When the Tofurky research division is working on new alternative protein products, they tend to worry about taste. They tend to worry about appearance. And they tend to worry about texture. 

If they’re making an alternative (i.e. no-animals-were-harmed) turk’y slice, they want to make it look, smell, and taste like the real thing, and they care about proper distribution of fat globules within the alt-slice. 

But here’s a hot take, might even be true: people don’t mainly eat food for the appearance. After all, they would still eat most foods in the dark. They don’t mainly eat foods for the texture, the taste, or even for the distribution of fat globules. People eat food for the nutrition. 

This is why people don’t eat bowls of sawdust mixed with artificial strawberry flavoring, even though we have invented perfectly good artificial strawberry flavoring. You could eat flavors straight up if you wanted to, but people don’t do that. You want ice cream, not cold dairy flavor #14, and you can tell the difference. This is a revealed preference: people don’t show up for the flavors.

A food has the same taste, smell, texture, retronasal olfaction, and general mouthfeel when you start eating it as when you finish. If you were eating for these features, you would never stop. But people do stop eating — just see how far you can get into a jar of frosting. The first bite may be heavenly, but you won’t get very deep. The gustation features of the frosting — taste, smell, etc. — don’t change. You stop eating because you are satisfied.

Assuming you buy this argument, that the real motivation behind eating food is nutrition, then why do people care about flavor (and appearance, and texture, etc.) at all? We’re so glad you asked:

People can detect some nutrients as soon as they hit the mouth: the obvious one is salt. It’s easy to figure out if a food is high in sodium; you just taste it. As a result, it’s easy to get enough salt. You just eat foods that are obviously salty until you’ve gotten enough. 

But other nutrients can’t be detected immediately. If they’re bound up deep within the food and need to be both digested and absorbed, it might take minutes, maybe hours, maybe even longer, before the body registers their presence. To get enough of these nutrients, you need to be able to recognize foods that contain these nutrients, even when you can’t detect them from chewing alone. 

This is where food qualities come in. Taste and texture are signs you learn that help you predict what nutrients are coming down the pipeline. Just like how you learn that thud of a candy bar at the bottom of a vending machine predicts incoming sugar. The sight of a halal van predicts greasy food imminently going down your drunk gullet. How you learn that the sight of the Lays bag means that there is something salty inside, even though you can’t detect salt just from looking at it. You also learn that the taste of lentils means that you will have more iron in your system soon, even if you can’t detect the iron from merely putting the lentils in your mouth.

To give context, this is coming from the model of psychology we described in our book, The Mind in the Wheel. In this model, motivation is the result of many different drives, each trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, and the systems creating the drives are called governors. In eating behavior, different governors track different nutrients and try to make sure you maintain your levels, hit your micros, get enough of each. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about this, but to give one example we’re confident about, there’s probably one governor that makes sure you get enough sodium, which is why you add salt to your food. There’s also at least one governor that keeps track of your fat intake, at least one governor clamoring for sugar, probably a governor for potassium. Who knows. 

Governors only care about hitting their goals. Taste and texture are just the signs they use to navigate. And this is where the problem comes in. 

Consider that for all its flaws, turkey is really nutritious. Two slices or 84 grams of turkey contains 29% of the Daily Value (DV) for Vitamin B12, 46% of the DV for Selenium, 49% of the DV for Vitamin B6, and 61% of the DV for Niacin (vitamin B3).

Tofurkey is not. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t contain any selenium or B vitamins. Not clear if it contains zinc or phosphorus either. Maybe this is wrong, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear that Tofurkey are trying to nutrition-match. And that may be the key to why these products are still not very popular. If you try to compete with turkey on taste and texture, but people choose foods based on nutrition, you’re gonna have a problem.

This is just one anecdote, but: our favorite alternative protein is Morningstar Farms vegetarian sausage links. And guess what food product contains 25% DV of vitamin B6, 50% DV of niacin, and 130% DV of vitamin B12 per two links? Outstanding in its field.

