Tag Archives: backyard

Dorms for Grownups

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The Bridge quoted me in Why Dorms for Grownups Are a New Way of Life. It opens,

If you think applying to Stanford or MIT is a long shot, consider the odds of landing a spot in a Brooklyn co-living residence. Common, the company now operating six co-living facilities in the borough, recently received more than 15,000 applications for about 300 available rooms in three of the cities it serves: New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Why the demand? Co-living, essentially the residential version of the co-working trend, offers dorm-like, amenity-filled living that’s particularly attractive to millennials. The apartments come pre-stocked with furniture, appliances, fast WiFi, and lots of prospective friends.

John Bogil, 24, has shared a giant living room, kitchen, basement, and backyard with nine other people since moving into a Crown Heights facility called Common Albany a year ago. Although it sounds crowded, Bogil enjoys the company. “It’s awesome. I’ve made friends for life,” Bogil said. Common, launched in 2015, is Manhattan-based but has found fertile ground in Brooklyn. The growing portfolio in the borough includes the newly built Common Baltic in Boerum Hill, which offers co-living spaces as well as traditional apartments. The rent varies by neighborhood, with spaces in Crown Heights starting at $1,475 and Boerum Hill spots going for $2,143 and up.

Tenants have their own private bedrooms, many with private baths, but share the living room and kitchen as well as amenity spaces including lounges, fitness rooms, roof decks, dining rooms and work spaces. Convenience is a major selling point: the suites in a Common building come fully furnished with beds, dressers, couches, tables and chairs, a TV, towels and sheets, and a weekly cleaning service. Many of the issues that traditional roommates wind up fighting about have been taken off the table, like Real World with less drama.

Common was launched by Brad Hargreaves, who earlier had co-founded General Assembly, now a global educational company with campuses in 15 cities. Like many entrepreneurs, Hargreaves was looking to solve a problem. When the Yale grad first moved to New York City, he looked for an available room in an apartment on Craigslist and found the process cumbersome. “Common offers an alternative to this,” he said. “We make living with roommates better, more convenient, and more efficient.”

With young people increasingly crowding certain urban areas, the idea of a starter apartment is changing. While rents in Brooklyn have eased lately, thanks in part to new construction, the median rent is a daunting $2,785. With rents like those, some 76% of people 21 to 34 years old say they’ve made compromises to find a place to live, including living with roommates, according to the NHP Foundation, a group advocating affordable housing.

“Co-living has proven to be more than a passing trend,” said Hargreaves. “The response to opening our first home in Brooklyn was so strong that we were able to rapidly expand in the borough as well as into San Francisco and Washington, D.C. We now have nine homes on two coasts and are actively looking at new homes and new cities.” Common chooses its spots carefully, aiming to balance affordability and urban amenities. “We look to open in neighborhoods where there’s access to public transit and great local retail for our members to explore and enjoy,” said Hargreaves.

Common has the financial fuel to grow much more. The company has raised more than $23 million in two rounds of financing from 15 investors. The budding co-living industry now has multiple competitors as well, including WeLive, HubHaus, Node, and Krash. In Long Island City, a co-living company called Ollie plans to operate what it calls the largest co-living facility in North America, occupying 13 of the 42 floors in a new skyscraper.

While much of the allure of co-living is practical, many residents appreciate having the company, which in a cosmopolitan place like Brooklyn creates diverse collections of roommates. “I really appreciate the exposure to different peoples, ideas and cultures,” said Bogil. “I’ve learned so much about Australian politics and South African sports, for example, which might sound like useless info on the surface, but it helps me to learn about the world in a way that I never would normally. It makes the world feel smaller.” More than 70% of Common members are on 12-month leases but most stay longer than a year.

While typical co-living residents are in their 20s, the format could work for older adults as well, once the format goes mainstream. “There is growing interest in more communal types of living environments of the type offered by Common,” said David Reiss, an attorney and professor of real estate at Brooklyn Law School. “Co-living appeals to different people and our membership is diverse,” Hargreaves said. “We have young professionals, married couples, those moving to New York City for their first job, those moving from abroad, and ranging in their early 20s into their 30s and 40s.”

