I want you to picture a specific feeling. You've
just finished a long day at work. You're in a
major city, maybe London, Seoul, New York, or,
you know, even just a rapidly densifying suburb.
Right. You swipe your key card to get into your
building. You step into an elevator with three
other people. You are standing shoulder to shoulder,
physically closer to these strangers than you
would be to a lover in a double bed. And you
say nothing. You ride up 30 floors in total silence.
You get off, walk down a long, sterile hallway
that smells like industrial carpet cleaner, unlock
your door, and you are completely, utterly alone.
It is the defining paradox of modern urbanism,
isn't it? We have never been physically denser,
yet socially. We have never been more distant.
Exactly. And for so long, we just accepted this
as the tax on city living. It was the price of
admission. If you want the job, if you want the
culture, you pay the loneliness tax. Right. But
looking at the stack of research you've brought
in today, that contract seems to be, well, it
seems to be breaking down. We are seeing people
and architects actively trying to hack the system.
We are. We are witnessing a radical reimagining
of the domestic environment. But what's so fascinating
to me is that this radical new future is actually
just a recycling of some. very, very ancient
pasts. OK, so today on the deep dive, we are
looking at the stack. We have a mountain of sources
here. We're covering the history and the current
state of student accommodation, which, spoiler
alert, is way wilder and older than I ever thought.
Much older. We're also looking at co -housing,
which is a sort of democratic, intentional village
model. The high effort model. The high effort
model. Yeah. And then we're looking at co -living,
which is the sleek, corporate, we'll handle it
for you. Service model. And our mission today
is to really untangle these terms because people
use them interchangeably all the time. Co -housing,
co -living, communes. But they mean fundamentally
different things. Right. And the stakes are high,
aren't they? Are we actually witnessing a return
to village life or are we just watching the,
I don't know, the commodification of having roommates?
That is the central question. It's a tension
between community, which is messy, and takes
work and convenience, which is clean, but it
costs you. It costs money. Okay, let's unpack
this. And to understand where we're going, we
have to look at where we started. And I think
for most people, they probably assume student
housing or dorms are a relatively modern invention,
maybe something that popped up with the Ivy Leagues
or, you know, Victorian England. That's a very
common misconception. But the link between learning
and living together is one of the oldest architectural
traditions we have. If we go all the way back
to the 5th century. To the 5th century, we're
talking... 1 ,500 years ago. 1 ,500, 1 ,600 years
ago, yeah. We have records of the Nalanda Mahavihara
in India. Nalanda. Historians argue this was
the world's first residential university. Now,
when I say residential university, don't picture
a few dorms next to a classroom. We are talking
about a massive, sprawling institution where
living on -site was integral to the learning
process. So it wasn't a commuter school. You
couldn't just show up for class and go home.
Far from it. It was a self -contained city of
learning. At its height, it had thousands of
scholars, monks, and teachers living in very
close quarters. The architecture itself was designed
to enforce the idea that learning doesn't stop
when the lecture ends. So the conversation just
continues. You learn in the dining hall. You
learn in the courtyard. You learn walking between
buildings. The living was the class. The environment
was the textbook. So the concept of the dorm
is 1 ,500 years old. Essentially, yes. And this
pattern. It just repeats across cultures. If
you look at the Islamic world, say, between the
10th and 13th centuries, you have the rise of
the madrasa system. These weren't just schools.
They were residential colleges, very much in
that same vein. I was looking at the notes on
the madrasa Ben Yusuf in Marrakesh. Now, this
place was built later, in the 16th century. But
the design details are just, they're incredible.
