Housing
A Brief History of Co-Living Spaces
Those Millennial-filled compounds aren’t all that different from 19th-century boarding houses.
We live in a world of ever-tinier micro-units, limited housing stock, and prohibitive rents. This is a world in which some purportedly well-adjusted, perfectly sane grown people pay to share bunk beds and willingly (?!) wake up for early morning dance parties in urban communes.
But co-living isn’t just a product of our current housing crisis or tolerance for club music before 7 a.m. There’s a long history of housing arrangements that served as de facto social networks for new urban transplants.