By the time he’s halfway up a climbing wall, Emerson Boyd is thinking only about which colorful nub might best carry his weight. For a few minutes, he’s beyond the reach of incoming emails — a freedom that’s hard to come by in the middle of a workday.
“Everyone here is doing their own thing, but they’re all working toward some goal that they have,” said the 29-year-old software developer, who co-works from First Ascent in the Loop. “The variety is good.”
Boyd is part of a growing contradiction in Chicago, a city that simultaneously boasts the nation’s second-largest co-working market and some of the highest office vacancy rates in the country. The disparity suggests workers might be looking for something more than a quiet cubicle.
Industry experts say Chicagoans are setting up laptops in spaces that double as climbing gyms and dog parks, trading subsidized parking for culinary classes and on-site podcast studios. Many still need a place to work, but the appeal of the conventional office has soured alongside the work-from-home routine they didn’t ask for.
“What people want in an office building has changed,” said Sean Boyd, who manages Avison Young’s market intelligence team. “But the need and desire for space, while different, is not gone.”
His work at Avison Young, a commercial real estate firm that tracks office markets, puts numbers to shifts in where Americans want to work. On one side are traditional offices, on the other alternative spaces that promise structure without a boss breathing over your shoulder.
Convention kept offices in the lead until the 2010s, when companies like WeWork and Regus won workers over with butcher-block desks and weekly happy hours. Then, offices fought back with breakout pods and coffee bars, a strategy that seemed foolproof until the pandemic leveled the playing field.
The tug-of-war continued in recent years, with co-working written off as little more than a temporary pandemic stopgap. But six years have passed since lockdown. Offices are open again. And masses of Chicagoans are still paying hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a year to work in spaces that look less traditional than ever.
“Co-working is where it’s going to be at,” said Deena Zimmerman, principal broker at Baum Realty Group. “It’s a really fun trend to watch and be a part of.”
After nearly two decades in the industry, Zimmerman said co-working first landed on her radar around 2022, when tenants began approaching her with plans to open spaces of their own. One was Pup Social in Bucktown, which billed itself as co-working for dog lovers.
She figured she’d bring her French bulldog, Millie, along for a day, expecting little more than a fun outing. Now, Zimmerman says Pup Social is the only place she works.
Long days of emails and meetings are broken up by watching Millie romp with other dogs. Occasionally, Zimmerman gets her hair blown out at Pup Social’s human beauty salon, not to be confused with the grooming area where her puppy gets pampered.
“I rarely go to the office,” said Zimmerman, 52, who lives in the West Loop. “Now that I’ve seen what I see, it’s almost like I can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.”
‘Movement snacks’
As more than 30% of Chicago’s office space sits empty, foot traffic at buildings still in use remains roughly one-third below pre-pandemic levels, Boyd said. Meanwhile, the city added around 2 million square feet of co-working space last year, expanding a footprint that now spans nearly 350 locations, according to CoworkingCafe, which tracks flexible workspaces nationwide.
Larger national brands with traditional designs control a significant portion of that urban inventory, but data shows legacy chains aren’t the ones driving Chicago’s co-working expansion. New operators entering the market accounted for 40 of the 64 co-working locations that opened in the city last year, the highest such count nationwide and evidence of growing appetite for the unconventional.
“People really enjoy the fact that they can close their laptop and go climb,” said Dan Bartz, co-founder of First Ascent. “We’ve seen more utilization than ever of our co-working areas.”
Bartz said the idea started as a joke, an April Fool’s Day social media post poking fun at what seemed, in 2017, like a preposterous concept: a co-working climbing space. But comments of support poured in, and Bartz began spreading dozens of desks across the company’s network of Chicago climbing gyms.
Co-working has since become a centerpiece of the business, said Bartz, who adds more seats each year. Members break up the workday with what he calls “movement snacks,” quick climbing sessions that often spark friendships with others who have made the gym their office.
