In the ’90s, We Had ‘Friends.’ Now They Call It Co-Living.
More prosaically, co-living can simply mean roommates and common rooms, like a dorm. For some developers, it’s a form of adaptive reuse: many co-living sites, like WeLive at 110 Wall Street , are leased, in this case from the landlord of what once was an office building, drained of its tenants by Hurricane Sandy. Slide Show Adventures in Co-Living Credit Photographs by Andrew White for The New York Times There are still co-living evangelists, like Brad Hargreaves of Common, who has promised that “the genuine and organic relationships our members build with each other,” as he wrote in a post for Medium, would not be tainted by allowing journalists to sleep over at Common properties (though they were welcome to tour). With over $23 million in financing, Common now operates in five cities, including out of eight houses in New York City. Some co-living ventures have collapsed under the weight of their ideals, like the utopian Pure House , started by Ryan Fix, now 42, in his Williamsburg l...