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When she moved to San Francisco a few years ago Shruti Merchant had a problem.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t really know anyone in the SF scene and, since she was working all the time, didn\u2019t really have a chance to get connected to a group she could call her own.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an old story for anyone moving out to a new place, but for Merchant, and others like her, the idea that there can be a better way to move to a place, and live in a city, has led to the creation of new co-living spaces.<\/p>\n
In the old days, these spaces (once called communes by a generation less capitalized\u00a0but perhaps no less idealistic) grew organically around shared interests and common themes \u2026 and a rejection of what were the prevailing social norms of the day.<\/p>\n
But now, as with many other things, the counter-culture of days past has been commoditized, capitalized, and sanitized. The youthful idealism remains, but the song, certainly, is not the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cRather than sifting through online listings, or living alone in an apartment for one, we started HubHaus<\/a> to offer an easy way for professionals to find quality shard housing solutions with a true sense of community,\u201d Shruti writes in a blogpost about the new financing the company has received.<\/p>\n That shared community is young, urban, professional, and mobile.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do all the work \u2014 from creating welcoming homes in neighborhoods you want to live in and setting up Wi-Fi and utilities to furnishing the place and finding people you\u2019ll love living with,\u201d Merchant writes to her prospective customers.<\/p>\n General Catalyst has bought the pitch, leading the company\u2019s \u00a0$1.4 million first financing. And other investors find similar magic in the co-living model (although I\u2019m not sure why). Common \u2014 another apartment developer with designs around designing communities \u2014 has raised $23.3 million in financing so far from investors including 8VC, Maveron, and Grand Central Tech.<\/p>\n Before both of these startups, there was Campus, which billed itself as a co-living company in the early days of the latest iteration of this particular living trend. The company launched, expanded, and shuttered its doors<\/a> in the span of a few years.<\/p>\n Our own former correspondent and longtime contributor, Kim Mai Cutler took a turn in the co-living startup world when she worked at Roam Co-living<\/a>, a multi-national twist on the concept<\/a> that raised $3.4 million from investors including the Collaborative Fund.<\/p>\n All of these fledgling startups pale in comparison to the true giants that are trying to muscle their way in to this \u201cnew\u201d paradigm for urban (international) living.<\/p>\n WeWork, the $3.69 billion micro-office space real estate developer, is getting into the co-living game with WeLive offering rooms for rent in Washington and New York, and the real estate owner, operator, and developer Property Management Group, which launched PMGx to pitch to debt-laden, young, urban professionals.<\/p>\n Questions abound around all of these intentional communities and co-living spaces. How do they integrate with their communities? What are they doing to ensure\u00a0fair rental and housing practices for minorities? What impact do these capitalized property owners and managers have on housing stores and the creation of real, lasting communities?<\/p>\n Lizzie Widdicomb, writing in The New Yorker<\/em> roughly a year ago\u00a0<\/em>laid out a beautiful history of the ever-changing\u00a0conundrum that is\u00a0living for the city.<\/p>\n She writes:<\/p>\n As a new, mobile workforce flooded into cities, demanding more freedom, boarding houses were largely replaced by cheap hotels designed for long-term stays. [Paul Groth, a professor of urban geography at the University of California, Berkeley] said, \u201cAs late as 1930, maybe one housing unit in ten was some variation of a residential hotel.\u201d The Barbizon, a women\u2019s-only establishment at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened in 1927, when large numbers of women were beginning to work outside the home. To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-size rooms and lavish shared facilities: a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun deck, Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash and badminton courts, a solarium, and a roof garden. To their parents, it offered the assurance of respectability: chaperones roamed the hallways, and men were not allowed above the first floor. Sylvia Plath, a resident in the nineteen-fifties, featured the Barbizon in \u201cThe Bell Jar,\u201d where it appears as the Amazon, a hotel for rich young women who \u201cwere all going to posh secretarial schools.\u201d<\/p>\n By the nineteen-sixties, hotel life had given way to the new dream: a place of one\u2019s own. In the sitcom \u201cThat Girl,\u201d which premi\u00e8red in 1966, Marlo Thomas played an aspiring actress, Ann Marie, who moves to New York to try to make it while working a series of odd jobs: waitress, department-store elf. In the show\u2019s second episode, a friendly doorman helps her move into her own apartment. Standing on the threshold, she announces, \u201cI\u2019m my own occupant!\u201d Like Ann Marie, young women seized one-bedrooms near First and Second Avenues, which became known for singles bars and \u201cstew zoos\u201d\u2014buildings packed with female flight attendants. The inaugural issue of Cosmopolitan<\/em> called the neighborhood \u201cThe Girl Ghetto\u201d: \u201cThousands upon thousands of single girls flock to the upper East Side, cramming themselves into small apartments, subsisting on an apple and a quart of diet soda a day, waiting for a telephone to ring and having a mad, wonderful time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Update Marlo Thomas\u2019 careers to Instagram model, social influencer, or \u2026 no\u2026 there\u2019re still department store elves\u2026 but you get the idea. That picture of the late 20th century isn\u2019t really all that different from the beginning of the 21st.<\/p>\n As long as there have been cities, and single people who want to live in them,\u00a0businesses will find new ways to cater to their whims and wants. The co-living phenomenon isn\u2019t that much different than what came before it \u2014 except in its organization and its capitalization.<\/p>\n Still, Merchant believe in the dream\u2026 and its magic.<\/p>\n Writing about the company\u2019s appeal, Merchant describes a living space and its notion of a shared community like this:<\/p>\n The real magic of HubHaus comes with the shared community that we have And there are pressures to make co-living more attractive. The rent in most cities is too damn high and in many cases for young professionals their incomes are probably too damn low. Beyond that, there\u2019s something to be said for finding new ways to network and communicate in a world where everyone is LinkedIn, Facebook-friended, Instagram-followed, and ephemerally Snapped. Real human connection can be hard to come by. Just ask these guys.<\/p>\nSylvia Plath\u00a0rocked co-living spaces too<\/h2>\n
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built. Members immediately gain access to 100\u2019s of other people in the
network, and are invited to a variety of member-only events. More
importantly, they\u2019re welcomed into their new \u201cfamily\u201d and bond with
housemates over monthly dinners, mixers, and just day-to-day life.
While many members move in for the low rent prices, most end up
staying for the connections that they make.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n