The trend toward community-oriented development is here to stay.
The future of shared commercial and residential space, like co-working and co-living, is bright. Co-living is aimed for a huge increase in capacity across countries and cities. And the number of urban green markets shows the continuing appeal of foodie-centric public spaces, as well as food halls. This year’s Emerging Trends found that collaborative consumption—integrated platforms of products, services, and experiences—is increasingly popular with younger generations favoring sustainability and social interaction. As traditional retail continues to struggle, this type of business can be a big draw for a larger project.
As more millennials become parents of school age kids, urban areas continue to rise in real estate prices. There’s a slow but steady push toward the ‘hot’ locations outside the big cities and city centers. They become more diverse, walkable with increasing developments that favor a density function interwoven with retail, recreation and transport access. These areas have seen an increase of new apartments, restaurants, office and community space. The developers are embracing the live/work/space formula and revived city districts into vibrant urban area’s with much success.
The co-living idea has received its share of ridicule but real estate developers need to break the mold to address the affordable housing crisis. There’s a large subset of the population that has either been priced out, or is feeling the agonies of loneliness, or is just looking for a more all-inclusive experience. Co-living companies can use economies of scale to save renters money, since they are furnishing hundreds of rooms at a time. By developing a new method to enable rapid construction and setup of affordable living spaces. They are taking advantage of empty commercial spaces — like shuttered storefronts, vacant office spaces and abandoned shopping malls.
Millennials are bringing back the mall, but not as a retail space — as an apartment.