
The Millennial Commune - applecore
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/realestate/the-millennial-commune.html
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Gmo
I've lived in a shared house for 7 years. To me, one of the advantage of a
shared house is to be with people that are different than you, because you all
have different experiences and can share and learn from that.

Of course, it's essential to have a good feeling with the others, but I feel
like this is going way too far, with just you ending up with others alike, and
no diversity. Granted, that's what they sell : “highly curated community of
like-minded individuals.”

~~~
dasil003
The idea of curating people is nauseating to me.

It speaks to one of the largest failures of technology, which is that the
techno utopians from Gen X believed the Internet would herald a new age of
informed democracy and rational debate. Instead what we got is a balkanization
of ideas where no one has to ever hear anything vaguely uncomfortable and we
can all stay ensconced in our little tribes.

~~~
angersock
So, curating people--or whatever other term you want to use for "picking your
roommates carefully"\--is damned important, and always has been.

If you have a roommate that loves throwing parties, and everyone else is maybe
super tired from working, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you have roommates that don't believe in cleaning, ever, then you're gonna
have a bad time.

If you have roommates that spend a lot of time torrenting and your internet
gets shut off, you're gonna have a bad time.

If you have roommates that are really into drug culture, you could well end up
having a bad time (seen this happen once or twice).

You can all be totally different in, say, politics or sexuality or income or
whatever (provided rent is still being made), but it gets super shitty super
fast if the basic "Hey, this is our home, don't cause problems" stuff isn't
nailed down.

~~~
dasil003
Well wait a second, _is_ picking your roommates carefully the same as the
curation they are talking about here? Because it doesn't feel that way to me.
It feels like they are trying to capitalize on the age-old concept of having
roommates, and slathering on a thick coat of shiny lacquer in the form of a
business model based on the painfully trendy idea of curation. I can't put my
finger on it exactly, maybe it's just the article that's to blame, but there's
something here that feels more akin to high school cliquishness than screening
potential roommates, and that's what I'm objecting to.

~~~
angersock
Well, let's be clear here: their main curation requirement seems to be "Can
you spend up to 48K a year in rent?".

~~~
dasil003
Hm, I'm not going to go back to read the article but I distinctly remember the
word "like-mindedness". But let's give you the benefit of the doubt for
argument's sake, then the only crime is the douchiness of calling that
"curation".

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morgante
Calling these spaces communes is ironic considering how incredibly capitalist
they are.

1\. Regulatory failure leads to a lack of reasonable real estate options in
growing cities.

2\. Striving young people want to move to the major cities for career reasons
anyways.

3\. Aspiring capitalists deploy capital to convert existing housing stock into
microunits while charging a premium.

Nothing in this is communist at all.

~~~
seiji
It's almost as if they've rebranded feudalism as "sharing."

Proper sharing would be a fully connected graph topology. Modern "sharing" is
hub-and-spoke where the hub extracts rent on all transactions because they
either made a website (lol, "tech company") or have absconded capital and sell
it back to you (time limited) at a profit.

~~~
tdaltonc
This seems like a comment for a post about Uber. I don't see how it's relevant
here.

~~~
seiji
Oh, the article itself is about people buying a single resource the sub-
renting it out. So that's the feudalism part.

The connected network part was also similar because you have to go through
these co-living space capitalist-hippy administrators to actually live in the
co-living space. So some of the co-living spaces are co-living as defined by
"you passed our landlord's test" but others are "everybody must like you to
live here."

