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Tiny co-living spaces are popping up across New York. Local communities see them as ‘harbingers of gentrification’.
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- Authors
- Jenna Zaza
- Published
- Sep 21 2025
- Word count
- 994 words
From the article:
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It seems like the high-end equivalent of boarding houses? They’re attracting opposition like boarding houses did. Since the residents are presumably pretty well-behaved, they have to reach for different complaints like “not from here” and “gentrification.”
Isn't it the opposite of gentry? The gentry is the wealthy land owning social class. These people are cohabiting because they can't afford to own land. If there even is land to buy in a place like NYC.
If anything, short term cohabitation creates the opposite of gentrification and likely lowers quality of living and reduces the economic value of the neighborhood. Perhaps the only thing that fits the narrative of gentrification is that the demographics change.
Other than that, this is not a problem of gentrification, it's just another symptom of the ever increasing squeeze of the housing market.
These days “gentrification” means “the neighborhood becomes more desirable and rents go up.” Nothing to do with gentry.
I imagine these co-ops wouldn’t affect property values much by themselves, but local businesses (particularly restaurants) will have a few more customers.
It’s ironic that it’s replacing a jazz club because younger people are more likely to go out to see entertainment. Too late for that club I guess?
Co-living spaces are popular around the world in cities that are cheap for American/European remote workers to live in. My friend is currently living in one in Mexico City as a medium-term rental. In those cases I think there's a better argument that they are gentrifiers. The rent is much higher than median rent in CDMX and the residents will tolerate higher prices for restaurants, groceries, etc. But at the same time the number of beds in that city of 20,000,000 that are in expensive co-living spaces must be miniscule - perhaps hundreds at most? It's still a bit of a niche interest.
And in a city as expensive as NYC I don't really buy the hatred.
I wonder if it has to do with normalizing increased rents for small square footage. They sound like "luxury small" which for the neighborhood could raise the ceiling for rentals of that size.
Increasing supply of housing is never going to drive up prices. That is the opposite of how things work.
But we've seen plenty of instances where more, new built housing has raised the ceiling of rents that can be charged and increased surrounding rents because of additional desirability - particularly from clientele that have the money to do so. That's been the whole history with gentrification.
I know abundance is a popular theory at the moment - more housing equals a closer match in supply/demand - but in a lot of places we're seeing reduced or halted construction because prices are falling.
Yes, when certain areas become less profitable to build in, developers might end up building in other areas instead. That's a pretty straightforward observation, and it does not show that more building makes prices go up. There's also various other factors that tend to prevent housing from being built which have nothing to do with market forces, such as zoning laws.
When you compare the list of cities that build the most housing to the list of cities where rent is falling the fastest, things line up pretty well.
https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/national-rent-data
If you just keep building more, gentrification will be less of an issue. If you build less, it becomes more of an issue. The rich people who want to move to a city will have the money to do it regardless of the price, if you don't build more houses for everyone else to move in that just makes it worse.
Which comes first, the desirability and increased rents or the new construction? People notice the new construction, but construction usually follows desirability. NYC demand isn't increasing because of new construction, it has always been extremely desirable!
The only way new construction will raise average rents is if it replaces old supply 1:1 instead of increasing it. If a new 5-over-1 replaces a single family home, that's a good thing that'll help fight the housing shortage.
It depends. If a neighborhood was older two story single family housing that was perceived as an uninteresting investment, but one company showed that you could make a profit turning them into boarding houses, suddenly the perceived value of those houses has changed, leading more companies to purchase them for that purpose. This lowers the supply of those houses for their previous purpose. To the degree that the people who had been in those houses would be happy with the boardinghouse, everything is fine, and perhaps prices drop. But it's likely that what's happened is a diminishing of the supply of those single family houses as they're transformed to a type of housing unattractive to the prior tenants. That leads to a lower supply but unchanged demand for the rest of the housing stock.
If all housing units were equivalently appealing to all people, then we could solve the housing crises by converting all housing to coffin hotels, leading to a boom in the total number of "units" where people could live. But the housing market is a bunch of different pools of supply and demand for housing, with interconnected but fairly independent groups of people who want a certain type of housing stock. So perhaps you can see how increasing the number of units of boarding house space could also raise the price of the type of housing that it was before?
Yes, increasing supply of one type of house by reducing supply of another type of house would reduce supply of something, and could make that more expensive.
This is irrelevant because the article is talking about a jazz bar being converted into housing. Last I checked, most people don't live in jazz bars.
Additionally, we are talking about New York City, this isn't some suburb where single family housing is the norm. Even if it was being converted into apartments, this would be affecting a very tiny minority of people who frankly should just live somewhere else anyway.
It's irrelevant to this one exact house discussed in the article, sure. You were making a much broader and absolute claim in your prior post, and it's that to which I was responding.
One of the major facets of gentrification is that the people who live there, especially the families, can no longer afford to keep living there. I can definitely see this causing that effect.
Personally in an era of atomization and alienation I think it's socially healthy for people to live in communal settings, where they must negotiate chores, boundaries, differences, desires.
I reckon that a contributor to our societal issues is how the structure of our economy and society make it so easier to be an individual and not have to meet and compromise with others.
Also, these co-living ventures are just a natural market response to the housing supply shortage. Cities make it difficult to build new housing structures cheaply and quickly, so for some entrepreneurs it is easier and simpler to subdivide existing stock. In a way, they're creating positive social impact by making hyper efficient use of limited space. What might have simply housed a household of 2 or 3 people could then house 4 or 5.
These kinds of tenament housing used to be extremely common throughout North America! They were largely banned in the 1900s to spite the poor and marginalized.
A shared living space with a private bed is much better than the streets, but the NIMBYs and middle class decided tenements were "inhumane" unless you're a college student.
While some of the old tenaments were unsafe and unsanitary, banning them was clearly a net negative for society...
To me, the only thing that is maybe unusual in this scenario s the corporate ownership of the house share. Decades ago, I spent my 20s in various cities across the country living in similar setups, a shared house but owned by a single landlord (who sometimes lived there too.)
Where else are young people going to live, if they don't want to live with their parents? It makes sense for cities to provide affordable housing for folks starting out in their lives and careers, the social aspect is also very attractive, especially as a young persons in a new city.
I do think it is a serious problem that the land ownership becoming more corporate than private, but given that reality, providing group home rentals seems like one of the better outcomes.
Sounds like a complicated situation. I read that there are historical NYC neighborhoods full of single-family or double-family homes, but developers are coming in to turn these homes into these co-living units to house many more people, thus making the same area of land much more profitable and responding to the housing shortage.
In turn, real estate companies see that and then raise rents to try and extract comparable value out of their properties. In the worst case, the tenants move out and they can redevelop into a multi-housing unit.
There’s really no winning here. Either you price historical residents out of their family home and businesses or you price new young residents out of finding a property. These kinds of shifts and cultural losses are inevitable as the tides of time roll forward and the demand passes from generation to generation. Appreciate what you have while it lasts.
Many neighborhoods that are majority POC, like Bed-Stuy in NYC, have a huge number of homes that are owner-occupied. In those neighborhoods, "gentrification" means Black home owners can sell their home for millions of dollars, if they want to.
If the areas didn't become more desirable or laws were passed to limit home values, the communities would be unfairly locked out of millions of dollars in increased property values.