Tech Bro of the Week: The VC-Funded 'Co-Living Experience' That Used to Be a Trailer Park
They removed 34 affordable housing units and replaced them with 34 luxury tiny homes with a communal kombucha tap.
"It's not a trailer park. It's a curated micro-community for people who think roughing it means shared Wi-Fi."
All characters in Tech Bro of the Week are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or evicting, is purely coincidental.
Tanner Breckinridge-Hayes has a vision. Unfortunately, that vision required displacing thirty-four families from a trailer park off East Riverside.
The park, which had operated since 1978, was home to line cooks, nursing assistants, musicians, and a retired welder named Carl who once saw Willie Nelson buying cigarettes at the gas station next door. It is now "The Commons at Riverside" — a VC-funded co-living community featuring tiny homes that start at $1,800/month, a communal kombucha tap, and a resident "vibe curator" named Sage.
"It's not a trailer park," Tanner corrected us, adjusting his Allbirds on the reclaimed-wood deck of the model unit. "It's a curated micro-community for people who think roughing it means shared Wi-Fi."
Tanner raised $7 million in Series A funding. The pitch deck described the project as "reimagining affordable housing through design-forward density." At no point did the phrase "affordable housing" mean housing that is affordable. This is a distinction Tanner calls "semantic."
What $1,800/month gets you at The Commons:
- A 280-square-foot unit with a "flex loft" (a plywood platform you sleep on), a two-burner cooktop, and a window that faces another unit's window approximately four feet away. Tanner calls this "community adjacency."
- Access to the "Shared Haus," a common area with a pool table, a cold brew station, and a Google Calendar for the single outdoor grill. The grill is booked through March.
- A "Residents App" where you can request quiet hours, report vibe disturbances, and vote on the monthly theme. Last month's theme was "Intentional Stillness." Carl the welder would have had a word for that, but this is a family publication.
The old trailer park residents were given sixty days' notice and a $500 relocation stipend. Several ended up in Pflugerville. One ended up in Lockhart. Carl, we're told, moved in with his daughter in San Marcos and still talks about the Willie Nelson thing.
Tanner does not know any of their names.
The waitlist for The Commons currently has 200 people on it, most of whom work remotely for companies based in San Francisco and describe their aesthetic as "minimal but intentional." The Instagram page has 8,000 followers and features photos of young professionals doing yoga on their decks at sunrise, which is approximately the same time the old residents used to leave for work.
When we asked Tanner how this was different from gentrification, he said, "We're not gentrifying. We're activating." We wrote that down because we wanted to remember it the next time someone asks us why Austin doesn't feel like Austin anymore. It sits nicely next to the South Congress condo situation in our growing file of things that keep us up at night.
The Commons has a mural on the entrance wall. It says "HOME IS WHERE YOUR HEART IS." It was painted over the spot where someone had written Carl's phone number in case of emergencies.
We drove home past what used to be Rainey Street. We did not stop. There was nowhere to park.
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