Coliving is the modern brand name for something far older than the word itself. People have shared homes for economic and communal reasons since the nineteenth century, long before operators packaged the idea into a rental product. This history traces that line — from boarding houses and communal apartments to the venture-backed brands that gave shared living its current name.
What Is the History of Coliving?
The history of coliving spans two centuries, from 19th-century boarding houses and communal housing experiments to venture-backed coliving brands launched after 2015. Each era added a feature that today's coliving takes for granted.
The key milestones in the history of coliving are listed in the timeline below.
| Period | Milestone | Region |
|---|---|---|
| 1820s–1930s | Boarding houses house urban workers | US, UK |
| 1903 | Fick's Collective, an early communal building | Copenhagen |
| 1909 | First kibbutz founded at Degania | Israel region |
| 1917 onward | Kommunalka communal apartments | Soviet Union |
| 1960s | Countercultural communes | US |
| 1972 | Sættedammen, first modern cohousing | Denmark |
| 2010–2013 | Hacker houses for tech workers | San Francisco |
| 2015–2016 | Common, WeLive, The Collective launch | New York, London |
| 2016 onward | European boom, including Cohabs | Europe |
| 2020 onward | Post-Covid flexibility | Global |
Reading the timeline top to bottom shows a single thread: shared living reinvented for each era's economy, then rebranded as coliving after 2015.
How Did 19th-Century Boarding Houses Shape Shared Living?
A boarding house offered a furnished room, meals and shared common spaces under one roof, run by a landlord or landlady who set the rules. It was the dominant form of urban lodging before apartments became standard.
The scale was significant: in nineteenth-century American cities, a large share of urban residents either boarded or took in lodgers, according to urban housing historians. That arrangement — a private room plus services for one payment — is the direct ancestor of the all-inclusive rent a modern coliving charges today. The boarding house established the core deal; later eras only refined it. You can see how the term settled into its current meaning in this explanation of the meaning of coliving, which defines the concept the boarding house prefigured.
What Was the Soviet Kommunalka?
The kommunalka was a state-allocated communal apartment in which two to seven families shared a single kitchen and bathroom while each family occupied one room. It was a housing form of necessity, not choice.
It emerged in 1917, when Lenin's housing policy redistributed large apartments in cities such as Moscow to ease a severe housing shortage across the Soviet Union. The kommunalka shared the physical setup of coliving — private rooms around communal facilities — but inverted its logic: residents were assigned to it by the state, whereas colivers select it freely. Compulsion versus choice is the line that separates the two.
How Do Kibbutzim Relate to Coliving?
A kibbutz is a collective community built on shared ownership and shared labour, with the first, Degania, founded in 1909. Kibbutzim organised not just housing but work, meals and childcare around the collective.
Their communal features echo in coliving: communal dining, shared childcare and extensive common spaces were central to kibbutz life. The difference is one of purpose. A kibbutz was built around ideology and agricultural production, while coliving is built around lifestyle and a rented room. Kibbutzim show how far communal living can go; coliving borrows the sociability without the shared economy.
How Did the Communes of the 1960s Influence Shared Housing?
The countercultural communes of the 1960s United States practised shared ownership and ideological communal living, rejecting private property in favour of the collective. Most were short-lived, but their influence outlasted them.
The more durable heir was Danish cohousing, whose first deliberately designed community, Sættedammen, formed in 1972 in Denmark. Cohousing paired private homes with shared facilities and self-governance. This is where coliving and cohousing diverge: cohousing is owner-led and permanent, coliving is operator-run and flexible — a distinction the guide to the difference between coliving and cohousing explores in full.
How Did Hacker Houses Start Modern Coliving?
Hacker houses in the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly 2010 to 2013, put tech workers under one roof beside the coworking boom, and this is where the word "coliving" took on its current meaning. Houses such as HackerHome and Rainbow Mansion housed engineers who wanted cheap rent, fast networking and a flexible move-in.
Three features carried straight into today's brands: professional networking as a selling point, a flexible room-by-room lease, and a fully furnished move-in. Silicon Valley reframed shared living as a career asset rather than a compromise, and that framing defined the wave of operators that followed.
How Did WeLive, Common and The Collective Scale Coliving?
Common, WeLive and The Collective turned coliving from a house into a business between 2015 and 2016. Common launched in New York in 2015, WeLive followed as WeWork's residential arm in 2016, and The Collective opened Old Oak in London in 2016 with 546 rooms — the largest coliving building of its time.
Venture capital and branding drove the scale-up, marketing coliving as a lifestyle product with a membership feel. Their later paths varied: The Collective entered administration in 2020, and Common was acquired by Habyt in 2023. The brands proved the model could scale, even where the individual companies did not survive it.
When Did Coliving Boom in Europe?
Coliving boomed in Europe from around 2015 to 2016, as operators adapted the American model to expensive, mobile European cities. Cohabs launched in Brussels in 2016, followed by Habyt in Berlin, Colonies in Paris and Urban Campus in Madrid over the next years.
Brussels became an early stronghold for a specific reason: constant international demand around the EU institutions and the European Quarter created a steady flow of tenants who needed flexible, furnished housing. That demand is why the city supports a dense coliving market, covered in this overview of coliving in Brussels and the neighbourhoods that anchor it.
How Has Coliving Changed Since Covid-19?
Coliving changed in three ways after 2020: remote work shifted demand toward flexibility, community gained value as an answer to isolation, and institutional capital entered the sector. The pandemic tested the model and then accelerated it.
Investor appetite tracks the shift. European living-sector reports from firms such as JLL and Savills recorded rising targeted investment into coliving from 2021 onward, as capital treated it as an operational asset class rather than an experiment. The result is a wider spread of models — urban, rural, corporate and hybrid — a diversification the guide to types of coliving spaces sets out across seven distinct formats.
How Does Modern Coliving Differ from Its Historical Forms?
Modern coliving differs from its historical forms mainly by being operator-run, flexible and optional, but it inherits a trait from each one. The lineage is set out below.
| Historical form | Shared trait | Modern coliving equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Boarding house | Furnished room with services | All-inclusive rent |
| Kommunalka | Shared kitchen | Shared common areas by choice |
| Commune | Life in community | Community events |
| Hacker house | Work-and-live setup | Coliving with coworking |
Every defining feature of a coliving already existed; the innovation was combining them into one flexible, all-inclusive product with a manager behind it.
Is Coliving a New Concept?
No, coliving is not a new concept — the brand-led, all-inclusive model is new, but shared living itself is at least two centuries old. What changed after 2015 is the packaging: a professional operator, a flexible contract and active community management wrapped around the same shared home that boarding houses and communal apartments offered generations ago.
