双语阅读｜房价高企之下，欧美兴起共享公寓
MONDAY is “Game of Thrones” night at The Collective’s Old Oak building. Millennials congregate in TV rooms around the 11-storey, 550-person block. Some gather at the cinema, lounging on bean bags decorated with old graphics from Life magazine. Nothing gets residents out of their rooms like the hit TV show. This is not a student dorm, however. It is home.
在合居公寓The Collective's Old Oak，周一是“权力游戏”之夜。千禧一代的年轻人聚集在一栋有11层楼，共550住户的大厦里的电视室。一些人则聚集在电影室，懒洋洋地躺在用《生活》杂志上的旧照片装饰的豆袋懒人沙发上。唯有这部热门电视剧才能让人们走出自己的房间。然而，这不是学生宿舍，这是他们的家。
The Collective is a pioneer of a new property format known as “co-living”. Instead of self-contained flats, residents live in tiny rooms with 12 square metres of floor space. Most contain just a bed and a bathroom. During a two-night stay your correspondent could barely fit his shoulders into the shower cubicle.
The Collective是一种称为“合居”的新的住宅模式。住户们生活在面积为12平方米的小房间里，而不是独立的公寓。其中大部分只有一张床和一间浴室。就算你的朋友只是想在这里过两夜，他连挤进浴室隔间的可能都没有。
It is outside these rooms that the building makes its pitch. It comes with a gym, spa, libraries, a good restaurant and a cinema. Residents get access to all of these amenities, as well as their room, for a rental payment of £800-£1,000 ($1,033-$1,292) a month. That includes all bills and high-speed Wi-Fi; they pay extra for meals in the restaurant. Residents have come up with their own services, too. The Collective houses a “library of things”, or a shared repository of useful objects—hammers, tape measures and even tents.
在这些房间以外的设施是这栋住宅最大的卖点，如有健身房、水疗馆、图书馆、美味的餐馆和电影院。住户们只需每月支付800 -1000欧元（约合1033-1292美元），就可以使用所有的设施，当然也包括他们自己的房间。这些费用里还包括所有账单，高速无线网络的费用，不过不包括在餐厅里的餐费。住户自己也能安装一些服务性设施。The Collective的房子就像是一个“物料库”，或者说是一个共享仓库，住户们共享着一些有用的物品，如锤子，卷尺，甚至是帐篷。
Rising rents have opened up a gap in the market. The ratio of average rents to incomes in London rose from a quarter to a third between 2004 and 2014. In New York, average rents have grown from 29% of average income in 2002 to 34% in 2014. Most young professionals moving to thriving cities face a difficult choice between spending a big share of their income on renting their own place, or moving in with strangers in a shared house to save money. The Collective offers something different.
不断上涨的租金让市场出现了缺口。从2004年到2014年，伦敦的平均房租与收入的比率从1：4上升到1：3。同样，纽约的平均房租对平均收入的占比从2002年的29%增涨到2014年的34%。大多数来到繁荣城市的年轻白领都面临着一个艰难的选择：是把大部分收入花在租一套公寓房上，还是为了节省开支，选择与陌生人合租。The Collective提供了另外一种选择。
Old Oak, the firm’s first building in north-west London, has been 97% occupied for most of this year. The Collective is putting up two more co-living buildings in London, one in Stratford and one in Canary Wharf. The notion of tiny rooms and shared luxury services is fairly new and little tested, but the property industry is paying attention. Jack Sibley of TH Real Estate, a property investment manager, calls it “one of the most promising ideas for the future of living to emerge for some time”.
老橡树(Old Oak)是该公司在伦敦西北部的第一栋建筑。今年大部分时间里，老橡树的出租率高达97%。The Collective在伦敦建造了另外两个合居住宅，一个位于斯特拉特福德，一个位于金丝雀码头。小型住房和共享豪华服务的概念是全新的，几乎没有经过考验，但房地产行业正在关注这类住宅。房地产投资经理杰克•西布利(Jack Sibley)称，这是未来一段时间内有关居住问题的最具前景的想法之一。
The next step for Reza Merchant, The Collective’s founder, is expansion abroad. He is close to striking deals on buildings in Boston and New York, and is talking to developers in Berlin, where historically low rents have been rising fast for the city’s young, creative types. The Collective has no real competitors in Britain but its move to America will see it run into Ollie, a co-living firm in New York.
