If you can afford the airfare, it’s getting easier to be a digital nomad. Roam, a new network of co-living spaces, offers a lease that lets you continually move: After a couple of weeks or months in Madrid, you can head to Miami, or Ubud, Bali. By 2017, the startup plans to have 8-10 locations around the world.
These aren’t designed as places for vacations. Instead, it’s an alternative way to think about home for “location-independent” people who can work remotely. After living and working nomadically in his twenties, founder Bruno Haid wanted to make it easier.
“Just managing my stuff and going back and forth between Airbnbs and housesitting became more cumbersome over time,” Haid says. “At the same time, I was involved in a couple of early co-living communities in San Francisco, and saw the cultural value of something like that.”
By combining co-living with nomadism, Haid hoped to help alleviate the loneliness of showing up in a new city and culture, knowing no one. Residents each have their own private bedroom and bathroom, but they also have access to a coworking space and shared communal areas. The point is to meet as many people as possible.
“If you go from location to location, it always takes a couple of weeks to feel at home,” he says. “That’s something that we want to make sure is done in a very short time frame. You can literally show up in Bali and you live with people who have been there for a long time, means you have everything you need to navigate the local community, to know what’s where, what can I connect to.”
Though it’s possible to book for a week ($500, no matter where you are, or $1800 for a month), the startup prefers that people stay longer, believing that community is something that most people lack in city life now. Like other co-living experiments, they also believe that it’s possible to design better living space if parts of it are shared: instead of cramped, crappy kitchenettes in multiple studio apartments, for example, the same money can be pooled to make a chef-quality communal kitchen.
The company is trying to bring more than the usual globe-trotting crowd of developers or designers. Some of the first residents included a playwright, a women’s rights activist working on issues in the Middle East, and the founder of Berlin’s first co-working space. It’s also meant for people of all ages.