In the Vegan War Room

We believe this has strategic implications. So please put on your five-star vegan general hat, as we lead you into your new imagined role as commander of the faithful.

General, as you may be aware, the main way our culture attempts to change behavior is by introducing conflict. We attempt to make people skinny by mocking them, which pits the shame governor against the hunger governors. We control children by keeping them inside at recess or making them stay after class, which pits the governors that make them act up in class against the governors that make them want to run around with their friends. Or we control them by saying, no dessert until you eat your brussel sprouts.

This is an unfortunate holdover from the behaviorists, who once dominated the study of psychology. In behaviorism, you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish. Naturally when they asked themselves “how to get less of a behavior?” the answer they came up with was “punish!” But this is a fundamentally incomplete picture of psychology. Reward and punishment don’t really exist — motivation is all about governors learning what will increase or decrease their errors. While you can decide to pit governors against each other, this approach has serious limitations. It just doesn’t work all that well. 

First of all, conflict between governors is experienced as anxiety. So while you can change someone’s behaviour by causing conflict, you’ll also make them seriously anxious. This is fine, we guess, if you hate them and want them to feel terrible all the time. But it’s more than a little antisocial. 

Anyone who’s the target of punishment will see what is happening. They don’t want to feel anxious all the time, and they especially don’t want to feel anxious about doing what to them are normal, everyday things. If you try to change their behavior in this way, they will find you annoying and do their best to avoid you, so you can’t create so much conflict inside them. Imagine how much less effective this strategy is, compared to finding a method of convincing that people don’t avoid, or that they might even actively seek out.

On top of this, conflict dies out without constant maintenance. In the short term you can convince people that they will be judged if they have premarital sex, but this lesson will quickly fade, especially if they see people getting busy without consequence. The only way to keep this in check is to run a constant humiliation campaign, where people are reminded that they will be shamed if they ever step out of line. This is expensive, neverending, and, for the obvious reasons, unpopular. Scolding can work in limited ways, but nobody likes a scold.

Many attempts to convince people to become vegan, or even to simply eat less meat, follow this strategy — they try to make people eat less meat by taking the governors that normally vote for meat-eating (several nutritional governors, and perhaps some other governors, like the one for status) and opposing them with some other drive. 

You can tell people that they are bad people for eating meat, you can say that they will be judged, shamed, or ostracized. You can tell them that eating meat is bad for their health or bad for the environment. This might even be true. But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s motivating. This strategy won’t work all that well. It only causes conflict, because the drives that vote against eating meat will be strenuously opposed by the drives that have always been voting to eat meat to begin with.

But you don’t need to fight your drives. Better to provide a substitute.

No one takes a horse to their dentist appointments anymore. Cars are just vegan carriages; hence “horseless carriage”. We used to kill whales for oil. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s not because people became more compassionate. It’s because whale oil lamps got beat out by better alternatives, like electric lighting. People substitute one good for another when it is either strictly better at satisfying the same need(s), or better in some way — for example, not as good, but much cheaper, or much faster, or much more convenient. 

Whale oil lamps burned bright, but with a disagreeable fishy smell. Imagine if in the early days of alternative lighting, they had tried to give whale oil substitutes like kerosene or electric lights the same fishy smell, imagining that this would make it easier to compete with whale oil. No! They just tried to address the need the whale oil was addressing, namely light, without trying to capture any of the incidental features of whale oil. They offered a superior product, or sometimes one that was inferior but cheaper, and that was enough to do the job. We don’t run whale ships off Nantucket any more. 

So if you want people to eat less meat, if you want more people to become vegan, you shouldn’t roll out alternative turkey, salami, or anything else. You should provide substitutes, competing superior products, that satisfy the same drives without any reference to the original product. Ta-daaaa.

