{"id":341244,"date":"2017-05-18T04:15:31","date_gmt":"2017-05-17T20:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1492544"},"modified":"2017-05-18T04:15:31","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T20:15:31","slug":"the-very-simple-argument-for-the-rise-of-co-living-people-need-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/the-very-simple-argument-for-the-rise-of-co-living-people-need-people\/","title":{"rendered":"The very simple argument for the rise of co-living: people need people"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.<\/p>\n

So go the lyrics<\/a> of the famous Barbara Streisand song. It was also a theme at a future of cities panel at Disrupt today, where the discussion came back and time again to community as a competitive advantage \u2014 particularly when it comes to startups that are trying to shake up the long-staid but quickly evolving $200 trillion<\/a> real estate industry.<\/p>\n

Featuring \u00a0Brad Hargreaves, the CEO of the\u00a0co-living startup called Common<\/a>;\u00a0Shruti Merchant, the CEO of a the co-living startup HubHaus<\/a>\u00a0that more recently launched in Mountain View, Ca.; and Stonly Baptiste, an investor with a\u00a0New York-based seed-stage venture firm Urban Us<\/a> that\u2019s focused on addressing climate change through smarter cities, all three argued the\u00a0business case for businesses renting rooms at a premium in exchange for amenities that were once found only at hotels.<\/p>\n

Common and HubHaus, for example, are part of a growing spate of companies that\u00a0don\u2019t acquire buildings but instead act as property managers \u2014 Common in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.; and HubHaus in Mountain View, Ca. (Both companies plan to expand into other cities.)<\/p>\n

Merchant said her startup\u00a0was born of her\u00a0own experience, living in a seven-bedroom house that had so much energy, an eighth\u00a0tenant asked to live in the garage. Hargreaves, who\u2019d earlier cofounded the\u00a0adult education school General Assembly<\/a>, meanwhile said he started Common because he knew that housing supply in urban centers was a problem poised to grow even more extreme.<\/p>\n

Baptiste said he\u00a0has backed another different\u00a0community home startup, Starcity<\/a>, in keeping with his\u00a0interest in backing founders looking to disrupt\u00a0transportation, built environments, utilities, and other massive industries that are ripe for tech-driven changes.<\/p>\n

The three painted a rosy picture of the benefits of co-living \u2014 community being first and foremost, given that it\u2019s\u00a0become a scarce commodity in today\u2019s day and and age. Yet moderator Jon Shieber pushed back several times, asking if the lifestyle being sold is really for everyone. How much does the average tenant make in salary, he asked, and do the companies worry that they\u2019re burnishing the already obnoxious stereotype of the wealthy techie?<\/p>\n

Hargreaves and Shruti shot back that their community spaces are diverse in terms of the industries, ages, and backgrounds of the tenants who live in them.<\/p>\n

Baptiste further added\u00a0that co-living spaces will also likely appeal to a growing population of elderly Americans, who may be \u201clooking to share the burden of aging together.\u201d (The type of\u00a0amenities offered by many co-living spaces could certainly be attractive\u00a0for older populations, too.)<\/p>\n

In the end, argued Hargreaves, both the way people live, and the people overseeing the buildings where people live, are\u00a0both in dire need of a refresh, and startups like Common would be foolish not<\/em> to pursue that opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou still need to build something [that] a bank is willing to tolerate [as a lending prospect], but you can do that in a friendlier and more convenient way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hargreaves added (to laughter from the crowd) that one of the reasons he\u2019s particularly excited to be a founder in real estate is that it\u2019s the \u201clast bastion of family businesses \u2014 business where the patriarch has two sons, and the smart one does the acquisitions, and the stupid one does the property management.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also one of the very few industries\u00a0where Google and Facebook and Amazon (and technology, more generally) haven\u2019t already staked a claim, he said.\u00a0\u201cReal estate is one of the last industries where someone is running that business just because they\u2019re related to the guy who ran it before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world.
\nSo go the lyrics of the famous Barbara Streisand song. It was also a theme at a future of cities panel at Disrupt today, where the discussion came back and time again to community as a competitive advantage — particularly when it comes to startups that are trying to shake up the long-staid but quickly evolving $200… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-341244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}