Intro

We’re building large, intergenerational co-housing communities in Mexico City. We have three properties, each averaging about 20 units, and a growing community of friends, families, and future-neighbors who want to live together in a way modern cities no longer make easy.

This is a field report on where we’re at, why we’re doing it, what we’re learning, what it reveals about the hidden constraints that make larger-scale shared housing so rare, and the lessons - and model - we’re developing to change that.

Welcome to CDMX

Mexico City hosts 23 million people, and sits 7,200 feet up in the mountains while also sinking every year, because it was built on a lake. At street level, you might walk past architecture that feels like a postcard from Europe, and then, a block later, an area shaped almost entirely by informal growth. It’s a wonderful, surreal, contradictory place that could be considered the top of the global south or the bottom of the global north, depending on who you ask or what kind of coffee you’re drinking.

It is also a city with a deep tradition of collective living. Vecindades (courtyard housing for working families) were once a common residential typology. Multigenerational households continue to inform everyday life. My wife grew up in a compound where seven houses belonged to her aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Her grandmother, the steward of the community and host of Sunday brunches for decades running, lived to 94. (The lesson I choose to take from that is that if, like her, you foster a strong community and drink tequila every day, you’ll live nearly forever).

Nevertheless the prevailing idea of success today in Mexico is the same one exported nearly everywhere: move up, move out, and don’t depend on anyone anymore. Most people who live collectively today do so out of necessity. And while family life is central, it is almost always organized around the nuclear family (i.e. not… super-nuclear).

New housing here is rarely designed to accommodate communities, subject to the same challenges that has made full-scale co-housing rare everywhere else: restrictive zoning, the complexities of communities, and development incentives that prioritize large standardized products. While money goes far here if it comes from the United States, for most of the city affordability is an entirely different equation, and land is extremely expensive.

So Mexico City is, at once, an ideal place to build community-oriented housing - and a very hard one.

How we got started

Our community started down this path over a conversation at a birthday party in late 2024. I’d been working in housing for years, compelled by the estimate that more than 90% of intentional communities that try to form fail. I was convinced it was worth trying anyway.

My wife is an architect, and we found a receptive audience in a group of friends who were asking the same questions about how they wanted to live. We knew the “path of least resistance” for living near friends was the incremental one: buy a duplex or a few homes near each other, and get 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. But we were personally and professionally fascinated by that remaining 20%, and in asking how a larger housing development, intentionally designed from the beginning with community in mind, could change how we lived.

So we reached out to various friends, and a growing group of us began meeting over brunch - mostly Mexican, some international, singles, couples, some of their kids, some of their parents, some interested in the urbanist/architectural aspects, some because they wanted to live in community.

We committed to meeting monthly, rotating who hosted the brunches. We set up a weekend trip to visit relevant communities in Mexico and workshop ideas. The meetings gave us a way to validate interest among people we loved and respected, and understand where interests overlapped. Slowly, some shared criteria began to emerge. We wanted to stay in the city, in a walkable neighborhood. We wanted kids growing up surrounded by other adults who knew their names. We wanted a scale that could unlock real possibilities: shared meals, extended family, friends passing through. We didn’t all want the same thing in the same proportions, but there was enough alignment to keep asking “what next?”

Our Model

Ultimately, many characteristics felt non-negotiable, but each desire had an implication. You can’t want everything without paying for it somewhere.

Land and money and making it real

It’s all academic until you have land. We focused on a few things to get from “brunch” to “under contract” (meaning you’ve secured the site with a deposit and exclusive path to purchase).

Process

We set up a very disciplined process. The first visit was in February 2025. Since then we’ve probably reviewed ~200 properties, visited ~40, built financial models for ~30, and made serious offers on a handful.