It had 134 rooms, all arranged around these small,
serene courtyards. But it was the lighting. The
lighting that really caught my attention. The
architecture there is incredibly telling, isn't
it? It reflects a very specific and very sophisticated
view of how the human mind works. Yeah, the description
says the rooms were designed with this specific
lighting trick. They had a reading area right
near the small window, so the brightest part
of the room, and then a wooden alcove for sleeping
tucked away in the darker interior. Think about
the psychology of that. it's light for work dark
for rest it's so simple but so profound the architects
understood that to master complex theology or
mathematics or whatever they were studying you
needed an environment that physically triggered
the brain to focus and then physically triggered
it to shut down It's literally designed to separate
your brain modes, which feels so different from
today where we just sit in a fluorescent box
that looks exactly the same at two in the afternoon
as it does at two in the morning. We've definitely
lost some of that nuance. But the key takeaway
here is that for centuries, student accommodation
wasn't a warehousing problem. It wasn't about
just storing bodies. It was a pedagogical tool.
You live together to learn together. So when
did that shift? Because when I think of student
halls, my mind immediately goes to the UK. You
know, Oxford, Cambridge, that whole Harry Potter
dining hall aesthetic. Well, the European evolution
is interesting because it started out quite rough.
In medieval Oxford and Cambridge, you initially
had what were just called halls. Just halls.
Yeah. And these were basically just boarding
houses. They weren't endowed. They weren't wealthy
corporations like the colleges are today. They
were just places to sleep, often run by a principal
who is essentially just a landlord collecting
rent. So it was. Purely transactional at first?
Originally, yes. But by the 15th century, the
colleges started to take over. And a college
is a different beast entirely. It's a corporation.
It has money, land, prestige. It becomes a community
that you belong to for life, not just for three
years. And physically, the accommodation changed,
too. This is where we see the invention of something
called the study bedroom. This is a crucial moment
in the history of privacy, a really important
innovation. I love that we have a date for this.
The term was first recorded in 1842 at Durham
University. So why is the study bedroom such
a big deal? It sounds so normal to us now. It
seems like a small detail, but it's a huge shift
in how we view the individual scholar. Before
this, wealthy students might have a set or a
suite of rooms, one for sleeping, one for working
or entertaining. And poor students might just
sleep in open bays or shared rooms, like a barracks.
So you either had a mansion or a barracks. There
was no in -between. Right. The study bedroom
combined those functions into a single accessible
unit. It meant that every student, regardless
of their social rank, had a door they could close.
They had a desk and a bed in the same space,
a private world. It's the great -grandfather
of every teenager's bedroom today, isn't it?
The desk and the bed in one room, poster on the
wall. Exactly. It democratized the private academic
space. It was a statement that said, you're an
individual scholar and you deserve a space for
introspection. And then, of course, this idea
migrates to America. You have the Harvard Indian
College in 1650, which was the first residential
building in the U .S. But then in the 19th century,
you get a uniquely American twist on it all.
The fraternity. The frat house. Yes. The first
residential chapter house popped up in 1864 at
Williams College. And this changes the dynamic
again. Now, housing isn't just about the university's
mission. It's about social status. It's about
exclusion. It becomes a club. A club with a roof.
And money starts to play a huge role here. You
mentioned Thomas Jefferson earlier in our prep.
He designed the Academical Village at the University
of Virginia. Which is architecturally stunning.
I mean, those rooms opening right onto the lawn,
it's beautiful. It is beautiful architecture,
no question. But the sources point out that it
was so expensive to build and maintain that it
made UVA the most expensive university in America
at the time. It became a significant barrier
to entry. So housing becomes a status symbol.
If you can afford the room, you get the education.
If you can't, you don't. Precisely. And that
tension, that push and pull between housing as
a utility for learning and housing as a luxury
asset is exactly what has completely exploded
in the last decade or so. Which brings us to
the modern day. And honestly, looking at these
sources, exploded is the right word. We aren't
talking about the quad anymore. We're talking
about the skyscraper. The verticalization of
student housing. It's a truly global phenomenon.
Let's just look at some of these stats. In Leeds,
you've got Sky Plaza. In London, there's Chapter
Spittlefields. But the numbers are just getting
crazy. As of 2025, so just last year, the world's
tallest student tower is 99 Washington Street
in New York City. That's a 50 -story tower. 50.
