This is a tolerable place to stay for a week—I enjoyed wandering around Little Tokyo, within walking distance. I bumped into a street market two blocks away and bought three fantastic books for $12, walked to a daytime arcade bar and to Japanese restaurants and to the delightful Japanese Village Plaza. The caretakers were very responsive over text and email.

However, you should not stay here if you are looking for anything remotely resembling a clean hotel room with towels or private bathrooms; that said, you’re not sharing a bathroom concurrently—each toilet and shower is in its own mini room, which is a big step up from stalls. This place is basically a hostel, with 25+ residents on my floor at any given time, and there was another floor above me. Be very clear that this is indeed a bare-bones dorm/hostel.

It’s also worth being aware of these safety, cleanliness, and parking issues:

- Safety:
- Around 6am on Wednesday, a non-resident followed a resident through the front door and wandered the hallways, exhibiting strange behavior such as following me silently downstairs when I went to feed my meter (it was still dark out) and standing close to me in the hallway while I was wrapped in my shower towel. Jay was very responsive (within minutes of my email) and found a security video to understand what had happened, but I was told a sign would go up telling residents not to let in strangers, and I never saw the sign go up.
- On Saturday, i found the backup bolt stuck out so that the front door wouldn’t lock. I didn’t have the key for the backup bolt and couldn’t close it, and no attending person was in sight, so it would have been very easy for a non-resident to walk in unattended again.
- Cleanliness: I saw professionals cleaning the floors twice, but the areas on the bathroom doors around the handles were black with dirt, and the wall right at face-level next to my bed was smeared with gunk and gross. Even worse, there were signs up saying that if you used your shower flip flops in the shower, you could be kicked out immediately. Who would take a shower in a public place without shower thongs!? Terribly unhygienic, and it’s unfair to require that people use a shared shower with bare feet. The pictures in the Airbnb posting show clean and gleaming rooms—these are of the shared spaces on the ground floor. The hallway floors upstairs where the bedrooms are are black and dingy, and there are a LOT of hallways.
- Parking: the only time I could not get on-street parking was on Saturday, and parking in the lot across the street was $7 per day, not $4 as listed. It’s possible that all-day parking in the lot is only $4 during the week.

I would stay here again if I could not find anything else nearby and I needed this particular location.