Found a developer partner

Trying to answer “can we build here?” is actually twenty different questions: setbacks, light wells, heritage constraints, allowable density, parking requirements, seismic requirements, water issues, title issues, neighbor issues, etc. You can answer all of those and still be left asking “am I doing this right, or am I about to risk absurd amounts of time and money on a misunderstanding?” We couldn’t have done this without deep experience in real estate development, least of all in Mexico City. So we prioritized finding a developer partner, and we courted the developer we most admired in the city, Rodrigo Rivero Borrell of Reurbano. He shared our vision of community-oriented development, and we convinced him to partner on the initial project, and eventually on more.

Started raising initial financing to secure land

One challenge of starting out in real estate is that you need a lot of money. The larger the project, the more money you’ll need. You need to start thinking about financing terms and sources early on, and you need to attract different types of financing (equity, debt, pre-sales where relevant, etc) at different intervals.

Initially, you need money to run due diligence on promising opportunities and move quickly to put down a deposit when something good appears (often 10% of the value of the land, but can vary widely). Most serious investors won’t engage until you have an actual site under contract and a credible plan attached to it, so friends and family often are the first check.

Once you have the land under contract, the conversation changes. You have very limited time in which to raise the rest of the money required by the project, so the groundwork for fundraising needs to have started much in advance. We created a mailing list to keep people updated every few months, attended courses, created a website, went to conferences like Edge Esmeralda and the Cohousing Association of America annual conference, and published in various places like the architectural journal Log (and now here!).

If you’re building something people genuinely want, momentum tends to compound. There’s so much unmet demand for better forms of housing that each step forward tends to pull more people into the orbit. More work creates more clarity. More clarity creates more trust. More trust brings more people, more introductions, more enthusiasm, and more capital.

Where we’re at now

We have a growing community (and welcoming more), with multiple sites under contract and development finance models that work for residents and investors. We’re currently in structural studies, design development, and early stages of governance modeling. These images show a snapshot of where it’s heading: intergenerational living, well designed apartments, community kitchens and dining areas, gardens for kids to play in, commercial spaces to welcome the neighborhood, and more.

Lessons

Again, the incremental version - buying a small property with a few friends - is the way to go for most people. For those who want more…

You’re a developer

Unless you have tons of money and can finance the entire project yourself, you are still doing real estate development: zoning, financing, design, contracts, permitting, construction management, legal structure, governance, sales/rental strategy. You either hire/partner with a developer, or become one, and probably, you’ll need to do both.

Participation is not free

Participation can slow decisions and burn emotional bandwidth, especially if it isn’t conditional on clearly defined commitment. But participation is also what turns housing into homes.

So do you wait until you have a fully committed community - i.e. people putting in a significant chunk of money to finance their share of the project - before moving forward? Do you finance the build first and hope a community forms around your vision? The answer depends on your goals and your appetite for risk.

People come to these projects for different reasons. Some want the process itself: collective exploration, shared decision-making, and co-design as the primary value. Others want the outcome: a building designed to facilitate community, without endless meetings. Both can be valid. They are not the same.

If you’re leading one of these efforts, among your most important strategic questions is arriving at what kind of participation you’re offering and what level of commitment you, personally, need to keep driving forward.

It’s a great moment if you want to go all-in on a big vision

Demand for community-oriented housing is growing. More developers are experimenting with new models. Many cities are creating clearer pathways for emerging developers. Organizations like the Cohousing Association of the United States offer resources and connections. AI dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of learning how to do this work, and of executing it. And, almost without exception, the people building these kinds of projects are remarkably generous with their knowledge and eager to share learnings and encouragement.

It’s a very heavy lift, and not for most, but there’s probably never been as much access to the information required to generate something like this, and a growing pool of capital willing to finance these unconventional projects.

What’s next

We are building a model to make this accessible without requiring every group to reinvent the wheel.

Most real estate development builds a project and, at best, hopes community forms afterward. We think that overlooks both the social and financial value of belonging. Community has to be designed, capitalized, and stewarded from the beginning. In practice, this involves three core ideas:

• Anchor communities

  • Small groups of existing friends and/or family (~20% of units) form the social core early. They bring trust and stewardship, seeding the culture and attracting others who will join later to something that already feels alive.

