Tech entrepreneurs revive communal livingJessy Kate Schingler left her job at NASA, moved to San Francisco, and helped turn a 7,500-square-foot, eight-bedroom mansion near Alamo Square into a creatives' residence called the Embassy. Tom Currier, a 22-year-old who dropped out of Stanford's computer science program when he earned a $100,000 Thiel fellowship, runs four large tech houses in the Bay Area - Dragon Stone, the Lodge, Olympus and Founder's Nest - and is talking about getting a similar place in Tahoe. Unlike hacker hostels, these "co-living spaces" are meant for entrepreneurs seeking a more permanent home and adopting a lifelong philosophy of communal living: shared groceries, family dinners and an emphasis on group perks (i.e., yoga rooms and bowling alleys) over personal space. High-end housesBill Harkins, a real estate agent who was working with the Embassy group, said that in the last six months he's seen a number of large and organized roommate troupes looking for high-end residences. The number of new, technology-driven communes in the San Francisco area is extensive and almost overwhelming - there's the Sub, the Laundry, Engine Works, Box Factory, Light Side, the Loft (a beautiful flop house), Sugar Magnolia, the Convent (a converted convent that is very fancy), the Center (complete with two in-house yoga studios), Monument, the Hive, the Factory (top secret), La Mancha, Woom Coop, Ghost Town Gallery (built around an art gallery), and one just called the Commune. Often backed by tech millionaires with ambitions beyond profit, the organizers talk about building homes with reduced rent options for desirable characters. The founders of Open Door Development Group, a real estate development firm for co-living properties, plan to start buying apartment buildings and residential hotels and converting them. "What I liked about space was the idea of creating human settlements," said Schingler, the former NASA engineer and co-founder of Open Door. There's a music room, dining room, baby grand piano, solarium, craft room and a living room with three sunny stained glass outcroppings where residents lounge and work during the day. Some young men circled the dining room table looking at visiting developer Eliot Shepherd's new product, a small Bluetooth box that can keep track of keys. There's a kind of radical openness to us, said Mike North, the founder of North Design Labs who lives in the building and teaches a course called Cooperative Innovation at UC Berkeley. Neighborhood objectionsNeighbors have been known to object to these types of arrangements, and, depending on the locale and living situation, the legality of a co-living setup might be questionable. When they were MBA students at Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Seattle, Ben Provan, 30, and Jay Standish, 28, came up with the idea of a real estate investment firm that buys buildings and converts them into co-living spaces. Part of their goal is to fight market forces that make cities less diverse. By creating a curated community rather than just a luxury housing development, they feel they can build diversity into the plan. Jonathan Mahler, who is in his mid-20s and lives in the house, said he divides his time between real estate investments, large-scale stone-carving, and writing about feminist theory.
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