Not your dad’s ‘old place’
Apartment’s image gets major makeover
Y ou might expect 25-year-olds in Washington to live with multiple roommates to afford to live in this high-cost city. But the visual of millennials hanging out in a crumbling group house on a stained couch leaking its stuffing is about to be shattered.
Newly designed co-living apartments bring sophistication and privacy to the group living experience. For example, instead of a moldy bathroom used by decades of transient residents, each roommate at the Oslo in Northwest Washington's Shaw neighborhood has a private bathroom with a sleek glass-enclosed shower and a private bedroom with a walk-in closet.
“When we saw that this place is brand-new and we could each have our own bedroom and bathroom, we grabbed it, especially since it was the last available apartment here," says Garrett Lance, who has lived at the Oslo with his roommates James Arnold, Justin Griffis and Andrew Krentz for two years. All are 25.
While Lance, Griffis and Arnold knew one another before moving in together, Krentz found the Oslo and his new roommates in the time-honored way of young people today: on Craigslist. All four roommates like being close to the Shaw Metro station, about one block away, along with bars, restaurants and stores.
Developers say more co-living apartments are in the works, an idea they expect to grow given the continual need in the District and other cities for moderately priced rentals, especially for young people.
What makes the Oslo and similar developments different from other group homes is that they are newly built residences specifically designed to make it easier to live with roommates. Instead of three or four people piling into an apartment with one bathroom, these units have private space for each person, along
with an open shared living area and kitchen.
"About six years ago, I was helping a friend build student housing near Catholic University and thought it would be cool to provide some of the features he was putting in there into housing for young people right out of college," says Martin Ditto, chief executive of Ditto Residential. "Four years ago, I found the building at 1734 6th St. in Shaw and decided to give it a shot."
Ditto says it took some extra effort to convince his financial backers that a rental building designed like upscale student housing would work, particularly because Shaw "wasn't as hot then as it is now."
"When I was showing the site to my banker, a guy comes running down the alley chased by a cop with his gun out screaming ' Freeze,' " Ditto says. "Anyone else would have turned down the loan at that point, but he knew the neighborhood and understood that the money would work, even if in the worst-case scenario."
Two years after Oslo Shaw opened, the building's nine threebedroom and four-bedroom units have been steadily occupied.
Some new co-living developments focus more on shared space and communal resident activities. Common, which has coliving apartments in San Francisco and Brooklyn and recently opened a building called the Richardson in Washington, provides furnished six-bedroom apartments, each with a shared kitchen, and communal activities led by a resident "house leader."
"We do co-living rather than traditional apartments because we believe we're addressing a use case - living with roommates - that is ubiquitous but totally unaddressed by real estate developers today," says Brad Hargreaves, founder and chief executive of Common.
At WeLive in Crystal City, Va., an office building converted into apartments, the units are also furnished and include studio and one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments. Some apartments have full kitchens, but residents also share large communal kitchens, a community garden, game rooms and quiet areas. At Novus Residences, a reconfigured office building in Alexandria, Va., by e-lofts, tenants can rent units for work or for living space that include a bedroom and full bathroom and have access to a kitchen and washer and dryer.
Callie Bruemmer, director of marketing for Ditto Residential, says the Oslo apartments compete for young renters more with group houses rather than traditional apartments because they're smaller buildings.
"D.C. has lots of young people moving here, but they're not necessarily high wage earners like the high-tech people moving into some other cities," says Christine Espenshade, a managing director at JLL in Washington. "These are people moving to work for their state representatives, or nonprofits or the government, and they want reasonably priced housing."
Espenshade says developers are emulating what new student housing looks like, with shared common elements but individual bedrooms and bathrooms.
"The rents are comparable to renting a small studio apartment in a new building, but for someone new to the city or who just wants to be more social, co-living is a good alternative," says Espenshade.
Rents at Oslo Shaw range from $1,250 to $1,400 per room. Roommates split utility costs just as they would in any other shared housing.
"The rent isn't dirt cheap, but it fits in that niche between a more expensive studio and an older group house that might be a little cheaper but where I'd have to share a bathroom," says Matthew Despard, another Oslo resident. "Group houses aren't always in a neighborhood as convenient as this, either. And if you have a studio, you have to carry all the utility costs on your own.”