No one eats yogurt because they have an innate disposition for yogurt. Instead, they eat it because yogurt fulfills some of their needs. If they could get those needs met through a different product, they probably would, especially if the alternative is faster / easier / cheaper. 

For the sake of illustration, let’s say that turkey contains just three nutrients, vitamins X, Y, and Z. 

If you make an alternative turkey that matches the real thing in taste and texture, but provides none of the same nutrients, then despite the superficial similarity, you’re not even competing in the same product category. It’s like selling cardboard boxes that look like cars but that can’t actually get you to work — however impressive they might look, they don’t meet the need. People will not be inclined to replace their real turkey with your alternative one, at least not without considerable outside motivation. You will be working uphill.

Making a really close match can actually be counterproductive. If an alternative food looks/tastes/smells very similar to an original food, but it doesn’t contain the same nutrition, this is basically the same as gaslighting your governors. And the better the taste match, the more confusing this is.

Think about it from the perspective of the selenium governor. You’re trying to encourage behaviors that keep you in the green zone on your selenium levels, mostly by predicting which foods will lead to more selenium later. But things have recently become really confusing. About half the time you taste turkey flavor and texture, you get more selenium a few hours later. The other half of the time, you encounter turkey flavor and texture, but the selenium never arrives. 

By eating alternative proteins that taste like the “real thing”, you end up seriously confusing your governors, with basically no benefit.

We recently tried one of these new vegan boxed eggs. It did have the appearance of scrambled eggs, and it curdled much like scrambled eggs. It even tasted somewhat like scrambled eggs. But the experience of eating it was overall terrible. Not the flavor — the deep sense that this was not truly filling, not a food product. Despite simulating the experience of eggs quite closely, we did not want it. Maybe because it was not truly nutritious.

If you make an alternative turkey that contains vitamins X, Y, and Z, you will at least be providing a real substitute. People will have a natural motivation to eat your alternative turkey. But if you do this, you’re still in direct competition with the original turkey. You’re in its niche, it is an away game for you and a home game for turkey. You have to convince the consumer’s mind that your alt-turkey is worth switching to, and that takes a lot of convincing. People prefer the familiar. Unless the new product is much better in some way, they won’t switch. 

If you are trying to replicate turkey, you need to make a matching blob that matches real turkey on all the dimensions people might care about. A product exactly like that is hard to make at all, and forget about doing it while also being cheap, available, and satisfying. This is why it’s an uphill battle, you’re trying to meet turkey exactly.

Those of us who have never tasted tukrey are in ignorance still, our subconscious has no idea that turkey slices would be a great source of vitamin X. We’re not tempted. But people who have tried turkey before have tasted the deli meat of knowledge, and there’s no losing that information once you have it. Vitamin X governor gets what vitamin X governor wants, so these people will always feel called to the best source of vitamin X they’re aware of. You’ll never convince the vitamin X governor that turkey is a bad source of vitamin X; you’ll get more mileage out of giving it a better way to get what it wants!

So instead of shaming, or offering mock meats, the winning strategy might be to just come up with new, original vegan foods that are very good sources of vitamins X, Y, and/or Z. Just make vitamin X drinks, vitamin Y candies, and vitamin Z spread. If you don’t try to mimic turkey, then you’re not in competition with turkey in any way. You don’t need to convince people that it’s better than turkey — you just need to convince them that it’s nutritious and delicious. Why try to copy turkey when you can beat it at its own game? 

You don’t need alt-turkey to be all turkey things to all turkey people. As long as people get their needs covered in a way that satisfies, they’ll be happy. 

It seems like it would be easier to make a good source of phosphorus, than to make a good source of phosphorus PLUS make it resemble yogurt as much as possible. Alternative proteins that try to mimic existing foods will always be at a disadvantage in terms of quality, taste, and cost, simply because trying to do two things is harder than doing one thing really well. You’ll lose out on a lot of tradeoffs.

