by @CodyBrown
A week ago, I signed a lease for an apartment in Bushwick that was formally a half way house—a place where people who used to be addicted to heroin go to ‘sober up’. After months of commuting to work together, Kate Ray and I are moving in together to work on kommons.com. We are thrilled to finally have a space to live and work but we’d also like to help others who are in similar positions with their startups. Over the course of the next few months it is our plan to turn the apartment back into a Half Way House—this time in a different form.
Background on The Apartment
The usual image of a half way house is that of a dilapidated under-funded building—this place is a little different. 979 Willoughby, was funded as a luxury condo development for an ‘up and coming’ neighborhood, the apartment in question is a soaring 3 floor penthouse with 4 bedrooms and terraces.
It’s a dream apartment but by the time it went on the market, the recession was in full force and they couldn’t move the units. So, instead of slashing the prices, the owner tried to turn it into a for-profit Half Way House. The neighborhood then flipped and harassed the owner to the point where he recently ended the program. That’s why the place is more affordable.
Why We Want to Turn it Back into a Half Way House
One of the constraints Kate and I ran into when we graduated and decided to startup in NYC was space. Not co-working space, there are a lot of great projects developing in that area—see General Assembly/New Work City/Makery—but living space. I’ve blogged about this before but In Silicon Valley you can talk someone into loaning you a garage and a couch for a few months but unless you’re BFF’s with Jay-Z, you can’t do that here. If you have a few thousand dollars saved and want to do a company in NYC, you have two options:
1.) Do your company part-time. A few thousand dollars is likely not enough to sustain your current living situation for more than a month.
2.) Budget Every Aspect of Your Life. If you want to pay around $500 a month in rent, there are places in NYC that are available deep in Brooklyn or Harlem. They provide shelter for cheap but the tradeoff is that by living so far away you miss out on many of the reasons you are living in NYC in the first place. The NYTM looks different when it takes you an hour to get there by subway.
Since graduation, Kate and I have chosen option two. We both decided that taking part time jobs would be immensely distracting and that it would be worth it to just be poor. So we ended our leases and our plan was to each do cheap sublets until Christmas but after moving twice in 30 days we realized that the energy consumed in moving and commuting to see each other was driving us crazy and ultimately not worth the amount saved in rent. We searched for another option, something in-between working a part-time job to stay afloat and living in poverty at the expense of missing a lot of NYC. We lucked out and found what we think is a third option that could also help others in a similar position, a startup Half Way House in Brooklyn.
New York City has historically been home to aspiring artists of every form willing to exchange security for time to work on their craft. This is the same idea, except instead of a group of painters or thespians, it’s people in tech.
Artists Lofts vs. Tech Lofts
There is a reason we didn’t just get an apartment in the McKibbin Lofts, coders are different from painters or thespians—they thrive in a different environment. There are a lot of distinctions but these are a couple of the biggest ones required in making a startup living space:
1.) Controlled Environment. One of the most helpful things Kate and I found when working on kommons is to divide days into ‘dev’ or ‘meeting’. Writing software takes focus but it also takes hours to settle into a kind of ‘flow state’— our best dev almost always comes on days that are completely uninterrupted. The typical artist loft is not ideal for this type of workflow. This is especially true at places like McKibbin Lofts where many of the residents sustain themselves by working odd days at restaurants and it’s not uncommon to have noise band practice at 1 am.
2.) Light and Nature. When you spend 14 hours of your day sitting in a single place staring at an LCD screen your body craves light and nature. Kate and I have both tried coding in places that are dark and it usually isn’t more than an hour before we want to stab our eyes with the end of a macbook pro cord. Our space doesn’t have a park outside it’s window but it has an insane amount of light and a beautiful urban view.
3.) Access to Manhattan. Because the M train is now on the orange line, we can now get to the city in around 20 minutes and take the train directly to West 4th street or Bryant Park. When we lived an hour from the city, we skipped a lot of great events and avoided meetings because it was just too time consuming to get to them. It’s important to sometimes be reclusive and lock yourself in a space and code, but you are here because of the brilliant people who already live in the city.
At the moment, it is just Kate and I living here with two friends. The place will only be able to have 4-6 people living here at any given time but we see it as a model that could be replicated in similar apartments.
We like this metaphor of a Half Way House because it relates to the transitional feeling an entrepreneur has to their home but we also like it because it ties into a bigger theme about NYC. A half way house is a place to go when you have acknowledged that there is no way to preserve an addiction and it’s time to re-enter a culture without this addiction. If one thing is clear about NYC, the companies that have made the city iconic, The New York Times, News Corp, Condé Nast, Miramax, are all addicted to something that is killing them. Whether it’s advertising revenue that will never return or fundamental incompatibilities with the internet, many of the people who work at these companies have seen the numbers and know they are in trouble but feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. They can either hope someone at their company will figure it out or quit their job and figure it out themselves. The latter is a much more difficult leap to make—we want to make it easier.
Or at least that’s the idea. This is an experiment, we’ll be tumbling’ about how it goes here: nywayhouse.tumblr.com