“We learned pretty quickly that members really want to be able to creatively integrate their life into this place,” said Bartz. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to create.”
Its success runs counter to the struggles of co-working’s biggest names, from WeWork’s infamous 2019 collapse and eventual bankruptcy to Industrious laying off roughly 20% of its workforce a year later. Both have since clawed their way back, but their models look markedly different from a growing crop of co-working spaces organized around interests that have little to do with the work itself.
“For a really long time, we talked about work-life balance like work is on one side and your life is on the other,” said Daniella Briseno Cornue, founder and owner of Le Village. “I think we realized during COVID that that was a myth.”
With on-site childcare, Le Village offers members a focused co-working space while their young children play and learn in supervised classrooms steps away. Parents can check in throughout the day, and a dedicated lunch break brings families back together to eat.
It’s the kind of setup Briseno Cornue needed herself in 2018, when, as a hybrid worker with a newborn, she struggled to find daycare that would allow her to breastfeed during the workday.
Ultimately, she quit her job and created it herself.
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She opened the first Le Village, an open-concept space in Irving Park, in 2019. A second followed in 2023, then four more. Today, all six locations operate at near-full membership capacity, according to Briseno Cornue, with three more in the works.
“We can’t cut ourselves in two, so we’ve started to create some unique ways to fill the gap,” said the 39-year-old Albany Park resident. “Work environments that are built around a different balance, I think, are going to be the future.”
‘Saunas and cold plunge pools’
Two years after her company shuttered its Chicago satellite office, Kelly Miller knew working from her one-bedroom apartment was taking a toll. She felt relegated to overstaying her welcome in noisy coffee shops and ending days without having spoken a word aloud.
Then a friend invited her to BIÂN, a luxury co-working club in River North.
“It was unbelievable,” said Miller, a 31-year-old marketing director who lives in Lincoln Park. “I remember leaving there and being like, ‘OK, I really need to find a space of my own.’”
Within hours of opening her laptop that day, Miller said she felt more focused and productive than she had in months. The sushi bar and on-site massage therapists didn’t hurt, either.
The experience BIÂN sells, at $4,400 a year plus a $1,000 initiation fee, is one employers across Chicago are trying to replicate as they look for new ways to lure workers back to the office. It’s why saunas and cold plunge pools have become standard fare in premium office buildings, why developments like The Bell on Randolph Street come with pickleball courts and a Formula 1 simulator.
“I tried it one time, and it’s pretty advanced,” said Alex Woods, a market intelligence analyst at Avison Young who tested the simulator himself. “There’s a race to have the best amenities.”
But amenities can only go so far, said architect Elyse Agnello, who has spent the past few years helping companies make their offices more collaborative. Agnello said shiny perks can’t compete with spaces that give workers more control over where and how they spend their day.
Technology has evolved faster than workplace conventions, said Agnello, who founded Chicago design firm DAAM in 2016. Many employers remain wedded to what she considers the increasingly outdated premise that workers need to sit in an assigned spot and stare at an assigned screen.
That, she said, is where traditional offices fall short.
“During the pandemic, for better or for worse, people’s eyes were open to how work could get done differently,” said Agnello. “Now, less rigor and more topography and fluidity just feel better.”
So, when Agnello and her two business partners opened Guild Row in Avondale, flexibility was central to their vision. The plan was to create a membership-based social club built around creative workshops and events, not another place to work.
Members turned it into one anyway, Agnello said, finding the community they wanted and bringing their jobs along with them. The Chicago Reader named Guild Row the city’s best co-working space for three consecutive years, a distinction Agnello attributes partly to the fact that it was never designed to function like an office.
That means using furniture of varying heights to carve out distinct spaces within each room, giving members freedom to take meetings from picnic tables and patinated couches. She carefully tucked a beige printer and microwave beneath hanging plants and relegated the dozen members who pay extra for dedicated desks to a loft, keeping their computer monitors out of sight.
