Valēka: Difference between revisions

===Alternative Housing===

Valēka is an expensive city with high housing costs and a high cost of living, but relies on large numbers of low-wage workers, irregular workers, interns, and starving artists to drive its important tourism, hospitality, intracity transport, culture industry, and panhandling sectors. Many Valēkans, especially those newly established, such as youth, immigrants, or domestic migrants, cannot afford conventional housing and may be unable or unwilling to commute from more affordable suburbs and satellite cities (e.g. Kantrasar) and instead seek out alternative accommodations, often while on the lengthy waitlist for public housing units.

{{wp|Single-room occupancy}} buildings are common across the city, and are often rented by migrants, remittance workers, and students. Forms of SRO progressively limited in their amenities include the {{wp|kitchenette}}, {{wp|bedsit}}, {{wp|microapartment}}, and finally the {{wp|cage apartment|shelf apartment}}. Valēka microapartments are often vertically-oriented to take advantage of overhead space, and make extensive use of shelving, ladders, hammockry, and suspended storage systems to extract maximal utility from limited floorspace, often in converted facilities not originally intended for human habitation. Although microapartments are built and leased commercially, the city is also home to thousands of private microapartments improvised in the closets, substair spaces, attics, and sheds of single-family residences, usually leased off the books for cash. Whereas microapartments make extensive use of shelving, shelf apartments, as their name suggests ''are'' industrial-scale metal shelving intended for warehouse or poultry use and partitioned into rentable units using chicken wire or other barriers. Some higher-end shelf apartments use wooden or brushed-metal shelving intended for archival or office purposes. Bans on this mode of housing have been proposed numerous times, but ultimately city authorities would rather weather the health and safety hazards posed thereby than deal with homeless people in the street.