If we created new food products that contain all the nutrients that people currently get from meat, except tastier, cheaper, or even just more convenient, people would slowly add these foods to their diet. Over time, these foods would displace turkey and other meats as superior substitutes, just like electric lights replaced gas lamps, or like cell phones eclipsed the telegraph. Without even thinking about it, people will soon be eating much less meat than they did before. And if these new foods are good enough sources of the nutrients we need, then in a generation or two people may not be eating meat at all. After all, meat is a bit of a hassle to produce and to cook. Not like my darling selenium drink. 

We see this already in some natural examples. Tofu is much more popular in countries like China, Korea, Japan, where it is simply seen as a food, than it is in the US, where it is treated as a meat substitute. You don’t frame your substitute as being in the same category as your competitors unless you really have to. That’s just basic marketing.

We have a friend whose family is from Cuba. She tells a story about how her grandmother was bemused when avocado toast got really popular in the 2010s. When asked why she found this so strange, her grandmother explained that back in Cuba, the only reason you would put avocado on your toast was if you were so dirt poor you couldn’t afford butter. It was an extremely shameful thing to have to put avocado on your toast, avocados grew on trees in the back yard and were basically free. If you were so very poor as to end up in this situation, you would at least try to hide it.

In Cuba, where avocado was seen as a substitute for butter, it was automatically seen as inferior. But when it appeared in 2010s America in the context of a totally new dish, it was wildly popular. And in terms of food replacement, avocado is a stealth vegan smash hit, way more successful than nearly any other plant-based product. It wasn’t framed that way, but in a practical sense, what did avocado displace? Mostly dairy- and egg-based spreads like butter, cream cheese, and mayonnaise. There may be no other food that has led to such an intense increase in the effective amount of veganism, even if the people switching away from these spreads didn’t see it that way. They just wanted avocado on the merits.

This product space is usually thought of as “alternative proteins”. Which is fine, protein is one thing that everyone needs. But a better perspective might be, “vegan ways to get where you’re going”. And just because some of these targets happen to be bundled together in old-fashioned flesh-and-blood meat, doesn’t mean they need to be bundled together in the same ways in the foods of the future.

A guy in Tennessee spent more than five weeks in jail because of an anodyne Facebook meme that did not even jokingly threaten violence:

The officers came to arrest Larry Bushart shortly before midnight on Sept. 21.

Mr. Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tenn., had posted a meme on Facebook after the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10. It was a picture of Donald Trump along with Mr. Trump’s comment in response to a school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa in 2024: “We have to get over it.” The meme was headed by the caption, “This seems relevant today.”

Mr. Bushart shared that meme in a Facebook thread promoting a vigil for Mr. Kirk in nearby Perry County, Tenn. The Perry County Sheriff’s Office obtained a warrant for Mr. Bushart’s arrest, claiming that the post was a threat of “mass violence” at a school. The sheriff’s office did this even though the meme referred to a shooting that took place more than a year before at a school in Iowa. The only connection — if you can even call it a connection — was that the Iowa school also had “Perry” in its name.

Mr. Bushart’s bail was set at $2 million. Unable to pay, he spent 37 days in jail before prosecutors dropped the charge.

In my 25 years working as a lawyer on free-speech cases, I have seen a lot of overreach. I have never seen anything quite like this. With the help of a local attorney, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is preparing a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the Perry County sheriff and others, seeking damages and a ruling that what happened to Mr. Bushart violated the First Amendment.

This episode recalls the abuses that gave rise to modern First Amendment jurisprudence more than a century ago. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for giving an antiwar speech and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction, it later changed course, holding that the government may punish political advocacy only when it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action or when it amounts to a genuine threat.

Most of the hundreds of others of people who lost their jobs for making non-reverent posts about Charlie Kirk are not First Amendment issues per se, but do lay bare the bad faith of the broader right’s CANCEL CULTURE industrial complex. It’s always meant that they should be able to say whatever you want and you should be able to shut up, and the rise in state censorship is even worse than this.