The Collective创始人雷扎•卖钱特(Reza Merchant)计划是向海外扩张。他即将收购波士顿和纽约的楼房。他还将与柏林的开发商商谈，因为对于在柏林富有创造力的年轻人来说，以往的低租金正在快速上涨。The Collective在英国并没有真正的竞争对手，但在进军美国市场时，将会遇到纽约的一家合居公司Ollie的挑战。
Both of Ollie’s existing co-living buildings are smaller than Old Oak (the largest of its kind in the world). But the American firm will soon run a co-living space over 13 floors of a building in Long Island City in the borough of Queens. It is being developed by Quadrum Global, a property investment company, whose financial models predict that co-living will substantially outperform conventional rented flats in future because the return per square foot is so high.
Ollie现有的两栋合居楼都比老橡树小——后者是全球同类建筑中最大的)。不过，这家美国企业很快就会在皇后区长岛市的一栋13层楼建筑里经营一家合居空间。这幢楼正在由房地产投资公司Quadrum Global建造。这家地产公司通过财务模型预测，由于每平方英尺的回报非常高，合居住宅的市场将大大超过传统的出租公寓。
WeWork, a private firm that is the world’s largest provider of shared workspaces and is valued at an estimated $20bn, has a residential arm, WeLive, that is running co-living units out of a leased building on Wall Street in Manhattan. It has joined forces with a property firm in Seattle called Martin Selig to construct a new 36-storey building, 23 floors of which will be dedicated to co-living.
WeWork是全球最大的共享办公室创业企业，估值约为200亿美元。该公司旗下的子公司WeLive在曼哈顿华尔街的一幢租赁大楼里运营合居公寓。它与西雅图的一家房地产公司马丁·塞利格(Martin Selig)合作，建造了一幢36层的新楼，其中有23层用来打造合居公寓。
The model will get tweaked as developers see what works and what doesn’t. Mr Merchant is using data gathered from Old Oak to refine The Collective’s new buildings. Rooms will be slightly larger, because the tiny square footage is one of the main reasons residents give for moving on. Sensors monitor use of the common spaces, and in the new complexes the kitchens will all be on one floor, rather than scattered around the building. Most of Old Oak’s shared spaces are in fact fairly empty; the liveliest area is the launderette, where residents mingle and watch TV as they wait for washing cycles.
开发商会审视哪种模式可行，并加以调整。雷扎•卖钱特(Reza Merchant)利用从老橡树收集到的数据来改进新的合居建筑。房间将会变得稍微大一些，因为住户会离开的一个主要原因是面积过小。在公共空间里会有传感器监测，而在新的住宅楼中，厨房将全部位于一层，而不是分散在大楼里。老橡树的大部分公用空间里实际上没什么人；最热闹的地方在自助洗衣间，住户在等待洗衣时会聚在一起看电视。
Maria Carvalho, a social-sciences academic at the London School of Economics, moved into the building because she wanted to live with other people, but did not want to have to find roommates. “I would call it a hipster commune, not a hippy commune,” she says. She particularly likes meeting friends walking home from the train station but says kitchen utensils often go missing. (With too many co-livers to be able to know everyone personally, CCTV is used in these areas as a guarantor of good conduct and cleanliness.)
伦敦经济学院(London School of Economics)的社会科学学者玛丽亚·卡瓦略(Maria Carvalho)搬来住的原因是她想和人住在一起，又不想找室友。她说:“我把它叫做潮人公社，而不是嬉皮士公社。”她特别喜欢那些从火车站步行回家的朋友，但她说厨房里用具经常不见。（鉴于合居人数数量之多，无法了解每个人的情况，在共享区域安装了监控摄像头，这能很好的保证住户的良好行为以及公寓的整洁。）
The Collective and other companies like it have a choice to make, says Roger Southam of Savills, a property firm. They could continue focusing on incoming workers to big cities, providing minimal private living space alongside attractive shared areas. But Mr Southam sees much more potential if co-living spaces can give residents slightly more private space, allowing them to attract people already living in cities. Starting from the smallest of rooms and working up may let co-living firms hit upon the perfect balance of shared and private space. Who, after all, doesn’t want a cinema in the basement?
在房地产公司工作戴维斯(Savills)的罗杰·索索姆(Roger Southam)表示，the Collective和其他公司都有机会。他们可以继续把注意力集中在大城市的外来务工人员身上，在极具吸引力的共享区域旁提供最低限度的私人生活空间。罗杰·索索姆(Roger Southam)认为，如果共同生活空间能给居民更多的私人空间，能够吸引更多城里人，那么合居住宅就更具潜力了。从最小的房间开始，向上发展，最终做到共享空间和私人空间的完美平衡。毕竟，谁不想在地下室拥有自己的私人影院呢?
编译：石婷婷
审校：李颖
编辑：翻吧君
来源：经济学人