The Early Days of the Coliving Movement

Eight years ago I packed my things into a U-Haul and drove from Seattle to Oakland. I had just finished business school, and had about two thousand dollars to my name. I didn’t have an apartment or a job lined up. I was headed to crash on my friend Zac’s floor,joining my friend Ben to scout for the biggest house we could find.

A few months before, there had been a moment when it had clicked for us. As we faced the end of grad school, none of us knew what was next, but we decided we didn’t need to do it alone. We loved the feeling of finishing each other’s sentences and building off each other’s ideas. We wanted to keep it going to help each other figure out the next phase of life. We would rent a huge house and find other people who had that glimmer in their eye. We didn’t have the answers, but we had a way forward.

We found an old 8-bedroom craftsman in Berkeley, and soon were scouring Craigslist for housemates and new furniture. Starting ‘The Sandbox House’ taught us a lot. We tried different ways of sharing grocery expenses, and eventually learned that an “everything included” system was the best. I was frequently grumpy before coffee, which rubbed Zac the wrong way, so Meredith showed us how to mediate and reconcile tensions. We wanted to live with people who were more than just roommates, so we had an elaborate application, asking questions like “how would you donate a billion dollars?”.

Ben and I went into business together within the first month at The Sandbox House. Another month later, CNN was on our doorstep recording footage. We had struck a nerve. There was a fresh feeling of excitement, as a broader swath of people yearned for more social connection. The attraction of community living was expanding beyond the usual suspects of alternative Berkeley co-op houses. People wanted it, but it was too hard to get accepted into the handful of community houses that existed. There was no one approaching the problem professionally to expand availability and to address common pitfalls.

For our first project as a company, we master-leased a 16-bedroom Victorian home. Dubbed ‘The Farmhouse,’ we invited 5 friends with complimentary personalities to be the founding team. What emerged was an incredibly self-organising culture that is going strong today (Farmhouse residents still recruit, vet and select 100% of their incoming housemates). As our second project, we bought and renovated a 3-unit building in Oakland and transformed a duplex into ‘The Canopy’ – a single 12-bedroom coliving home. By the time we did our third project, we had learned that property management would be the core of our business model. We partnered with a family office who acquired an Oakland mansion so gorgeous that Ben and I decided to move in.

For the next four and a half years, Ben and I got another chance to roll up our sleeves as founding residents, and lived together in ‘Euclid Manor’. Using this house as the latest DNA, we launched project after project, and gained unexpected insights. We uncovered the essential factors that make coliving not just a pleasant housing option, but an impactful life experience.

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The Social Nuances of Living Together

After our first few houses, we thought we had it all figured out. Some things went effortlessly, and some were mistakes, so we applied those learnings to the next batch of houses. But it turns out that starting communities is almost like raising kids – each one is radically different and presents new problems and opportunities. They also grow and mature over time. They ask for money and get annoyed with their parents. Culture manifests itself differently each time, so it’s easy to draw false conclusions based on one or two similarities. After launching 16 communities, we now have enough experience to draw a common thread.

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Reviving Dormant ‘Social DNA’

Humans are innately social – we are a species that has lived in bands and tribes for millions of years. Only in the past few hundred years, with the advent of industrial society, has it been feasible to live an isolated life disconnected from a supportive group, family, clan or village. Many residents who join our communities are new to the concept of communal living, with perhaps a dorm or fraternity experience to draw upon. Some people come in worried about losing something, and have difficulty compromising.

They are used to having to fend for themselves in our society. These people come in focused on protecting and securing what is best for themselves, and to some extent view the needs and considerations of others as a threat. As they loosen up in community, a more generous and trusting stance toward cohabitating with others emerges naturally. Our job as facilitators is to help people get through the bumps in the road that could hinder them from shifting into this pro-social stance.

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From Safety to Agency to Expression

To radically oversimplify, we’ve noticed that there are roughly three stages that both individuals and communities move through as a group forms, gels and matures. At any given time, there will be people who are at different stages in the process. Each of these themes will recur for different people at different times – you don’t get “over” safety entirely, but it may become less of a major factor as you get comfortable in the group. These three stages include safety, agency and expression, as described below:

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1. Safety

Archetypal statement: “I’m not going to lose what I have. I’ll be no worse off.”

The first stage that the person and group need to establish is a basic sense of trust. People need to know that their things won’t be stolen and that their identity will be accepted. Some people may come in with a higher degree of self-confidence and innate sense of safety in the world at large, and these people can be helpful early facilitators for the group. People who come in with a lower innate sense of safety will inevitably test the group, and this will frequently result in the first bump in the road that the group needs to navigate. Through the process of making everyone feel safe, it’s common that the people who felt the most “triggered” – and may have even threatened to leave – become some of the strongest leaders and contributors. This may be because it is a new and rare experience for them to feel held, supported and accepted, and a previously repressed part of them is unlocked and empowered in the process.

Once most members of the community feel safe most of the time, it frees up an enormous amount of emotional energy that would otherwise be spent worrying, posturing and negotiating.

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2. Agency

Archetypal statement: “I can take measures to improve my life that also create win-wins with my housemates.”

Once trust is predominant, the attention of the group can shift from defining problems to creating solutions. It starts to be fun as people relax their personal preferences. The wellbeing of the group becomes just as important as getting one’s way on any item. People begin to say things like “I would prefer we be a shoes- off household, but if it makes everyone feel more relaxed to keep shoes on, I’m happy to take on the vacuuming chore to meet my need for cleanliness in a different way.” When these win-win style statements are made without resentment, it’s a sign that agency is beginning to prevail.

