, build out your network.
Slightly cynical version of previous point (although I don’t think I’d hold it against people) that relates to your comment is “if you’re newer to a social network, you have fewer things proving your value to that social network. Providing couch space is a way to provide value. Later on, you may have demonstrated your value in other ways, such that you no longer need to do so in order to have a reputation as “person who is helpful to the network.”
When I used to host more, I lived in NYC where there were few other places to crash within my social network. Now I live in the Bay where I wouldn’t provide as much marginal value. There might be other versions of this applying at a more general level.
I think some amount of “getting wise/street smart about how to deal with people” actually requires you to get a bit burned in some way. You can hypothetically learn it from people who’ve already been burned and passed the wisdom along, but it’s harder to internalize. So, might as well spend the process of getting street smart on actually helping some people?
Oh, final point which I suspect ties more closely in with Alicorn’s original motivation:
People vary in how much they enjoy hosting guests (and how costly “bad” guests are to them). Before you start hosting people, you don’t know how much this benefits/costs you. Everyone implementing the algorithm “host people until they find that they have no longer want to, or slowly raising their standards on who they host over time”, gets you a mixture of benefits for hosters and hostees.
I do not think that this consideration is plausible unless the distribution of “guest quality” is very narrow (low–σ); otherwise the luck of the draw trumps everything.
My own distribution of guest quality has been quite large, and most of my “burned-ness” comes from 2 extreme cases, but I also would probably still be hosting people if
a) I lived in NYC where guest-crash-space was more important
b) I lived with roommates who weren’t particularly averse to hosting (by contrast, those roommates have correctly updated that even median-ish-but-below-average hostees are very costly to them)
Non-extreme cases seem to fall in a fairly regular spectrum from “actively good person to have around” to “costs a fairly predictable amount of tension in ‘how easy it is to get time using the show’, ‘having the common space to yourself’, ‘dealing with travelers who are in some kind of bad mood that makes the living room slightly worse’”, which I feel fits into my point.
The extreme bad eggs are quite bad and I’m not sure about their total frequency, but I also now think I mostly know how to screen them off now.
Indeed, I have no quarrel with most of your points (and your second bullet point—“do this until you have sufficiently proved your value and don’t have to”—is, I think, particularly worth considering for its wider applicability).
That being said, let me play devil’s advocate on one aspect of what you wrote:
This is, I think, counterbalanced (at least to some degree) by the fact that when you are younger and have less of a network, you face a greater risk that any given tail risk (such as finding yourself embroiled in costly, lengthy legal proceedings, or having all of your valuables stolen, or having your good name slandered, etc.) will “wipe you out” completely. Someone who has a dense, reliable social network, and a reasonable build-up of assets, has a “cushion” that can more easily absorb such tail risks.
(There is also the emotional analogue of this: when you’re older, more experienced, and more financially and socially secure, setbacks—especially direct personal betrayals—do not hit you as hard as they would if you were younger and, perhaps, more vulnerable. This is something to keep in mind especially for folks who are neuroatypical.)
Nod.
An alternative, less cynical viewpoint, would be that it actually does cost more to host couchsurfers as you get older. You get more stuff. You get better stuff. You get more attached to your stuff. All of these things make it more costly to host couchsurfers since the expected cost of broken stuff increases proportionally to all three of those things. It’s one thing to host a couchsurfer when all your furniture is Ikea and all your dishes are plastic. It’s quite another thing when you’ve picked up a proper sectional, a nice coffee table and proper plates and silverware.