When Adam Neumann was studying at New York’s Baruch College 20 years ago, he pitched an idea he called “concept living” to its start-up competition: a communal twist on apartment rentals that sounded like a student dorm for urban professionals.

His professor quickly dismissed it, telling him that no entrepreneur could raise enough money to change how people live. Neumann dropped out to launch a few other start-ups (which also fizzled) before founding what he dubbed another kind of physical social network: WeWork, the co-working business whose rise and fall was to become a byword for start-up hubris.

Neumann’s company, which brought beer, pinball and flexibility to the humdrum business of office leases, raised so much money that by 2016 he was able to revive his original idea. Its WeLive business, he said, would offer monthly rentals in apartment buildings with pool tables and communal kitchens to a generation that was increasingly priced out of America’s big cities.