'Co-living': the end of urban loneliness or cynical corporate dormitories?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Really, this is what a lot of these co-living places are, they just don't want to use that four letter word: "Dorm".
I am amused, but not surprised to see us rediscover all the 'greatest' ideas of the USSR.
I'm assuming that the next one will be 'papers, please, comrade'...
I think the lesson is that having a sense of community and opportunities for regular socialization far outweigh the impact of things like square footage or granite countertops. In terms of subjective wellbeing, most of us would probably do better to live closer to friends and family, even if it means a step-down to a shittier house.
Why should they have granite countertops when I don't?
>"However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense."
Clugston says that it costs about $20,000 a year to house someone. If they're on the street, it can cost up to $100,000 a year.
This one is pretty heart warming too:
>He says city staff found housing for one man, but he insisted on leaving to sleep under cars. Day after day, they'd search him out and take him back to his new home. "They did it 75 times, but they had the patience and they didn't give up on him and, eventually, he ended up staying in the house," he says. "Ultimately, people do want a roof over their heads."
seems like a slightly unwarranted conclusion.
alternative conclusion: "Ultimately, people will submit to living under a roof if they are relocated by state goons seventy five times."
I'm not trying to be flippant here; I think we walk a dangerous line when we presume to know what's best for a person and especially when we apply pressure to get them to change their ways.
one of my good friends from high school developed severe schizophrenia after graduating and has been homeless for several years now. he has a standing offer of support from his (wealthy) parents on the sole condition than he start some form of treatment. I and some of our other friends have repeatedly tried to help him get into housing, treatment, or even temporary shelter, and he always refuses. his parents had him involuntarily committed for a few days; he left as soon as he was able. when I run into him and ask how he's doing, he always says he's doing great and loves the freedom of his lifestyle. he doesn't look great, but is it really up to me to decide?
A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.
A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.
Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?
Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on.
I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.
On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates.
It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.
Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.
Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions?
In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either.
"On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates."
Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects.
And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?
And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).
Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).
"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)
If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.
The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.
Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.
The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".
That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.
To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.
Absolutely not. These are horrendous reasons and take much of the blame for the housing crisis. We must build upwards to house people.
But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.
I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.
Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.
And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.
In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.
Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4550536,-80.4917221,331a,35y...
That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.
There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vanc...
That is not at all a natural spike in housing prices and it's pretty much made housing unaffordable here.
This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die.
Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door.
I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k.
So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.
That's almost never a good economic decision.
In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.
<Chortling with unholy glee>
One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.
As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in.
You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong?
For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.
That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live.
> For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.
I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me.
> Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it?
Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.
>as it doesn't involve me
When your neighbors are shouting at each other with you in the middle, it involves you.
>why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors?
You absolutely shouldn't, for we should all love our neighbors. But you should absolutely be allowed to hate your neighbors' actions.
>use the force of law to force them to change
Have you ever dealt with invoking city noise ordinances? It's a long, tiresome process, and meanwhile your neighbors you're invoking them against aren't going to be too happy with you. Take it from me, I grew up poor and lived in crappy neighborhoods. Playing outside as a 6-year-old, it was routine for the neighborhood drunk to yell slurs at me and my siblings. First day we moved in, Dad called the cops on that guy, and the cops basically chuckled at my Dad over the phone. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sir."
And if they get into arguments at the breakfast table?
I had a friend once who had a married couple as roommates. They didn't get along. The weekly RPG session was interrupted by arriving police a couple of times. Problem finally solved by my friend moving to a single-family dwelling.
That does not follow. You may be right, but not for that reason.
I don't think the housing crisis is the primary driver, rather it's cheap loans and a booming market for urban residential development. They built co-living in Chicago! There is no housing crisis here, if anything they are saying we are overbuilt. https://chicago.goquarters.com/west-loop/
In decades past single room occupancy housing was far more common. However they were seen as a blight to the city since it was mostly occupied by drug addicts and the poor. So cities and neighborhoods didn't complain once real estate started to take off and they began to be converted into more lucrative forms of housing.
Eliminating the cheapest of the cheap eliminated the lesser of two evils.
