Fluid Living: The Future of Homes                            AM

The American suburbs are failing. Long a staple of the “American Dream”, suburban development has reached an end of a long period of cheap growth since the mid 20th century. With their enormous physical footprints, shoddy construction, and hastily installed infrastructure, many suburbs are visibly crumbling. Suburban shopping malls are empty, and suburban factories have gone quiet as the american economy continues to move away from manufacturing and into tech and service.(3)

The central problem lies in the misconception that owning a house in the modern age is an asset, and this ideation continues to drive construction of more and more unfortunate fields full of  single family boxes with no architectural merit.

Due to the rise of the gig economy, a movement of young freelance and commission creatives, millenials working in tech and service industries will travel for work and pleasure far more than any other generation. This will make home ownership a liability instead of an asset to many people. Owning a home ties you down to an area, limits your options, and sinks your capital into a material possession when it could be used for more prudent and productive economic activities.

This paradigm shift from sole ownership to a shared use model is well underway across the world. “Collaborative consumption”, a term coined by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, is a economic model based on “possible use, but not possession, of physical and human assets, such as time, space, and skills.” (1)
This model has already been witnessed unprecedented success in the automobile market. With the rise of ridesharing apps, many professionals living in cities have opted and will increasingly choose to pass on owning a car. In some urban areas, successful decentralized electric scooter and bicycle businesses such as “Bird” have found a market for fluid, “use it when you need it” transportation services that embody the concept of collaborative consumption. The tech and public infrastructure present in developed countries is eating away at the need for expensive and impractical ownership of private transportation. Societal theorist Peter Hesseldahl writes that “We are moving towards a hyper connected economy in which a growing part of what creates value is coordination, interaction, sharing and collaboration.” (4)


The same thing will occur in the housing market in the near future. As the baby boomer generation passes away, there will be a surplus of suburban houses that far outweighs the demand of millennials and generation Z, especially when you take falling fertility rates in developed nations and the breakdown of the family unit into account. This will cause a massive collapse of the already sliding suburban housing market. One study by Fannie Mae’s Economic and Strategic Research group warns that the “beginning of a mass exodus looms on the horizon,” where “homeownership demand from younger generations is insufficient to fill the void left by multitudes of departing older owners.”(5)

Additionally, the rise of telecommuting and online only creative freelance jobs is already being felt strongly in the workforce. According to the University of Oxford, “Labour markets are in the midst of a dramatic transformation, where standard employment is being increasingly supplemented or replaced by temporary freelancers who are recruited online - Millions of people now use online platforms and apps to find online work and recruit occasional help over the internet.”(6) This shift in the way people work will cause there to be no reason for the average white collar professional to cut off their own legs both geographically and financially by making the commitment to buy a home.

The future of home ownership is not ownership at all, it is a decentralized collaborative consumption model. This model is the perfect solution to this wide scale growing crisis because it solves all the issues previously mentioned, as well as adding some attractive perks and advantages. Companies based around this model would have multiple housing complexes across the nation with a full array of amenities at each location, with some even offering in-complex shopping, restaurants, transportation services, and relaxation/ recreation centres, all collectively shared by the fluid clientele.

One major transformation that this model would enable is the clearing of suburban sprawl space for large public parks, greenspace, and recreation areas. This is due to the vast decrease in the amount of space used per person as opposed to modern suburban life. To illustrate the point, imagine the wasted space and resources if today, instead of sharing our roads with other drivers, everyone had their own personal roads built to and from where they needed to go. Not only is this inefficient and greedy, it is extremely inconvenient, just like sprawling suburban developments where each person actively uses only a tiny fraction of their material possessions at any given time, and has to travel long distances through a sea of other peoples mostly unused houses to find separate commercial buildings that satisfy their social and service needs. A new built environment of efficient and convenient fluid housing complexes will open up a huge amount of outdoor space that could be used for large scale environmental restoration and public landscaping projects.

