Campus CEO Tom Currier has just announced that his fast-growing housing startup will be dissolving, putting in jeopardy its upwards of 150 San Francisco and New York City residents from roughly 30 co-living houses.

Campus, which SFist examined in January, was something of a corporate co-op. Acting as a property management group while espousing the ethos and principles of co-living, Campus offered newly-renovated rooms on a monthly basis for roughly $1,000 to $2,200. It's unclear what owners will choose to do with their properties.

Houses in neighborhoods like the Mission received professional cleaning courtesy of Campus, and house events were hosted and managed by a team of Campus employees. Each location came with a hot-tub, and Campus "members" were granted access to wine country and Tahoe vacation homes.

"We very regretfully announce that Campus Coliving will cease operations on August 31, 2015," reads the note that now replaces Campus' website. Just hours ago, the site was full of promising images of cheery, pristine living spaces targeted at young, like-minded city newcomers, many of them in the tech industry. "Despite continued attempts to alter the company’s current business model and explore alternative ones, we were unable to make Campus into an economically viable business."

Currier's company grew out of his experiences co-living after he left his own campus, Stanford, with $100,000 but as yet no degree when he was selected as a Thiel Fellow.

In January, as campus was growing quickly and considering a name change to attract a wider audience, one resident, Jordan Bennett, glowed when asked to share her experience. "It's a little nerve racking to move to a new city," she explained, "so to come to San Francisco and have a community that was already set up made me feel more comfortable making the move, and I've met people that I would have never met otherwise."

Currier also used some of the above wording in a letter to Campus members who now face the difficult decision of how and where to move. Through an anonymous tip, SFist obtained the full break-up letter to residents, which is below.

Previously: On 'Campus': A College-Like Take On Commune Living For Millennials New To Town

Tom Currier, the 23-year-old CEO and co-founder of Campus, believes in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. With housing, safety, and even pots and pans provided for members of his unique co-houses, residents can focus on forming fulfilling friendships, mostly with people they've just met.

Campus is an investment-backed property management startup with 20 houses in the Bay Area and four in New York, all fully remodeled, furnished, and spacious, many of them with yards and hot tubs. Houses range from four to 24 residents, for whom almost everything is taken care of, including the little stuff like a full spice rack and a bottomless supply of olive oil.

That's in exchange for a small membership fee and rent somewhere between $1,000 to $2,200 per month for a sizable single or shared room. Conflict resolution, if necessary, is provided by Campus employees, and Campus membership currently comes with shared access to Tahoe and Napa vacation houses. Everyone's month-to-month, and everything from repairs to professional cleaning to toilet paper is provided by Campus employees so that residents, says Currier, can meet those higher level needs.

"In college, all your needs are met, and that's one of the happiest times in your life," he told me in a tony Tenderloin co-working space. But he doesn't think that experience needs to apply just on traditional college campuses, nor does that experience need to end there.

Currier himself left Stanford's physics program after his sophomore year when he earned a $100,000 Thiel fellowship. Eventually in East Palo Alto, where he worked on his first startup, Currier joined friends at Black Box Mansion, a community house for startup builders in Atherton. From that he drew inspiration for Campus, where he now lives in the eight-person Noe Valley Campus house.

But what would Currier, a 23-year-old landlord of sorts, be doing living among his flock of tenants? "We don't own the property," he clarified earlier for CMX, "That would become prohibitively expensive. We're much more like Airbnb, an interface and the organizing force behind the community living."

The matter of who the company caters and markets to, however, is spurring a current identity crisis of sorts at Campus. The company is mulling a name change in the coming months in order to avoid being pigeonholed as purely for recent grads. Currier says Campus is for anyone, though he admits after some pressing that perhaps couples with newborns might want to "own their own space." Naturally, he's particularly sensitive to any hint of age discrimination, which would be illegal.

Though Campus members have diverse interests, backgrounds, and even nationalities, right now they are predominantly recent college graduates between 22 and 24 who just moved to San Francisco. And since this is San Francisco in 2015, many of them work in tech, at large companies and small startups.

