The Millennial Commune

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/realestate/the-millennial-commune.html

by applecore • 11 years ago

31 58 11 years ago

nytimes.com

paulhauggis• 11 years ago

This is a result of the ridiculous rent in places like sf. Why not figure out a way to lower the rent?

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

The only solutions are:

1. Build more housing (won't happen) 2. Rent control (doesn't work, mostly. Distorts the market) 3. The bubble pops (most likely)

kitsunesoba• 11 years ago

The way I see it, ridiculous rent is largely (but not solely) thanks to predatory real estate owners and bankers. Given that a place to live is a necessity and that people need to live reasonably close to their workplaces, I think it's worth considering some form of regulation. I don't know what that might be, but it's clear that the system we have doesn't work.

morgante5• 11 years ago

Build more housing (won't happen)

Why not? Eventually non-owners will form a majority of voters and will vote to remove ridiculous restrictions.

Generational rent-seeking can only persist for so long.

a5seo• 11 years ago

If anything coops ARE a solution to high rents. They take a large space and make it available to rent as individual rooms and amortize the cost of a living room, kitchen, etc across roommates. It's not like these spaces would have simply been one bedroom apartments.

Seems very much like WeWork for rental housing.

My only concern is that this model seems ripe for discrimination, of many many kinds. "Oh, we only rent to people with a STEM degree from an Ivy." Yet another way an SAT score turns into a life.

rdl• 11 years ago

I'd love to see someone with land exempt from regulations (e.g. the federal government) declare:

1) Vibrant tech/startup sector is critical to US national security and economic prosperity

2) SFBA is critical to the success of US tech/startups

3) Housing costs are a major impediment to tech/startups

4) High-density housing to be constructed on federal land (and/or federal preemption used to build housing elsewhere).

Doing this as a private entity would be a bit more interesting -- I wonder what happens if you either drop serious dollars to take over one of the smaller towns in the Bay Area (campaigning and/or moving people into high density housing for a while to get residency to vote).

Straight civil disobedience (unpermitted live work) also happens, but doing it at the scale needed would be a bit more challenging. Probably crazy libertarian fantasy to build a supertall in downtown SF on your own land in direct defiance of the local government, unless you're state/federal.

plonh6• 11 years ago

Why is SFBA sacrosanct? Open a startup in Kansas City.

Gmo• 11 years ago

I've lived in a shared house for 7 years. To me, one of the advantage of a shared house is to be with people that are different than you, because you all have different experiences and can share and learn from that.

Of course, it's essential to have a good feeling with the others, but I feel like this is going way too far, with just you ending up with others alike, and no diversity. Granted, that's what they sell : “highly curated community of like-minded individuals.”

archagon• 11 years ago

As someone who lived in a co-op in college, I agree completely. I also think it's pretty important for the members to directly own/rent the house instead of some corporation.

clamprecht2• 11 years ago

The "like-minded individuals" thing always bothers me. I'd hate to live with a bunch of people who think just like me. How about a co-living space with "unlike-minded" individuals (who still get along)?

icanhackit• 11 years ago

I'd hate to live with a bunch of people who think just like me.

Is this because you're worried about an echo-chamber effect where you won't learn, see or do something new? Some of the benefits I get from hanging out (and living) with like-minded people is that they've come across some new music in a genre they thought I might appreciate, read a new study or article in a field of science, politics or philosophy that we commonly find interesting, cook an obscure meal or go out to a new restaurant that, based on my past preferences, they knew I'd enjoy.

Expanding one's experiences and tastes can be an evolutionary process, and people with similar tastes can help you step through them faster than you would on your own - the cadence merely increases. It doesn't have to be a binary thing either - often someone's friend or partner will be quite different philosophically and you have the opportunity to listen to their ideas or tastes and become richer from exploring those things with them.

dasil0033• 11 years ago

The idea of curating people is nauseating to me.

It speaks to one of the largest failures of technology, which is that the techno utopians from Gen X believed the Internet would herald a new age of informed democracy and rational debate. Instead what we got is a balkanization of ideas where no one has to ever hear anything vaguely uncomfortable and we can all stay ensconced in our little tribes.

xacaxulu2• 11 years ago

Totally agree. The smugness here is absolutely off-putting. Generally whenever anything that had a chill, egalitarian, hippyish vibe (think yoga, farmers markets, actual communes) becomes an LLC or corp charging thousands of dollars for overpriced buzzwords and feel-good marketing, you can be certain a fleecing is taking place.

tomp• 11 years ago

I guess it depends what "curating" means. I never want to live with people who leave food remains in the living room, don't wash the dishes and keep old rotten food in the fridge.

angersock2• 11 years ago

So, curating people--or whatever other term you want to use for "picking your roommates carefully"--is damned important, and always has been.

