Common’s coliving conquest continues

Two new houses are on the way for Common, the coliving company founded by General Assembly cofounder Brad Hargreaves.

Houses Common Cornelia will be in Ridgewood, Queens, and Common Lincoln will be in Prospect-Lefferts Garden in Brooklyn.

With rents starting at $1,400 and $1,700 a month, they’re some of the least expensive houses Common has offered so far.

In just the two years since its founding, Common now has 14 coliving houses in New York, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco.

For the uninitiated, coliving is a new way of organizing apartments. Instead of each apartment having its own kitchen and living room and bathroom, residents in Common houses share those spaces and have their own bedrooms.

“One of the challenges is that these cities have a big mismatch between supply and demand for housing. I saw the New York problem first-hand,” Common founder Hargreaves told us when the company launched. “Our students [at General Assembly] would come and typically wouldn’t qualify for a lease and would end up going to Craigslist and would rent a space from a stranger. Some of those are great and some were really, really bad.”

It’s a compelling idea, particularly in cities where demand for housing outstrips supply. And with strict zoning regulations in some cities, growing denser makes more sense than growing higher. It’s for this reason we ranked Common No. 1 on our list of Brooklyn startups for 2017 and called 2016 The Year of Coliving.