A World Without Co-Working Spaces

As non-essential businesses shut due to the coronavirus pandemic, co-working spaces and the writers who use them find themselves with limited options.

By Steven T. Wright

Seasoned work-from-home warriors know well that finding a workspace outside of your tiny apartment is key to maintaining your sanity, whether that’s your local coffee shop, a library, or a dedicated co-working space where you pay for membership — anywhere you can be around other people. But as the ongoing coronavirus crisis has pushed us out of public spaces and back into our cramped homes, the co-working industry is struggling to figure out how to adapt to the impossibility of physical business, not to mention the unclear, sometimes contradictory responses of local and federal governments.

“Before this, I never would’ve thought that I had to make these kinds of decisions,” says Adam Segal, the CEO of Cove, a co-working company with locations in D.C. and Boston. “The hardest part for us as a business has been trying to weed through guidance from the government, or lack thereof, to make decisions in real time. We’ve been placed in an environment where we have to make decisions that I don’t feel equipped to make.”

Segal says that Cove started to track the spread of the coronavirus as a serious threat more than a month ago. They made the tough decision to close in mid-March, back when only a handful of US cities had begun to shutter non-essential businesses. At first, Cove referred to this temporary closure of its locations as a “redesign,” an opportunity to reorient their spaces to make them compliant with social distancing. According to Segal, they were prepared to reopen on March 19, with special measures like desk-distancing and limited seats to protect against the spread of the virus. But a day or two before then, D.C.’s local government released new retail guidelines that forced them to close in the short-term, at least until April 27.

While Segal says that Cove will struggle over the next few weeks — and possibly longer than that, depending on how the situation develops — he feels that these concerns will ripple out to affect all retail businesses that rely on foot traffic. He also notes that the industry was already due for a correction after the very public IPO failure of WeWork and the glut of competitors that the co-working startup’s overvaluation inspired to enter the market. “Now that the market’s flooded, it’s a race to the bottom, and a lot of businesses can’t exist like that,” Segal says. “This crisis is going to expedite that.”

As a service that markets itself as more of a local, neighborhood space — rather than the sprawling glass-and-steel downtown locations of a WeWork, for example — Segal says that Cove is particularly affected by COVID-19. In order to meet its members where they are, Cove has introduced a new product called “Cove @ Home,” which provides a virtual community and tips for setting up a home workspace, as well as perks like coffee and snacks delivered to your home. While Segal says he’s proud of his company’s response to the crisis, he emphasizes the incredible level of uncertainty surrounding the current situation. “There’s definitely a future for co-working spaces; I just think a lot is going to happen between now and that future. We don’t know who’s going to come out of the other side of this.”

Non-traditional co-working companies are also feeling the squeeze. Deskpass is a tech company that offers a monthly membership to more than 500 spaces across 20 cities, primarily in suburbs and smaller urban areas. Last week, the company published a blog post that showed a direct correlation between the declining number of visitors to its spaces with the reported cases of COVID-19 per capita. (Seattle was the hardest-hit city at that point, with an 85% drop in customers over that past week.) For Deskpass co-founder Sam Rosen, the numbers are a stark reminder that the situation might get worse before it gets better.

“From our perspective, because we have an active, ongoing support and billing relationship with many of these co-working spaces, we’re in a unique position to see how they’re responding to COVID, what their short-term and medium-term plans are,” Rosen says. “We’re seeing some places in less-hit areas stay open, though many are closing outright…In my own co-working space in Oak Park, IL, they were planning to stay open to the dozen-or-so paying members who are there most days, but we just got a shelter-in-place order, so they have to close. Some are even using their spaces as staging centers to distribute information or food.”

Since each of these organizations is independent from Deskpass, each of them is in, as Rosen puts it, a different “specific, precarious situation.” Though Rosen has no illusions about the challenges that these spaces will face in the upcoming weeks and months, he also feels that there’s a tremendous opportunity for growth. He believes that the idea of the office as the central place of work is already ebbing away, since half of Deskpass’s customers work remotely for large companies.

“Two weeks ago, most companies in the world didn’t have a remote work policy,” he says. “Two weeks from now, every company of the world is going to have one, and some of the fears that they have around productivity, maintaining their business, they will be assuaged. If schools are going to be out until August, there might be a time when parents have to go back to work, but the kids are at home. A co-working space is a quick, obvious half-step. When we reintroduce the idea of the office, employees are going to want a flexible work policy, and that’s an opportunity for us.”

While Segal, the Cove CEO, agrees that this crisis will accelerate existing trends towards remote work, he’s less optimistic about the near-term. “Yes, the home is going to be central. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t have put our locations next to where people live,” he says. “Businesses will learn to love working from home because it cuts the bottom line. You don’t need a co-working space to be productive, after all: you need a place to see other people. We are hurtling towards the future of work, but I don’t know who the winners of that will be. Especially now.”

As co-working spaces close for at least the next few weeks due to local ordinances, remote and freelance workers who rely on them are looking elsewhere, but most popular alternatives are also shuttered. Public buildings like libraries were among the first to close their doors in many communities, and coffee shops and cafes have been closed by government orders. A week or two ago, a few of my freelance colleagues briefly considered purchasing cheap hotel rooms in order to work in their lobbies. (Many hotels have closed in the intervening days.) In Minneapolis, where I live, the libraries have been able to provide online services during their usual hours, but it’s still not ideal for those who use the library as a public space. I’m priced out of my local co-working spaces, and I often work in the stacks of a local library when I need to stretch my legs.

It’s a sobering reality that weighs heavily on those who help run these public institutions. “We see ourselves as community meeting spaces, in that space is freely available,” says Ali Turner, the division manager for Hennepin County Libraries. “It’s one of the last free spaces where you don’t have to buy anything or believe anything to be in our space. We see that as the cornerstone of our service model. We are eager to reopen, but the county makes that decision.”

In the short-term, for the sake of public health, everyone must learn to work from home the best we can, adapting to a world in which freelancing still exists but co-working doesn’t. Some will have it easier than others. For those of us who cohabitate in tiny apartments — like my girlfriend and I — it can be a struggle. I’ve already had to brave the Minnesota cold and take my laptop out to the tiny park a few blocks away in order to give her space when she gives a virtual presentation in one of her classes or an oral argument to one of her professors. It’s not ideal, but I’ve already gotten used to huddling on the park bench, making sure every stranger stays at least six feet from me.

It feels a bit dystopian, sure. But, as Segal says, you don’t always need a co-working space to be productive. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery, and that can be free — even if it is quite chilly.

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