This just sounds like a corporate, rent extracting appropriation of "co-living".
Honestly I'm sick and tired of the normalization of rent seeking. It's draining our collective creative energy.
If you want a glimpse into the original organized "co-living" movement, see here: https://coophousing.org/
The corporate domination of capital is essentially takeover of local governance.
I feel like this is the prototype of Roko's basilisk.[0]
I mean the rent-seeking part isn't new. That's been around since the beginning of time. Rent-seekers are going to rent-seek.
But the application of the latest modern technology to optimize it. This whole gig economy. That's new and feels like it's getting out of control.
Runaway optimization of rent-seeking is more like a ponzi scheme "as advertised": the later you get in on the action, the harder you get screwed. It is uniformly bad for anyone who didn't have a combination of luck and capital in the early stages. The risk and payoff of not being able to afford housing in the forseeable future is much more concrete, universally applicable, and requires only extrapolating from trends; a far smaller series of logical leaps.
I'm not seeing the connection you're attempting to draw. Care to clarify?
That might at least allow homeless people to be/feel clean, be treated with more respect/dignity and have a connection to a network of resources that could help them out.
In SF it might also get rid of the shit on the sidewalks, the smell of pee everywhere (especially around bars/nightclubs) and allow for easier tourism (it's kind of a pain finding a restroom some times when traveling).
Why not invest in the poor/less fortunate and give them as much as we can give them? All of society would be better off if instead of blaming these people for their situation, we helped them have a better one.
PS: Amsterdam has a slightly similar concept with their public urinals. They are kind gross, but they definitely help with keeping people from peeing all over the place. And pretty much everywhere in Japan there are clean public toilets (no showers or lockers though), it's really amazing.
It's hard to tell "less fortunate but a kind person that will be independent if given the chance" from "doesn't give a fuck and will take advantage of anything free/helpful in a destructive manner without any respect to others including those equally less fortunate or generous to him/her"
Society definitely creates the second type of people but I can't fault anyone for not wanting to put themselves in a position of vulnerability for the greater good of someone who won't appreciate it.
At the same time, why "punish" everyone for the actions of a few?
Also, if everyone has access to a certain benefit, it's really hard to take advantage of it in a negative way. For example you can't resell it.
I feel like toilets/showers should be something like roads, ubiquitous, accessible to everyone and continuously maintained.
I haven't seen people complaining about trucks/busses using the roads too much/more than them, while making money.
Nice. A totalitarian 'utopia', where your every move is watched on cctv for possible infractions.
I wonder what else they will punish residents for. Bringing dates back home? Having a skirt that's too short?
Working at the same company is not a shared set of values, at least not the way that companies are structured today and how workers are seen by those companies. As such, I don't think that these living spaces can build the tribal and communal opportunities that make a shared living space workable, and make people willing to improve that shared space. As corporations become larger, and with consideration to the fact that they might start to consider these kinds of shared values and try to build based on those, it might be possible, but it's probably also illegal for a corporation to do such a thing.
Creating a community from a mixed bag of corporate workers is possible, but it would take a lot more work.
- be owned by the individuals that live there if they choose to do so (renting should be a choice; owning should have similar accessibility)
- have a sensible framework for both renting and ownership that empowers the individuals actually living there e.g. no onerous lease crap or leasehold shenanigans
- actually be built e.g. kill off silly zoning
This sounds like none of those.
In most countries established interests block it. Hacking around it by just deciding that the way previous generations lived a happy life is inaccessible now and everyone should just live in Uber Flats is not the answer, sorry.
That's how most social housing in the UK worked until a decade or two ago.
The home I grew up in was rented by my parents for over 20 years, they basically treated it as if they owned it.
We bought it recently because this may change at some point in the future. Practically other than the rent not existing nothing changes.
The model of a home as being this ephemeral thing that you just sort of occupy for a bit and then move on to the next town isn't one that most people actually want.
It's prevalent on Hacker News because there are a ton of people here with no family, no plans to form a family, and for whom moving around often for work is normal. Which is fine, but it's not representative of the general population.
