WePark, A New Twist On Co-Working Space

Victor Pontis, an entrepreneurial web developer has decided that due to the high costs of renting an office space in San Fransico, that it would be a great idea to turn parking spots into coworking spaces. He initially got the idea after seeing a bike carrier that has the capacity for an entire eight bikes in one spot. So similar to the popular WeWork office spaces, this unique co-working space will be called WePark. This parking space office will be fully set up with chairs, desks and will only cost whatever the parking meter would generally charge anyone who chooses to park their car in that very spot.

Victor Pontis is a 26-year-old app developer in San Francisco when he saw a funny conversation on Twitter about setting up a workspace in a parking spot. He’d been giving a lot of thought to the huge amounts of parking spots given to cars in the extremely expensive city. So he decided to put the idea into action. Pontis brought a folding desk and a chair to an empty parking space at 16th and Market street. He paid his work-space rent (the meter cost $2.75 per hour) and posted photos of himself on social media. WePark is a radical rethinking of city space that has spread from San Francisco to Bristol, Los Angeles, and Portland. “If we were designing cities from scratch, would we choose to create the car-centric, parking-dominated spaces we have now?” asks Victor Pontis, the organizer of WePark. “Probably not.”

It was tried out at first as an experimental prototype and was received in a variety of ways. Many people saw it as a frustrating reminder of how incredibly high the prices are in the area. Others were angry about the fact that it would be taking up spaces that should be used for cars to park and other purposes that serve the community as a whole – such as cafes, more apartments for living, and even bike lanes or just simply bigger sidewalks. Nonetheless, many freelancers around the world are drawn into the idea of this new kind of co-working space. Perhaps this will be a new thing.