Common Offers $3,000 Rooms, a Slack Channel, and the Promise of Post-College Friendship
I will be the first to say that Slack is great. It’s a well-designed app! But it amuses me, in a way that also makes me feel sad, to hear that the app—which you can download and use for free—is being touted as an amenity in a new NYC “co-living” complex where people can rent single rooms (many of which include shared bathrooms) for between $2,250 and $3,190 a month.
This is Common, the Crown Heights (and soon-to-be Williamsburg) complex where you pay to share space, Wi-Fi, complimentary toilet paper, and a Slack channel with your new best friends. Here’s one of the site’s testimonials, which should give you the gist:
I brought only my clothes, as everything else was provided for me, I made instant friends in a city where I didn’t know anyone, and unlike a 12 month commitment my lease was flexible with my schedule.
(The $2,250-$3,190 rent is for a month-to-month lease; you can get a slight price reduction if you’re willing to commit to a Common year.) [UPDATE: I misunderstood the pricing. The $2,250–3,190 quote is for Common’s upcoming property in Williamsburg. The Crown Heights property starts at $1,500/month.]
Gothamist describes Common as an attempt to “repackage the camaraderie of a freshman dorm room.” Jia Tolentino goes even further, writing in Jezebel:
One of the most depressing things about the so-called sharing economy — the recession-induced workforce transition in which everyone hustles twice as hard to piece their shit together except for a relatively small group of selectively lazy and self-deluded individuals who rejoice in replacing all physical interactions with an app — is the disingenuous way it’s co-opted the language of community. […] How will you ever come to the understanding that interpersonal effort is the only way to find interpersonal meaning when you’ve got someone buying your goddamn toilet paper for you and your expensive communal apartment building comes with its own fucking Slack?
I agree with Tolentino. There’s something about this apartment complex that feels wrong, in the “why have we worked so hard for so little” sense, and the “why are they trying to pass off a dorm room with unlimited TP and a special channel on a free app as this amazing thing worth $36,000 a year” sense.
But I want to go back to that idea of interpersonal effort, because very few apartments—or even neighborhoods—foster the growth of interpersonal relationships anymore, and it might be the one thing Common does right.
Earlier this week Nir Eyal posted a Medium essay about the importance of friendship, including his early efforts at interpersonal connection:
After moving into our Midtown Manhattan apartment, we invited all the neighbors over for drinks by placing Kinko’s-printed quarter-sheets into everyone’s mailboxes. Then, we waited for our versions of Chandler, Kramer, and Elaine to show up. But they didn’t. In fact, no one did. As the ice in the cooler melted and the guacamole browned, not a single person among 100 apartments stopped by. Not. One. Person.
Recalling that episode now, we sound embarrassingly naïve. We didn’t realize friendships in the real world worked nothing like the ones we had forged in our dormitories, let alone those we saw on television. Yet as it turns out, our desire to belong to a tight community was far from foolish.
I did the exact same thing when I moved into my first post-college apartment. Wrote a cheerful note inviting the young woman who lived across the hall to dinner, slipped it under her door, and waited. Within the first month of my living in the “big city,” I quickly learned that it was not socially appropriate to start up a conversation on the bus or at the library or anywhere else other people might be present. I got used to living alone. It shaped the rest of my adult life.
If I had lived in Common, however, I could have logged on to Slack.
“Someone will say they are making pancakes [in the channel] on a Sunday morning, and people will show up and have their own impromptu breakfast.”
That’s Gothamist quoting Common CEO Brad Hargreaves, and there’s something compelling about that idea, that you can live in the same building as dozens of other people and, for once in your life, get to know them.
There are inherent problems, of course, in the idea of a self-selecting community where everyone can afford to pay $3,000 a month for a room (you can imagine what demographic that attracts and the multiple demographics it excludes).
But how else are we going to learn that we do better when we do it together if there’s no together in our lives? It’s the sort of thing that I’m only starting to figure out now, in my mid-30s, because it took me that long to find a solid group of friends after college.
And in that way I envy the Common men and women.
I suppose I also envy anyone who can drop $3,000 a month on a single room.