Building a Wall

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photo by I, Xauxa

Realtor.com quoted me in Mark Zuckerberg Annoys His Neighbors by Building a Big Wall. It opens,

They say good fences make good neighbors, but that’s definitely not the case for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Word has it he’s been building a 6-foot wall around his 700-acre property in Kilauea, Kauai—and this construction has sparked an outcry among his neighbors, who say the wall obstructs the gorgeous ocean view.

“It’s immense,” longtime resident Gy Hall told West Hawaii Today. “It’s really sad that somebody would come in and buy a huge piece of land, and the first thing they do is cut off this view that’s been available and appreciated by the community here for years.”

To make their annoyance known, neighbors have resorted to posting messages on Zuckerberg’s wall—the real wall, not the virtual one on his Facebook profile—asking (mostly) politely for him to take it down. But the signs get removed soon after they appear (most likely by the tech giant’s henchmen).

Granted, it does seem to be a bit of a travesty when a billionaire swoops in and builds a wall that blocks ocean vistas that have been enjoyed by Hawaiians for centuries. So, what are the rules, exactly, on building walls or fences on your property? Can you build whatever you want, or might he have overstepped his bounds?

“Fence and wall limits are generally set by local laws, and residential properties generally have a maximum allowable height,” says David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School. “Common limits are 6 feet for backyard fences and 4 feet for front-yard fences.”

That said, in relatively unpopulated areas like Kauai, it’s certainly possible that no laws exist at all.

Jumping the Affordable Housing Shark

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"Henry Winkler Happy Days 1976" by ABC Television

The Fonz

Realtor.com quoted me in Could Fonzie Solve America’s Housing Shortage? It opens,

Call me old-fashioned, but in my heart of hearts, Fonzie from the 1970s TV show “Happy Days” is still the epitome of cool. That leather jacket. The shades. Those thumbs!

He may also be the solution to America’s housing shortage.

As you may recall, Fonzie lived above the Cunninghams’ garage—offbeat living quarters that are making a big comeback today thanks to BIMBY, short for “builder in my back yard.” BIMBYs carve out small, bootleg homes on their property by renovating work sheds, upgrading floors over garages, or raising new structures from scratch.

BIMBYs typically create these dwellings for aging parents (thus their not-so-sexy nickname “granny flats”), or to rent out to college students who can’t afford traditional apartments. Their renaissance is due to plain old necessity: Housing is just too damn expensive. A BIMBY home, though modest, is a deal for both tenants and cash-strapped homeowners. It’s a win-win scenario for Cunninghams and Fonzies alike!

That’s why Logan Jenkins, a journalist for the San Diego Tribune, recently suggested the BIMBY resurgence could fill a desperate need for affordable housing in areas where the cost of living on new homes and rentals has spiraled way out of control.

“If 10% of the homeowners in San Diego County added 450 square feet of separate living space to their properties, the affordable housing crisis would be largely over,” Jenkins argued.

And far from dragging down the neighborhood with riffraff, such housing “enables a neighborhood to maintain diversity that otherwise would be lost in a hot housing market,” according to Larry Ford, a geographer and author of “The Spaces Between Buildings.” After all, wasn’t Fonzie the life of the party?

This may explain why certain cities are embracing BIMBYs with open arms. Portland has changed its local laws to forgive their developer fees. Santa Cruz offers pre-approved architectural plans, loans, and fee waivers to what it calls “accessory dwelling units,” or ADUs, spurring a fourfold increase in applications. And other local governments are following suit.

“ADUs could make a big impact in curing housing issues in many locations,” says John Lavey with Community Builders, a nonprofit that has studied the trend, “especially in desirable locations such as Bozeman, Montana, where I’m located, where housing and rent costs exceed national averages. And for millennials seeking walkability and neighborhood authenticity, these ADUs are in high demand.” 

But not all communities are automatically lining up to accept these BIMBY newcomers.

“Zoning limitations on accessory units were adopted by lots of local planning boards that were consciously rejecting them for their communities,” says David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School. To change the regulations, BIMBY advocates would need to go head to head against the NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) crowd, who argue that an influx of Fonzies could drive down property values.