• Human-centered architecture

  • Without design that actively facilitates interaction, the potential for community is diminished. It’s like putting tea in cold water.

• Bounded participation

  • The high-risk parts of development can’t be crowdsourced. We focus participation on low-cost, high-leverage areas (like co-designing shared spaces) to create ownership without stalling the project.

We now have properties, a growing community, and a strong vision. But the real work is clearly still ahead.

Thanks Chris for sharing! You can follow his ongoing journey on the Familiar Spaces substack, and/or fill out the info form on the Familiar Spaces website.

The tension between creating a community space that is welcoming, generative, AND sustainable is one we love to explore. Jesse shares his journey with Highside: the special magic that comes from trusting people with nice things, and the reasons he eventually decided to shut it down. We see echoes of merlins place, another ‘third space’/living space in Brooklyn, and Clarendon, a house & community hub for nine years in Cambridge, MA.

Date founded: 2022

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Rented or owned: Rented

Amount of space: ~2500 sq ft multi-purpose warehouse with one bedroom

Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots

I sat down to write an essay about what I’ve learned from running a community space the last few years, and the imposter syndrome hit before I even typed the first letter. What do I know?? And who wants to take lessons from the guy whose space shut down?

But damn it, I have learned some things about community spaces! And here’s the first one, before I get into specifics:

JUST START.

You will never get it perfectly right the first time. There will never be the perfect space, or the perfect financial model, or the perfect moment. You have to be just crazy enough to believe that it’s gonna work out, jump into the deep end, and figure it out along the way.

But let’s back up.

What is a community space?

The purpose of a community space is to give people a place to gather, connect, and belong, usually centered around a particular set of activities, interests, and/or beliefs.

Homes, gardens, workshops, farms, and warehouses can all become community spaces…really, any space where people can gather regularly and that they can have some agency over will work!

It’s important to talk about what community spaces aren’t, too. They’re not profit-first businesses, which sounds obvious but is complicated in practice, since they do usually have to make money. This creates a tension between staying true to the space’s purpose (serving its community) and staying alive (making enough money to continue).

Who am I?

For the last few years, I built and ran a space in Brooklyn called Highside Workshop. It was a multipurpose space that hosted everything from concerts to art galleries to motorcycle repair workshops to tattoo popups. It was also my home.

When I got the warehouse that became Highside Workshop, I had no plan – I just knew I wanted to create a place for my creative and talented friends to come do their thing, no matter what that was. It took a while to get rolling, but eventually a friend of a friend (now one of my closest friends) suggested we throw a concert. To our complete surprise, lots of people showed up and had an absolute blast! From there, we were off to the races.

Skipping ahead: we had our final show last August, and Highside has since closed. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the past few years, trying to pinpoint where the magic of the place came from. Because there was some ineffable sense of magic there. In the wake of our last show, a truly shocking number of people told me things about their personal relationship to Highside that were almost hard for me to believe: that it was their favorite place on Earth, that they felt able to be themselves there in a way they couldn’t anywhere else, that they were having a hard time imagining finding another community where they felt so safe and welcome. That some of the best memories of their lives are there, that they unlocked new versions of themselves there, that Highside is where they learned that it’s ok to take chances and fail.

So I have to wonder: what made all that possible? There was no explicit structure to the community, no rules, hardly any regularly scheduled events, no group practices or rituals, nothing. I also wonder: how can I help make it more likely that there will be more spaces like Highside in the world? So that’s what the rest of this piece is about. What makes a community space thrive?

Community space philosophy

Trust

People aren’t used to being trusted. Most of us are used to others assuming that we’re not trustworthy, so we’re defensive by default. That’s why treating someone as if they are trustworthy before getting any proof of it is powerful: it throws them out of their default framing and gives them the opportunity to become the person you’re trusting them to be.