The post Life during the free speech administration appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Today’s post is from , who writes the newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher about the intersection of music and data, and whose book, “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves,” is out now.

Everybody’s saying it: culture is stuck. Or at a standstill. Or collapsing. And it’s not just journalists and critics who talk like this. Surveys show regular people also think that popular culture is not doing well.

While I am skeptical of some of these ideas, people do have a decent point. The box office is jammed with prequels, sequels, and remakes. The highest grossing concert tours are often by artists from decades ago. Brand logos all look the same. Color is disappearing from the world.

Most people point to the internet, social media platforms, and curation algorithms as the causes of this stagnation, and I think there’s a lot of truth to those perspectives. But there’s a powerful force that is often left out of these discussions, one that is — ironically — meant to protect creatives: copyright. Let’s turn to the world of music, a world that I am very familiar with, to understand how.

The Music Catalog Purchasing Craze

Copyright lasts a long time. Currently, works are protected in the United States for the life of the author plus 70 years for individual works and 95 years for anonymous works or works for hire. That means art can often remain valuable for more than a century, creating a huge incentive to buy up old copyrights and squeeze them for cash.

We see this happening right now. Over the last few years, labels, publishers, and private equity firms have been buying the catalogs of famous musicians for eye-popping sums. Neil Young sold his catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund for $150 million. Phil Collins and his Genesis bandmates sold theirs to Concord for $300 million. Bob Dylan also sold his to Universal for $300 million. Bruce Springsteen’s went to Sony for $550 million. And that only scratches the surface.

Why would anyone pay so much for a catalog of aging songs? It turns out there’s still a lot of money to be made on hits from decades ago. Billy Joel, for example, hasn’t released a studio album since 1993, yet he remains the 169th most popular artist on Spotify. Every time the Piano Man’s music is streamed, purchased, covered, or placed in the background of a movie or television show, he gets paid. Investors are betting that much music of the past will remain valuable long into the future.

Still, you can’t just sit on a music catalog for a hundred years and expect to rake in the dough. Popular culture changes fast. Most people aren’t listening to music from 1965, let alone 1925. If you want kids to be listening to “Yellow Submarine” 50 years from now, someone has to show it to them. Investors are aware of this, and that’s why they go to great lengths to remarket, repackage, and relitigate the past.

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Remarket: Let’s Make a Movie!

In 2020, Authentic Brands Group was trying to reinvigorate Elvis Presley’s brand. After purchasing 85 percent of the King’s likeness, publishing, and estate in 2013, yearly earnings had fallen 30 percent. The company needed to make the “Heartbreak Hotel” singer cool again. Among other things, they decided to produce a new Elvis Presley biopic. The 2022 film, directed by Baz Luhrmann, grossed more than $280 million.

This Elvis Presley strategy has been played out repeatedly in the past decade.

• Investment group purchases the intellectual property of a star from yesteryear

• Investment group needs to create new revenue streams to turn a profit

• Investment group produces a biopic

As I reported in my newsletter, we are seeing more than 200 percent more music biopics released each year on average as compared to just a few decades ago. Many of these biopics are released after the recent sale of intellectual property. As you might imagine, when gobs of money and resources are used to retell stories of the past, there is less of those things left for new stories.

Repackage: Let’s Make a Song!

In the same way that you may have noticed a surge in music biopics over the last decade, you may have also noticed huge hits sampling and interpolating elements of older hits. Shaboozey’s number one hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” interpolates large pieces of J-Kwon’s 2004 smash “Tipsy.” Jack Harlow’s number one hit “First Class” is built around a sample of Fergie’s 2006 number one hit “Glamorous.” Drake and Future’s “Way 2 Sexy” interpolates elements of Right Said Fred’s 1991 number one hit “I’m Too Sexy.”

