By Futurist Thomas Frey
The emerging model of affordable living as a service — and why solving the housing problem may also solve the relevance problem
A Conversation That Made Me Revise My Thinking
I recently came across a company exploring what they called “affordable living as a service.” The phrase itself is worth sitting with for a moment, because it reframes something we have always treated as a fixed cost — shelter — as something that could be delivered, bundled, optimized, and priced the way we now think about software, transportation, or entertainment.
The concept is still forming at the edges. But the problem it is responding to is not. The American housing crisis is one of the most consequential and most underappreciated barriers to human potential operating in this country right now — and the standard toolkit for addressing it has largely failed. New approaches, even partially formed ones, deserve serious attention. Because what’s happening to American workers, families, and communities as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable is not just a real estate problem. It is a relevance problem. And it is worsening every year.
The Scale of What We’re Dealing With
The numbers are blunt and they deserve to be stated plainly. As of 2025, the United States faces a housing shortage estimated by Goldman Sachs and others at between 4 and 7 million units. Rents have risen more than 30 percent since 2017. Home prices are up 60 percent nationwide since 2019. As of mid-2025, the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s Housing Ownership Affordability Monitor shows that owning a median-priced home now consumes nearly 48 percent of the median household’s income — a level that has hovered in the punishing 40 to 50 percent range for two consecutive years. The income needed to buy a single-family home has doubled since 2019.
The rental market offers no relief. Fifty percent of all American renters — more than 22 million households — are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. More than 12 million households are severely cost-burdened, spending more than 50 percent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition documents a shortage of 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for the country’s lowest-income renters. The stock of units renting below $1,000 per month dropped more than 30 percent between 2013 and 2023 — from 24.8 million units to 17.2 million — even as overall supply nominally increased. Sun Belt cities that once provided an affordable escape valve for people priced out of coastal markets — Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Miami — are now approaching the supply constraints that previously defined New York and San Francisco. According to Brookings, this may be the first time in American history where the country lacks affordable housing markets with high job growth simultaneously.
In 2024, more than 770,000 people experienced homelessness — the highest number ever recorded, up 18 percent year over year. The causes are structural, not primarily behavioral, and the standard response — tax credits, public housing, zoning reform — moves too slowly and reaches too few to address what is fundamentally a systems problem operating at national scale.
How Housing Became a Relevance Trap
Here is the connection that most housing policy conversations miss, and the one that ties directly to everything I write about in The Relevance Gap. Housing cost isn’t just a financial burden. It is an opportunity cost that compounds over time and quietly determines who gets to invest in their own future and who doesn’t.
When a family is spending 45 percent of their income on rent, they are not investing that 45 percent in education, in skills development, in starting a business, in savings that could fund a career pivot, in the kind of deliberate self-reinvention that staying relevant in a changing economy requires. The money going to housing is not simply gone — it is actively preventing the investments that would allow them to build a more resilient future. Housing cost doesn’t just burden the present. It mortgages the future.
The geographic dimension adds another layer. One of the most consistent findings in labor economics is that place matters enormously for career trajectory — that access to the right job market, the right professional community, the right cluster of opportunity has an outsized effect on lifetime earnings and career resilience. But access to high-opportunity places is increasingly gatekept by housing costs that price out the very workers those places claim to need. A teacher, a nurse, a skilled tradesperson, a small business owner in San Francisco or New York or Seattle is priced not just out of owning a home but out of the city itself — forced into commutes of 90 minutes or more, or simply out of the region entirely, making the career investments that proximity to a thriving economy enables effectively unavailable.
And then there is mobility. The Relevance Stack I described in Column 2 of this series includes skill velocity as its second layer — the meta-capability to acquire new skills at the pace the environment demands. Skill velocity requires investment: in time, in attention, in the willingness to take risks. All three of those investments are harder to make when you are financially constrained, geographically locked, and spending the majority of your cognitive energy managing the anxiety of housing insecurity. Affordable housing is not just a welfare issue. It is an economic productivity issue, a workforce development issue, and a national competitiveness issue. It is also a relevance issue.