In practice, this means making the space vulnerable. It means giving people opportunities to hurt the space and trusting that they won’t. I didn’t move the expensive, delicate things out of sight during events at Highside. It was a gamble, but it paid off: people felt at home.

Of course, trusting by default means you occasionally get burned. People flake or don’t treat the space with respect. But I’d rather give people the opportunity to live up to my trust and sometimes be proven wrong, than assume the worst and occasionally be proven right.

Belonging

We wanted community members to feel like they’re welcome anytime, for any reason, regardless of whether or not there’s anything specific going on. Space for serendipitous gatherings causes people to meet who might not otherwise cross paths, and allows the community to grow its own ideas and uses for the space, unconstrained by the specifics of a particular event.

There’s a catch-22 here, though: the space needs to make money, but we want people to feel a sense of belonging that transcends any entry fee. There’s no perfect solution to that, but something that worked at Highside was going wayyyyy above and beyond in making sure that everyone who came to an event felt cared for, comfortable, and welcome.

For people who rented the space for an event, that meant talking through their needs in depth before the day of the event and making sure we supplied everything they needed on the day of. To make concert attendees feel cared for, we often charged less than we could have for tickets. We made our drinks with good alcohol and sold them at below-market prices. When we needed to hire event staff, we paid them more than we needed to. You get the idea: be present, be attentive, and give more of yourself than anyone would expect.

Once people feel like they are trusted and they belong, surprising things start to happen.

Agency

Many people have not had the experience of trying something difficult and uncertain and having it go well. Usually the biggest barrier standing in their way isn’t anything to do with their capability – it’s their beliefs about their own level of capability.

I saw this repeatedly at Highside: someone would talk about their interests (music, cooking, whatever) and hint at wanting to put on an event related to that interest, but as soon as I said “let’s do it!” they would backpedal out of fear it wouldn’t go well. But usually if we encouraged them, told them we wouldn’t care if it didn’t go perfectly, and offered to help with the logistics, they would try their hardest and the event would go better than they had imagined.

A community space with a collectively embodied sense of “yes we can” allows more prosocial and agentic versions of people to emerge, which in turn enables the community to continue creating the conditions for its own success.

Abundance

We (mostly) don’t expect to have a relationship with a business beyond: pay money, get something. The relationships between a community space and its members are totally different. If you (as a community space-holder) play your cards right, the members of your community will be there because of a sense of belonging. People don’t want a transactional relationship with their community, which means they will contribute their time, money, and resources in ways that don’t “make sense” in economic terms. Some examples of this at Highside:

• Dozens of people gave their time, with no expectation of…anything, really. Cleaning, renovation, event management, bookings, designing promotional materials, social media management…you name it, someone did it at Highside for free.

• Other people spent thousands to improve Highside without being asked. They paid for dumpsters and carpeting during renovations, sound and lighting equipment once we’d had a few concerts, woodworking tools for framing and building shelving, etc.

• The vast majority of our events were planned, booked, and attended by people who heard about us through word of mouth. The people who came here felt at home, so they invited others.

None of this is to imply that community spaces shouldn’t try to make money at all – absent a benefactor, most spaces will need to make some money. The point is that money isn’t the point, it’s just a means to an end…and that end is the sense of belonging the community feels in the space. Generating more belonging with less money means the space can be more resilient, more generous, and build an ever-greater feeling of abundance.

Purpose

I’ve written a lot about how community spaces should exist, but they also need to figure out why they exist – a shared purpose or interest to coalesce around. This could be anything: local mutual aid, fixing bicycles, regenerative agriculture, writing, music, you name it. The purpose of the space can (and should!) evolve over time, as the community evolves around it, but some kind of explicit direction helps steer the ship and makes it clear to people how to interact with the space.