Given that, the vibe around Campus houses is one of both networking and new-friend-making, not unlike a dorm.

Jordan Bennett, who has lived in one of Campus' houses for three months, heard of the Campus community through a friend who was already a member. "It was so great," she told me. "It's a little nerve racking to move to a new city, so to come to San Francisco and have a community that was already set up made me feel more comfortable making the move, and I've met people that I would have never met otherwise."

Bennett lives in one of the smallest Campus houses on the hyper-desirable block of 18th Street between Mission and Valencia. "My roommates are all in different occupations, and it's been great to learn from them," she says. "We've created our own little family in the Mission, and Campus does a great job with Campus wide events, where you meet members from different houses." One of the most popular was a Dolores Park party thrown by the company with free burritos and dancing. Events like this, plus communal dinners and game nights, are all a part of the Campus lifestyle.

To learn more about the company, I decided to go through the campus application process myself. It's pretty thorough, with residents making their own decisions on on the basis of what Currier calls "personality fit." There's an initial video conference call, where in my case not one but two Thiel fellows were on the line. Then there are open houses with pizza and beer for current housemates to meet candidates in a friendly, speed-dating atmosphere.

Each house defines its culture in terms of shared goals and "Typical Conversation Topics," listed on the Campus website. "Sports, travel, entrepreneurship" for one, "business, startups, food and cooking, exercising, travel, and outdoors activities," at another, "film, music, culture, and design," at a third.

"The Lodge" via buildcampus.com

Currier claims that "even entrepreneurs don't always want to live with entrepreneurs." One member writes on a bio on Campus' website, "I love that even though we are all so different and have come from all over the world, we've somehow bonded quickly as a family under one roof."

Campus has critics, such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping project who call such living arrangements "digerati dorms." Long has it been feared that San Francisco might become a dormitory for tech workers, and some may see Campus as that nightmare come true. Currier has already made statements assuring critics that "There's absolutely no Ellis Act stuff going on here... We are only moving into large, single-family homes, never evicting anyone. It's in our best interest as well that we keep housing affordable for everyone in the city." That said, folks like Gabriel Medina, the Mission Economic Development Agency's Policy Manager, has concerns, pointing out that between 2000 and 2012, family households in the area fell from 42 percent to 28 percent.

Currier wants Campus to keep growing, with an eye on more houses in San Francisco and expansion to more cities — something that is likely to freak out everyone who is already freaking out about the rapidly changing housing landscape in SF. According to Dave Fontenot, a young Hackathon founder who dropped out of the University of Michigan and lives in the Campus house on Mission Street between 18th and 19th Streets, all of his friends already want to move to Campus. The company's rising popularity, of course, comes at a time when we hardly need to mention the housing crisis and the high price of one- and two-bedroom apartments. Living together, something that's probably always happened in San Francisco, has never made so much sense.

"I could see Campus being the majority of the housing in a city like San Francisco," Fontenot told me, "Tom has a radical vision, when I first met with him, that guy is like, even in his eyes, you can see he's on a mission to take over the world." I saw that, too, but is it the glint of a cult commune leader, or the glint of a Silicon Valley CEO?

Campus' Panhandle house: buildcampus.com

"San Francisco values" have always made room for unorthodox housing arrangements, from co-ops and communes to co-habitating enclaves of gay men and lesbians. Are recent examples like Campus, and the somewhat similar Embassy network, the next chapter in this housing evolution, the 2015 version of the Diggers and Cockettes and all the hippie communes of the '60s and '70s? Or is the appropriation of that communal-living legacy dramatically different in an era when young urban professionals dominate the city's culture and housing market?

Campus is essentially an extension of the modern college experience, which has become marked by dorm cushiness and food quality rankings. It's also a reflection of the tech-campus culture that many new transplants experience all day, where snacks and games come standard.

