Conceptual rendering of an upscale building transformed for co-living.
BuzzFeed News
Before WeWork came knocking, the 12-story building at the corner of South Clark and 23rd streets in a grayscale office park in Crystal City was outdated and vacant. But by the time the $10 billion co-working company is done, it will be a brightly painted beacon of innovation where residents of the Washington, D.C., suburb — once a bedroom community for defense and military workers that Bloomberg Businessweek described as “a brutalist enclave of office blocs and subterranean shopping centers” — can both co-work and “co-live.” The interior will feature 360-square-foot “micro-apartments” nestled atop two floors of shared working space in a futurist vision of the ultimate in home/office efficiency. After the conversion was approved by Arlington County, one board member told a local news site that transforming “an aging, vacant office building into an innovative live–work space is an example of how we continue to reinvent Crystal City as a more attractive, vibrant place that will attract more entrepreneurs and tech workers.”
Over the past seven months or so, several sleek new real estate developments have been announced, a couple of them even venture-backed, that want to offer residents a customized version of this brand of co-living. They share some basic similarities with their Bay Area predecessors, from experimental Northern California communes to hacker hostels crammed with young software engineers who headed West because it looked exciting on HBO. All ask residents to trade personal space for the perks of group living, but the newer entrants have a different attitude toward the “communal” part of the proposition — here, the “co-” prefix is more a signifier of close quarters and plug-and-play co-habitation, rather than co-op–style shared duties, chore wheels, and elbow grease. Month-to-month rental agreements require little more than a signature and a credit card. Your chores are done for you, seamlessly, in the background. Rooms are cleaned weekly. Coordinated events make even the socializing aspect easier.
It’s a simple and intoxicating proposition — one born of the same Silicon Valley belief system that has plowed billions of dollars into on-demand apps that do your laundry, cook your meals, chauffeur you around, and clean your house, and that has so thoroughly shifted personal fulfillment to work that it's all but indistinguishable from life. The do-it-for-me rental agreement reflects an unwavering faith in better living through entrepreneurship that constantly coos: When acting in service of a Big Idea, your time is too valuable to waste.
And for those in the business of selling short-term diced-and-quartered residential space in cute city neighborhoods with an entrepreneurial gloss, there’s no moment like the present. Co-living may have been invented in the Bay Area, but now it’s being exported to places like Crystal City and Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Opportunism, after all, lives on both coasts.
WeWork Navy Yard.
S9 Architects/Perkins Eastman / Via newyorkyimby.com
The spaces in question are superficially different, but politically aligned: better designed, better funded, and way sexier versions of the group housing that came before them.
WeWork was set to launch its communal living concept (branded as WeLive) in Crystal City last month but the latest internal estimates are late fall or the end of the year. The next WeLive property is a 27-story office building in lower Manhattan. That's just the beginning. One commercial real estate insider told BuzzFeed News that in the past couple months, WeWork has also leased a “five-story plus penthouse” office building at 1161 Mission Street in San Francisco’s Mid-Market, a hub of tech company headquarters, for launching another WeLive. The 69,000-square-foot space is roughly three blocks from Twitter, four blocks from Uber, six blocks from Pinterest, and a quick hop from the luxury high-rises and controversy that followed.
WeWork may be based in New York, but signing three long-term leases before launching is pure Silicon Valley chutzpah. (Another Silicon Valley quirk? WeWork never buys, only leases, and calls it being “asset-light.”) The Crystal City project will include 252 of these micro-apartments plus amenities like an arcade, an herb garden, a library, common areas done up in fashionable neutrals, and, of course, plenty of bike parking. The Manhattan property is located at 110 Wall St., a 27-story “dark, shiny modernist tower” that was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. WeWork has not confirmed the San Francisco deal, but the other two buildings will include its trademark shared offices, so members presumably can toggle between co-work and co-life at will.
Meanwhile, a startup called Common has already raised $7.35 million at a $20 million valuation for a co-living network in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant and initially planned to charge $1,750 per month. Common’s first property, a brownstone redesigned to fit 19 rooms, launches in October. Rooms will be least 80 square feet and feature at least one window. Common’s founder, Brad Hargreaves — also the co-founder of General Assembly, the startup that kicked off the “learn to code” craze — told BuzzFeed News that he will offer weekly cleaning, a set of shared supplies including coffee, paper towels, and fresh fruit. The garden floor will become a shared area that functions as a co-working space during the day and a dining room at night. That’s what users want, Hargreaves said. Many “work from their homes and co-working spaces” and end up confined to one room. “Their bed is often three feet from their desk, so it's hard to separate work and life.” Hargreaves thinks of Common as a product, and says user feedback requested “some modicum of separation.” Common’s value proposition to them is, then: “Hey, rather than working three feet from your bed, why not work a little further away?”
And The Caravanserai, which bills itself as a “global co-living subscription,” is charging $1,600 per month for access to houses in Ubud, Mexico City, and Lisbon. CEO Bruno Haid describes himself as a “founding tenant” of three co-living spaces, including 20Mission, an infamous spot in San Francisco that lets tenants pay in bitcoin.
Other startups are slowly exploring co-living concepts that look a little less like high-end hacker hostels and a little more like luxury short-term rentals, albeit ones with a faintly cooperative glow. This month, the deluxe co-working space Neuehouse — which sells itself toward “ambitious innovators” — raised $25 million. A tech investor, who reviewed the company’s pitch deck last year and passed, told Buzzfeed News that Neuehouse has looked into doing “a hotel and extended stay.” (The source requested anonymity because the investor has a working relationship with the New York–based company.) WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has been coy about WeLive and declined to speak for this article, but he has dangled the possibility of Webnb as well. “The hotel experience is an ‘I’ experience, not a ‘We’ experience,” he recently told Businessweek.