This was one of the biggest mistakes I made with Highside. I wanted it to be everything for everybody, but in retrospect that didn’t work very well. Most people thought of us as a venue, and there are a particular set of ways in which people are used to interacting with venues that don’t lend themselves to building a self-sustaining, self-governing community. And once people thought of us as a venue, it was hard to get them to form a new picture in their heads.

Another important aspect of having a purpose is so that the core group that’s dedicating lots of time and energy to the space stays engaged. This was another aspect of the mistake I mentioned: I started to check out, because I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do – there wasn’t the time or space to work on physical projects when there were regularly 60-120 people there.

This principle applies to creating community spaces specifically, but not to building community in general. I don’t think having a highly specific purpose is the best way to build communities of place, like a well-connected neighborhood or village (a la Fractal). That kind of community depends on people continuing to feel connected even if their specific interests or priorities shift, and feeling like the community context will support them in the long term. I think community spaces are downstream of communities of place: a good neighborhood could have many community spaces that fulfill different needs or interests.

Transparency

Transparency underlies all the other values I’ve described here. If the would-be community doesn’t know the principles, purpose, and financial situation of the space, it’s hard for them to know how to engage.

Financial transparency is particularly disarming, in a world where finances are usually taboo…being transparent about the costs of keeping the space alive and how any income is spent allows community members to make an informed decision about how much to contribute. When I first made it public that Highside was in financial trouble, we got a few thousand dollars of donations in the first couple days. That’s a few thousand dollars that we never would have seen had I kept our finances under wraps, and I probably left thousands on the table by not sharing our finances sooner.

Personal transparency from the organizers is key, too – being honest with themselves, each other, and everyone else about how things are going. The more everyone knows where everyone else is at, the easier it is for people to know how they can plug in and help. I could have done a better job of this, and if I had, Highside might have lasted longer. I felt like I should be able to keep up with everything myself, and found myself overworked, stressed out, and frustrated that I wasn’t getting more help. But how could I expect help if I didn’t share what I needed?

Sooo…why did Highside close?

If running a community space is so great, why’d I shut mine down?

I started the space by myself, with no specific plan of what sort of space I was trying to create. I took on all the risk, and didn’t intend it to be a place that would sustain itself financially – I used my freelance business income to pay for it, and lived there to make it affordable. It was expensive, but doable at first. As time went on, I spent more time stewarding the space and gradually lost interest in (and time for) the work that was supporting it. It proved difficult to switch to a self-sustaining financial model when that wasn’t how it was initially conceived. Tons of people helped out – more than I ever expected – but none of them had the bandwidth to take it on as a full-time job with me, which was what I really needed.

Also, because I was so non-specific about what I wanted the space to be, it turned into the first thing that came along: a venue. Which was fun, but it wasn’t a sustainable model. We had neighbors, so we couldn’t throw that many shows, and I was living there, which was kinda tough when there were lots of concerts. My bedroom turned into a green room for every show, which is not conducive to maintaining one’s sanity. And the other things I wanted to do there – like work on old vehicles, or offer artist studio space, or experiment with lighting production, etc – were hard to do in a space that needed to be able to hold a full crowd several times a month.

In the end, it came down to the fact that I didn’t want to be the steward of what would have to be mostly a for-profit event space in order to keep Highside afloat. I think if I had started things with clearer intentions and a bit more support, it would have been easier (or less necessary) to change direction. I don’t regret a thing, though – I learned so, so much, and had the best times of my life at Highside. And when I open another space someday, I won’t make the same mistakes again.

There’s way more to talk about, and I cover some of it in the full-length version of this piece, but I think that the principles above set a good foundation for guiding much of the practical, day-to-day work of building and maintaining a community space.

Again, if thinking about the details is getting in the way of just getting started, then forget everything I wrote besides the first few lines: just start. Find a space that’ll work well enough, start inviting people to it, and be the best host you can be. In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.

