Community and connection are some of my most important values. Personally, I love to learn from people of all types of backgrounds, have deep and meaningful conversations, and get recommendations from others — whether it’s places to visit, books to read, or lifestyle changes to try. Professionally, my career has centered around connecting students, alumni, and professionals into meaningful relationships. I also view my work in sales as simply having authentic conversations with people and understanding their needs.
The one choice that has most helped me lean into my value of community, and that I can confidently say has significantly changed my life for the better, is coliving.
What is Coliving?
Coliving is a community living model where a group of people share housing. Coliving spaces include shared common areas, and can include other amenities like community activities (ex. shared meals, parties) and coworking space.
In the past few years, I’ve lived in four different coliving spaces in SF. These have ranged in layout (ex. dorm style, house, normal apartment), size (8 to 70 people), and types of people (from those born and raised in the Bay, to international people living in the US for the first time).
The Benefits of Coliving
I’ve found that living in the same space as others allows me to get to know a new group of people super quickly. The proximity with others makes it easy to make plans together, which has led to more frequent and meaningful communal experiences. To me, this has a lot of benefits over living in separate apartments with friends in the same city and relying on occasional dinner meetups as the main source of connection.
What makes these shared experiences particularly special is the types of people I’ve met through coliving. Out of the variety of people I’ve been able to cross paths with, I’ve felt like there’s a self-selection of people with similar values around community, wanting to connect with others, open-mindness, and other positive values that people opting to live in a coliving space might have.
Coliving has also been great for my personal growth: specifically for my mental health, physical health, and having fun.
- Mental health: the sense of belonging and connection I’ve felt through coliving has had definite positive benefits for my mental health. When I had a rough day recently, I was somewhat jokingly wondering if I might feel better if I had a larger personal room, but after having a good spontaneous chat with my housemate Altair, I realized that connection is actually exactly what I needed. Even just being around the presence of others makes me less stuck in my own head and makes me realize that we’re all humans trying to figure it out.
- Physical health: Coliving has helped me stay active. For example, having others around makes it a lot easier to play sports or work out with others. I’m also much more likely to go on a spontaneous bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge if I have housemates that are asking me if I want to go compared to if I were on my own.
- Fun: It’s quite hard for me to relax, but doing things with others greatly alleviates this challenge and makes me feel really present. It makes trying new activities a lot easier too!
I used to think achieving my goals was just about individually working hard and having enough willpower. Now, I’m a big believer that putting yourself in the right environment can make an even larger and sustained difference, as the right environment can constantly nudge you to behave in ways that align in the direction you want to head.
Tribe Coliving
My first coliving experience was moving into a 70-person coliving space called Tribe — in February 2020… great timing, I know 😂 The community aspect of coliving was definitely a plus at the time, but I felt that a bigger factor behind me choosing it was actually that it was cheaper and just a quick place for me to move into to start living in SF.
It didn’t take me long to realize just how important the community aspect afforded by coliving was for me, especially after COVID hit three weeks into my time in SF. The spontaneous conversations, events, and just being around others during a stressful and uncertain time were all so impactful for me that I felt I might have had a stronger sense of community than if I had lived on my own in SF without a pandemic.
Some recurring activities I enjoyed included playing ultimate frisbee, rock climbing outdoors, and one that I participated in and later helped run called “Beers and Ideas”, where we would meet to set goals for ourselves for the next two weeks and hold ourselves accountable, all over some beers. Several times when we were playing ultimate, I distinctly remember pausing to think to myself how surreal it was to be able to have so much fun with others so easily during a time when everything was shut down.
We also had fun one-off events like an in-house version of Food Network’s Chopped (for which I was a judge), an 18-person trip to Lake Tahoe, and attending my first wedding at Golden Gate Park. One memory that sticks out in particular is when we went on a hiking trip and had an outdoor BBQ on 4th of July weekend in 2020. I remember feeling an immense sense of gratitude for the community that Tribe had enabled, because I remembered that exactly a year prior, I was a fresh college grad settling into a new place pre-pandemic, and had felt lonely over 4th of July weekend.
908 Coliving
After heading out of SF in 2021 to spend time with family and live in different places across the US while SF was still relatively shut down due to COVID, I came back in 2022 to start at a 14-person coliving space called 908. If I were to summarize my time at 908, I would say it was a time full of moments of deep connection and significant personal growth.
Even though I didn’t know a single person before moving into 908, I found a community that was incredibly supportive of my growth in areas of mental health, being more active, eating healthy, having fun without feeling guilty about it, and even dating. My favorite activity was doing a Sat morning outdoor workout with housemates at the Marina, and grabbing a vegan brunch together at Wildseed afterwards.
I also learned and tried many new things because of my housemates. I started to eat a more plant-based diet after learning from my roommate Josh, tried yoga and pilates for the first time, watched standup comedy, went raspberry picking and made muffins with them afterwards, watched documentaries on topics I typically might not watch myself, played games, etc. There were also more international people living in the house, so I enjoyed learning more about their cultures and backgrounds.
Overall, another way I could tell there was a good sense of community was that ‘alumni’ that used to live at 908 would come back regularly for parties and events, and add to the communal feeling of all having gone through a shared experience.
I’m now an ‘alum’ of Tribe and 908 myself, and am so grateful that I still get to go back to spend time with people there and participate in events. A favorite of mine is Enrichment Circle at Tribe, where the fabulous event coordinator Anthony presents on a mental health and personal development topic, and we have intentional conversation about it afterwards.
Concluding Thoughts
When I set out to write this piece, I was intending to write an update on my life overall in 2022. It didn’t take long though for me to realize that a majority of the good things that have happened this year actually tie back to coliving in some way, which led to a new focus for this piece. Living in coliving spaces has had a tremendous positive impact on my sense of community and connection, and my personal growth in areas like mental health, physical health, and having fun.
I’m grateful to coliving for allowing me to discover and deepen my relationship with my values of community and connection. In a society where loneliness and mental health challenges are unfortunately becoming increasingly prevalent, I hope to see more people give coliving a try, and to see more coliving spaces pop up across the country and world!