8 ms·

The Millennial Commune

31 points by applecore 11y ago

paulhauggis 11y ago
This is a result of the ridiculous rent in places like sf. Why not figure out a way to lower the rent?
- toomuchtodo 11y 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 11y 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.
    - harryh 11y ago
      You see it wrong. When demand for housing (or any other product) exceeds supply the price goes up. The system SF has is actually broken due too to much regulation. Regulation that inhibits the creation of new housing which would increase supply and lower prices.
      - dempseye 11y ago
        He does not see it wrong. You are appealing to supply and demand as if it was an immutable law of the universe and not just an outcome of predatory human behaviour. When demand outstrips supply, prices go up. He never suggested otherwise. But why do sellers raise the prices on necessities such as housing just because they can? It is because they are predatory assholes.
        quicklyfrozen 11y ago
        Do you offer to take a lower then market rate from your employer because it's more then you need? Then why would you expect the same from a property owner? And why blame just the property owners? Presumably if no one was willing to pay the rents they would have to come down -- but some "predatory" renters are willing to pay to get what they want.
        dempseye 11y ago
        It is very simple. I blame the property owners because they have vastly more power than the renters. If a renter has a choice between paying an exorbitant rent and sleeping on the street, then I do not blame him for paying. However, I think that a renter who pays an exorbitant rent when a cheaper yet still liveable alternative is available is partly complicit. I work for myself, but in the hypothetical situation where I worked for somebody else, no, I would not offer to take a lower rate from my employer just because it is more than I need. I am entitled to every single penny that my employer makes from my labour. The difference between what he makes from it and what he pays me for it is capitalistic exploitation. It is in the interest of justice that it be minimised.
        harryh 11y ago
        I certainly agree that human behavior isn't an immutable law of the universe in the same way that, say, gravity is. But, at least to me, it seems that treating it as such gives us a pretty good model for how the world actually works and thus allows us to make accurate predictions about the future.
      - seiji 11y ago
        Thought experiment. SF and NYC are "desirable" places to live. People want to be there. The world is more "globalized" than ever now. How does supply and demand cope when 6 million to 60 million superhumanly rich people (from all over the world!) want the same thing a non-superhumanly rich person also wants? It's the exact same "superhuman AI will take all our jobs" reasoning, except in this case we have actual humans with access to vastly more wealth than any average person can accumulate. On a long enough time scale, the market may win and only $100 millionaires and billionaires will live in SF and NYC. But for now, the non-independently-wealthy (those poor suckers who need a 'job' to live) end up paying $5,000 per month for a one bedroom apartment. That means you need to make over $200k per year just to be independent. In reality, you should be making $450k per year to live "nicely." (In actual reality, if you are a programmer who can create value with your mind your skills are easily worth over $3 million per year). Regulation could give us options like: no non-resident foreign nationals may purchase property here. nobody may purchase more than one housing unit within the city limits. no one person may be the landlord of more than 3 housing units (or else you have "the rich get richer" where one guy uses rent income to buy more buildings to get more rent income—soon, one guy has 60 buildings being milked for rent). nobody may purchase units for money laundering purposes. hell, throw in a morality clause and say if you are convicted of a crime you lose your multi-million-dollar condo as well (hi, wall street frauds). Regulate the heck outta the housing market because fixed assets can't be efficiently allocated in the face of supernormal resources unless you consider "the rich deserve more than people with full time jobs" to be a proper way of allocating physical pieces of the planet earth.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - larrys 11y ago
      Ok sure then you are then advocating taking property lawfully obtained and giving it to someone else? And what do you mean by "predatory real estate owners and bankers". It's a free market system if you can't afford to live in an area then live somewhere where you can afford given what your job is. Nobody is entitled to a particular job in an area (if they are not paid enough) if they can't (with the pay) afford the rent. I'd love to live many places but I have to consider the practicality. Hawaii would be nice! [1] As far as people getting pushed out because of rents being driven up, the answer to that is not to take property away from lawful owners. Want to "lower the rent"? Government buys at fair market value some apartments or housing how about that? (Sure that will happen, right?) Fine as long as the rightful owners agree and everyone else in the community uses their tax dollars to pay for acquiring that property. Given you are so unhappy about this would you use your tax dollars so that others could live and not have high rent? [1] To clarify not because of housing prices but because of economic opportunity. NYC would be nice also however housing, traffic and so on are out of my comfort zone.
      - kasey_junk 11y ago
        It is an oddity that in the face of someone advocating for "some form of regulation" you immediately jump to property confiscation. Governments dramatically impact the price of the housing market already via any manner of policies such as zoning, regressive tax subsidies on mortgages and even school funding. Not everyone who suggests tweaking the laws is on the vanguard of a communist revolution.