If you have a roommate that loves throwing parties, and everyone else is maybe super tired from working, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you have roommates that don't believe in cleaning, ever, then you're gonna have a bad time.

If you have roommates that spend a lot of time torrenting and your internet gets shut off, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you have roommates that are really into drug culture, you could well end up having a bad time (seen this happen once or twice).

You can all be totally different in, say, politics or sexuality or income or whatever (provided rent is still being made), but it gets super shitty super fast if the basic "Hey, this is our home, don't cause problems" stuff isn't nailed down.

plonh6• 11 years ago

People had bad and good roommates, and matchmakers (for dating) long before Gen X.

morgante5• 11 years ago

Calling these spaces communes is ironic considering how incredibly capitalist they are.

1. Regulatory failure leads to a lack of reasonable real estate options in growing cities.

2. Striving young people want to move to the major cities for career reasons anyways.

3. Aspiring capitalists deploy capital to convert existing housing stock into microunits while charging a premium.

Nothing in this is communist at all.

notNow• 11 years ago

I agree totally. Another instance of opportunistic capitalism bastardizing a very pleasant concept and lifestyle like communalism and turning into unrecognizable monster of itself.

Shame that these people didn't go "organic" and searched for the real deal in living in a real commune and not that synthetic one.

seiji5• 11 years ago

It's almost as if they've rebranded feudalism as "sharing."

Proper sharing would be a fully connected graph topology. Modern "sharing" is hub-and-spoke where the hub extracts rent on all transactions because they either made a website (lol, "tech company") or have absconded capital and sell it back to you (time limited) at a profit.

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

This seems like a comment for a post about Uber. I don't see how it's relevant here.

WalterSear2• 11 years ago

A commune Ayn Rand could love.

pyb• 11 years ago

Great points, you hit the nail on the head.

thatsso1999• 11 years ago

The living spaces described aren't communes in any way, shape or form. This is just paying to have roommates you don't know with some perks. actual cooperatives/communes are occupied by their member-owners, who have full control over their space. It's laughable that this being marketed as edgy socialist living when it's just a big apartment with some nice branding.

An actual co-op shares food purchases, requires labor like cooking and cleaning, and the members share democratic control over the house's finances. There is no actual reason why you need microleases - the co-op I live in has 6 month leases at a minimum, and on average most members live here for two years. People stay for so long because actual cooperatives foster a culture of cooperation and a community full of real friendships, giving its members a deep, lasting connection with the space and their fellow housemates. Microleases seem like they create a transitory and shallow culture with people coming and leaving all the time and not actually making any connection with the space, partially because you can't leave your mark on the space since you don't own it.

There are very large and active communities of both residential and commercial cooperatives in Berkeley, Michigan, and Austin (where the co-op I live in is), and I think this is because there is cheaper land and individual houses. It's close to impossible for starting true residential cooperatives in downtown NYC because the landlord often owns the entire building, which would require an enormous amount of money to acquire, and would lead to enormous cooperatives which would be difficult to run. There _are_ very large, apartment-style cooperatives - there are at least 5 co-ops in Austin with over 100 people each - but there are many more that are house style with 15-30 people. I think the ones in Berkeley and Michigan tend to be closer to 30-40 people, but they're still just big houses.

The cooperative movement is alive and well and has been for decades. Capitalists trying to jump onto the sharing economy bandwagon just dilute the message and create the wrong impression of what actual shared living is - raw democratic control over your space. Cooperatives have amazing potential in the internet age, but seem to have been largely forgotten by modern day technologists. A non-profit Uber, cooperatively controlled by both drivers and developers, is an obvious example of a great system that would work very well and be immensely popular with drivers. There are a lot of knotty problems to work out, but nothing insurmountable. If 100+ drug-addled college kids can democratically run an entire apartment complex successfully for 3 decades (and even make money, too!), surely today's technologists can build software that allow many more people to democratically run much larger systems.

xacaxulu2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'd still rather be able to walk around naked in my kitchen and sleep with my significant other without people listening. I don't need to live in an adult hostel to have friends and meet interesting people.

plonh6• 11 years ago

Sure, many prefer to live in a big well built private home, but we can't afford it. Even individual apartments doing provide that much audio privacy, in USA construction.

jfb• 11 years ago

The NYT seems to be the perfect machine for exposing the uttermost eyerollingist of douchebags.

plonh6• 11 years ago

This is a renters coop.

In a coop, the owners approve/reject apartment sales. This is the same, except the residents are renters, while the owners still pick who is allowed in.

I am surprised this doesn't run afoul of Equal Housing (anti-discrimination) laws, since the people rejecting applicants aren't the residents.

te_chris• 11 years ago

Congratulations entitled young Americans, you've invented flatting.

The Millennial Commune

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