Though sampling builds on a rich musical tradition, the reason some of these songs are created is the same reason modern biopics are created. In 2023, for example, Pitchfork reported that after Hipgnosis Songs Fund purchased the Rick James catalog, they began pitching A-listers on sampling “Super Freak.” Nicki Minaj and her team jumped at the offer and scored a smash with the bland “Super Freaky Girl.” Again, the promotion of songs like these come at the expense of novel ideas.

Relitigate: Let’s File a Lawsuit!

If remaking works of the past does not provide enough of a financial return, you can also just file a bunch of lawsuits. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal noted a 31 percent increase in musical copyright-infringement cases filed between 2015 and 2018. Many of those cases never make it very far, but litigation that goes the distance has increased too.

In my book “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves,” I found that the number of musical copyright-infringement cases that received a judicial opinion at the federal level grew 200 percent between the 2000s and the 2010s.

Some of these lawsuits represent legitimate grievances. But most illustrate how exorbitant copyright terms allow the most successful rightsholders to bully the next generation of artists. The Marvin Gaye estate, for example, is notoriously litigious, suing anyone for so much as making music with a similar vibe as Mr. Gaye.

Of note, Marvin Gaye has been dead since 1984. Because his music won’t enter the public domain until 2054, his estate can try to maximize the return on his intellectual property by threatening — and often following through on — lawsuits. (Remixes and biopics also help, which the Gaye estate has been involved with in addition to their courtroom shenanigans.)

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to enforce your copyright in court. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a music biopic. There’s also nothing inherently wrong with sampling and remixing older works. There isn’t even anything wrong with investing in intellectual property of the past.

But when you combine huge investments with digital platforms that make the past and present equally accessible, along with copyrights that will likely last more than a century, you get a situation where — as Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan put it in 2021 — “the handful of artists who struck it biggest in previous generations may cast an ever-larger shadow over the future.”

What Can We Do?

I don’t think we should abolish intellectual property rights. In fact, I think those rights are vital to the flourishing of creative industries. But our culture sits at a troubling intersection where creative tools are more accessible than ever before, but more money seems to be flowing into works of the past than works of the present. If copyright terms were shortened, there would be a stronger incentive to find the next generation of talent.

But how long should those terms be?

Sadly, we don’t have a ton of wiggle room. Copyright is largely governed by international treaties. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works has been signed onto by 181 countries (including the US) and stipulates that the minimum term of protection should be at least the life of the author plus 50 years if the author is known and 50 years from publication if the author is unknown.

According to law professor Sam Ricketson, amending the terms of the Berne Convention is “highly unlikely,” so the best the U.S. may be able to do is adhere to the minimums. Even so, shortening from 95 years to 50 years, and life plus 70 years to life plus 50 years, would be a step in the right direction.

In the meantime, there are other tools that could help alleviate this issue. Some have suggested making it easier for authors to terminate their copyrights. Others have pushed for more clearly defining “transformative use,” which could cut down on frivolous litigation. Still, others have suggested lowering the caps for statutory damages in infringement cases.

While all of those would be helpful, I think the most impactful policy-fix would be the expansion of “compulsory licensing.”

Compulsory licenses allow a third party to use a protected work without the owner’s consent, provided royalties are paid to the owner. Not only does the Berne Convention lay out guidelines for compulsory licensing, but these licenses have been used to great effect in the U.S. and abroad.

In 1909, for example, Congress established a compulsory mechanical license in the world of music. This meant that if you wanted to cover, say, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” you wouldn’t need express permission from the Boss. Anyone could release a cover of the song so long as they filed some paperwork and paid the government-mandated royalty rate.

Without the compulsory license, everyone — from the smallest artist to the biggest star — would need to get direct permission from the original songwriter and negotiate a royalty rate to perform a cover. This would have led to dramatically fewer covers being released. But because of compulsory licensing, musical interpretations flourished across a range of genres (e.g., jazz, blues, rock) during the 20th century with copyright owners still being compensated.