      - seiji 11y ago
        advocating taking property lawfully obtained and giving it to someone else? Yes. Obtaining property "technically lawfully" but actually illegally is not going to survive. It's a free market system Except, corrupt foreign millionaires and billionaires are buying up in-demand US real estate (SF, LA, NYC) as safe houses (see: russian and arab mobsters/politicians/princes buying condos with 3 bulletproof safe rooms) and long term investments (see: chinese family buying Palo Alto homes for their newborn daughter because they know she will go to stanford in 20 years) without living there. They either let the houses sit idle or rent them out at a profit, taking more money out of the local economy. We do not welcome our new foreign non-productive overlords. the answer to that is not to take property away from lawful owners. We need to track down all these "optimistic investment" purchases and safe house purchases then just imminent domain them back to the public who actually participate in the local economy. When people on salary are competing with millionaires and billionaires for rent, they can't win. Entire living centers are being built as "ghost towers." Real estate developers travel overseas and sell every unit in a tower to Chinese buyers 5 years before even breaking ground on the building. Then when the building is complete, it sits 90% empty. The developers get their money and the buyers get to ride on tax breaks, but it does nothing to help the local population. Then, all of that isn't getting into when all this fancy housing is purchased by illegal foreign money. There's a spectrum here. We need to audit all purchase records, pierce the veil of every LLC, and determine if real estate purchases in tight markets are made as an attempt at laundering money. If so, the property is forfeit.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - morgante 11y 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.
    - YokoZar 11y ago
      This has already happened in Mountain View. Last election the "renting" demographic managed to overthrow the entire city council, who previously had been controlled by the typical "raise home prices by blocking construction" homeowner interest group. The result has been the beginning of many new large multi-unit housing developments. Dense multistory condos and rowhouses near downtown are happening. Google's plan for office space was even rejected because it didn't have enough new housing units!
      - plonh 11y ago
        I read Google's plan was rejected because Mountain View didn't want more Google employees living in the city -- they wanted a more employer-diverse resident+business base.
    - mahyarm 11y ago
      In SF, the majority of voters are already renters. Something like %70. But the people who live there are oddly irrational and think building will somehow raise the rent because it would be all 'luxury' apartments, and thus 'raise' the price. And these are the "perma renters" who have been forced out or closed to forced out due to their lower incomes. The renter political majority are the people who got laws such as rent control in. And the other very landlord unfriendly laws that make ~ %30 of residential rental stock unoccupied in SF due to fears of bad renters costing far more than their income. Also their are other laws that let petty NIMBYs prevent neighbors building stuff in their empty lots, so they can extract concessions out of them, or just avoid the personal inconvenience of construction during working hours. A good chunk of people in SF are unemployed / not in the labor force. Something around %30. 'Tech workers' are a very small minority of the population, but are the new immigrants aggravating the supply problems. Then you have old money in SF organizing political groups to block building on the water front so their waterfront condo views will not be block and so on. The multiple competing interests in SF lead to the general regulatory failure there of not building nearly enough. SF has always been a city with it's head far up it's ass, it was very bad in other ways in the 70s too, with similar 'renter friendly' laws causing more problems than solutions.
  - a5seo 11y 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 11y 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.
  - plonh 11y ago
    Why is SFBA sacrosanct? Open a startup in Kansas City.
Gmo 11y 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 11y 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.
- clamprecht 11y 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 11y 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.
    - 11y ago
morgante 11y 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 11y 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.
- seiji 11y 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 11y ago
    This seems like a comment for a post about Uber. I don't see how it's relevant here.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Oh, the article itself is about people buying a single resource the sub-renting it out. So that's the feudalism part. The connected network part was also similar because you have to go through these co-living space capitalist-hippy administrators to actually live in the co-living space. So some of the co-living spaces are co-living as defined by "you passed our landlord's test" but others are "everybody must like you to live here." If this was relating to Uber, we'd also mention they are doing the entire "break local laws and hope city hall doesn't care" trick by introducing oversubscribed short term housing which is against city policy.
thatsso1999 11y 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.
xacaxulu 11y 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.
- plonh 11y 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 11y ago
The NYT seems to be the perfect machine for exposing the uttermost eyerollingist of douchebags.
plonh 11y 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 11y ago
Congratulations entitled young Americans, you've invented flatting.

