WeWork branches out with WeLive
WeWork, the company that leases office space to startups, has bigger ambitions: it wants to rent you a “co-living” space where you work, too.  The company is close to launching its co-living apartments, known as WeLive spaces, in places like San Francisco and Washington DC, and will ultimately be renting out 360-square-foot “micro apartments,” which sit on top of WeWork’s co-working spaces. WeWork will offer more than 250 micro-apartments at each location, along with amenities like bike parking, an herb garden, and a library.
The spaces in question are superficially different, but politically aligned: better designed, better funded, and way sexier versions of the group housing that came before them.

WeWork was set to launch its communal living concept (branded as WeLive) in Crystal City last month but the latest internal estimates are late fall or the end of the year. The next WeLive property is a 27-story office building in lower Manhattan. That's just the beginning. One commercial real estate insider told BuzzFeed News that in the past couple months, WeWork has also leased a “five-story plus penthouse” office building at 1161 Mission Street in San Francisco’s Mid-Market, a hub of tech company headquarters, for launching another WeLive. The 69,000-square-foot space is roughly three blocks from Twitter, four blocks from Uber, six blocks from Pinterest, and a quick hop from the luxury high-rises and controversy that followed.

WeWork may be based in New York, but signing three long-term leases before launching is pure Silicon Valley chutzpah. (Another Silicon Valley quirk? WeWork never buys, only leases, and calls it being “asset-light.”) The Crystal City project will include 252 of these micro-apartments plus amenities like an arcade, an herb garden, a library, common areas done up in fashionable neutrals, and, of course, plenty of bike parking. The Manhattan property is located at 110 Wall St., a 27-story “dark, shiny modernist tower” that was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. WeWork has not confirmed the San Francisco deal, but the other two buildings will include its trademark shared offices, so members presumably can toggle between co-work and co-life at will.

Meanwhile, a startup called Common has already raised $7.35 million at a $20 million valuation for a co-living network in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant and initially planned to charge $1,750 per month. Common’s first property, a brownstone redesigned to fit 19 rooms, launches in October. Rooms will be least 80 square feet and feature at least one window. Common’s founder, Brad Hargreaves — also the co-founder of General Assembly, the startup that kicked off the “learn to code” craze — told BuzzFeed News that he will offer weekly cleaning, a set of shared supplies including coffee, paper towels, and fresh fruit. The garden floor will become a shared area that functions as a co-working space during the day and a dining room at night. That’s what users want, Hargreaves said. Many “work from their homes and co-working spaces” and end up confined to one room. “Their bed is often three feet from their desk, so it's hard to separate work and life.” Hargreaves thinks of Common as a product, and says user feedback requested “some modicum of separation.” Common’s value proposition to them is, then: “Hey, rather than working three feet from your bed, why not work a little further away?”

And The Caravanserai, which bills itself as a “global co-living subscription,” is charging $1,600 per month for access to houses in Ubud, Mexico City, and Lisbon. CEO Bruno Haid describes himself as a “founding tenant” of three co-living spaces, including 20Mission, an infamous spot in San Francisco that lets tenants pay in bitcoin.

Other startups are slowly exploring co-living concepts that look a little less like high-end hacker hostels and a little more like luxury short-term rentals, albeit ones with a faintly cooperative glow. This month, the deluxe co-working space Neuehouse — which sells itself toward “ambitious innovators” — raised $25 million. A tech investor, who reviewed the company’s pitch deck last year and passed, told Buzzfeed News that Neuehouse has looked into doing “a hotel and extended stay.” (The source requested anonymity because the investor has a working relationship with the New York–based company.) WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has been coy about WeLive and declined to speak for this article, but he has dangled the possibility of Webnb as well. “The hotel experience is an ‘I’ experience, not a ‘We’ experience,” he recently told Businessweek.



The trend risks veering into self-parody. Twitter users had trouble figuring out whether a widely shared recent piece in the New York Times real estate section was for real.