Slouching Towards Utopia with Fractal Coliving

I recently recorded a podcast for Campfire: A City Building Podcast with Priya Rose, cofounder of Fractal NYC.

Priya shares the playbooks that allowed her to build a coliving campus in Brooklyn of 36 residents that anchors a broader community of 400 hundred people.

Episode Trailer:

Listen on Apple Podcasts || Listen on Spotify.

Lessons for the Future of Living

A few takeaways from my conversation that you can apply in your own life:

1. Building a neighborhood is a coordination problem, not a money problem.

You don’t need to outright own your dream coliving property - you can work with landlords and co-create leases that enable your vision. You can also host regular events to increase the frequency of interactions that prospective community members have with you and with each other. Priya does this by arranging weekly dinners in Brooklyn. Similarly, my friends and I host monthly brunches with creator spotlights at our house in Venice Beach.

Don’t let a lack of property ownership keep you from getting started.

2. Planting the flag (writing a vision doc) continues to be a successful model for building coliving communities across geographies.

While I have not yet authored a vision doc, my housemates and I consistently spread the word that we are building a “hub for the creative and the curious.” This serves as a bat signal to attract the friends we want to live near because they will be aligned around the same intention. At our monthly brunches, we invite up-and-coming creators to perform 15-minute, Tiny Desk-style sets to hammer this messaging home.

When the day comes to fill an empty room, expand our rental footprint, or buy a property, we will be in great shape to publish a vision doc around the “hub for the creative and the curious” messaging.

3. Lean on an iterative model to build your ideal coliving home.

I’m now living in my ninth coliving environment since the start of 2021, five of which have been in Southern California. Each iteration has offered slight improvements and changes. Every time a lease ends, you have an opportunity to renegotiate something better or find a new property.

The Fractal model started with two apartments (like in Friends) and steadily added momentum until it became the dense coliving entity it is today. Now they’re adding a “university” component and are preparing to be multigenerational as children start to enter the picture.

Let me know what you think of this shorter format!