Behind 1037 Dean Street, three oak trees now shade a backyard full of laptops. They were planted by hand, one at a time, after the site's founder personally hauled out 140 cubic yards of trash left behind by the auto parts store and junkyard that once occupied the building. This month, that backyard turns twelve years old, and so does the coworking company built around it.
Work Heights opened its first location on Dean Street in 2014, back when the building's most recent tenant was a junkyard and its earlier life, going back to the 1940s, was as a dancehall. Founder Sam Strauss-Malcolm named that original space MACHINE. Twelve years later, the company has grown to seven locations across Brooklyn, and it did all of it without outside investment, according to the company's own anniversary announcement this week. For anyone who works out of a laptop bag in Crown Heights, that detail matters more than it sounds like it should.
Two Locations, Not One
If you live in Crown Heights and have gone looking for a place to work that isn't your kitchen table, you've probably found Work Heights twice without realizing it's the same company. MACHINE sits at 1037 Dean Street. ELECTRIC, the newer of the two, sits at 650 Franklin Avenue. Both are walkable from the parkways that give this neighborhood its shape, and both put you within reach of the 2, 3, 4, 5, and C trains.
They are not interchangeable, though. MACHINE has the backyard with the oak trees, and it's one of only three Work Heights locations with a podcast booth. ELECTRIC is the one location in the entire network without an outdoor space. If you want to take a call under trees, you know which address to walk to. If you want dedicated indoor focus without the garden, that's the other one.
Membership covers both, along with the other five locations spread across Williamsburg, Boerum Hill, Bed-Stuy, Prospect Heights, and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. That single-membership structure is part of why the company describes itself less as a coworking chain and more as a network built one neighborhood at a time. A member based near Dean Street can pick up a desk in Williamsburg the same afternoon a client meeting pulls them across the borough, without opening a second account or paying a second bill.
Why Twelve Years Is the Actual Headline
Coworking has not had an easy decade. WeWork, once valued at roughly $47 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2023 after years of capital-heavy expansion, and it emerged in June 2024 with a portfolio a fraction of its former size. That collapse became the story most people know about flexible office space: raise enormous sums, expand faster than the leases can support, then contract hard when the math stops working.
Work Heights took the opposite path for the same twelve years. Instead of raising money to open locations ahead of demand, the company added them one at a time, funding each new space with the ones already running. MACHINE came first in 2014. ELECTRIC followed in Crown Heights later. SONIC opened in Bed-Stuy, in a building whose basement once served as a recording studio for reggae and gospel artists, a history the current podcast booth there quietly preserves. GRANDER, the newest, opened in Williamsburg in 2025.
That slower approach is now playing out against a Brooklyn market that is still very much expanding. The borough had approximately 90 coworking locations in early 2026, according to CoworkingCafe data cited in the company's anniversary release, accounting for about 4.4 percent of Brooklyn's total leasable office inventory. Brooklyn's coworking footprint grew roughly 7 percent year over year even as the national market added more than 1,000 new locations in 2025 alone. New operators keep arriving too. Mindspace expanded its Williamsburg presence, and Jay Suites entered the borough in late 2025. Work Heights is entering its thirteenth year in that same crowded field, still running on the model it started with.
"Our growth has been steady, neighborhood by neighborhood, and shaped by the people who actually use the spaces," Strauss-Malcolm said in the anniversary announcement.
What the Twelve Years Actually Bought
The amenity list at MACHINE and ELECTRIC reads like most coworking spaces on paper. Both offer 24/7 access, dedicated desks, hot desks, conference rooms, kitchens with La Colombe coffee, free black-and-white printing, and dog-friendly floors. All seven Work Heights locations run on Herman Miller furniture, a detail the company points to when comparing itself to larger corporate operators built around bulk enterprise contracts rather than individual members.
Where the two Crown Heights locations diverge is in the smaller, harder-to-fake details. The backyard at MACHINE isn't a marketing photo. It's the direct result of one person clearing a junkyard by hand and choosing to plant three specific trees instead of paving the lot into extra desk space. That kind of decision doesn't show up on a spec sheet, and it's the reason members describe the space less like an office product and more like a neighborhood fixture that happens to have WiFi.
If you want to see either space before committing to anything, tours run by appointment Monday through Saturday, late morning through early afternoon, through Work Heights' own site.
The Bigger Pattern
Twelve years is not a headline number the way a funding round or a new-store count would be. But in an industry where the biggest name just spent three years in bankruptcy proceedings and reemerged smaller, staying open for twelve years on your own terms, in the same two buildings you started with plus a slow, self-funded expansion, is the more interesting story. It says something about how work actually happens in Crown Heights: less through disruption, more through people showing up in the same backyard for over a decade, under trees somebody planted on purpose.
If Work Heights' twelve years say anything about this stretch of Brooklyn, it's that staying power here tends to come from getting embedded in a specific block, not from scaling past it. That's the same read we bring to the homes and buildings we work with across Crown Heights, where the properties that hold their value longest are usually the ones someone cared for in specific, hands-on ways over many years, not the ones that expanded fastest.
If you're weighing a move in Crown Heights, whether that's a first purchase, a sale, or figuring out what a brownstone or condo here is actually worth in today's market, the Dima Lysius Team knows this neighborhood block by block. Contact us when you're ready to talk specifics.
