Next-gen workspaces emphasize sharing

Finished work studios with reliable heat and hot water cost anywhere from about $600 to more than $1,000 a month in the Providence area. But if that space is shared, individual tenants each pay a fraction of that price.
A group of entrepreneurs, artists, real-estate professionals and economic-development officials is working to make such commercial spaces in the capital city affordable to more people through a new model of the shared workspace – a concept already in use in cities around the world.
Co-working environments are loosely defined as work spaces in which entrepreneurs, freelancers and other professionals without a formal affiliation share work space, resources and infrastructure, said Jack Templin, co-founder of Providence Geeks and a technology industry consultant to the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
Co-work spaces are often rented on a month-to-month basis and range in cost depending on the amount of time a person plans to use the space. In some cases, a professional in a co-work environment will pay less than $200 a month to spend a few hours a week at a desk shared by other people, Templin said.
“People are questioning a lot of different dimensions, from where should the space be, to how long should space be [leased for], to what should be shared, to ‘Do I have dedicated space or not?’ to ‘Who do I really want to be working next to?’ ” he said. “I think it plays really well here. We’ve got a large free-agent population. We’ve got a large creative and professional population. We’ve got a civic, community-minded culture that likes interaction and cross-pollination.”
A London-based company that is developing co-work environments around the world agrees Providence is a natural for the concept. The company, called The Hub, wants to break into the U.S. market and has the city on its list, said Sally Struever, a founder of PUENTE, the nonprofit real estate and economic development organization that developed The Plant in Providence’s Valley neighborhood.
And several local owners of commercial real estate say they are interested in renting space to a co-work model.
On Dec. 6, about 100 people attended a panel discussion that Templin moderated at the EDC’s headquarters at American Locomotive Works in Providence on the development of non-traditional co-work spaces.
Struever said she’s in discussions with The Hub, which is building a global network of co-work spaces to be paired with a virtual networking platform similar to Facebook.
The Hub is a three-year-old business that operates a co-work space in London. It recently started or is in the process of starting several others around the world, including in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Berlin and Johannesburg, South Africa, Struever said.
“We’re definitely looking at Providence as a potential market (for a co-work project), probably in relation to some other cities and hubs along the Amtrak corridor, like New York and Boston,” she said.
The trick is to create a co-work model that supports itself and is not reliant on public subsidies, grant funding or financial gifts, said Greg Gibson a co-founder of BetaHouse, a co-working space in Cambridge, Mass. for people working in the IT and digital media industries.
At BetaHouse, in Cambridge, rents range from $400 a month for full-timers to $200 a month for part-time people who want to come occasionally, Gibson said.
“If you can satisfy the needs of the artistic community, (and) the startup-business community, with also an eye toward, ‘How can this be a profitable model for real-estate developers?’ then I think you have the recipe to actually make it happen,” Gibson said. “You know, a lot of people sometimes try to do these things without an eye toward business realities, and I think that’s a mistake.”
Several real-estate owners in the city have said they are interested in leasing space to a co-work model, Templin said, including Gary Brandeis, managing director of Philadelphia-based FB Capital, which recently purchased the landmark Federal Reserve building in downtown Providence and plans to develop it into the first of a series of high-tech “iBuildings” to be rolled out nationally.
“I suspect there will be co-working solutions across different sectors,” Templin said. “You know, some might be very specific – like Betahouse – to Web people, some might just be more like creative professionals … I also think there will be different locations, and that’s probably closely tied to different price points, and levels of funky versus professional.” •