The world needs more of these friendly, people-oriented spaces. Call me if you want encouragement. Good luck :)

Curious about community living? Find more case studies, how tos, and reflections at Supernuclear: a guide to coliving. Sign up to be notified as future articles are published here:

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You can find the directory of the articles we’ve written and plan to write here.

While we believe that some form of communal living makes sense for every stage of life, what that looks like might change over time. Carly spent seven years at a fifteen person communal home, and now lives with just two others and her dog. Below, she and her old housemates expand on the ways their time at the big house continues to reverberate in their lives.

When my best friend offered me a room in her 15-person communal house in San Francisco’s Mission District, I balked at the idea. I’d just moved back to the U.S. after a disastrous year in a Panamanian eco-village, with nowhere to live and a negative credit card balance to my name. “I wouldn’t be able to afford it, anyways,” I told her by way of excuse. “I know,” she replied. “That’s why I already paid your first month’s rent.”

I didn’t want to leave after a month, so I stayed for another (and paid back my generous pal). Ultimately, I ended up spending seven of the most formative years of my life in that big, bustling home. I adored so much about the world we built together: the fascinating people who cycled in and out of the rooms, the commitments we made to each other, the special traditions we kept, the meticulous organizational systems that allowed us to thrive. I always felt supported and I rarely experienced loneliness.

My tenure in the house eventually ran its course, as things usually do. I still loved the idea of living with close friends, but I craved a quieter atmosphere with less turnover and more space (I now share a duplex with two alums of this same community). By the time I moved out, I’d lived through full resident turnover multiple times, spent a year as the sole leaseholder, and taken on every “area of responsibility,” from finance manager to head of recruitment to garbage lady. I’d also done a whole lot of living within its four walls: I recovered from addiction and depression, weathered a global pandemic, switched careers, raised a puppy, and wrote a book.

My former housemates and I are now scattered all over the world, leading wildly different lives. Some formed nuclear families and now raise children, others planted new roots in different cities. We all have one thing in common, though: Our years of coliving shaped us in ways we continue to benefit from today.

I caught up with several of my former housemates to hear more about how they design their “post-communal” lives according to the values and habits we learned while living together, stitching together several of those insights for this newsletter.

Celebrate your strengths, and remain curious about what others have to offer.

Our home was full of supportive, curious individuals—an environment that enabled us to lean into what we loved and create conditions to share it with one another. For example, I used to think writing was meant to be a solitary pursuit. But after several housemates asked me for help with their own writing projects, I began facilitating a weekly workshop series, “Wordsy Wednesday,” which I ultimately extended to members of our community beyond the household. And while I haven’t taken a science class since high school, I found myself learning about particle physics over morning coffee on more than one occasion.

This mindset persisted for many of us long after leaving the house. I’ve found myself embracing my own passions and skills with more authority and confidence, and approaching people I meet with a newfound curiosity. “I took a nugget of wisdom with me from every single person,” one housemate told me. “I still benefit from what I learned while I was living there.”

Delegate areas of ownership.

In our home, different people were responsible for different things. We called those “AOR”s, and we took them seriously, and we relied on each other to adhere to them. “If the internet broke, I knew exactly who to talk to; if we needed more Brazil nuts, it was my job to get them,” said a former housemate. Our community depended on each person owning their particular area of responsibility, and when balls were dropped, we held them accountable.

Many of my ex-housemates said that embracing an AOR system has made them more comfortable with delegating responsibilities in other aspects of their lives, be it on a work project or planning a group trip with friends. “It helped me learn how to not have my hands in everything at any given time,” another housemate said, “which removes so much of the logistical and emotional overhead.”

Tune into your own needs.

Counterintuitively, living with fifteen people made me a lot better at spending time alone. With so many people around all the time, I was forced to really listen to what my body needed, when it needed it, and carve out spaces that felt like special sanctuaries just for me (my bedroom was an obvious example, but I also loved drinking coffee on the roof early in the morning before others woke up).

