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I lived in two campus houses for a period over a year. The vision and concept were great, and it's failure should 100% not be read as a failure of the sector. S

I lived in two campus houses for a period over a year. The vision and concept were great, and it's failure should 100% not be read as a failure of the sector. Someone's going to do this right and make a big success. I don't know if they'll reinvent whole cities, Tom's full vision, but they'll make better places for people to live. My personal view of why it fails (as a housemate not an insider to the business) was the following: 1. Too much money too early meant they spent more than they should on things which weren't necessarily valued. Examples being hot-tubs in all the early houses, the vacation houses (I get they were an experiment) etc. 2. Poor financial management. Property at it's core is a simple business and getting the accounting/billing right is vital. I suspect that the leadership team didn't have enough financial knowledge of the books to run such a business, needed a grey hair CFO much earlier. 3. Premature scaling. I assume pressure from investors and the economics models showed you had to get mega scale to get VC rewards, and this lead to pressure to grow too fast. I moved from one house to another and it was clear there was a difference in how carefully the inhabitants were selected and this weakened the value proposition (the second house had two separate groups with very different and competing goals from living together). I really hope someone gets this right, and not just for 20 something year olds. When I get married and have kids I'd love to have 5-10 other families sharing common areas, responsibilities etc. Figuring out how to build that community element and make it scalable is the hard part.

gatsby 11y ago
Great analysis. The author of this blog compares Campus to WeWork, but WeWork is actually doing a very similar concept to Campus called WeLive: https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/office/welive-and-wework-in-crystal-city-43957 https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/office/welive-and-... With WeWork's massive success over the last six years, it should certainly be interesting to see if they can get the economics and experience right.
dsr_ 11y ago
The name for what you want is cohousing -- I know of at least four cohousing communities in the Boston area, and there are probably many, many more. The usual cohousing model is (relatively) small apartments gathered around shared communal resources, in a condominium financial arrangement. Instead of the condo just being your share of a building, it's a share of the community. The fee is partially in money and partially in chores performed: helping to cook for a communal meal once a week, helping to clean up, helping to maintain things and make things better. A cohousing community can generally afford better amenities than the people could individually: how often do you want to play piano? If you're not a pro, having a well-insulated piano room is really expensive - but justifying it as part of the community is easy. Want a really good home theater? A pro kitchen? Really good gardens? The people I know who have tried cohousing have either left after the first year or decided that was how they wanted to live for the rest of their lives.
- klipt 11y ago
  > If you're not a pro, having a well-insulated piano room is really expensive - but justifying it as part of the community is easy. Or you could just use a digital piano with headphones. Much cheaper. > The people I know who have tried cohousing have either left after the first year or decided that was how they wanted to live for the rest of their lives. I imagine a lot of it depends on the other people. Tragedy of the commons can easily happen unless everyone shares the same standards of kitchen neatness, etc.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    >Or you could just use a digital piano with headphones. Not necessarily. The tactile feedback from the keys is an important part of playing the instrument. Properly weighted keys are for some reason very, very expensive to do well on a digital piano. Some piano teachers will require that students practice on a real instrument after their first year of instruction. That way the student can figure out whether they really want to commit to it before making a large purchase, but a decent upright in the home is considered a requirement for further study.
    - klipt 11y ago
      > Properly weighted keys are for some reason very, very expensive to do well on a digital piano. You can get a decent hammer-weighted digital piano for under $1000: http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2167459/Comparison_of_Portable_Digital.html http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/216745... More expensive than a $100 unweighted keyboard to be sure, but still much cheaper than a decent acoustic. Plus they can be played silently, can be used to record MIDI tracks, and you never have to tune them!
secabeen 11y ago
For the married and with kids solution, the term you're looking for is Co-Housing. We have friends who live in a co-housing community in suburban Boston, and love it. http://www.cohousing.org/ http://www.cohousing.org/ is the national coordinating organization.
klipt 11y ago
> Someone's going to do this right and make a big success. Berkeley has tons of student co-ops which are arguably a success in that the number of students applying to live there is much larger than the available space, and there are long waiting lists. What I don't understand is trying to shoe-horn this into the mold of a for-profit startup. Co-ops can easily be run co-operatively as non-profits by their members.
- hugh4 11y ago
  A bunch of people living in a shared house on a non-profit basis isn't even a co-op, that's generally just a "share house". Share houses are fine, but they have disadvantages, such as the lack of a nice centralised way of finding and moving into one, and the fact that stuff like finding new tenants and negotiating interpersonal conflicts between tenants and kicking problem tenants out all have to be done by the residents themselves, and many (not all) people would rather just outsource all that stuff to a central authority. So I think there's definitely room in the market for a company which deals with all that guff for you, in exchange for charging a somewhat higher rent.

