Space is the place

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on company towns and hybrid spaces.

Last month, the New York Post reported that the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has been quietly buying homes in Greenville, North Carolina, for himself, his family, and affiliated employees. So far, he has purchased five separate homes on the same street, centered around a cul-de-sac. This could be an entirely personal decision to keep his entourage close to home (Donaldson grew up in Greenville). Or perhaps he wanted to flex his generosity by offering housing for those who work for him. But it wouldn’t be beyond Donaldson, who has parlayed his YouTube fame into an lucrative e-commerce business and MrBeast Burger, an expansive ghost kitchen franchise with over 300 “locations,” to develop what would essentially be a company town, a corporate-owned residential community in the vein of Walt Disney’s Celebration, Florida.

A number of company towns were developed in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a means to provide housing and local services for workers. Back then, it was common for laborers in industries like coal mining, lumber, or railroad construction to move their families to underpopulated regions for proximity to work. Most mining towns, as a result, consisted primarily of industry employees or their families. Some corporations took this one step further: They purchased surrounding property and opened up schools, churches, and businesses, such that workers had no choice but to spend their income on company-owned goods and services. Company towns were a means to perpetuate workers’ economic interdependence.

The modern equivalent of a company town, built by Disney or MrBeast or Amazon, would look and function differently from its industrial predecessors. (Silicon Valley campuses once functioned like micro-towns, offering free meals, workout classes, and other pre-Covid perks.) However, the underlying premise is quite similar. It sets up housing, or real estate, as a branded commodity, one that people can buy into or earn through their labor.

This concept might seem a little far-fetched from the realities of most white-collar American workers, who have stubbornly (and successfully) evaded the return to in-office work. The pandemic expedited the demise of the traditional office, leading company executives to seek out virtual office spaces or construct virtual headquarters for remote employees. The commercial real estate market has yet to recover from Covid-era hybrid work, and office vacancy in New York is still at a record high. In major US cities, occupancy has yet to surpass 50 percent. Remote work is the future, but that doesn’t mean it has to only take place online.

During lockdown, recreational and retail spaces also seemed to be heading towards the virtual. In 2021, when the concept of the metaverse was still shiny and new, bullish investors began snapping up parcels of digital real estate, in what the New York Times described as “a virtual land boom.” This was, of course, all highly speculative. Their investment logic was guided by the mistaken belief that if people were going to spend most—if not all—of their time online, their physical surroundings would soon become an afterthought. This turned out to be a dire overestimation. The viability of a 24/7 metaverse was conflated with the popularity of Fortnite and Roblox without any of the entertainment value. People still want to be somewhere comfortable, aesthetic, soothing, or stimulating—even if they’re tethered to their devices while experiencing it.

The “next hot real estate market” won’t be entirely virtual. Whether spaces are oriented around work, recreation, or retail, the future will be hybrid, featuring digital elements that are grounded in some real-world experience. Physical space—and consequently real estate—has remained essential, even though our social interactions, retail purchases, and work are increasingly performed or mediated online. New hybrid workplaces, for example, are being designed with comfort and collaboration in mind—a place “where people want to come versus where they have to come,” one HR executive told TIME—with comfy couches and long shared tables, rather than sectioned-off cubicles and harsh fluorescent lighting.

This led me to think of a recent conversation I had with Somewhere Good CEO Naj Austin. We discussed the post-pandemic development of in-person third spaces and how these venues are often constructed around consumerism and community, two increasingly overlapping phenomena that fuse together aspects of work and play. Think: a coffee shop you can go to work during the day and see a comedy show at night. In Covid’s aftermath, I noticed that local Brooklyn-based businesses (Public Records, Elsewhere, Ostudio) have begun to reinvent themselves to function as omnichannel retail, multi-purpose venues.

This is not exclusive to just brick-and-mortar storefronts, but also online brands, including Web3 social collectives like Friends With Benefits, which hosts an annual three-day festival, and LinksDAO, which bought a golf course in northern Scotland. Once, it was necessary for businesses to have a digital presence. The same can now be said for having a flagship location or, at the very least, temporary space for in-person gatherings.

In the realm of retail, there’s the return of experiential shopping and branded pop-ups, among direct-to-consumer brands like Glossier, which opened four new US stores last year, and older retailers like J.Crew, which opened a concept store for its men’s collection. In March 2023, A24 bought Greenwich Village’s Cherry Lane Theater, following a move from Audible, which stages work at Minetta Lane Theater, and Netflix, which has a long-term lease with storied theaters in NY and LA. When community becomes a marketing tool, companies have to find spaces to accommodate customers or, even better, host interactive “activations” or “installations” to further sell them on a product, service, or lifestyle.

Take it one step further, and we’re back to housing, which is, after all, the apex of lifestyle. Last year, disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised $350 million to build out Flow, a series of branded apartment complexes across Miami, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, and Nashville. Neumann’s idea is basically a dorm-style version of Living+, a fictional planned residential project in Succession, which was likened to “[bringing] the cruise-ship experience to dry land.” The Walt Disney Co. has a similar project in development called Storyliving, consisting of residential communities with wellness programming, club membership, entertainment, and cooking classes. Jimmy Buffett has a Margaritaville-branded “active living community,” geared towards people ages 55 and older, with three outposts in the South. And just yesterday, Cabin launched a “network city of globally-distributed properties for remote workers.” These branded living communities are company towns for the modern consumer.

It’s not just the virtual and physical realms that are colliding. The boundaries between home, work, shop, and play are blurring, too. With real estate, a famously non-fungible asset, it’s all about location—and getting in as early as you can. What if your landlord was a brand or an influencer? What’s the difference anyway?

RELATED READING

• Companies are finally designing offices for the new work reality (Time)

• Why office buildings are still in trouble (NYT)

• Disney developing ‘storyliving’ towns for Californians who want to live surrounded by Disney (LA Times)

• The next hot housing market is in the metaverse (NYT)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Buzzfeed’s new AI offering is a “kitchen assistant” called Botatouille. (NYT)

• Novelist Brandon Taylor on morality in fiction and Succession’s gray morality. (Substack)

  • “Evil is something that exists in-universe in Billions whereas it does not really exist in Succession except the evil we import into it out of our own moral frameworks. We have to supply the evil to Succession in a way we simply don’t with Billions.”

• On buying uncommon perfume and weird scents that “evoked not just sex and death, but obscenity, wastage, injury, [and] ruin.” (Black Lipstick, Substack)

• Me, reading the Curbed article on affording NYC: Damn bitch, you live like this?

  • My favorite observation: “Two parents we spoke to spend $75 a month just on strawberries and blueberries.”

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