Co-living startups promise to wait for the cable guy and replace the toilet paper. Illustration by Harry Campbell

Cole Kennedy moved to New York a year ago. He was twenty-three and had recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in English. He applied for copywriting jobs all over, and assumed that he’d end up in the Midwest. “Moving to New York seemed cool, but it was, like, a thing that happens to other people,” he told me. Then his lottery ticket arrived: a paid internship at Foursquare, the search-and-discovery app, which is based in Manhattan.

First stop: Craigslist, for a place to live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the city’s neighborhoods, but he’d seen HBO’s “Girls,” and, he said, “I pretty much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn.” He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named Patrick was subletting a room in his two-bedroom apartment for a thousand and fifty dollars a month.

The annals of Craigslist are filled with roommate horror stories: the scammer, the party animal, the creep. But Patrick turned out to be an easygoing twenty-nine-year-old photographer from South Carolina. Kennedy liked him immediately, even though the two-bedroom apartment turned out to be a one-room loft. Patrick slept upstairs. Kennedy’s room was a former closet. Still, he was excited. His job was great. He was in New York.

But what to do when work ended? He loved Jane Jacobs’s evocations of Greenwich Village, with its friendly shop owners and its “ballet” of the city streets. But, he said, “I’d end up going to a bar and just sitting there, talking to a bartender and staring at Twitter.” A thought surfaced: I’m surrounded by people and things to do, and yet I’m so fucking bored and lonely.

All of this seemed very far away on a Sunday night this winter, in the basement of a renovated four-story brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building, Kennedy’s new home, is run by the co-living startup Common, which offers what it calls “flexible, community-driven housing.” Co-living has also been billed as “dorms for grown-ups,” a description that Common resists. But the company has set out to restore a certain subset of young, urban professionals to the paradise they lost when they left college campuses—a furnished place to live, unlimited coffee and toilet paper, a sense of belonging.

Common has three locations in Brooklyn: the brownstone in Crown Heights, on Pacific Street—which, when it opened, received more than a thousand applications for eighteen rooms—a second, smaller brownstone in the neighborhood, and a fifty-one-bedroom complex in Williamsburg, which opens this week. Instead of signing a lease, residents sign up for a “membership.” On average, they pay eighteen hundred dollars a month for a furnished bedroom and common areas. The company solves what it calls “the tragedy of the commons”—waiting for the cable guy and hiring housecleaners. There’s a chat room on Slack, where members can plan activities, and a “house leader,” who functions a bit like a college R.A.

Kennedy, who is now a copywriter for the startup Handy, found Common through a BuzzFeed article. Initially, he was put off by the price tag. A room at Common doesn’t just cost more than a room in a shared Brooklyn apartment (average price: twelve hundred dollars); it costs more than some studio apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which Gary Malin, the president of the real-estate broker Citi Habitats, told me can be obtained for “fifteen hundred dollars and up.”

But Kennedy did a little math. “Eighteen hundred—if you want to pay that little for a studio or one-bedroom, you’re going to get a really junky place,” he said. With a discount for promising to stay at Common for at least a year, he now pays a little less than fifteen hundred dollars a month.

Co-living businesses are still in the startup phase. Some people are incredulous. Under an article about the phenomenon on Curbed, a commenter wrote, “Why the fuck would anyone want that?” But Common, which is based in midtown and has twenty employees, recently raised more than seven million dollars from investors, including Maveron, a venture-capital firm started by Dan Levitan and Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks. Jason Stoffer, a partner at Maveron, anticipates that companies like Common will transform residential housing by creating a brand that is “emotionally and culturally resonant with millennials” who aren’t served by some aspects of apartment living. (Instead of landlord-ese, Common uses startup argot, advertising its “core values.” In his application, Kennedy wrote that he most appreciated the value “Be Present.”) Stoffer brought up AirBnb, the vacation-rental business valued at twenty-five billion dollars: “People sleeping on couches in someone else’s apartment for thirty dollars a night felt absolutely crazy ten years ago! But now it’s normal.”

Common encourages its members to organize group activities. “I thought they were going to force me to do these events I don’t want to do,” Kennedy said. “Like, let’s sit in a drum circle and do basket weaving.” But the events turned out to be things like movie nights and bowling. He decided to organize a book club.

The night of its first meeting, the brownstone’s basement was clean and warm. At the back of the room was a screening area, where four members lounged on modern couches and adult-size beanbags. Kennedy, who has chin-length, sandy-colored hair, was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. Most of his housemates were in their twenties, recent transplants to New York. Kennedy’s selection was “The Art of Fielding,” by Chad Harbach, and he led the discussion. He mentioned the fictional baseball manual at the center of the plot: “Did any of you guys look to see if ‘The Art of Fielding’ is real?”

Another Common member, Jeremy Schrage, spoke up. At forty-four, Schrage was the oldest member of the group. He makes a living “flipping apps and advising startups,” and had recently moved from California. “I actually put it into Google and read the Wikipedia,” Schrage said.

There was a pause. Kennedy asked, “What else, guys?”

Annelie Chavez, the brownstone’s twenty-seven-year-old house leader, grew up in a large extended Filipino family in California. “After being in New York for, like, a year and a half and not really having that many overlapping circles of friends, it made me a little homesick for the connections that the four or five main characters have with each other,” she said.

Kennedy agreed. “New York is the loneliest city in the world,” he said. “You basically go to work, work ridiculous hours, and come home.”

Schrage offered a theory: “It’s where the headquarters of all these corporations are, and people are coming here and they want to kick ass. During the day, everybody just has horse blinders on. They’re getting on the 6 train and going to work and stepping over some bum and not thinking about it.” He sighed. “It’s kind of crazy,” he said. “I don’t want to lose that California part of me. That compassion or empathy.”

Kennedy looked at his phone. It was getting late. “What book should we read next?”

Matt, another housemate, asked, “Have you guys read ‘The Poisonwood Bible’?”

I first met Kennedy in December, after most of Common’s members had moved in. The company threw a holiday party in the brownstone on Pacific Street. A flat-screen by the door showed which floors were serving which ethnic cuisine, all catered by nearby restaurants. In the basement, where people were drinking wine from plastic cups, Kennedy dispensed advice about restaurants in the area. (After his time at Foursquare, he considers himself the house’s “concierge.”)