Some parts of Commonspace are sure to appeal to 20-somethings looking for friends in the city. Evans plans to create an online recruiting process that will help him select applicants who fit into the community. Residents will be able to communicate with one another through Facebook groups and Slack channels, and will come together through weekly dinners and pub crawls and will be able to garden together on the rooftop.

The apartments will be fully furnished to appeal to potential residents who don’t own much (the units will have very limited storage space). The bedrooms are built into the big windows of the office building—one window per unit—and the rest of the apartment can be traversed in three big leaps. Residents will have to sign up for only six months to start. Evans and Talarico hope to also rent out some of the units on Airbnb to get fresh faces moving through the space.

The units will cost from $700 to $900 a month, which is slightly cheaper than the going rent for a one-bedroom in downtown Syracuse, the two say.

“If your normal rent is $1,500, we’re coming in way under that,” Talarico said. “You can spend that money elsewhere, living, not just sustaining.”

Evans might be entering the market at the perfect time. Millennials are staying single longer than previous generations have, creating a glut of people still living on their own in apartments, rather than marrying and buying homes. But the generation is also notoriously social, having been raised on the internet and the constant communication it provides. Indeed, more 25-to-34-year-olds live with roommates than have in previous generations, partly because rental prices have climbed while wages have remained stagnant.

But this is also a generation that has grown up with luxury, and may be accustomed to college campuses with climbing walls, infinity pools, and, of course, their own bathrooms. Commonspace gives these Millennials the benefits of living with roommates—they can save money and stay up late watching Gilmore Girls—with the privacy and the style an entitled generation might expect.

Evans and Talarico aren’t the only ones trying out something like this. Pure House, which The New York Times called a “Millennial commune,” is a Williamsburg apartment building that also creates a networking and social community for its residents. Krash is a start-up that invites entrepreneurs to live in a shared living space for three to 12 months in Boston, New York, or D.C. to jump-start their connections. Even WeWork, the massive co-working space, is planning on moving into shared living spaces, according to the The Wall Street Journal.

But no other start-up has combined shared space and micro units. Yet what makes Commonspace truly different is its goal of helping revitalize the downtown of a Rust Belt city that struggles with some of the highest rates of poverty in the nation. In cities such as Syracuse, Evans explains, people moved to the suburbs at an alarming rate, abandoning the downtown. Young professionals moved to the suburbs, too, because there wasn’t much happening downtown after dark. Evans lived in a Philadelphia suburb by himself after college and still remembers how lonely it was.