Campus feels far more professional and reputable than some other recent attempts at communal living in San Francisco. Take the disastrous Negev, which has allegedly, illegally converted a fire-damaged SRO into unlivable micro-units. Then there's Embassy SF, a chain of "intentional living communities" that's even taken over residence at the historic Red Vic in the Haight. And SF is now littered with dozens of other, smaller communities like in-the-know Mission boarding house and arts space The Sub.

You might argue that this is just one example of an entrepreneur creating model, using the existing housing stock at hand, for the type of "middle-income" affordable housing for which the Mayor and seemingly everyone else keep pushing. It's a compromise, sure, but even 22-year-olds aren't going to want to live with 20+ other people forever. And this gives them a foothold in the city where few others exist, until they can face the "adult" challenges of landlords and utility bills and fights with neighbors that don't get resolved by an RA.

At worst, concepts like Campus perpetuate the myopia of young San Francisco, solving an element of the housing crisis but, in typical fashion, only for itself. When they work, though, and when they don't displace longtime, lower income residents, these are essentially just the city's freshman dorms — a stepping stone before braving Craigslist all by one's lonesome. For that, there's obviously always going to be a market.

All previous coverage of modern communes on SFist.

Tony Palo Alto school of higher learning, Stanford University, has seen a sharp increase in reports of rape on campus. Incidents of sexual assault more than doubled from 10 in 2009 to 21 in 2010, at least according to school's 2011 Safety, Security & Fire Report. A reported 16 of the 2010 sexual assaults happened inside school dorms or residences.

Stanford Chief of Police Laura Wilson explained to Palo Alto Weekly that the rise in sexual assaults could be "due to greater reporting by victims rather than an actual increase in the number of assaults."

As reported by Inside Scoop, the post-collegiate neverland ranch in the Marina just got a little more self-effacing as the former Delaney's Bar on Chestnut Street suddenly becomes Campus. Scoop reports that the layout is the same, minus the bright green neon out front.

The new joint may not have the beer pong tables like Union Street's Frat Row, but after hearing multiple Marina residents refer to their rides home on the 30X as "going back to campus", we imagine there are plenty of newly transplanted co-eds around to make this place a success based on the name alone.

[InsideScoop]

Whether you're a pro-Obama gloater or you live in pro-Hillary Delegate Hub fantasyland, the next few weeks should be interesting. News about City College dedication after the jump.

Now that the bets are in (okay, so no one really cast any bets - how boring is that?), you can go to Cafe du Nord, tonight, to check out San Francisco's unsigned best at Live 105's "Top 5 Local Bands Contest." Tuesday, venture over to Great American Music Hall to catch San Francisco's own, Scissors for Lefty. (You'll want to purchase your tickets soon to their off-the-hook New Year's Party at BotH.) Oh, you'll also get to see Juliette and the Licks headline. (It looks like they like to perform sans clothes. Woot!)

Back in July, we briefly mentioned a "band-of-the-moment" named Vampire Weekend. They are back and this time they are headlining at The Independent. We listened to Mansford Roof (listen here) and we couldn't get over how catchy and quirky they are. We love them; their infectious bite style is called: "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", "Upper West Side Soweto", "Campus", and "Oxford Comma Riddim". We feel it safe to assume that the inside joke is for Columbia University's alumni only. Look for a full length album late January.

Friday we'll be hanging out at Live 105's "Not So Silent Night." Our attentions will be focused on the local band (who won Monday night's competition), Jimmy Eat World and Modest Mouse (two of our favorites). Saturday, quirky sock-loving violinist, Andrew Bird, from Chicago is back in town. We saw him earlier this year and was overwhelmed by the incredible process that Bird goes through to create his minimalist folk electronic-art music.

Don't forget Tori Amos' three-night stint over in Oakland at Paramount Theatre, Friday through Sunday.

Take the jump to see the full listings...