She’s fielded her fair share of complaints about the lack of enclosed pods for private calls and the abundant natural light that can cast glare on computer screens. But Agnello said those inconveniences are the cost of creating a place people actually want to spend time in, even if members occasionally have to rotate out of the sun.
“People will tell you what they think they want,” she said, “but they’re totally willing to trade off having glare for having natural light every time.”
The defining feature of highly specialized co-working spaces, however, goes beyond baskets of free snacks or tufted upholstery straight out of Jay Gatsby’s living room. Many members say the draw is a sense of belonging that forms naturally around a shared interest.
At Pup Social, Zimmerman says she easily connects with people whose professions she often knows little about. It doesn’t matter that her makeshift colleagues don’t share her employer, or that they might not even know what she does for a living. What feels special, she said, is that they didn’t find each other simply because someone else put them in the same room.
“When you get around a group of people that are that likeminded, it’s just really fun,” she said. “It’s much more inviting than going to an office, and my office would kill me for saying that, but it’s the truth.”
But that degree of specialization can carry trade-offs, said Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist and professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Fine, who spent his career studying how small groups develop their own cultures and relationships, said communities built around shared interests risk becoming too insular.
Treating such a space as an alternative to a traditional office could deprive workers of the different perspectives that are critical to personal and professional growth, he said. The strongest groups have not only emotional connection but a shared purpose, and Fine isn’t convinced the latter comes naturally in a co-working space.
“To be successful is not just to have a whole bunch of good players, but to work together with a common goal and a sense of identity,” he said. “Both are important in terms of getting things done.”
The work question
Most who work from specialized co-working spaces agree that they make the workday more enjoyable. What’s less clear, experts say, is how they affect the work itself.
“I’ve never seen any research on co-working spaces,” said Yana Gallen, a labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago who studies remote work.
Michael Gibbs, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who studies remote and hybrid work, came up empty, too.
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“I cannot think of a single academic study looking at co-working,” he said.
Gibbs is among the many academics who turned their attention to remote work as the pandemic pushed it into the mainstream. Since 2020, a growing body of research has examined its effects on everything from individual well-being to collaboration and productivity.
Co-working may provide a level of social interaction that improves on working in isolation, Gibbs said, but research on its effects remains sparse. In the meantime, experts say it more closely resembles working from home than working from an office, and may carry many of the same drawbacks.
“You don’t learn about office politics,” said Gibbs. “You don’t get to meet senior people who might either be your mentors or who may consider you when it’s promotion time.”
Research has linked working in the office with higher productivity and promotion rates, Gibbs said, with every watercooler conversation offering another chance to exchange ideas and build camaraderie. Those professional benefits, in his view, are reason enough for workers with access to an office to spend at least some of their time there.
For many Chicagoans, though, returning to the office is less a choice than a mandate, with employers like Amazon and JPMorgan Chase last year requiring employees to return full time. Co-working operators say they’ve watched those policies ripple through their own spaces, bringing tears and frustration to members forced to leave.
“It’s absolutely devastating,” said Briseno Cornue.
Briseno Cornue said a number of members have canceled their Le Village memberships after being required to return to the office. More striking, she said, is that some ultimately quit those jobs and find new ones that allow them to return to co-working.
Zimmerman has an office of her own at Baum Realty, where dog-friendly policies mean Millie is always welcome. But why confine her to a bed in the corner when she could spend the day running around with other dogs?
It’s the way a space differs from the office that can make co-working so special, mused Vanessa Ruiz as she spent a recent morning working from a bar stool at Guild Row. She and her wife have spent hundreds of workdays there since 2020, when pandemic-induced loneliness drove them to join.
What followed were lifelong friendships, forged over dumpling classes and live music in the courtyard. Guild Row is where Ruiz threw her wife’s 50th birthday party and where the couple looked forward to bringing their son as soon as he was born.
“It’s brought all these different aspects of life together,” said Ruiz, 43. “It’s not just a co-working space.”