The Rise of the Roommate | The Walrus

My thinking is that in the Entrepreneurial Age the housing market should be analyzed through a categorization scheme that simply separates two groups. On the one hand are what my wife, Laetitia Vitaud, calls the hunters: people who spend a relatively short amount of time in a particular area because they’re hunting for money (as workers), knowledge

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It’s not that there’s nothing wonderful—or challenging, in an interesting way—about making and cultivating an isolated living space. But it’s definitely a less natural way of being, at least if you’re taking human history into account. That we’ve come to see it as admirable says a lot about our culture: our commitment to individualism, our emphasis... See more

It’s interesting to think about how new generational consumer behaviors translate into new businesses. We’re seeing a slew of startups building better solutions to the housing crisis, the climate crisis, the education crisis. But there are also less obvious impacts from consumer behavior:

Rather than an important rite of passage, maybe living alone is just one experience of many that can shape a person. By emphasizing it—not just individuals living on their own, but individual, nuclear families, too—I wonder what kind of society we’re aiming to create.