50 stories. It houses 650 students. And looking
ahead, London is planning a 48 -story tower at
30 Marshwall that's set to open in 2028. We are
literally warehousing students in the clouds.
And we have to ask why. I mean, part of it is
obviously land scare city in cities like London
and New York. You can't just build a sprawling
low rise campus in downtown Manhattan anymore.
Of course. But a huge part of it is the financialization
of the sector. Financialization. What do you
mean by that? Student housing isn't just a place
to sleep anymore. It is a massive global asset
class. These buildings are often not owned by
the university. They're owned by pension funds,
by private equity firms, by offshore developers.
So the students are just yield generating units
in a spreadsheet somewhere. To a degree, yes.
It's considered a counter cyclical asset. The
thinking is, even in a recession, people go to
university, so the rent keeps coming in. It's
very, very attractive to large -scale investors.
But sometimes this drive for efficiency and density,
it goes way too far. We have to talk about Dormzilla.
Ah, yes, Munger Hall, the cautionary tale. This
story is wild. So this was a proposed project
at UC Santa Barbara a few years back. The nickname
Dormzilla was, I think, well -earned. The plan
was to house 4 ,500 students in one single mass.
block. And the design flaw that ultimately killed
it. Windowless rooms. The source says 94 % of
the rooms would have been windowless. They're
going to use artificial, quote, virtual windows.
4 ,500 students and almost none of them can see
the sun from their own room. Now, you have to
ask, why would anyone even propose that? It wasn't
just to save money on construction. The donor
behind it, Charlie Munger, he actually had a
philosophy. He believed that if you made the
private rooms incredibly comfortable but windowless,
students would hate being in them. Wait, the
goal was to make them hate their own rooms? The
goal was to force them out, to push them into
the common areas. It was social engineering through
architecture. The idea was, if your room is a
cave, you will go to the lounge and collaborate.
That is, that's terrifying. It's like treating
human beings like ants in an ant farm. We'll
just change the tunnels to make them go where
we want. It triggered a massive backlash, as
you can imagine. An architect on the university's
design review board actually quit in protest.
It really highlights the extreme end of that
efficiency mindset. When you treat students purely
as units to be stored, you end up with windowless
boxes. And the mental health implications. I
mean, the sources mention isolation, circadian
rhythm disruption. All of it. It was cited as
a major concern. Thank goodness that project
was canceled. But even in the buildings that
do have windows, does this vertical living actually
create a community or does it just create proximity?
That is the exclusion problem. And we're seeing
this distinct trend, particularly in the UK and
Australia. You have these shiny new towers. They're
often called PBSA, Purpose Built Student Accommodation.
PBSA sounds very... bureaucratic. It is. These
are often run by large private companies. And
because of the price point, they have gyms, cinemas,
concierges. They attract a very specific demographic.
International students. Overwhelmingly, yes.
They're often the ones paying full tuition and
they're looking for a secure, serviced, all -inclusive
experience when they arrive in a new country.
Okay, that makes sense. Meanwhile, local domestic
students, who maybe can't afford that premium
rent or just prefer a different vibe, they stay
in the traditional shared houses out in the suburbs.
So you're physically segregating the student
body before they even meet. The rich international
students are in the tower, the local students
are in the town. It creates parallel lives. You
completely lose that melting pot effect that
the old residential colleges were supposed to
aim for. You have the global mobile class living
in a fortress and the locals living on the ground.
And there's a darker side to the money fueling
these towers, too, isn't there? This is where
it gets really interesting. When you follow the
money. Who actually owns these buildings? The
sources mention concerns about tax avoidance.
Often it's offshore developers. Because these
are private assets, the profits are often funneled
out of the country where the university is. There
have even been investigations into sanctions
evasion. For example, Russian money being parked
in Western student housing developments because
it's seen as a stable, anonymous asset. Wow.
That is a long, long way from the monks at Nalanda.
