Coliving: Dorms for Grownups

[greggman]

These are a thing in Japan. Not sure how common they are. One of my co-workers now in is 40s recently moved into one.

They generally advertise you'll have an active social live in the shared space and they advertise beautiful shared spaces. I've never been so I don't know if the ads live up to reality.

A few links

http://www.social-apartment.com/

https://www.hituji.jp/

http://tokyosharehouse.com/jpn/

Note there have been crappy shared living houses for ever, for example an infamous one that targets foreigners is Sakura House

The new thing is advertising them as better than living alone and dressing them up, including organizing activities like shared dinners etc..

[sdrothrock]

As someone who lives in Tokyo and has looked into share houses, there are two things that I found more attractive about Coliving versus share houses here:

1. Personal space: you get your own bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom especially is a dealbreaker for me.

2. Cost: share houses in Tokyo in decent places are often the same price as an apartment of similar size; there's really no financial benefit.

The share houses I've seen tend to have really bad tenant:facilities ratios for bathrooms, baths/showers, and washers. At worst, I've seen places with (for example) room for 15 tenants, but only one shower, one washer, and two bathrooms. That's far from an ideal situation, especially when I could get my own apartment for the same price...

[icanhackit]

The new thing is advertising them as better than living alone and dressing them up, including organizing activities like shared dinners etc..

"Here are your new cellmates...I mean friends!"

Happily introverted people would love this arrangement /s. A better decision might be to rent out a capsule in a kapuseru hoteru and use the money saved to enjoy going out with real friends or sit in a quiet izakaya gulping beer and smoking while reading/surfing/hacking.

This contrived social shit reminds me of working in aged care many moons ago. None of the tenants cared deeply for each other and the company running the show was able to fleece them under the guise of a more social, more fun environment. They would have been happier staying in their family home where the spectre of death wasn't standing in every hall.

[ics]

Been a while since I read anything about it but isn't the main attraction of Sakura House and others that you don't need key money (and all the other pains associated with getting a rental in Japan)?

[tdicola]

These are already a thing in Seattle--they call them 'apodments': http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/seattles-mic... There's a lot of controversy around them though as they're in a gray area of regulations. Developers want to take existing buildings, gut them, and rebuild as apodments without adding extra parking or other facilities that a denser building would need.

[TulliusCicero]

Adhering-to-regulations aside, I think this is a good thing. Buildings shouldn't be required to have lots of parking. What other facilities are they missing?

[mattgrice]

No, these are not apodments. Apodments are the minimum legally rentable unit. The shared area in an apodment is the kitchen only. It can only be shared by 7 units. It is not designed as a social space, and not treated as one per your linked article. It's a hallway and a place to heat up noodles.

This article is talking about larger units, each with their own kitchen, and a large shared area designed for social use.

[mbrock]

Right now I'm hunting for second-hand apartment rentals in the most boring and unattractive parts of Sweden because I work remotely, don't need excitement, am okay with being alone, and can't afford big city rent—plus there are no apartments to rent in major Swedish cities unless you've been in the right queue for 15 years. I'd move into one of these things tomorrow if I could. Nothing is less interesting to me than owning furniture or signing long contracts. Yes, I am a millenial.

[bro-stick]

Consider dwelling in an RV or fit out a fully functional home in a schoolbus. http://hankboughtabus.com

[friendcomputer]

"Evans plans to create an online recruiting process that will help him select applicants who fit into the community."

Gotta be careful of those discrimination laws.

[whyaduck]

"a space he envisions as a dorm for Millennials" - he's pretty much over the line from the start if that's an accurate representation of his goals.

[Sniffnoy]

IINM, at least in the US, such laws don't apply to "shared dwelling spaces", which these would count as. (Not a lawyer.)

[goodJobWalrus]

Yeah, the fact you have to audition for an overpriced room is kind of offputting, too.

[joshuaheard]

Why limit to millenials? This seems like it could be tailored to be a good solution for the poor or fixed-income elderly as well.

[xkcd-sucks]

The elderly already have a whole spectrum of shared living spaces ranging from crappy senior homes to swanky gated communities. This is just rebranding retirement homes as something for young working people.

[alkimie2]

I detest the idea of living in a space where I could not open a window. I barely tolerate it in an office environment.

[andrewstuart]

Shared living as a middle aged man. Sounds like the ninth inner circle of hell to me. The one just after the eighth inner circle where you freeze in liquid nitrogen for eternity.

[osipov]

It pisses me off that US is turning into a version of USSR. The housing described in the article approaches the horrors of Soviet communal apartments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

[qopp]

I wonder if this kind of thing is starting up more simply due to the rise in the age of first marriages?

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html

[patkai]

Why doesn't Y-combinator have such, I always wondered. Small bedrooms and small offices, I mean. It would save a lot of money for startups and it would also let them mingle a lot, maybe too much :)

[sekou]

I thought about this idea a while back when I saw an article about modernizing the concept of the trailer park home. I guess cultural grouping could be bad if it lead to more homogeneous thinking, but maybe it could occur naturally on a smaller scale in the same building and provide a different dynamic of interaction, kind of like what you see in some neighborhoods in NYC.

[beatpanda]

These stories are becoming tiresome. "Millenials" did not invent living in a house with roommates, or coops, or boarding houses, or SROs, or any of the living arrangements that have existed for centuries that pre-date scumbags in San Francisco trying to charge foolish engineers $1,000 for a bunk.

[Sniffnoy]

None of these things are new, true, but they're not common. It's not so easy finding a co-op to live in if you're not near a university, or, for that matter, even if you are near one, especially if you're not a student. If they're becoming more common, that's a trend worth broadcasting; hopefully it continues.

I'll agree that presenting it as a new invention, or something tailored for this radical new generation of "Millenials", is a bit obnoxious and misleading. But I'm still glad to see this sort of thing.

[eli_gottlieb]

Very much agreed. This is just an economically rational response to the housing prices young renters face in urban areas and the lack of community they/we grew up with in the suburbs. Thus the logical solution: live with a bunch of other people, and form a community out of them.

[cbd1984]

Is there a plan to make this website render on Mobile Firefox?

[dang]

Yes. The plan is to fix the bug.

This question is off-topic though. If you want to ask us something, the site guidelines request that you email [email protected].

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538020 and marked it off-topic.

[DrScump]

already posted twice over past 3 days, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523455

[kareemm]

I posted this 22h ago: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5930/deletable/hn.png

But it's showing up on the front page that I posted it 4h ago: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5930/deletable/hn-frontp...

The id is the same (10531322) so I'm guessing this is part of the "repost interesting stories that didn't get traction" experiment that HN is trying.

FWIW I didn't actually repost this a second time. Guessing the software or one of the mods has a "move this story back to the 'new' queue" feature if they think it should be given a second chance at frontpage glory.

[dang]

I get that this is annoying, and we're working on a plan to group duplicate submissions together, but in the meantime everyone needs to understand that allowing reposts until a story has had significant attention is explicitly ok here. It's a tactic for letting the best stories surface, which is the #1 quality concern for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=...