I just read about a popular co-working company in New York called Framework. The concept is super simple. They rent single-person office pods (see above). Each one is sound insulated and has a sitting/standing desk, a filing cabinet, a kettle, a french press, and a small fridge. And at their latest location in Williamsburg, these rent for $820 per month. Their tagline is "your home office away from home" and I think that's a good way of describing the offering. Because let's consider the math.
These pods are 8 feet x 8 feet. So at $820 per month, one would be effectively paying about $12.81 per square foot in rent, which I would assume is significantly higher than average apartment rents in the city. If you take the present value of $820 per month over 25 years at a rate of 5% (to generally simulate mortgage payments), you get close to $140k in value. My point being that if you can afford an additional $820 per month for an office pod, then you could likely afford to rent or buy a home with an additional 64 square feet.
But from what I can tell, that's not necessarily the main problem that Framework is solving. The key words seem to be: "away from home." Home can be distracting for some people and in some situations. If you're trying to get serious work done, I can see why shuttering yourself in a pod would be an attractive solution.
Photo via Framework
Fred Wilson (venture capitalist) and Joanne Wilson (also an investor) have been working on a passive house apartment building in Brooklyn for the last five years. Their development company is called Frame Home. And this past week they received a pretty great Christmas gift in the form of a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy from NYC Buildings.
At 5 storeys and with only 10 two-bedroom units, you could classify this building as the kind "missing middle" housing that gets so much air time here in Toronto. And so not only have they managed to build relatively small, but they've done it using passive house design principles.
Here are some of the apartment building's features:
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure
Passive house design approach
Triple-pane windows
Interior polished and insulated concrete walls (presumably to act as a thermal mass to moderate heating/cooling throughout the year)