The “As a Service” Reframe
The concept of “living as a service” doesn’t start with housing policy. It starts with a different question: what if the unit of value in housing is not the physical asset — the unit, the building, the deed — but the outcome? What if you could deliver shelter, stability, community, and flexibility as a service, the way Netflix delivers entertainment or Spotify delivers music, unbundled from the enormous overhead of ownership, construction finance, and regulatory negotiation that makes traditional affordable housing so slow and so expensive to produce?
This is not a new idea in its most basic form. Co-living companies like Common, Ollie, and others pioneered furnished, service-included, month-to-month living for urban professionals years ago. Japan’s ADDress offers unlimited access to 200 properties nationwide for a single monthly fee. Selina built a global network of co-living and co-working spaces accessible through a subscription. The digital nomad economy has been running on subscription living infrastructure for a decade. What’s new — and genuinely interesting — is the application of this model to affordability rather than premium lifestyle. The innovation is not the service architecture. It’s the target market and the mission.
Affordable living as a service asks a different set of questions than affordable housing has traditionally asked. Instead of: how do we finance the construction of affordable units? it asks: how do we deliver stable, adequate, connected living at a cost that working people can actually afford, using existing assets, technology, and service design? Instead of: how do we build more supply? it asks: how do we make better use of what already exists — the millions of underutilized square feet in vacant office buildings, underoccupied hotels, aging strip malls, rural towns with excellent land costs and empty storefronts — and deliver living as an outcome rather than a commodity?
The Pew Charitable Trusts collaborated with the design firm Gensler in 2025 to examine the conversion of vacant office buildings in ten major U.S. cities into co-living microapartments. The analysis found that converting underutilized commercial space into furnished, service-included living environments is technically feasible in most major markets and potentially more cost-effective than new construction — particularly when the office conversion takes advantage of existing plumbing infrastructure, existing location value, and existing building systems. This is the infrastructure of affordable living as a service: not new buildings, but new purposes for existing ones. Not new supply, but new utilization of what is already there.
What the Bundle Actually Includes
The power of the service model lies not just in what it costs but in what it delivers. A truly effective affordable living as a service offering bundles several things that poor and working people currently have to purchase, negotiate, and manage separately — each with its own friction, cost, and cognitive overhead.
The most obvious is the physical space itself — furnished, maintained, utilities included, internet included. No security deposit that you have to save for months. No lease negotiation. No utility accounts to open and close. No furniture to acquire and move. These friction costs are small for affluent renters and enormous for low-income ones — not just in money but in time, stress, and cognitive bandwidth. The service model eliminates them with a single monthly fee.
The second element is flexibility. Month-to-month terms, or short-term terms with a simple, low-cost extension mechanism, give people the mobility that the traditional 12-month lease denies them. In a labor market that is increasingly rewarding people who can reposition themselves quickly — moving toward new opportunities, following the work, building skills in new environments — geographic flexibility is a career asset. The affordable living service model enables it. The traditional lease model prevents it.
The third element, less obvious but potentially most valuable, is community and connection. Isolation is one of the most underappreciated costs of poverty and housing insecurity — and one of the most corrosive to the kind of resilience and forward motion that building a better life requires. A thoughtfully designed living-as-a-service environment creates physical proximity between people who are trying to improve their situations — shared kitchens, shared workspaces, shared social infrastructure — that generates the weak-tie relationships, the peer accountability, and the serendipitous connections that are among the most powerful drivers of upward mobility. The sociology of co-living at its best is not about shared laundry. It is about shared humanity in a context designed to enable it.
And the fourth element — the one that takes this from housing to something more ambitious — is what gets stacked on top. The service model, because it delivers at scale through a single operational platform rather than thousands of independent landlord relationships, creates the infrastructure for delivering additional services to the same population at low marginal cost. Workforce training. Financial literacy. Healthcare navigation. Childcare coordination. Job placement. Skills development. The platform that delivers your housing can also deliver the wraparound supports that actually move the needle on economic mobility — at a cost structure that only works when you’ve already built the trust and the relationship through the housing service itself.
The Relevance Connection
I want to be direct about why this concept matters to everything The Relevance Gap is about.
The Relevance Gap is widening. The distance between people who are positioned to adapt to a changing economy and people who are being left behind is growing every year. Most of the conversation about that gap focuses on skills, on education, on technology adoption. What it rarely focuses on is the foundational question of whether people even have the stability and the resources to invest in their own relevance in the first place.
