Across from Kimberly Chexnayder’s bed (which folds out from the wall) and abo🐷ve her flat-screen TV (which came with her small but sparkling ꧅new apartment), she’s posted a slightly faded Polaroid of her mother.
The picture was taken 30 years ago, during what her mom described asꦯ her NYC “wild days,” when she flitted between apartments, owned a record store and was friendly with Andy Warhol.
Chexnayder, a 23-year-old junior analyst for the NFL, always coveted even a small slice of her mother’s New York life. But her experience moving to the city has been far different — and easier: She pays $1,700 per month for her 152-square-foot room through co-living startup Ollie (a shortened version of the resort-reminiscent term “all-inclusive”) in Long Island City’s Alta building. The move makes her one of the hundreds of young New Yorkers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who💙 are turning to co-living as a solution to frustrating and expensive apartment searꦑches.
Co-living companies aim to disrupt traditional apartment life — just asඣ coworking spaces did for s🌱taid office life — by borrowing the concept of resource-sharing. Tenants trade personal space for a fully furnished bedroom, shared common areas and sometimes group social events, all under a prix-fixe cost structure.
Say goodbye to frantically searching Craigslist f🅠or roommates, argu💫ing over the internet bill, running to the bodega because you ran out of toilet paper, taking trips to Ikea or playing bed-bug roulette with the couch you found on the street. Say hello to, well, life in an adult dorm. Residents still have to deal with security deposits and income requirements, but the whole experience is much less Wild West than a classic New York apartment hunt.
The trend — which some treat as a half-step between college housing and the dog-eat-dog rental market — is growing in popularity, with companies like Ollie, Common, Roomrs, WeWork’s WeLive and Dwell gobbling up square footage from East Harlem to Midwood. Advocates say co-living is the future of housing in an increasingly cramped city, allowing people to trade privacy for shared amenities, a no-chores lifestyle and fun (if chaperoned) group outings. Critics say it’s a sanitized approach to city living for the generation that trusts Silicon Valley companies to solve problems, akin to eschewing the subway to take Ubers eve🌠rywhere.
Chexnayder and her mother are fans. “As much as [my mom] loves New York, I think there is still an inherent concern that raises in your mind when you think, ‘Your new🐼 college grad is just moving to the city and starting a new life,’ ” says Chexnayder. “She got really emotional when I [found Ollie]. It💦 was just a huge sigh of relief: ‘Ugh, we found a place, we are safe.’ ”
Alta is on the higher end of the spectrum: The slick 43-story development opened last year and feels more like a hotel than a starter home. For rents ranging from $1,300 to $2,300, residents get a “microsuite” with a bed that folds into the wall to reveal a couch and mini living area, plus a shared kitche🦩n and bathroom. Ollie, which partnered with Simon Baron Development to add its co-living spaces during construction, kitted out the units with brand-new appliances, dishware, furniture and TVs; it refills soap dispensers, drops off paper towels and offers weekly housekeeping and linen services. The building itself — a mix of rooms operated by Ollie and 297 traditional apartments — offers a full gym, a lap pool, a golf simulator, a yoga studio; a common room offers a ping-pong table and stadium seating that is set up during “Game of Thrones” and other screenings. Ollie’s studios in ♒the building average 516 square feet.
For comparison, Chexnayder’s $1,700 room in a two-bedroom apartment on the open market might cost about $2,031, without utilities and furniture, , since the average price of a tw﷽o-bedroom as of March 2019 was $4,063.
The co-l♋iving idea has received its share of mockery — after all, the name sounds like a spif🙈fy rebrand for the generic concept of “roommates.” But Ollie CEO Christopher Bledsoe says real estate developers need to break the mold to address the affordable housing crisis.
“There’s a large subset of the population that has either been priced out, or is feeling the pangs of loneliness, or is just looking or a more all-inclusive experience,” he says. Co-living companies can use economies of scale to save renters (or “members,” as some companies call them) money, since🏅 they are furnishing hun🧔dreds of rooms at a time.
Adds Bledsoe, “It’s counterintuitive♛, but we✃’re adding costs to improve affordability.”
On the other end of the spectrum is Roomrs, with📖 400 rooms across 130 apartments in neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, Midwood, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg. It offers fewer social events and building amenities but retains a focus on saving money for tenants.
“We think the neighborhood and the city will alwa🧜ys be cooler than any space we can do,” says Roomrs CEO Or Goldschmidt.
Enter Ana Gonzalez-Soto, 19, who moved to the city from Texas to attend Pace University but wasn’t interested in official student housing. The city wasn’t intimidating, but apartment hunting was. “Having to go through the application process, having to furni✤sh it. . .” she says. “Honestly, it wasn’t in my budget and I didn’t have time beꦑcause I was so busy.”
The Rꦍoomrs building she found in Ea꧃st Harlem seemed like the perfect solution. For $1,400 a month, she shares a first-floor pad with three roommates. She quickly made her bedroom her own, adorning it with a pink color scheme, a Crosley record player and a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” poster. “This is the perfect transition,” she says.
“Going from this into real-world housing is much 🦩better than doing it straight out of the d꧟orm or your parents’ house. It’s not as scary.”
Maybe detractors are peeved that younger people have it easier than they did. Buzzfeed’s Nitasha Tiku called co-living the “Disneyland version of startup life,” while NYU researcher Lior Zalmanson once described it as “Silicon Valley selling you living with roommates for a profit.” Still, it’s hard to feel sympathetic toward people who have long benefited from traditional rentals: fee-taking brok🎀ers and landlords who may illegally subdivide their units or force out longtime residents to command higher rents from newer tenants.
After sharing a small three-bed💞room place in Bushwick, Rob Poole, 29, switched to a $1🐎,575-a-month Crown Heights room in a co-living space run by Common. Fault-finders, Poole says, are simply romanticizing the Big Apple’s chaotic style of survival.
“I don’t think there are any New Yorkers who would complain about not having 🃏to go outside in the snow to do laundry,” he says. “When I moved here, it just kind of let me enjoy the things I care about more — running around Prospect Park, hanging♒ out with my girlfriend.”
After living at home, 24-year-old Nichola🐭s Gordon moved into a $1,500-a-month Ollie room i♛n Alta. He especially enjoys the organized social events that come included with rent, such as a snowshoeing trip followed by a whiskey tasting upstate.
“They’re selling a lifestyle here,” says the Brooklyn ꦗnative, who works in marketing for HBO. “Part of that is being adventurous — being open.”
Nicole Peinado, 26, ended up loving her $1,600-a-month room in a different two-bedroom Common apartment in Crown Heights because it banishes another headache: finding roommates. Common ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚhandles pairing roommates and gives residents reprieve if they don’t jive with their chosen ones.
“Just looking for a roommate was probably, for me, the most daunting thing,” she says. “If there’s an issue, you �⛎�can request to transfer.”
From Chexnayder’s soundproof window at Alta, sh🥃e watches the 7 and N trains roll by on elevated tracks with the 59th Street bridge in the background, a view not many twentysomething New Yorkers can afford. She travels a lot for work and can’t imagine giving up the ease of her all-inclusive microsuite any time soon.
“It𒅌’s just completely normalized in my head,” she says. “It’s one less tಞhing to worry about when you’re constantly on the go, and you have 5 million things on your mind.”