SAN DIEGO – The name says it all. UnCommons is a 40-acre Las Vegas project being built by San Diego-based Matter Real Estate Group that uses what the firm calls human-centered design based on research by neuroscientists and social workers in its development.
“We focus on a sense of belonging,” said Jim Stuart, a partner in Matter Real Estate Group, headquartered in Sorrento Valley.
“Everything is organized in this very intimate environment that brings proximity which accentuates humanity,” Stuart said. “You don’t feel like you’re crossing this vast cavern of buildings and parking lots.”
In the works since 2019, UnCommons has cost about $575 million so far, and the final cost of the project could be about $850 million, Stuart said.
“That is the value at full build-out, including another 455 apartments and another office building that we have yet to build,” Stuart said.
Matter Real Estate is in the process of refinancing the project, which Stuart expects to conclude by the end of the year.
With Gensler as the architect and Burke Construction as the general contractor, the UnCommons campus has 342,000 square feet of office space, 66,508 square feet of rental housing and retail businesses.
In an indication of the project’s success, nearly all of the office space that’s been completed has been leased, much of it to brand-name companies such as Deloitte and Morgan Stanley, and the retail portion of the development is 85% leased.
Everything about UnCommons is meant to be a little bit different.
“You’re not going to find Starbucks. You’re going to find a Blue Bottle café,” Stuart said.
A Need for Social Connections
As UnCommons was being planned, Stuart said that he was dismayed by the lack of social engagement that he’s seen as people rely on social media rather than face-to-face interaction, so he set out to remedy that.
“With that mission at hand, you just have to ask the next question, which we did, and that question is, ‘What does the built environment do to contribute to a set of solutions?’” Stuart said.
To find out, Matter Real Estate hired neuroscientists and social workers, among others, and ran six months of workshop with recent college graduates, human resource experts and people with Internet startup companies to learn what people expected from their workplaces and where they live.
“People are seeking, if not outright demanding, that the places they work address their need for inspiration, their need for social connections, their need for community,” Stuart said.
Unlike the Baby Boomers that followed a linear path in their careers from their first job and first home to retirement, Stuart said that the workshops showed that those who came of age subsequently follow a less predictable path with different aspirations.
Job security can be elusive for them, and many have been priced out of home ownership.
“What they don’t want is to go back to a soulless building in the middle of a parking lot with dim lights and old desks and eat last night’s leftovers and commute back home and wake up and do it all over again,” Stuart said. “We are no longer putting up buildings. We are now building workplace communities.”
With that in mind, Stuart said that UnCommons is meant to be a place people come to in their off-hours, on weekends and after work.