4 Ways Co-Living is Different These Days
There are still "adult dorms" though
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I recently met someone who was in the middle of reading my book, Brave New Home, and had some questions to ask me about the book’s chapter on co-living. As I explained to the reader, the co-living scene seems to change year by year. The co-living scene that I wrote about in the book, full of big co-living operations – WeLive, Common, Ollie, Starcity, and more – imploded during the pandemic. Many of their properties have been sold off and turned into hotels or apartments.
But I still hear a ton about new co-living ideas. The appeal of affordable, shared housing and/or intentional communities persists. Maybe co-living is not dead (as I may have written once!), but different.
Here are 4 ways co-living has changed:
Large-scale co-living operations are less focused on social connection than on affordability and practicality
For the previous generation of co-living operators, a key part of the co-living pitch was the intentional community provided. Curated amenity spaces, group dinners and classes were all aimed at people who wanted something more than just a room to rent. But now many of the most successful operators of shared housing are less focused on community, and more focused on helping people find the most affordable housing for their needs.
Padsplit, which continues to grow and now has more than 19,000 units under operation, is providing shared housing where people rent by the room. Padsplit’s appeal is a combination of affordability and easy-in/out renting, not necessarily the community the housing provides.
Likewise Urbanests offers rooms for rent with few frills. It’s appealing to international engineers in San Francisco who are working for Gen AI startups and who can’t afford or don’t want to pay extra for a full apartment. Both companies point to how shared housing can be an important tool for addressing the affordability crisis.
Additionally, the organizations who are talking about co-living as a housing solution, such as Pew and 5Boro Institute, see it as an opportunity to efficiently reuse vacant office buildings. Co-living is well suited to office building floor plates because you can retain shared bathrooms and make use of windowless core space as shared amenity rooms. These approaches to co-living might mention the importance of community, but they’re more focused on the practical fit between co-living and office towers.
It’s more temporary
On the flip side of the trend toward efficiency are co-living experiments that seek out deeper community in shorter sprints. Edge Esmeralda is one of the more captivating examples of the trend where people are living in close knit communities, or what they call a “pop-up village,” for just a few weeks a year. To attend Edge Esmeralda, people will end up in nearby hotels and campsites with shared activities during the day. Temporary co-living is also more in keeping with the growing trend of digital nomadism, where people change locations every few months. It’s interesting to see that co-living operators that cater to digital nomads, such as Offsite, have continued to stay in business while the traditional longer-term rental co-living companies have not. Perhaps there’s more of a market for short-term intentional communities than for long-term commitments to live with a group of people.