31 points by applecore 11y ago

paulhauggis 11y ago

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

toomuchtodo 11y 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 11y 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.
  - harryh 11y ago
    You see it wrong. When demand for housing (or any other product) exceeds supply the price goes up. The system SF has is actually broken due too to much regulation. Regulation that inhibits the creation of new housing which would increase supply and lower prices.
    - dempseye 11y ago
      He does not see it wrong. You are appealing to supply and demand as if it was an immutable law of the universe and not just an outcome of predatory human behaviour. When demand outstrips supply, prices go up. He never suggested otherwise. But why do sellers raise the prices on necessities such as housing just because they can? It is because they are predatory assholes.
      - quicklyfrozen 11y ago
        Do you offer to take a lower then market rate from your employer because it's more then you need? Then why would you expect the same from a property owner? And why blame just the property owners? Presumably if no one was willing to pay the rents they would have to come down -- but some "predatory" renters are willing to pay to get what they want.
        dempseye 11y ago
        It is very simple. I blame the property owners because they have vastly more power than the renters. If a renter has a choice between paying an exorbitant rent and sleeping on the street, then I do not blame him for paying. However, I think that a renter who pays an exorbitant rent when a cheaper yet still liveable alternative is available is partly complicit. I work for myself, but in the hypothetical situation where I worked for somebody else, no, I would not offer to take a lower rate from my employer just because it is more than I need. I am entitled to every single penny that my employer makes from my labour. The difference between what he makes from it and what he pays me for it is capitalistic exploitation. It is in the interest of justice that it be minimised.
      - harryh 11y ago
        I certainly agree that human behavior isn't an immutable law of the universe in the same way that, say, gravity is. But, at least to me, it seems that treating it as such gives us a pretty good model for how the world actually works and thus allows us to make accurate predictions about the future.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Thought experiment. SF and NYC are "desirable" places to live. People want to be there. The world is more "globalized" than ever now. How does supply and demand cope when 6 million to 60 million superhumanly rich people (from all over the world!) want the same thing a non-superhumanly rich person also wants? It's the exact same "superhuman AI will take all our jobs" reasoning, except in this case we have actual humans with access to vastly more wealth than any average person can accumulate. On a long enough time scale, the market may win and only $100 millionaires and billionaires will live in SF and NYC. But for now, the non-independently-wealthy (those poor suckers who need a 'job' to live) end up paying $5,000 per month for a one bedroom apartment. That means you need to make over $200k per year just to be independent. In reality, you should be making $450k per year to live "nicely." (In actual reality, if you are a programmer who can create value with your mind your skills are easily worth over $3 million per year). Regulation could give us options like: no non-resident foreign nationals may purchase property here. nobody may purchase more than one housing unit within the city limits. no one person may be the landlord of more than 3 housing units (or else you have "the rich get richer" where one guy uses rent income to buy more buildings to get more rent income—soon, one guy has 60 buildings being milked for rent). nobody may purchase units for money laundering purposes. hell, throw in a morality clause and say if you are convicted of a crime you lose your multi-million-dollar condo as well (hi, wall street frauds). Regulate the heck outta the housing market because fixed assets can't be efficiently allocated in the face of supernormal resources unless you consider "the rich deserve more than people with full time jobs" to be a proper way of allocating physical pieces of the planet earth.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - larrys 11y ago
    Ok sure then you are then advocating taking property lawfully obtained and giving it to someone else? And what do you mean by "predatory real estate owners and bankers". It's a free market system if you can't afford to live in an area then live somewhere where you can afford given what your job is. Nobody is entitled to a particular job in an area (if they are not paid enough) if they can't (with the pay) afford the rent. I'd love to live many places but I have to consider the practicality. Hawaii would be nice! [1] As far as people getting pushed out because of rents being driven up, the answer to that is not to take property away from lawful owners. Want to "lower the rent"? Government buys at fair market value some apartments or housing how about that? (Sure that will happen, right?) Fine as long as the rightful owners agree and everyone else in the community uses their tax dollars to pay for acquiring that property. Given you are so unhappy about this would you use your tax dollars so that others could live and not have high rent? [1] To clarify not because of housing prices but because of economic opportunity. NYC would be nice also however housing, traffic and so on are out of my comfort zone.
    - kasey_junk 11y ago
      It is an oddity that in the face of someone advocating for "some form of regulation" you immediately jump to property confiscation. Governments dramatically impact the price of the housing market already via any manner of policies such as zoning, regressive tax subsidies on mortgages and even school funding. Not everyone who suggests tweaking the laws is on the vanguard of a communist revolution.
