Julie Chang@JulieChangRE
If you are on a budget or just graduating HS or college, does co-living appeal to you?
Gensler explored the feasibility of transforming vacant office buildings into co-living microapartments in 10 U.S. cities: Denver; Minneapolis; Seattle; Los Angeles; Houston; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Phoenix.
The Gensler design is to locate fully furnished rooms on a building’s perimeter, with windows. It also envisions shared kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry near the building’s core, where an office building’s plumbing already exists.
In the 10 cities studied by the Pew/Gensler team, approximately half of all renter households are considered to be cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent. In 2024, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported a record 771,000 people experiencing homelessness in the U.S., an 18% increase from the prior year.
There’s also a mismatch between the housing that is available and what renters need: There is not enough housing near jobs and amenities that is affordable for most workers. Many renters earn less than half the area median income and struggle to find housing in job-rich downtowns where median rents often exceed $2,000 per month. In addition, 40% of renter households nationwide consist of just one person; that figure was closer to 50% in many of the cities studied and reached 56% and 58% in Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
Source: Pew Study