This model would also allow for a high degree of creative architectural realization of each large scale unit. High end units would have gorgeously designed spaces for use by the general community of the complex, meaning that individual quality of life is dramatically increased for every single resident. Imagine having multiple homes across the nation, each equipped with tennis courts, gyms, a pool, rental vehicles, and even medical centres. To live this kind of lifestyle today you would need to be a multimillionaire, but in the future this kind of life will be a reality for average professionals due to the power of shared infrastructure.

The type of person most suitable for this living model is a creative, financially independent entrepreneur with a freelance or flexible internet based profession. It is estimated that the amount of self employed workers will rise sharply in the next decades as people find their own niche in an ever evolving culture. Artificial Intelligence Expert Kai Fu Lee says “about 50% of our jobs will, in fact, be taken over by AI and automation within the next 15 years. Accountants, factory workers, truckers, paralegals, and radiologists — just to name a few — will be confronted by a disruption akin to that faced by farmers during the industrial revolution.”(7)  As automation and AI continues to shrink the market for jobs dealing with repetitive and data processing tasks, the middle class will shift towards a market of ideas. People who find their business niche will have to travel between urban areas to meet the subset of the population interested in their service, product, or creative/artistic talents. Collaborative consumption housing is key, because it allows for an easy flow of population between housing situations.

Clients would be able to live in their unit like an apartment for as long as they needed to stay in an area, and then move on, growing their global understanding and becoming true citizens of a nation instead of a resident of a just a single town or area. They could travel the country (or the world), knowing that at each location they visit they will have a space and a community culture to rely on for social grounding.

In addition to benefiting the wealthy and middle class, this model could also provide unprecedented quality of life for poor populations. The same model could be scaled down, providing each human with a basic clean sleeping space and shared facilities that would be impossible for any of them to afford individually.

For example, a stripped down unit designed for 50 of the poorest members of society might have the following total operating expenses: Climate control (750 dollars a month), Clean sheets and laundry(1000 dollars a month), high speed internet connection(250 dollars a month), plus 2 full time staff members paid well above minimum wage (4,000 a month each) for $6.66 a day per resident per day or $200 per resident per month. This would also come with the key advantage present at all levels of the structure in that it offers the resident unprecedented freedom to travel between cities and regions and build their skills and understanding.

This model is in some ways a fusion of a hotel and an apartment complex, but with advantages that neither offer currently and a decreased price due to the more steady cash flow due to the inherent nature of the subscription model, as well as a more quality of life focus instead of the current focus of hotels on short term hospitality in urban spaces.

Another aspect of this proposal worth exploring is the social benefits of communal living. Humans are social animals, and unfortunately the digital age has seen a decrease in the average number of close friends per person. People are living alone, getting married later, and engaging in less social activities on average. These subscription based housing solutions could easily host gatherings and events within communities, as well as using algorithms to match people with possible friends and romantic interests living in the same complex. People could easily form a global network of friends and acquaintances, keeping contact over digital connection and VR hangouts.

In addition to the immediate benefit of living around many other humans in a communal shared asset setting, an additional psychological bonus could exist in the form of brand cultures created by the companies and organizations that own infrastructure. In the International Encyclopedia of Behavioral Science, Grauerholz suggests “individuals can be an important information source for other individuals, providing social benefits and representing a form of consumer agency.” (8) The brand cultures created by systems of collaborative lifestyle provide a community and a support group for members of the culture, and gives them a norm of living to compare their lifestyle. Because of the competitive nature of the market for capturing and retaining loyal clients, companies will have an incentive for customer service and business innovation, creating a better experience for end users.

This system is related to a hotel, but it is different in fundamental ways that allow it to be desirable for the long term. Self contained facilities for shopping, eating, and leisure are built into the living space, creating a full ecosystem to support the needs of inhabitants in an efficient and socially satisfying manner. The small costs that consumers would otherwise incur from running and maintaining their own property is converted into a benefit that is felt collectively by the community and society as a whole.