If this was relating to Uber, we'd also mention they are doing the entire
"break local laws and hope city hall doesn't care" trick by introducing
oversubscribed short term housing which is against city policy.

~~~
jsprogrammer
The houselord is merely being compensated for the value created through its
curation.

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thatsso1999
The living spaces described aren't communes in any way, shape or form. This is
just paying to have roommates you don't know with some perks. _actual_
cooperatives/communes are occupied by their member-owners, who have full
control over their space. It's laughable that this being marketed as edgy
socialist living when it's just a big apartment with some nice branding.

An actual co-op shares food purchases, requires labor like cooking and
cleaning, and the members share democratic control over the house's finances.
There is no actual reason why you need microleases - the co-op I live in has 6
month leases at a minimum, and on average most members live here for two
years. People stay for so long because actual cooperatives foster a culture of
cooperation and a community full of real friendships, giving its members a
deep, lasting connection with the space and their fellow housemates.
Microleases seem like they create a transitory and shallow culture with people
coming and leaving all the time and not actually making any connection with
the space, partially because you can't leave your mark on the space since you
don't own it.

There are very large and active communities of both residential and commercial
cooperatives in Berkeley, Michigan, and Austin (where the co-op I live in is),
and I think this is because there is cheaper land and individual houses. It's
close to impossible for starting true residential cooperatives in downtown NYC
because the landlord often owns the entire building, which would require an
enormous amount of money to acquire, and would lead to enormous cooperatives
which would be difficult to run. There _are_ very large, apartment-style
cooperatives - there are at least 5 co-ops in Austin with over 100 people each
- but there are many more that are house style with 15-30 people. I think the
ones in Berkeley and Michigan tend to be closer to 30-40 people, but they're
still just big houses.

The cooperative movement is alive and well and has been for decades.
Capitalists trying to jump onto the sharing economy bandwagon just dilute the
message and create the wrong impression of what actual shared living is - raw
democratic control over your space. Cooperatives have amazing potential in the
internet age, but seem to have been largely forgotten by modern day
technologists. A non-profit Uber, cooperatively controlled by both drivers and
developers, is an obvious example of a great system that would work very well
and be immensely popular with drivers. There are a lot of knotty problems to
work out, but nothing insurmountable. If 100+ drug-addled college kids can
democratically run an entire apartment complex successfully for 3 decades (and
even make money, too!), surely today's technologists can build software that
allow many more people to democratically run much larger systems.

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plonh
This is a renters coop.

In a coop, the owners approve/reject apartment sales. This is the same, except
the residents are renters, while the owners still pick who is allowed in.

I am surprised this doesn't run afoul of Equal Housing (anti-discrimination)
laws, since the people rejecting applicants aren't the residents.

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xacaxulu
Yeah, I'd still rather be able to walk around naked in my kitchen and sleep
with my significant other without people listening. I don't need to live in an
adult hostel to have friends and meet interesting people.

~~~
plonh
Sure, many prefer to live in a big well built private home, but we can't
afford it. Even individual apartments doing provide that much audio privacy,
in USA construction.

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jfb
The NYT seems to be the perfect machine for exposing the uttermost
eyerollingist of douchebags.

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te_chris
Congratulations entitled young Americans, you've invented flatting.

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paulhauggis
This is a result of the ridiculous rent in places like sf. Why not figure out
a way to lower the rent?

~~~
toomuchtodo
The only solutions are:

1\. Build more housing (won't happen) 2\. Rent control (doesn't work, mostly.
Distorts the market) 3\. The bubble pops (most likely)

~~~
morgante
> Build more housing (won't happen)

Why not? Eventually non-owners will form a majority of voters and will vote to
remove ridiculous restrictions.

Generational rent-seeking can only persist for so long.

~~~
mahyarm
In SF, the majority of voters are already renters. Something like %70. But the
people who live there are oddly irrational and think building will somehow
raise the rent because it would be all 'luxury' apartments, and thus 'raise'
the price. And these are the "perma renters" who have been forced out or
closed to forced out due to their lower incomes.

The renter political majority are the people who got laws such as rent control
in. And the other very landlord unfriendly laws that make ~ %30 of residential
rental stock unoccupied in SF due to fears of bad renters costing far more
than their income. Also their are other laws that let petty NIMBYs prevent
neighbors building stuff in their empty lots, so they can extract concessions
out of them, or just avoid the personal inconvenience of construction during
working hours. A good chunk of people in SF are unemployed / not in the labor
force. Something around %30. 'Tech workers' are a very small minority of the
population, but are the new immigrants aggravating the supply problems.

Then you have old money in SF organizing political groups to block building on
the water front so their waterfront condo views will not be block and so on.

The multiple competing interests in SF lead to the general regulatory failure
there of not building nearly enough. SF has always been a city with it's head
far up it's ass, it was very bad in other ways in the 70s too, with similar
'renter friendly' laws causing more problems than solutions.

~~~
theseatoms
> But the people who live there are oddly irrational and think building will
> somehow raise the rent because it would be all 'luxury' apartments, and thus
> 'raise' the price.

Is this for real? So clearly false. (Increasing supply will somehow increase
demand by even more?) I have to assume these ideas have been spread by the
vested interests that you've noted.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I'm no expert, but isn't that what typically happens with gentrification? Make
the neighborhood more desirable by whatever means, more middle/upper-class
people want to live there, local landlords raise the rent on existing units
despite no actual change in their quality?

I've read about folks who worked for years to clean up their low-end
neighborhoods, organize a neighborhood watch, drive out the dealers, etc, and
as things improve the landlord jacks the rent up until they have to move to a
slum area again. That's not about "luxury apartments" specifically, just about
how manifestly screwed you are if you're not at least middle-class.

~~~
morgante
Gentrification often comes down to increasing demand without increasing
supply. If supply weren't artificially restricted, it would be profitable to
expand the housing stock instead of completely displacing existing residents.

