Our society is growing. The so-called “rise of consciousness” that is present in every sphere of our lives is creating a story in which thinking about our impact is becoming key.

Over the last several decades, the notion of impact has found its place within the corporate world. From new environmental standards to the 2019 decision by Business Roundtable to redefine the role of corporations as serving all stakeholders, including shareholders, employees and communities, this edition of Coliving Insights touches upon a subject that has been growing in importance for years.

While the notion of impact has been growing within the real estate industry, it still is not the major focus of the industry. For a long time, we’ve been neglecting the fact that the building and construction industries are responsible for 39% of worldwide carbon emissions, or that both our exterior and interior architecture influences our psychology and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit.

As director of Co-Liv, the global association for coliving professionals, my role is to help professionals grow their activities while guiding the industry towards a common goal. In short, to ensure that together, coliving professionals can learn about the impact that they’re creating and implement best practices to build an industry that is aligned with our values.

Yet, it’s not that simple.

Back in 2017, Co-Liv led a worldwide survey to ask coliving operators to define the term ‘coliving’. The result defined coliving as the following:

“Any shared living space that improves the quality of life of its residents”.

The notion that coliving can have a life-enhancing impact has been one of the key discussion points within Co-Liv since then. What is enough to satisfy the delivery of term impact? Is it life-enhancing to offer a product that innovates in terms of housing flexibility, or do we need to have personal changes on residents occur to call coliving life-enhancing?

While some coliving players fundamentally ask themselves how to measure and deliver impact in coliving, others don’t. What we’re seeing is a potential perpetuation of greenwashing within the industry: not every impact-labeled initiative has impact embedded in its core, as sometimes negative impact is neglected, and the lack of robust impact frameworks can create a vague application of the term.

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Let’s take a concrete example:

One of the key promises of coliving is the offer of “community”. As with every term, this one has different definitions - on one side, defining community as people living in a space, while on the other side defining community as a group of people that have an emotional connection and identification between each other.

Most coliving spaces promise community, yet not every resident experiences the feeling and benefits of it. Instead of measuring community by the amount of people who share fundamental resources such as a kitchen and living room, we could measure the amount of people that residents befriend or meet in person outside of communal events.

In the case of community, another question arises: if residents experience “community” as a group of three hundred people living emotionally disconnected lives within a building, what notion of community will that foster in the future, if not any?

​​The same thinking applies to other promises of coliving. We still have to see how coliving can become an affordable product that is well integrated within local neighbourhoods. To this point, the majority of operators do not fall within the public policy definition of affordability (or only partly as required by planning authorities) and in many cases may lead to an acceleration of gentrification in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Which leads to another example: how do we measure the positive impact of coliving in cities?

Certain operators are trying to showcase the impact they are having. Venn, a coliving operator in Tel Aviv, NYC and Berlin, created its own impact report showcasing the reduction of loneliness felt by residents after being part of the community and giving statistics on the increase in local business growth.

Yet, policymakers are still struggling to understand the holistic impact of coliving spaces. Back in 2019, at a conference in which a city representative of Lisbon was interacting with local operators, the main question that the policymaker had was: ‘how can we ensure that our shared living spaces, which often have reduced private space sizes, are creating a better quality of life for residents in the long-term’?

Certain cities like Dublin have witnessed public discontentment after development proposals that offered too little personal space for prices way above the market. Those protests are still going on now and are putting public officials in between the needs of residents and developers.

Other cities such as New York have created pilot programs to explore the role of coliving in subjects such as affordable housing. The ShareNYC initiative ended up selecting three coliving operators to grant permission for the development and operations of affordable coliving schemes in exchange for certain agreements such as pricing, accessibility and locations.

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The question yet remains how the success of those programs will be measured - which is why, if we want to measure the impact of coliving, then we need to create frameworks that explore both the positive and negative impact that such residences have on the residents, the neighbourhood and the wider environment.

We need to ask ourselves the right questions to determine the right value. This is not a question of net promoter scores or simple “did you prefer your stay with us over living by yourself?” questions. Rather, it is about taking on a scientific approach in measuring impact and creating the space, cooperation and exchange around those methods.

With Co-Liv, we are going to continue to empower those discussions, whether in our virtual events, during our Co-Liv Summit 2021 or in upcoming publications.

Only discussions, interactions and the thirst for understanding can lead us to create a world aligned with our visions. We encourage you to be part of this journey.