In other countries, compulsory licensing has also been established for “orphan works,” or those for which the author cannot be located. In these cases, governments have elected to step in and grant a limited, non-transferable license for a work. Compulsory licensing schemes could clearly be applied in a variety of artistic scenarios. In fact, I’ve previously advocated in Slow Boring for a compulsory license to be established for music samples.

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This reasoning may strike you as odd. If Disney, for example, was forced to license various parts of the “Star Wars” universe to other creators, wouldn’t we just end up with an avalanche of horrible “Star War”-related content? Possibly. But because Disney has a monopoly on the idea, no one else can try to outdo them.

The compulsory license for cover songs again proves a good comparison here. There are scores of covers that are now considered the canonical version of a song. In a world without a compulsory license — or the public domain — it’s possible those would not exist (e.g., Jimi Hendrix covers Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Jeff Buckley covers Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Sinéad O’Connor covers Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”).

Though we have largely focused this discussion around music, I want to make it clear that the same dynamics are playing out in nearly every creative industry. When film studios spend millions on legacy brands and old television series are rebooted and video game studios refuse to license out-of-print games, we are witnessing the same painful effects of long copyright terms in these fields.

There is no simple fix to make our culture more dynamic. But if we can advocate for any changes that prevent intellectual property from being weaponized, shorten the revenue runway for older works, and lower friction for the creation of newer works, then we might just create a world that incentivizes the creation of new works while still compensating the artists of yore.

Thank you to Adam Mastroianni for feedback on the post.

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As housing costs rise across the country, it’s worth looking into what was used in the past to address housing shortages. It used to be popular to rent small, furnished rooms in residential buildings by the week or month. Residents typically shared kitchens and bathrooms. This arrangement, called single-room occupancy, made up a sizable portion of housing in major cities into the middle of the 20th century.

But beginning in the 1950s, some residents and politicians led a push against SROs, decrying the buildings as urban blight. Cities began outlawing SRO buildings through building codes and zoning laws. Nationwide, millions of SRO units were lost, the buildings demolished as part of urban renewal efforts, or converted to other uses.

The SRO concept has survived in small numbers, though, used mostly by organizations dedicated to addressing homelessness. In DC, the local nonprofit SOME owns about 700 SRO and efficiency units, for example.

As the need for affordable housing grows, SRO-like accommodations are reappearing in DC and elsewhere, but they look a lot different than they did a century ago: PadSplit uses membership agreements, not leases, for renters so they can rent by the week instead of month or year-long agreements typical of leases. Cohabs has shared amenities, including laundry rooms and gyms, for multiple six-person units (the maximum number of unrelated renters allowed per single-family home in DC) to share.

While not explicitly banned in DC, a combination of building codes (SRO bedroom sizes must be 95 square feet; the building must have a 24-hour security system), high land costs and zoning restrictions (cannot be built in areas zones for single-family homes) prevent the economics of operating an SRO building from making sense.

While I don’t have the solutions, the success of private companies offering affordable rooms suggests that the demand is there. It would be wise for DC to encourage more SRO and SRO-type buildings, whether that’s with additional subsidies for SROs, looser zoning restrictions, or rolling back unnecessary building codes.

Renting by the room

Two companies, Cohabs and Padsplit, are beginning to fill in the affordability gap with SRO-like housing options.

Cohabs’ offerings resemble group houses, with furnished rooms rented out individually on leases of at least three months. The company currently operates one house in Columbia Heights and another on Capitol Hill, with plans to expand to LeDroit Park and Logan Circle later this year.

The Columbia Heights house was originally two rowhomes that were combined into one, plus an addition on top. In the house, there are 36 bedrooms, nineteen bathrooms, and two kitchens, plus other amenities including a gym and coworking space.

According to Cohabs’ DC City Manager, Jessica Liu, the typical lease is six months and the average age of tenants is 28. Nearly three-quarters of the Columbia Heights house residents are international and many of the tenants are interns, graduate students, or digital nomads. Some use the house as a way to meet other people or explore the city before moving on.

