A year after a sleeping-pod dormitory on San Francisco's Mint Plaza gained media attention and, subsequently, negative attention from the city's building inspectors, the complex has received official city approval.

SFist's Apartment Sadness column came out of hibernation last fall to call out the latest example of expensive — and very tiny — tech-worker housing to crop up on the local market. ABC 7 did a story on it, without giving the name or address, just pointing to the relative novelty of having a place to live in SF that only cost $700 per month.

That story went a little viral, and about 10 days later, the company behind this project at 12 Mint Plaza, Brownstone Shared Housing, was dinged with building-code violations by the city. Among the violations cited were the illegal installation of 4-by-3.5-foot, twin-bed sleeping pods without a residential building permit, and illegally converting a toilet into a shower. There was also a citation for a front door that required a key to lock and unlock it from the inside, which was an obvious fire hazard.

It's been a year, and James Stallworth with Brownstone Shared Housing tells ABC 7 that significant changes didn't end up being required, and this was mostly red tape.

"There really wasn't anything that we had to change about the building," Stallworth says. "If we had to do all sorts of retrofitting to make it safe, I would have accepted that. I'm a human and know we have to provide a safe place to live but there were no safety concerns. There was really no construction that we had to do to improve the building."

Stallworth adds, "There was never anything illegal about the pods. It's just that we didn't have a change of use because this building used to be bank. So, we went through that process for about a year."

The door that needed a key for exiting was clearly a safety concern, but that had a five-day turnaround stipulation last year so presumably that was fixed quickly.

Young startup "founders" arriving from out of town are apparently still packing in the place, in search of cheap rent and not interested in paying a few hundred dollars more per month to live with roommates in a normal apartment. The SF location also provides work desks, and some common-area space. (Brownstone also operates pod hotels in New York and Palo Alto.)

Are we returning to the days of 2014/2015 when I could easily open up Craigslist and find a questionable converted closet or basement renting for $1500 or more? We shall see, and the rental market hasn't been that tight in quite a while.

But Stallworth tells ABC 7 that he's already planning a much bigger version of this long-term-stay pod hotel, elsewhere in the city.

"We are in the process of opening a place that is five times this size," Stallworth tells the station. "Early next year it will be opening."

Previously: Mint Plaza Sleeping Pod Complex Dinged With Violations After City Inspection