The Detroit Co-Working Landscape in 2024: Analysis and experiences from my journey as a small business owner

Coworking space has been a big part of my professional life since 2007. Yes, I have been working remotely in flex spaces for nearly 20 years! In this post I’ll give a brief overview of my connection to these spaces, and an update on current options in the City of Detroit. Market evolution has occurred and is important to call out, so I will compare my first analysis in 2019, to the current state as 2024 comes to a close.

For 17 years I have worked, collaborated, cross-pollinated ideas, built friendships, and enjoyed space with other professionals. I have found tremendous value being in close proximity to other entrepreneurs, whether they are running start-ups or small established businesses. Sharing space, ideas, learning, and all the good food is a critical component of human evolution. Since isolation often yields loneliness and depression, I have always sought out purposeful engagement with strangers in my work. This supports work-life balance and positive mental health outcomes versus running everything from my home office. Granted, I have a nice home office that comes with a loving partner, cats, my own food and drink, etc., but sharing space with others outside the home invites Serendipity to visit your life more often- and that, for me, is a good thing!

Back in 2007, I supported Ann Arbor SPARK opening their Ypsilanti business incubator and co-working space. I was the business manager for a small systems integration and software development company. We had well outgrown our office space and I was happy to team up with a larger organization. SPARK was launching a new location, and I supported their search with the promise of a right-fit high-tech anchor tenant lease. While I evolved out of that employment relationship, they remain the anchor tenant to this day.

In 2016, I (finally) relocated from Ypsilanti to Detroit. Commuting from Ypsi to Detroit never made much sense to me, as I had wanted to live in Motown since the early 1990s, and regular commuting on I-94 is bad math for a long life. The cost of living in Detroit is complicated and nonsensical, and so is finding a move-in-ready townhome. Once those challenges were worked out, I set up my home office and quickly found myself with a co-working membership at Ponyride, which was a few minutes from my home in Southwest Detroit. Ponyride was a special space, full of artisan makers, small nonprofits, and start-ups. Ponyride was raw, and represented the freedom of an unwound Detroit, where moderately resourced folks could make things up as they went due to lack of well-functioning systems, enforcement, and an unspoken code- if you were doing good things and flying under the radar, there would not be a lot of questions until there was a problem. While this creates a range of health and safety challenges, no one to my knowledge was harmed in the making of the Ponyride story.

By 2019, Ford announced their purchase & renovation plans for Michigan Central Station. Ponyride’s health and safety issues were wearing on me, and the owners cashed out on the sale of their maker building as real estate speculators are prone to do when the time is right.

Now I had a research opportunity!

It took a couple of hours and the use of a common web search engine, but I built a list of available co-working spaces, with a few helpful data points. Here is what I found in 2019:

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Price was the easiest to compare across sites and amenities. Parking was a must as I’m often moving from place to place in a way not convenient for biking or available transit options.

Green Garage was the lowest priced membership, and is situated in a very walkable space in the Cass Corridor (Midtown). While their price was best at face value, I quickly found out they had a cult-like vetting process for new members that included a mandatory pre-commitment orientation meeting (awkward), and advertised prices could shift considerably after considering the carbon footprint of the potential tenant in their space. All of this was a bit much for my taste and I moved on to other options.

Hunt Street Station was just opening in 2019, and had an attractive list of amenities, but I was not enamored with inner-city highway commutes from my home. WeWork was also new, but cult-like in an awkward corporate way, and was quickly ruled out. I made my way through the list of spaces weighing the cost/pros/cons/commute/parking/amenities/etc.

Bamboo hit the nail on the head. They had the aesthetic, amenities, and location I was looking for. Importantly, they also had a high concentration of creative and decent humans. I already knew several tenants, and got to know a lot more over time. Culture is important, and Bamboo had it with the bonus expectation of expansion to Royal Oak, and eventually Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids. Good stuff and off I went to sign a membership lease.

I started in the co-working space, but discovered the high ceilings, while visually impressive, allowed my voice to carry across dozens of work stations. This was not great for private conversations with clients, or the constant drumbeat of Zoom meetings that fill my calendar. The team worked with me to move into a private office at a rate that made sense for my small company, and 4 out of the 5 years we were not in a government mandated lockdown, Bamboo was my home away from home.

After spending 5 years at Bamboo, I received a reasonable request for a rent increase. The timing of this request coincided with internal reflections on budget priorities, and it was time for something new. I let my lease expire in November 2024, and now I’m back at my home office, hopping from coffee shops and restaurants getting work done. For the next few months I am testing a co-working arrangement near my new-to-me home in Grandmont Rosedale and thinking again on where is the right home for my business.