We've gone from living together to reach enlightenment
to living together to evade sanctions. It's the
complete commodification of community. And that
is the perfect segue to the next two models we
need to talk about. Because as adults, we're
facing the exact same choice. Do we want to buy
a community as a service or do we want to build
a community as a democracy? Right. So let's pivot
from the students to the adults. Let's talk about
the build it model first. Co -housing. co -housing.
Now, I want to be super clear for you listening
here, because this tripped me up at first. Co
-housing is not the same as co -living. They
sound similar, but they're opposites in many
ways. Correct. If you take one thing away from
this deep dive, let it be that distinction. So
co -housing is the democratic village. It is
intentional. It's self -governing and it's cooperative.
You don't just rent a room. You join a system.
You have responsibilities. And it has a very
specific and I think very charming origin story.
It starts in Denmark in the late 1960s. I love
this story. So there was this widespread dissatisfaction
with the standard single family house. People
felt isolated in the suburbs, the classic complaint.
And then in 1967, a woman named Bodle Gray wrote
a newspaper article with the best headline I
have ever heard. Children should have 100 parents.
Children should have 100 parents. I mean, as
a parent, that sounds both exhausting and incredibly
helpful at the same time. It tapped into a deep
desire for the proverbial village. The idea wasn't
that you give up your legal rights to your kids,
obviously, but that the environment should be
so safe and so communal that any adult instinctively
looks out for any child. So this article sparks
a movement. You have architects like Jan Goodman
Hoyer getting involved and they start building
these communities. But it's not just a commune
where everyone sleeps in a big pile and shares
everything. No, and that's the absolute key.
In co -housing, you own your own private home.
You have a kitchen, you have a bathroom, you
have a living room, you have privacy when you
want it. But the site is designed to force interaction.
The sources all mention the cars. This seems
to be a major design rule. It is. It's fundamental.
In a typical suburb, the car is king. You drive
into your attached garage, the garage door closes,
you walk into your kitchen. You might never see
a soul for days. Intel housing? The cars are
pushed to the periphery. You park on the edge
of the property. To get to your front door, you
have to walk. You have to walk through the green
space, past your neighbor's front porches, past
a playground. It forces the... Hello. It forces
the interaction. And usually the kitchen windows
are designed to face the pedestrian pathway.
So if you're at your sink doing dishes, you see
who is coming and going. The entire design is
about eliminating anonymity. And the heart of
it all is the common house. Yes. This is an extension
of everyone's living room. It has a big industrial
style kitchen, a large dining hall, maybe laundry
facilities, a workshop, a playroom for the kids.
And the social contract is that you eat together.
Shared meals are the glue that holds it all together.
Maybe it's twice a week. Maybe it's every night.
It varies. But you sign up to cook for your neighbors
and in return, they cook for you. But here's
the rub. Who decides what you need? Who decides
when the lawn gets mowed or who fixes the broken
swing set? You do. All of you. It's collaborative
democracy. Residents decide everything, usually
by consensus. That sounds lovely in theory, but
also, have you ever been to a condo board meeting?
It could be a nightmare. It's the condo board
problem on steroids. Because you aren't just
deciding on fixing the roof, you're deciding
on the menu, the social rules, the shared values,
how to handle conflicts between neighbors. It
requires a massive amount of what sociologists
call emotional labor. It's high effort, high
reward. Precisely. And this model. It migrated
to the U .S. in the 90s. Two architects, Catherine
McAmint and Charles Durrett, who actually coined
the English term co -housing, they built the
first one, Muir Commons, in Davis, California,
back in 1991. And is it still going? It is. And
the model has spread. In Europe, they have a
really interesting version of this called Joint
Building Ventures or Baugrupp in German. What's
that? It's the German model. A group of people
will actually pool their money together to build
an entire apartment building from scratch, completely
bypassing the developer. So you cut out the developer's
profit. You save a lot of money and you get exactly
the building you want designed for your specific
needs. But you take on all the risk. If the contractor
goes bust halfway through, you go bust. See,
that appeals to me on one level. You control
your destiny. But it takes years of meetings
before you even break ground. The commitment
is huge. It is. It requires capital, time, and
very good social skills, which is why for many
people, co -housing is just too hard. They want
the community, but they don't want the meetings.
