The Share (House) Economy

With housing prices soaring, the rental market set to implode and millennials feeling more isolated than ever, many believe that the solution lies in apartments designed for community living. With the first Australian offering opening its doors, Hannah-Rose Yee gives up her personal space to see what co-living is all about.

- Hannah-Rose Yee

It’s Friday night and your flatmates are pouring a river of pinot grigio into your glass. It’s been a big week and you’ve been counting down to this for days. It has become something of a tradition for you all to gather on a Friday and recount the week that was over wine and cheese. Without these end-of-week hangouts, you wouldn’t feel as close to half as many of your flatmates as you do now. You probably wouldn’t even know their names. After all, there are 550 of them.

Welcome to the share house economy. Better known as co-living, it’s an attempt to solve the untenability of urban living, which by 2050 will comprise 68 per cent of the world’s population. Australians now have to spend up to 13 times their annual income to afford a house, which explains why a third of the population are renters. Then there’s a crisis of loneliness among urbanites, with young people in particular retreating to devices instead of connecting IRL

With the aim of offering a more affordable and inclusive style of living, one with an emphasis on community, co-living start-ups are popping up all over the world. In London there’s The Collective, the largest co-living building in the world (550 residents), Roam and Lyvly. The US has OpenDoor and WeLive (an arm of the co-working behemoth WeWork, it aims to house 34,000 people this year). Australia’s first co-living offering, UKO, opened in Sydney last year.