Based on the same ubiquitous search engine’s mapping feature, I visited the available websites of all the spaces that were associated with a “co-working” listing in Detroit. It appears that only one of the 8 spaces I looked at in 2019 no longer exists, and there are 7 new vendors available within the City of Detroit. In other words, the functional co-working vendor community has doubled. Good news for those seeking diverse options!

Yes- there are more spaces outside of the city, but those are not of interest to me unless they are available as remote locations included with my new membership.

Here is the updated list as of December 2024:

In this search round, I added some additional criteria: (a) is there a virtual office (mailbox) membership, (b) what Detroit neighborhoods the facilities are located in, and (c) if there is access to multiple locations with the membership.

In the pricing columns, I was interested to see the spread of high and low prices across the organizations. The prices detailed here are assumed on a monthly basis, but may be charged annually, and were the lowest listed cost on the site for each membership type. If the organization lacks market transparency and does not publish pricing, this is noted with an asterisk. Thankfully, there are enough options available in the marketplace today that it seems odd to invest a lot of time inviting sales pitches by submitting internet forms and making phone calls to do simple price discovery. As with all things real estate, caveat emptor, and everything can become negotiable. It is worth noting that there are a range of value-added services that will quickly increase these prices, and each provider should be contacted directly once you narrow on what is important for you and your team.

When averaged across all organizations, the cost of memberships for the four co-working categories in Detroit are as follows:

• Virtual (mailbox) membership- $56 per month,
• Co-working in any open seat- $136 per month,
• Dedicated desk where you can keep your stuff and not have to haul around monitors and your preferred accessories- $293 per month,
• Private office where you can close the door and hang up maps and concert posters on the walls- $625 per month.

Comparing these average monthly costs between 2019 and 2024, was a fun exercise. Co-working space monthly costs have fallen by 3%. It makes sense that this has become a more competitive landscape with new properties. I infer that some of these organizations utilize this as a loss-leader to get folks in the door on their way to more profitable memberships. The Planet Fitness business model is another reasonable assumption to make, where you want lots of passive income from folks that don’t cancel under-utilized memberships.

Looking at dedicated desk space- the average cost was flat. Here I can see the market for dedicated desks to be niche. The dedicated desk offers little, if any privacy, but spares the inconvenience of carrying a bunch of stuff around. If privacy is not important, then this is a pretty cost effective option for most solo-entrepreneurs. In my experience, such an arrangement also makes sense for a distributed team where co-working access is helpful for drop-in work around in-person meetings.

Where concerns private offices, I have noticed high anecdotal demand in casual conversations. If you need privacy, as I often do with consulting and real estate clients, then this is where you find price growth over the last 5 years. There are a lot of neighbors out there that don’t have the luxury of home office space, or if they do, distractions and isolation just are not conducive to productivity. Published prices for this category are up 34% in the last 5 years, despite doubling the number of co-working operators in the market.

For whatever reason, I did not capture virtual membership data in 2019, so I could not compare those price points- this service is readily available, regardless. Each co-working operator offers a few perks with this affordable level of membership that can be more useful than simply paying less for a post office box.

As we move toward 2025, I have a range of investments to consider for my business including where it will live and how that decision becomes an investment in my community. In an ideal world, I would collaborate with one or more neighborhood nonprofits and Detroit’s economic developers to build a commercial corridor study on top of the city’s strategic neighborhood framework from 2018. I have a strong hunch that my neighbors want higher and better uses of our commercial corridor, which includes a lot of vacant buildings.

Once I know more about the mish-mash of 3000 square foot mid-century cinder block buildings near my home, it may make sense to buy one to serve as space for my wide range of business interests and community engagement. I could see a co-working component with that space, or maybe I serve as an anchor tenant for an economic development organization as I once did in Ypsilanti.

Whatever happens, it makes sense to share this co-working data and story in case it can benefit a neighbor, a collaborator, or friends in Detroit. Happy co-working to you!

If you have made it this far, then thank you for reading! If you would like me to do short pieces like this in 2025, then please send me some feedback on what you liked, what could be improved, and what topics you would like me to think on and write about in the future.

Cheers!

About the author: David Palmer Palmer is a multi-disciplinary strategist, facilitator, convenor, Associate Broker and Realtor based in Detroit, Michigan. He has over 30 years of management and research experience, and earned a Master of Public Administration degree from Eastern Michigan University. He is focused on the areas where workforce and economic development, real estate, and nonprofits intersect to lift up normal humans with improved policy and program outcomes. Palmer’s research and publications can be found at www.kiteandkeypartners.com.

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