They don't want the work. And that's where the
market steps in. Enter co -living. The corporate
hack for city living. So if co -housing is a
democracy you have to work at, co -living is
a service you subscribe to. It's space as a service.
Exactly. In co -living, you are a customer. You
rent a room, usually a small private bedroom,
in a beautifully designed, often brand new building.
The utilities are set up. The Wi -Fi works from
day one. The furniture is there. And critically,
the community is provided for you. It's the plug
and play model. You show up with your suitcase
and boom, you have a home and a prepackaged social
network. We tend to think of this as a very Silicon
Valley invention. You know, digital nomads, tech
bros, the we work of sleeping. But historically,
it's not new at all. Right. The sources point
to the Isocon building in London all the way
back in 1934. The Isocon was fascinating. It
was this modernist experiment. Tiny, minimalist
apartments, but with a shared kitchen and services.
And a famous resident. I saw that in the notes.
Agatha Christie. She lived there for a while.
No way. The queen of cozy murder mysteries lived
in a modernist co -living experiment. She did.
And then there was Kensal House in 1937. So the
idea of minimal private space, maximal shared
service is an old modernist dream. Silicon Valley
just rebranded it, optimized it, and built an
app for it. And boy, did they scale it. The expansion
in the 2020s has been absolutely massive. It's
a global boom. Asia Pacific is huge for this.
Singapore is a major hub. You've got brands like
Hamlet. Is that spelled H -M -L -E -T? Yes. Like
Hamlet without the A. Very startup -y. Of course
it is. And the assembly place. In the U .S.,
you had companies like Common, Ollie, Bungalow
that really took off. It was driven by the gig
economy. If you are a freelancer moving from
New York to San Francisco for a three -month
contract, you can't sign a 12 -month lease and
buy a whole apartment's worth of furniture. You
need co -living. It's housing for the commitment
phobic, or maybe the commitment unalienable,
given the economy. It's for the mobile workforce.
And in Europe, specifically Spain, it's exploding.
Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, you have brands
like Enso and Haus. As of last year, 2025, there
were over 110 ,000 operational co -living beds
in Europe. That is a lot of beds. But why now?
I mean, aside from the flexibility of the gig
economy. Two big reasons, and they're both things
we've touched on. Loneliness and sustainability.
The loneliness epidemic again. It always comes
back to that. We started the show talking about
isolation. Co -living companies explicitly market
themselves as a cure for loneliness. Their ads
say instant friends. You have a community manager
on staff who organizes. It's like being a freshman
in college forever, but with better paying jobs.
In a way, yes. But for a 28 -year -old who's
just moved to a new city and works from home,
that is a very valuable service. You pay a premium
on the rent, but you get a social life included.
And the sustainability angle, how does that work?
It's all about efficiency. It leads to a reduced
per -person consumption of energy and space.
If 20 people share one massive high -end energy
-efficient kitchen instead of 20 people having
20 mediocre, small, inefficient kitchens, you
save resources, you buy fewer appliances, you
heat less space. But, and there is always a but,
is it all just taco nights and sustainability?
Because when you have large corporations running
residential housing, things can get tricky. This
is where we hit the friction, the critical analysis
from the sources. And the biggest criticism leveled
at co -living is gentrification. How does co
-living drive gentrification differently than,
say, just a new luxury apartment building? Well,
imagine a traditional apartment building in a
historic neighborhood in Barcelona. It might
have eight large apartments that house local
families on standard long -term leases. A developer
buys it. They realize. If I chop these apartments
up into 32 microsuites and market them to digital
nomads from North America earning American salaries,
I can triple the rent I get per square foot.
