My interest in “coworking” was piqued by a presentation Chris Messina and Raven Zachary gave in Dallas at the first local Barcamp (January 2006.) It sounded sorta’ dreamy: a place, a community, a petri dish for people and ideas to flourish in a way they don’t when you’re working from home, a café, or a low-rise office with drop ceilings. I was familiar with incubators like StarTech in Richardson and various executive suites, but this was different.
Surely, many of us in attendance at that presentation thought: Dallas must have this coworking! In subsequent weeks, quite a few people added their names to the coworking wiki expressing their interest. Dallas is a big city, and naturally people live all over the place; which became challenge number one: agreeing on a central location. Challenge number two, and more important to me, was finding the right kind of area. Coworking spaces that I’ve seen do well are typically located in an urban area with easy (read: walkable) access to cafés, pubs, and local eateries. The buildings housing successful coworking spaces also tend to have some character, i.e., they’re not sterile office buildings like the corporate prisons where many of us have worked at one time on another. (Hats off to the younger ones among us who are skipping the ‘working for the man’ phase and bravely jumping straight into entrepreneurial pursuits!)
To jump ahead (about 2 yrs 9 mths!), in mid-October a buddy, Dave Copps, called to say that he was considering a new office space for his company, PureDiscovery, and asked if I knew anyone else needing space…hrmm. My first question was “WHERE?” because not just any place was going to work for what I had in mind 
Luckily Dave’s response was “well, a friend is considering buying a 100-year-old house in Uptown” - BINGO! :D
The Home of CoHabitat Coworking
My mind was off to the races; considering the possibilities as I explained the tenets of coworking and rattled off some examples like Conjunctured (Austin), IndyHall (Philly), CitizenSpace (SF) and CarolineCollective (Houston.) Dave saw the potential and shared some information with the real estate guys. After the first property under consideration (right off the Katy Trail) we had toured with few a dozen friends fell through, we quickly settled on another, equally-old and quirky house, on the opposite end of Routh St. in the State-Thomas area.
Knowing we needed our entrepreneurial friends and the larger local community to rally behind the idea, we quickly settled on a name, “CoHabitat,” to represent the vision going forward. I setup the requisite twitter account and Facebook page and starting spreading the word with folks who I expected would support the idea.
In my next post about CoHabitat, I’ll write about what’s happened in the last 5 weeks or so since we starting moving in on top of the previous owners and tenants
A special thanks goes out to those who were first to support CoHabitat and have given their time and support to move things forward (not to mention moving furniture): Christopher St. John, Stormy Shippy, Andy Chen, Andres Fabris, Nikhil Nilakantan, Jacob Morse (logo), Adam Strickland, Steven Ray (website), Marvin Molina and Joseph Manes (Ikea assembly).
Follow us on twitter for regular updates and check out our Facebook Page too. I’ll update this post when the website is up.