You cannot build skill velocity from inside a housing crisis. You cannot develop relationship capital when you are spending 90 minutes each way commuting from the only affordable neighborhood you can find. You cannot practice identity flexibility — the willingness to let go of who you’ve been and become who you need to be — when your financial situation is so precarious that any disruption to your current income is catastrophic. The Relevance Stack requires a floor. Affordable living as a service is an attempt to build that floor.
There is a deeper alignment here too. The subscription economy has, over the past two decades, disaggregated ownership from access across almost every consumer category. You do not need to own a car to have transportation. You do not need to own a film library to watch movies. You do not need to own music to listen to it. In every case, the shift from ownership to access lowered the upfront cost of entry, increased flexibility, and made the relevant experience available to more people at lower friction. The same logic, applied to housing, suggests that you should not need to own — or even lease on traditional terms — a physical dwelling in order to have stable, adequate, well-located shelter. Access to good living should not require the kind of capital accumulation that is increasingly available only to the already-wealthy. It should be a service, delivered well, at a price that working people can afford.
The Honest Challenges
The concept is inspiring. The execution is hard, and the path from inspiring concept to scaled reality is littered with the well-intentioned failures of previous affordable housing innovations.
The unit economics are genuinely difficult. Delivering a high-quality living experience at a price affordable to low and moderate-income households requires either very low land costs, very high operational efficiency, significant subsidy, or some combination of all three. The co-living companies that have attempted to build at scale — WeWork’s WeLive, Common, others — have found the economics challenging even at premium price points. Translating the model to affordability requires either a breakthrough in cost structure or a creative integration of public subsidy in a political environment that is currently moving in the opposite direction.
The regulatory environment is hostile in many jurisdictions. Zoning laws that prohibit co-living configurations, minimum square footage requirements that predate any consideration of shared amenities as a substitute for private space, and single-family zoning that covers most residential land in most American cities all create structural barriers that cannot be solved by service design alone. Goldman Sachs estimated that relaxing land use restrictions to match the least-restrictive quartile of cities would produce 2.5 million additional housing units over ten years — which would close about two-thirds of the estimated shortage. The policy lever is enormous. The political will to pull it is limited.
And there is a dignity dimension that any serious affordable living model must grapple with. Affordable housing has a long and painful history of delivering adequate shelter in ways that signal to residents that they are a problem to be managed rather than people to be served. The service model must earn trust it historically has not been given — through design quality, resident voice in governance, genuine community investment, and the consistent demonstration that “affordable” does not mean diminished.
Why It Matters Anyway
The problems are real. The concept is still forming. And the need is urgent enough that imperfect progress matters more than waiting for perfect solutions.
What excites me about the affordable living as a service framing is not the technology or the business model. It is the underlying philosophy. It starts from the premise that every person deserves a stable, adequate, dignified place to live — not as a reward for having already achieved economic success, but as a precondition for pursuing it. It treats housing not as a commodity allocated by market forces to those who can outcompete for it, but as infrastructure — like roads, like schools, like broadband — whose wide availability makes the whole economy function better and makes individual human flourishing more possible.
We have built an economy that is extraordinarily good at rewarding people who can invest in their own development, move fluidly toward opportunity, and navigate change with resources and stability at their back. We have built a housing system that increasingly denies the foundation for all of that to the people who most need it. Affordable living as a service is a small, early attempt to close that gap. It will not solve the housing crisis alone. It will not solve the Relevance Gap alone. But the insight at the center of it — that access to a stable, adequate, affordable place to live is not a luxury, but a platform — is one of the most important ideas in circulation right now. Every serious conversation about the future of human potential needs to start there.
The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies — The definitive annual report on American housing affordability, cost burden, and the structural forces driving the crisis
Converting Obsolete Offices to Co-Living Apartments Could Help Ease the Housing Shortage
Pew Charitable Trusts / Gensler — The feasibility study on repurposing vacant commercial space as co-living microapartments across 10 U.S. cities
The Outlook for U.S. Housing Supply and Affordability
Goldman Sachs — Why 3 to 4 million additional units are needed, what land use reform could unlock, and what stands in the way