So it pushes out the locals. It creates a huge
displacement effect. It replaces long -term residents
with a transient professional class. It completely
changes the fabric of the neighborhood. The local
bakery that's been there for 50 years becomes
a matcha latte spot. And cities are fighting
back. They are. Barcelona and Berlin have been
very aggressive on this. They've introduced new
regulations that define minimum unit sizes for
apartments. They're trying to stop what they
call speculative use. They are basically saying
you can't just build shoeboxes and call it co
-living to bypass basic housing standards for
our citizens. OK, so we have student housing,
which is like the training ground for all this.
We have co -living. the convenience service,
and co -housing, the democratic high effort project.
But there is a fourth model that's popping up
in our sources, co -home ownership. This is a
really interesting emergence in the 21st century.
It sits somewhere in the middle of all of this,
between renting and owning in the traditional
sense. How does it work? Is it just like a few
friends getting together and buying a house?
It's more structured and legally sophisticated
than that. Traditionally, if you and I bought
a house together, we'd be on one mortgage. If
I lost my job and stopped paying my half, you
would be liable for the whole thing. It's a huge
financial risk. Right. It's famous for ruining
friendships. Exactly. But now we are seeing these
new legal and financial models where multiple
buyers can purchase a single property together,
but they maintain separate mortgages or separate
legal equity shares. Wait, you can get separate
mortgages on one house? How does that even work?
In some jurisdictions, yes. Or you might have
separate legal titles for suites within a single
home. It allows you to build your own equity
independently of the other owners. And importantly,
it gives you an exit strategy that doesn't blow
everything up. That's the key. If you want to
move out, you don't have to force everyone to
sell the entire house. You just sell your share
or your suite to a new approved buyer. That's
really smart. Because usually buying a house
with friends is a nightmare if one person wants
to break up with their partner or move for a
job. Exactly. This model bridges that gap. It
makes ownership affordable for millennials and
Gen Z who are completely locked out of the market,
but it avoids that commune level of total financial
entanglement. So if we step back from all these
models. What does this all mean? We've looked
at the history, the tech bros, the Danish families.
What is the big picture here? I think we are
witnessing the slow, undeniable breakdown of
the nuclear family home as the default unit of
society. That is a big statement. Think about
it. The single family home with the white picket
fence, that was a very specific mid -20th century
ideal. It worked for a particular economic moment,
for a particular type of family structure. But
for many, many people today, it's either completely
unaffordable or it's socially isolating or both.
So we are pivoting back to the village just in
different forms. We are looking for shared resources
again, whether that's driven by necessity. I
can't afford rent, so I need roommates or by
desire. I want 100 parents for my children. The
arrow is pointing toward more collective forms
of living. But the divergence is in how we get
there, the path we choose. Right. And that is
the friction. That's the core of this whole deep
dive. We've gone from fifth century monks at
Nalanda living a life of shared purpose to Danish
families wanting a village for their kids to
digital nomads in Singapore booking a room and
a social life on an app. It's a whole spectrum
of connection from the deeply integrated to the
purely transactional. And so for you listening,
whether you are renting or buying or just feeling
lonely in your apartment right now, the takeaway
is that the way we structure our physical space
dictates our social lives. You cannot separate
architecture from community. Winston Churchill
said it best, didn't he? We shape our buildings
and thereafter they shape us. Exactly. And here's
a final provocative thought for you to chew on,
something that really struck me from the sources.
It seems that community is now something you
can acquire in two ways. You can buy it as a
product that's co -living, or you can work for
it as a job that's co -housing. The question
is, If we outsource the effort of community to
a corporate landlord, if we just pay for the
taco night rather than arguing about organizing
and cooking for the taco night, do we lose the
very resilience we were trying to build in the
first place? Is a community real if you can just
cancel your subscription? Or is it only real
if you have to fight with your neighbors about
where to park the car and then make up afterwards?
Maybe the fight is the point. Maybe the friction
is what builds the muscle of community. Something
to think about next time you're in that elevator
with a stranger. This has been The Deep Dive.
Thanks for listening. Goodbye.