Tech companies have followed a familiar pattern for decades now: Break the law, fend off enforcement, then hire enough lobbyists and give politicians enough money to get your activities retroactively legalized.

That’s what Uber did. It’s what Airbnb did.

Now apparently it’s what a company called Brownstone Shared Housing is doing, according to former Sup. Dean Preston.

Brownstone’s model is pretty dystopian from the start. It offers single beds in dorms for $700 a month (a sign of just how terribly San Francisco has failed to provide affordable housing.)

The city has already approved the first set of what Wiliam Gibson, in an early dystopian tech novel, refers to as “coffins.”

But under state law, landlords can’t rent these sorts of beds. As Preston points out:

[California Civil Code

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