At this stage, people begin to act earnestly and constructively to benefit the group. This pragmatism breeds a better-functioning household with less breakdowns and logistical issues. The reduction of problems begins to fuel a positive trend toward harmony. Emotions in groups are contagious, so as people invest in the wellbeing of the group, everyone receives the emotional dividends. This further fuels the relaxing of personal preferences because the positive emotions of the group directly benefit the individual.

In other words, you care more about the group feeling good than having your personal preferences fulfilled. These preferences lose their emotional weight because the emotional value we get from friendship is larger than the peace we get from the arrangement of shoes.

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3. Expression

Archetypal statement: “I get value out of you being happy. By focusing on giving more than receiving, I feel myself growing into a fuller expression of myself.”

This is a stage that won’t begin for at least a year, if at all. At this stage, friendships have deepened in a way that people feel deeply understood for who they are. The home becomes a place where people act naturally and feel comfortable being themselves without effort. Beyond the basic logistics of managing a home together, at this stage creativity and originality bloom. People may finally muster the courage to quit jobs, change careers, learn an instrument or fall in love.

In the home, new projects, elaborate decoration, unique events, costume parties, playful dances and late-night philosophical conversations flourish. The community has such strong positive emotion that challenges are addressed very early and don’t get a chance to fester into resentment.

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Community at Scale

As OpenDoor grows larger, a major focus is on how to facilitate the same kind of depth with much larger groups of people. Our latest projects are 78- and 52-bedroom micro-apartment buildings with common spaces. A full explanation of our systems, software and approach would be too long for this article, but it’s worth sharing a few highlights on how we approach the issue.

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Break it Down

Like most operators approaching larger projects, we’ll be breaking buildings down into smaller social sub-groups of roughly 10-15 people. We’ve found this to be a good size in our previous projects. We aren’t really starting communities of 300 people – we’re creating a building that will contain 20 communities of 15 people each, just like an apartment building contains families of 2-5 people each.

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Starting is Easy; Changing is Hard

We’ve found it’s easier to start a community off on good footing than it is to right the ship when things
get rough. In all our projects we’ve recruited early residents to breathe life into the group, and have offered ever more comprehensive workshops, trainings and toolkits for living together. Today this looks like a 4-month community-building residency where early residents forge early bonds, create vision and values, charter shared agreements and create a stable foundation. This foundation creates a coherent sense of place that subsequent residents are invited into.

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Everyone does the dishes; everyone builds community

In many ways, “building community” is more a way of “being” than a tactical “doing” and as such, we view every touchpoint with our residents as an opportunity to nudge things in a good direction. We need to model the kind of culture and behaviour that we know makes communities thrive. Every member of our staff is involved in community building, and we run our company as a community itself, so every team member has a palpable experience of the benefits of community. This also means that all residents are responsible for building community. Although we do have on-site resident managers, really their role is to encourage the participation and leadership of as many residents as possible. Community is not a transactional product that can be bought and consumed. It is an authentic set of relationships that imparts the greatest benefits to those who nurture it.

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Diversity and Difference Get us Farther

The fundamental challenge of all groups, teams, companies and collectives is about managing differences. You need people with different skill sets and backgrounds to solve different kinds of problems. But these people don’t always agree on how to move forward together. If we put 10 identical people together, there will be no challenges, but there will also be no depth, growth, creativity or insight. Our work is about tying together broader nets that can hold a wider range of people and allow them to feel safe. Luckily, it’s the collective brilliance of this kind of multi-talented group that enables the very adaptation and flexibility that allows it to succeed.

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Looking Back on 8 Years in Coliving

When we started OpenDoor and were trying to put together our first few projects, the concept of coliving was a new idea to all the developers and investors that we spoke with. Not only were we a new company with no capital, no track record and no projects, but no one had ever heard of the housing product that we were pitching. Over time other operators emerged, bankrolled by VC checks, and the conversation changed as people warmed up to the concept. Fast forward another 5 years, and now a number of those high-flying “name brand” startups have come and gone. There are a handful of purpose-built coliving projects that have already come out of the ground in the US (including our own). But the vast majority of coliving bedrooms around the globe seem to repurpose existing multifamily or hotel assets. Now the conversation is about developing institutional- scale projects, both to achieve economies of scale in management and also unlock larger pools of capital.

It’s incredible to see how many coliving operators there are around the globe these days, and how well funded the space has become. However, the concept is probably better known by real estate investors than it is by everyday consumers. I’m interested to see how much mainstream cultural adoption the shared lifestyle achieves. If the trend is mostly being driven by unaffordable rents in primary cities around the globe, then micro-apartments probably achieve the same affordability benefits and investor alpha as coliving without the social risk of shared spaces.

Is there a real cultural shift happening? If values are bending toward conviviality, socialisation and relationships, at some point consumers will develop a more discerning taste for which coliving project they will move into. I would welcome a shift of attention from courting institutional investors to capturing consumer market share by resonating authentically with our ultimate customers – everyday people. The industry has been fairly insular and “B2B”-focused, and I’d love to see coliving have a bolder expression in public life. Still, most of the articles about coliving feature the businesses behind the projects. I’d like to see more emphasis and curiosity about what it’s like to be immersed in community, and hear about
the real impact it has on people’s lives. The defining characteristic of coliving is socialisation, so for the concept to achieve reliable, long-term success, we can’t just focus on making real estate deals happen, we need to become experts in helping people get along with one another.