Construction Maison

Take a walk east from the gold-plated cupola of San Francisco City Hall and the landscape transforms into the Tenderloin, a patchwork of residential hotels, small delis and social service clinics that cater to the poor. It winds into the city’s main tourist corridor , and, farther along, a glossy cluster of condominium towers where upper- story penthouses cost millions . These symbols of extreme poverty and prosperity are wedged together in District Six, which serves both as a portal for visitors and a cauldron where San Francisco ’s most pressing political issues simmer . For 20 years, District Six voters have reliably concluded that the solutions to those issues come from the progressive viewpoint. And while it’s more than a year until the next election for supervisor, the contest is already shaping up as a test of whether that is still true. From the Tenderloin to the Mission Bay waterfront , District Six has seen a rush of development over the past two decades, and residents are ...

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...