Campus tree residency news! At Cal, it turns out those people living in the trees to protest the UC's plan to cut them down themselves did significant damage to the trees in question by cutting off the tops of the trees to put in their sleeping platforms. Ah, the sweet smell of irony. Meanwhile, at rival Stanford, they've finally evicted a veteran who's been living in the tree grove off Palm Drive for almost 10 years. (Does anyone actually pay to live at Stanford anymore? Goodness.)

In San Mateo, they're investigating claims that a police deputy was busted in the act in a county courthoouse. The deputy was busted by a court reporter, who saw a pair of male buttocks dashing down a back hallway. No one would go on the record, except for a spokesperson for a judge on that floor, who said it definitely didn't happen in that judge's courtroom. People are wondering if the sheriff can really make a fair ruling on this, given that the sheriff was recently himself busted at a brothel in Las Vegas.

And maybe it's not your dryer after all. Two cats in Los Altos have brought home, one by one, seventeen odd socks over the last few weeks. After flyering their neighborhood ("Neighbor, are you losing socks?"), they've figured out someone has a bag of laundry in their driveway (though that person hasn't come by to reclaim the socks, and refused to comment to the newspaper when they called.) One of the cats' owners notes there's a bag of some other laundry in that neighbor's driveway too. "I just hope the cats don't bring home the underwear." Ah, it reminds us of the Beanie-baby stalking cat in the East Bay around Christmas of last year.

You're appearing in Apple stores to discuss how to use Macs in Film and Editing, what is the BEST thing about them?
WELL, THESE DAYS I JUST LIKE HOW SMALL AND SIMPLE EVERYTHING IS.

When and why did you start using Macs for your work? Would you consider yourself an Apple acolyte?
AFTER I TRADED IN MY COMMODORE 64, I UPGRADED TO A MAC. I STARTED IN THE FILM BUSINESS AS AN EDITOR AND I EDITED TRAILERS FOR HOLLYWOOD MOVIES SUCH AS STAR WARS: EPISODE 1 AND THE THIN RED LINE. SO I FIRST GOT STARTED ON AN AVID, WHICH RAN OFF OF A MAC COMPUTER. SO FOR ME IN THIS BUSINESS, MAC'S ARE ALL I HAVE EVER USED.

How do you decide which song to use with a particular scene in the film?
WELL THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES WHERE I HAVE LISTENED TO A RECORD AND A CERTAIN SONG JUST HAD A VERY CINEMATIC FEEL. SO I JUST SAVE THAT THOUGHT AND KNOW THAT AT SOME POINT A SCENE WILL COME ALONG THAT WILL FIT IT PERFECT. WHILE OTHER TIMES I HAVE A SCENE THAT NEEDS A SONG AND I JUST START GOING THROUGH CD'S AND RECORDS IN SEARCH OF THE RIGHT ONE. BUT I MUST SAY, I HAVE NO SET PROCESS, I JUST LOVE MUSIC AND AM ALWAYS WANTING TO LISTEN TO STUFF THAT IS NEW TO ME. SOME OF THAT JUST INSPIRES ME TO MAKE SOMETHING COOL AND SOME OF IT FITS PERFECTLY INTO A SCENE. LASTLY, I CALL A FRIEND AND HAVE HIM MAKE SOMETHING SPECIAL FOR A SCENE, WHICH IS ALWAYS MY FAVORITE ROUTE.

Any tips for aspiring surf film creators?
JUST GET OUT AND DO IT. THAT IS WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED ABOUT MAKING SURF FILMS, IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH.

Diablo Valley College was closed today after two bomb threats were called in to the campus on Monday. Then, this morning, bomb-sniffing dogs were seen on campus sniffing around "an area of interest." That sound you heard was hundreds of stoners exhaling as they discovered the dogs were looking for bongs, not bombs (hey, now there's an organization we could get behind).

The two threats were called in yesterday to both the Concord and Pleasant Hill police, warning them that a bomb was planted and would go off in a "few days." Campus is closed indefinitely until they can figure out how serious the threat was.

Hmmm...wonder if it's mid-terms there this week.