Slashdot Mirror
Dorms For Grownups: a Solution For Lonely Millennials?
HughPickens.com writes: Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic that Millennials want the chance to be alone in their own bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, but they also want to be social and never lonely.That's why real estate developer Troy Evans is starting construction on a new space in Syracuse called Commonspace that he envisions as a dorm for Millennials. It will feature 21 microunits, each packed with a tiny kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living space into 300-square-feet. The microunits surround shared common areas including a chef's kitchen, a game room, and a TV room. "We're trying to combine an affordable apartment with this community style of living, rather than living by yourself in a one-bedroom in the suburbs," says Evans. The apartments will be fully furnished to appeal to potential residents who don't own much (the units will have very limited storage space). The bedrooms are built into the big windows of the office building—one window per unit—and the rest of the apartment can be traversed in three big leaps. The units will cost between $700 and $900 a month. "If your normal rent is $1,500, we're coming in way under that," says John Talarico. "You can spend that money elsewhere, living, not just sustaining."
Co-living has also gained traction in a Brooklyn apartment building that creates a networking and social community for its residents and where prospective residents answer probing questions like "What are your passions?" and "Tell us your story (Excite us!)." If accepted, tenants live in what the company's promotional materials describe as a "highly curated community of like-minded individuals." Millennials are staying single longer than previous generations have, creating a glut of people still living on their own in apartments, rather than marrying and buying homes. But the generation is also notoriously social, having been raised on the Internet and the constant communication it provides. This is a generation that has grown accustomed to college campuses with climbing walls, infinity pools, and of course, their own bathrooms. Commonspace gives these Milliennials the benefits of living with roommates—they can save money and stay up late watching Gilmore Girls—with the privacy and style an entitled generation might expect. "It's the best of both worlds," says Michelle Kingman. "You have roommates, but they're not roommates."
Co-living has also gained traction in a Brooklyn apartment building that creates a networking and social community for its residents and where prospective residents answer probing questions like "What are your passions?" and "Tell us your story (Excite us!)." If accepted, tenants live in what the company's promotional materials describe as a "highly curated community of like-minded individuals." Millennials are staying single longer than previous generations have, creating a glut of people still living on their own in apartments, rather than marrying and buying homes. But the generation is also notoriously social, having been raised on the Internet and the constant communication it provides. This is a generation that has grown accustomed to college campuses with climbing walls, infinity pools, and of course, their own bathrooms. Commonspace gives these Milliennials the benefits of living with roommates—they can save money and stay up late watching Gilmore Girls—with the privacy and style an entitled generation might expect. "It's the best of both worlds," says Michelle Kingman. "You have roommates, but they're not roommates."
There will be a few people that will completely ruin the shared living space for everyone, and if there's no one to police it, the whole place will go to hell.
In order to do that, they would have to get jobs first...
The problem with this idea is that people will be fine with it for a year or two post-graduation, but it's going to start to suck fairly quickly after that.
It's not unusual for people to cling to elements of their student life after they graduate and get their first jobs. I did the same myself; moved into a shared house with a few people I'd known at university and tried to keep a student-ish lifestyle running alongside a full-time job.
It lasted 18 months. Then I gave up and rented a place on my own.
The demands of being a full member of the workforce are very different to the demands of being a student. When you're having to get up at a set time every morning (and generally pretty early), find yourself getting older and needing a regular sleep-pattern, needing a quiet space to do work that actually matters (rather than essentially being for your own benefit, as your work as a student was) and so on, the whole shared-living thing breaks down pretty rapidly. Irritations about your cohabitees different body-clocks, cooking smells, personal hygiene and expectations of reasonable noise levels all start to feel much more important than they did when you were still studying. And as you get more and more irritated with them, they are getting more and more irritated with you.
On top of that, this is generally the time when many people are going to be getting into more lasting romantic relationships, which might eventually lead to marriage and kids. This is not easy when you're sharing accommodation with a bunch of other people and personal space is a scarce commodity.
I guess they might make this work as a commercial proposition if it's a short-term rental affair. The problem is that if you get longer-term residents who age significantly past the incomers, this is going to turn into a vision of hell pretty fast.
What this certainly isn't is an alternative to providing sufficient quantities of decent quality new housing suitable for long-term occupation and family life. That's what we're very short of here in the UK. The issue here for Millennials is that whether or not they want to live like this, they may well have no choice. The option of renting my own place that was open to me more than a dozen years ago (let alone buying one, as I later did) is a lot less accessible now, due to rising rents.
Assuming that their baby boomer parents bothered to leave anything for them. Millenials might be the first generation in a long time to get the shaft by their departing parents.
I think a loooonnggg time ago it was called a rooming house. You got a bedroom, your in-room bath was a pitcher of water, wash basin and a chamber pot. Meals were served in the dining room. You went to {bathhouse, whorehouse, river} to bathe, although I'm sure at least some offered a tub once a week.
Then they had efficiency apartments. I lived in one built in the 1920s -- galley kitchen, breakfast nook, one giant room, large closet and a bathroom.
I rather liked the efficiency. For a while I used the breakfast nook as my bedroom with a curtain to separate it off, which made the one large room more like a combined living/dining area.
It was also dirt cheap, but I never felt quite like an adult until I moved into a place with an actual bedroom.
Oblig...
My neighbor knocked on my door at 2:30 am? You believe that? 2:30 in the morning!
Lucky for him I was still up playing my drums.
Because nobody has money that they could sell to? That's the whole reason the economy is in the dump it is.
Just people wanting something doesn't sell jack. If you want to sell, the demand side needs money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.