Ancedotal, but my intuition is that dorm life is much easier, though that may be inherent to college. It's extremely frustrating to know that few will give you any of their time to form friendships, no matter the effort you try.
Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
I'm sure dorms are great if all you want to do is party all the time. However given that people working at Foxconn/Amazon are probably working 8-16 hours every day, I'm doubtful that they'd really be in a partying mood after working that long.
Hence, when everyone is finished working their shift and just wants to sleep, and you don't, it's a bit hard to be social without pissing off people around you.
> Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
You're talking about old warehouses which have been converted into trendy apartments. This is gentrification. No one actually wants to live in a functional warehouse.
I was recently in South Korea and was surprised to see that there were a lot of large apartment buildings around Seoul which appeared to be employee dormitories from previous decades (1980s I believe). Some even still said Samsung and LG on the side.
However, I don't think this concept would work in Western society. The cultures between Asia and the West are very different. It's common for several generations to live in the same house in China/Japan/Korea, but this isn't the case in the West.
I agree it would make sense to build dormitories, from a transportation and economic perspective it makes perfect sense. Economies of scale.
But people in the West don't want to move to live near the factory/warehouse. They want to have a social life, and dorm life really doesn't facilitate having a social life.