The trend risks veering into self-parody. Twitter users had trouble figuring out whether a widely shared recent piece in the New York Times real estate section was for real.
20Mission / Via 20mission.com
Co-living is still too nascent and disjointed to be described in certain terms. But a good place to look for clues might be WeWork, which leases short-term shared office space in 47 locations across 16 cities, and which helped pioneer the contemporary trend toward clean-lined and well-stocked communal productivity sanctuaries. Investors valued the five-year-old company at $5 billion in December, then cranked that up to jaw-dropping $10 billion last month.
It’s no coincidence that two of the main figures packaging and selling the idea of co-living to millennials outside the Bay Area — Hargreaves and Neumann — are the same people that helped make the lifestyle of a startup founder aspirational in the first place. Because WeWork is not, as its name might suggest, for workers. It’s a quasi-incubator for die-hard entrepreneurs, a “community of creators” complete with an online magazine called Creator and the yogic tagline “Do What You Love” — earnest enough to empower, vague enough not to threaten — scrawled on nearly every surface. Some WeWork co-working locations have arcades; others have bocce ball courts. The floor plans are open, the coffee is micro-roasted, the beer is craft, the music is up-tempo and anodyne. Quilted leather couches offer a change of scenery for your MacBook. Common areas facilitate collaboration. Networking is as easy as swiveling your Humanscale chair toward your nearest fellow creator. It’s not until a few weeks have passed that you start to notice that the reclaimed wood is fake, the free beer is almost always flat, and there are grown men day-sleeping on that quilted leather couch. Still, $400 a month per desk is a small price to pay for the opportunity to play Zuck.
WeWork didn’t invent co-working, but it did capitalize on prevailing macro trends, many of which originated in Silicon Valley. Freelancers, contractors, and the self-employed are now almost a third of the labor force, meaning independent office space is in higher demand than ever. In the era of always-on smartphones and the age of the “personal brand,” what we do is increasingly synonymous with who we are — as John Battelle, a tech industry veteran and author, wrote on his blog in June, “[WeWork is] attempting to scale a new kind of culture … that promises a quality workstyle, to be certain, but one that also celebrates who we are as people: we seek to find meaning in work.” And at the same time, the so-called sharing economy has imbued instant gratification with a sense of righteousness. It’s a small leap for the same Silicon Valley that convinced every Uber customer they were sharing to then sell us on spending hundreds of dollars a month for a desk and a bottomless keg because it elevates office work to the higher plane of collaboration.
But perhaps most important of all, WeWork has managed to align itself with the new American dream, updated by Silicon Valley: Get rich quick, by building a startup that changes the world. World change seems doable — every app promises that. But the actual building part can be daunting. So WeWork is part of a constellation of venture-backed services that help with the hard stuff, like learning to code or finding an inspiring office space.
Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE 'STUFF', SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don't want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”
As Miguel McKelvey, WeWork’s co-founder along with Neumann, said of WeLive at a March event, “When you’re in that startup phase, where everything is hard, it would be great if that initial experience [of leasing an apartment] was a little bit easier.” And as a startup founder wrote in a post on Product Hunt, a sort of cool-hunting message board, The Caravanserai offers “peace of mind as a service.” The same people sporting “Do What You Love” T-shirts don’t need to stop when the clock strikes 5 (or 6, or 10, as the case may be). They don’t need to deal with the onerous apartment search process or cumbersome leases or landlords who are bad at email or housemates who don't grok their ambition. They don’t need to merely live — they can co-live.
BuzzFeed News
Neither co-working nor co-living are exclusive to Silicon Valley, but they do reflect a boom-time belief system first seeded here in the land of startups. Innovation is infectious, and the spirit of disruption can be transferred by proximity or osmosis. With each newly minted billionaire who built a product you use, the message gets more convincing. Work can be a form of self-expression. You can retain your values and still rake it in. Just find a problem and fix it.
Bootstrapping is out of vogue. A smart person’s time is too valuable to waste — if you’re well-fed and free of distractions, there’s more time to fix the world. It’s telling that that same rhapsodic Product Hunt post about Caravanserai made reference to “how a search for a good co-working space or coffee shop” while traveling “can take up days,” or that Benjamin Dyett, who co-founded the co-working space Grind, made the place sound like an all-inclusive office resort. “If you need to send a fax, all you need to do is email to the front desk, we’ll take care of it for you,” he told BuzzFeed News. The goal is to help Grind members “get through the workday and take care of the little problems they might have. Our members don’t have to stop and think about little annoyances that happen.”
And indeed, co-living’s true believers speak of an environment in which they are all but forced to be their best selves. Ben Greenberg joined 20Mission, the co-living space in San Francisco, after dropping out of Indiana University a few years ago. The startup he was working on at the time didn’t pan out and his time as a software engineer at Lyft only lasted 10 months, but Greenberg is grateful. “Even if people fail at the startup game, it’s kind of a success, because you can meet up with all these people, start working on it, and get better at it,” he told BuzzFeed News. He credits 20Mission’s sister space in Colombia with helping him stoke his true passion: the website Glowyshit.com, where he sells “basically anything that’s awesome and glows.”
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