Dormitories Are The Next Real Estate Trend
Do you have fond memories of college-style living arrangements, with the requisite flip-flops to the communal bathroom and the refrigerator filled with items that are growing exotic new mold specimens? Then you’re in luck: A real estate developer promises to bring all the glamor of randomly assigned roommates to your slightly more adult life. Young & Woo Associates is planning a number of new buildings that allow tenants to rent by the room month-to-month.
It’s a project run by a San Francisco start-up appropriately named Campus, Curbed reports, and it’ll cut up buildings into three-to-five bedroom places where each bedroom is rented by itself. You pay a one-time fee for the shared amenities, like access to the bathroom and kitchen and (if you’re lucky) laundry room and backyard. They have a pilot version of the program running on 87th street, and they have plans to bring the operation to ten more buildings in Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, the Lower East Side, and Sunset Park. Pros: It’ll be way easier to find an easy sublet. Cons: It could, like AirBnB, tempt landlords into withholding apartments for shorter-term tenants, taking away from our already limited and very expensive housing stock.