The NYT coliving profile includes Node Brooklyn, ignores Common

The New York Times gave coliving the Styles treatment in an article published yesterday, but left out the biggest player in the market, Brooklyn’s Common.

Writer Penelope Green stayed at several coliving spaces in Manhattan, New Jersey and at Node Brooklyn for her piece “In the ’90s, We Had ‘Friends.’ Now They Call It Co-Living.” At each location she did crafts, ate, did yoga and more.

At Node Brooklyn, Green went to a crafts night:

“On this night, nearly all of the building’s 13 tenants had gathered to paint pots for tiny succulents, an activity led by Paivi Kankaro, 34, whose company, CraftJam, runs D.I.Y. events around New York City,” she wrote. “‘Craft is yoga for your brain,’ Ms. Kankaro said.”

The omission of Common was noteworthy if only because it is, with eight locations and $23 million in funding, the best established coliving company in the city. The reason, Green writes, is that founder Brad Hargreaves did not allow her to stay overnight.

“There are still co-living evangelists, like Brad Hargreaves of Common, who has promised that ‘the genuine and organic relationships our members build with each other,’ as he wrote in a post for Medium, would not be tainted by allowing journalists to sleep over at Common properties,” Green writes.

The whole piece is worth a read, and does give a glimpse into an otherwise mostly unseen world.