gatsby 11y ago

Great analysis. The author of this blog compares Campus to WeWork, but WeWork is actually doing a very similar concept to Campus called WeLive: https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/office/welive-and-wework-in-crystal-city-43957 https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/office/welive-and-... With WeWork's massive success over the last six years, it should certainly be interesting to see if they can get the economics and experience right.

dsr_ 11y ago

The name for what you want is cohousing -- I know of at least four cohousing communities in the Boston area, and there are probably many, many more. The usual cohousing model is (relatively) small apartments gathered around shared communal resources, in a condominium financial arrangement. Instead of the condo just being your share of a building, it's a share of the community. The fee is partially in money and partially in chores performed: helping to cook for a communal meal once a week, helping to clean up, helping to maintain things and make things better. A cohousing community can generally afford better amenities than the people could individually: how often do you want to play piano? If you're not a pro, having a well-insulated piano room is really expensive - but justifying it as part of the community is easy. Want a really good home theater? A pro kitchen? Really good gardens? The people I know who have tried cohousing have either left after the first year or decided that was how they wanted to live for the rest of their lives.

klipt 11y ago
> If you're not a pro, having a well-insulated piano room is really expensive - but justifying it as part of the community is easy. Or you could just use a digital piano with headphones. Much cheaper. > The people I know who have tried cohousing have either left after the first year or decided that was how they wanted to live for the rest of their lives. I imagine a lot of it depends on the other people. Tragedy of the commons can easily happen unless everyone shares the same standards of kitchen neatness, etc.
- superuser2 11y ago
  >Or you could just use a digital piano with headphones. Not necessarily. The tactile feedback from the keys is an important part of playing the instrument. Properly weighted keys are for some reason very, very expensive to do well on a digital piano. Some piano teachers will require that students practice on a real instrument after their first year of instruction. That way the student can figure out whether they really want to commit to it before making a large purchase, but a decent upright in the home is considered a requirement for further study.
  - klipt 11y ago
    > Properly weighted keys are for some reason very, very expensive to do well on a digital piano. You can get a decent hammer-weighted digital piano for under $1000: http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2167459/Comparison_of_Portable_Digital.html http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/216745... More expensive than a $100 unweighted keyboard to be sure, but still much cheaper than a decent acoustic. Plus they can be played silently, can be used to record MIDI tracks, and you never have to tune them!

secabeen 11y ago

For the married and with kids solution, the term you're looking for is Co-Housing. We have friends who live in a co-housing community in suburban Boston, and love it. http://www.cohousing.org/ http://www.cohousing.org/ is the national coordinating organization.

klipt 11y ago

> Someone's going to do this right and make a big success. Berkeley has tons of student co-ops which are arguably a success in that the number of students applying to live there is much larger than the available space, and there are long waiting lists. What I don't understand is trying to shoe-horn this into the mold of a for-profit startup. Co-ops can easily be run co-operatively as non-profits by their members.

hugh4 11y ago
A bunch of people living in a shared house on a non-profit basis isn't even a co-op, that's generally just a "share house". Share houses are fine, but they have disadvantages, such as the lack of a nice centralised way of finding and moving into one, and the fact that stuff like finding new tenants and negotiating interpersonal conflicts between tenants and kicking problem tenants out all have to be done by the residents themselves, and many (not all) people would rather just outsource all that stuff to a central authority. So I think there's definitely room in the market for a company which deals with all that guff for you, in exchange for charging a somewhat higher rent.