“Sometimes in the group chat you’ll see, ‘It’s a nice day, does anyone want to walk to Georgetown?’” Lui said of the Cohabs Whatsapp group.

DC’s large international population was one of the draws for Cohabs, along with the city’s young and transient residents, according to James Grasso, the company’s head of real estate. The company was originally founded in Europe and now operates 23 houses in New York City. DC is the company’s second US market.

Cohabs aren’t exactly cheap. In DC, a room with a private bathroom is about $1,600 a month on average — cheaper than an apartment in the same neighborhood, but closer to group house pricing than to that of a traditional SRO.

A more affordable option is PadSplit. Similar to Cohabs, PadSplit rents furnished bedrooms by the room. PadSplit homes typically turn non-bedrooms — think living rooms or dens — into bedrooms using temporary walls. Nationally speaking, PadSplit homes can house seven to eight people in a four bedroom.

Unlike Cohabs, PadSplit does not own the homes. The platform connects people looking for housing to homeowners, who furnish and manage the houses. Those living in a PadSplit home are technically not tenants, since there is no lease. Instead, they sign a PadSplit membership agreement.

PadSplit is priced to be 50% to 60% of a local studio apartment: Currently, a room in a Columbia Heights house is about $1,000 per month, plus move-in and membership fees. Utilities, including WiFi, are included. While PadSplit can suggest the pricing, the host has the ultimate say.

Unlike traditional landlords, PadSplit doesn’t require a security deposit or a minimum credit score. The company uses income verification to approve an applicant. Successful applicants cannot have more than two evictions on their record in the past seven years, or any felony convictions.

While PadSplit doesn’t target any type of demographic, PadSplit members tend to be blue-collar workers making between $20,000 and $60,000 a year, according to Andrew Mackler, the company’s head of market launch. The most common employers of DC members are Amazon, public schools, the federal government, and George Washington University.

Not signing a lease gives members more flexibility: Most members stay within the PadSplit system for about eight to nine months, and often move between homes. In some cases, members will move into one home while they wait for a room in another to open up.

Marcus Barnes, a PadSplit owner in DC, Maryland, and Atlanta, said he has to spend time making properties “PadSplit ready” — adding walls and furnishing the bedrooms. But once a home has been converted, he says he makes more money with a PadSplit than he did previously renting to a traditional tenant.

Pushback and safety concerns

As with SROs, PadSplit homes are not always welcome. Neighbors of an Atlanta PadSplit that was illegally operating in a single-family neighborhood complained to the county last year. Mackler said most pushback from neighbors is related to trash, house upkeep, cars, or other quality of life issues.

Some members have had trouble with PadSplit arrangements. One member in Houston found unsanitary conditions and a stranger accessing her room before a journalist contacted the company’s CEO and she was able to transfer to a new house. Another in Atlanta had to get a protection order from police before PadSplit agreed to remove a man who was making unwelcome advances and peeping in her window.

These negative experiences highlight some of the real safety concerns that can come with affordable rooms offered in this way. Barnes said that in the three to four years he has been a PadSplit host, he has only had to evict one person. According to the company, about 1% of PadSplit members are evicted. The company will try to work with members before pursuing an eviction.

Demand highlights unmet need

PadSplit is growing, hitting 20,000 units earlier this year, proving the country’s need for affordable housing is still unmet. By expanding not just the number of housing units but also the types of housing units available, cities like DC can be better suited to meet the various needs of current and future residents.

While SROs are not explicitly discouraged, there is still a disconnect between the demand for SRO buildings and the supply in urban areas. Until SRO buildings are welcome through zoning laws and building codes, private companies will continue to find workarounds, creating their own SRO-like options to meet the demand.

Top image: PadSplit and Cohabs are two companies offering rooms in Columbia Heights. Image by Mike Maguire licensed under Creative Commons.

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