For the people stuck owning it, yes. Why would I want to rent out a property under those terms? I'm assuming most of the risk for the asset, but giving up almost all control of it.
I mean, why not both? I think the problem is real, and I think modern housing approaches are driven by patterns and drives that are woefully outdated. I think there must be more humane, more collaborative ways to live.
On the other hand, I can name a lot of companies that market to real problems but clearly care much more about massive revenue than making any real difference.
Consider that cities in N. America either have homes with large lots or condos with maximum 2 bedrooms (the price for 3 bedrooms or more scale non-linearly). Therefore it is very difficult to have a family of 4+ in an apartment.
The homes with large lots create areas with too low density which cause our transportation woes (long commutes, highways, infeasibility of public transport).
The 2 bedroom condo building are also often high-rises, which are also terrible (density is too high, making transportation near the building very difficult - just see the jams caused by people getting out of the high rise in the morning).
A more sensible, IMHO, is to have apartment blocks no taller than 8 stories with a good mix of 1, 2, and three bedroom units. These are found in poorer developed countries where the middle class could not necessarily afford a car, never mind two (my family in BsAs, for example in a 100 m^2, three bedroom apt)
Canada, with a much more sensible gov't [0], has similar woes driven by building idiotic high rises.
[0] Govt spending as a fraction of GDP is similar; the suburbs are much higher density than the US; the line at the DMV takes less then 15 minutes; a new passport takes 2 hours to get from when it was requested (clearly I've lived in very many places).
After all, if you're transforming your cities into a sea of asphalt and destroying the public transportation systems, how convenient is a housing project with thousands of units and no parking?
On the other hand, the Germans gave them a proper housing crisis to solve :S
> recently, the Somerville planning office released a report in which they confided that, in a city of nearly 80,000 people, there are exactly 22 residential buildings that meet the city’s zoning code. Every single other home is too dense to be legal: Either it takes up too much of the lot, or it has too many homes, or it’s too tall, or it’s not set far back enough from the street, and so on. (Note that this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.)
I'm not interested in living in a cubbyhole inside a co-working space.
Almost all of these places look super depressing, like something out of American Psycho.
I'd expect the common room to look like a makerspace, or Grandma's house, or an artist's studio, or a game room, or maybe each corner of it is different, whatever.
Bit of a creepy sounding sentence with that name
Since it's such 1984-speak.
Years ago they called these things tenement buildings. Although the word can mean any multi-home building, it usually is used (at least in the USA) as a reference to high capacity, low footprint, urban living arrangements.
So, yeah. It's a nice way to solve housing crisis for relatively low income living, but don't act like it's some sort of innovation that people are going to find super desirable. Because most people won't. Some people do, but most people kinda want their own house.
Tenement buildings -> Co-living
Serfdom -> Gig economy
Mass propaganda -> Targeted content
We can’t just have an article about co-living... Ugh.
All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet. They also follow a consistent pattern of cramming as many people into a tiny space as possible to milk properties while billing themselves as driving some kind of positive housing revolution.
This is just open concept for housing and the CEO who talks about doing this out of some implied generosity is a comical stereotype of the sociopathic but charismatic SV executive.
If you want to build a community, you need to foster a common, meaningful goal for people to come together over, and it needs to be organic. It also helps if the people have a common culture/heritage. You can't commercialize community as a product to transient weekly renters from random places for any meaningful amount of time, it just comes off as forced and artificial, like corporate propaganda.
That said, I mean: >All of these spaces seem to have in common that they're absolutely hostile to introverts who need at least some privacy and quiet.
That's kind of a strange complaint, because why would such a person seek out a co-living arrangement? Wouldn't renting a studio or efficiency apartment be more consistent with his/her personality and desires as far as living arrangement? (And cheaper than a trendy co-living place to boot?)
Sure, but in the article these spaces are billed by their marketing as solutions to the affordable housing crisis, but it seems like they're potentially missing out on a market share and possibly creating living spaces which are even uncomfortably open for extroverts, by being designed as excessively open, in the same way that open concept over optimizes for design constraint enabling collaboration to the overall detriment of comfort and productiveness.