    - seiji 11y ago
      advocating taking property lawfully obtained and giving it to someone else? Yes. Obtaining property "technically lawfully" but actually illegally is not going to survive. It's a free market system Except, corrupt foreign millionaires and billionaires are buying up in-demand US real estate (SF, LA, NYC) as safe houses (see: russian and arab mobsters/politicians/princes buying condos with 3 bulletproof safe rooms) and long term investments (see: chinese family buying Palo Alto homes for their newborn daughter because they know she will go to stanford in 20 years) without living there. They either let the houses sit idle or rent them out at a profit, taking more money out of the local economy. We do not welcome our new foreign non-productive overlords. the answer to that is not to take property away from lawful owners. We need to track down all these "optimistic investment" purchases and safe house purchases then just imminent domain them back to the public who actually participate in the local economy. When people on salary are competing with millionaires and billionaires for rent, they can't win. Entire living centers are being built as "ghost towers." Real estate developers travel overseas and sell every unit in a tower to Chinese buyers 5 years before even breaking ground on the building. Then when the building is complete, it sits 90% empty. The developers get their money and the buyers get to ride on tax breaks, but it does nothing to help the local population. Then, all of that isn't getting into when all this fancy housing is purchased by illegal foreign money. There's a spectrum here. We need to audit all purchase records, pierce the veil of every LLC, and determine if real estate purchases in tight markets are made as an attempt at laundering money. If so, the property is forfeit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- morgante 11y 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.
  - YokoZar 11y ago
    This has already happened in Mountain View. Last election the "renting" demographic managed to overthrow the entire city council, who previously had been controlled by the typical "raise home prices by blocking construction" homeowner interest group. The result has been the beginning of many new large multi-unit housing developments. Dense multistory condos and rowhouses near downtown are happening. Google's plan for office space was even rejected because it didn't have enough new housing units!
    - plonh 11y ago
      I read Google's plan was rejected because Mountain View didn't want more Google employees living in the city -- they wanted a more employer-diverse resident+business base.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    In SF, the majority of voters are already renters. Something like %70. But the people who live there are oddly irrational and think building will somehow raise the rent because it would be all 'luxury' apartments, and thus 'raise' the price. And these are the "perma renters" who have been forced out or closed to forced out due to their lower incomes. The renter political majority are the people who got laws such as rent control in. And the other very landlord unfriendly laws that make ~ %30 of residential rental stock unoccupied in SF due to fears of bad renters costing far more than their income. Also their are other laws that let petty NIMBYs prevent neighbors building stuff in their empty lots, so they can extract concessions out of them, or just avoid the personal inconvenience of construction during working hours. A good chunk of people in SF are unemployed / not in the labor force. Something around %30. 'Tech workers' are a very small minority of the population, but are the new immigrants aggravating the supply problems. Then you have old money in SF organizing political groups to block building on the water front so their waterfront condo views will not be block and so on. The multiple competing interests in SF lead to the general regulatory failure there of not building nearly enough. SF has always been a city with it's head far up it's ass, it was very bad in other ways in the 70s too, with similar 'renter friendly' laws causing more problems than solutions.
- a5seo 11y 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 11y 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.
- plonh 11y ago
  Why is SFBA sacrosanct? Open a startup in Kansas City.

Gmo 11y 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 11y 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.
clamprecht 11y 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 11y 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.
  - 11y ago

morgante 11y 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 11y 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.
seiji 11y 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 11y ago
  This seems like a comment for a post about Uber. I don't see how it's relevant here.
  - seiji 11y ago
    Oh, the article itself is about people buying a single resource the sub-renting it out. So that's the feudalism part. The connected network part was also similar because you have to go through these co-living space capitalist-hippy administrators to actually live in the co-living space. So some of the co-living spaces are co-living as defined by "you passed our landlord's test" but others are "everybody must like you to live here." If this was relating to Uber, we'd also mention they are doing the entire "break local laws and hope city hall doesn't care" trick by introducing oversubscribed short term housing which is against city policy.

thatsso1999 11y 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.

xacaxulu 11y 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.

plonh 11y 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 11y ago

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

plonh 11y 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 11y ago

Congratulations entitled young Americans, you've invented flatting.