“In a communal environment, you learn so much about yourself and what you need,” one housemate explained, adding that in his own day-to-day life now, he’s much better at understanding when he has to set a boundary, carve out some alone time, or invest in other forms of self-care.

Replicate community in other ways.

Many of us got used to what one ex-housemate described as “ambient socializing”: the idea that you can walk out of your room at any time of day and choose your own adventure, be it a deep conversation or sitting on the kitchen couch listening to everyone else’s chatter. Before I moved out, I realized that I never wanted to lose the feeling of having other people I loved in my shared space, so I recruited one former housemate to move into a new apartment with me, and another to occupy the flat downstairs.

Our house might not swarm with the same level of activity, but we drop in and out of each others’ apartments with casual regularity, host shared dinners and movie nights, and hang out in our lush backyard. I relish the sound of the television humming in the other room while I’m falling asleep at night, which makes our home feel cozy and full.

Resolve conflict compassionately.

I’ve always been a conflict-averse people pleaser, but sharing 24/7 space with more than a dozen other humans makes disagreements inevitable. Our community had several frameworks for resolving conflict: we read books about nonviolent communication, attended an immersive full-day conscious leadership group, and held space for public “clearings” when certain tensions bubbled up to the house level.

Coliving made me less afraid of embracing conflict and more apt at resolving it compassionately. When you live with that many people, you become forced to evaluate disagreements from multiple perspectives, and it’s a breeding ground for empathy. I try to practice nonviolent communication and compassionate conflict resolution whenever an interpersonal issue arises, and I’ve noticed how productive this is when I’ve had hard conversations with other former housemates.

Bond over shared meals.

One of our home’s most celebrated traditions is our Monday Night Family Dinner, which still continues today within the house’s current iteration. Each week, housemates come together for a shared meal. We rotate cooking and cleaning duties, invite guests, and once a month, go around the table for an individual “check-in” shared at the group level.

These family dinners have made a lasting impact on many former housemates, in a number of ways. “I can close my eyes and cook for 25 people, no f*cking problem,” one person, who still loves to host large shared meals at her own house, said. “Check-ins really imprinted on me the idea that even if you think you’re struggling with something alone,” another said, “other humans are going through similar challenges.”

But sharing food with fifteen other people also stunts your growth in certain ways: “I never had to figure out what to cook or how to make a shopping list until I was in my late thirties,” admitted a former housemate. “Going to the grocery store is still not super comfortable to me!”

Cherish the depth of your relationships.

“It’s hard to get enough hours with new friends I make,” one ex-housemate told me, “after spending thousands of hours with the friends I lived with for so many years.” Living in a big communal house created conditions for closeness that I’d never before experienced outside my nuclear family. Identity becomes almost porous—it’s impossible not to let down your guard and soak people in.

In the years since leaving the house, I’ve come to cherish that depth, as have other housemates I spoke to. We go out of our way to spend time together when the opportunity arises: last summer, twenty of us converged in Reno, Nevada, from opposite corners of the country for a reunion. And the friends I made living communally are the kinds of people who can call me out of the blue, no matter the time of day, even if we haven’t spoken in multiple years, and our shared history immediately allows us to pick up right where we left off.

As a forty-year-old woman who doesn’t want children and deliberately designed her life to allow for spontaneity, travel, creativity, and close connections, I can’t imagine I won’t be living communally for many years to come. In fact, when I picture myself as an elderly woman in her sunset years, I almost always envision a situation where I’m surrounded by a huge crew of chosen family members across generations. But for now, “communal-lite” with an emphasis on all the lessons I learned in the house serves me well—even if it means I’m in charge of the grocery list more often.

Recently, they came by Bebop, the house I share with friends in Brooklyn, NY. For your viewing pleasure, here’s the full video:

And if you want the TL;DR version, here are a few noteworthy sections:

4:20 the difficulty of finding landlords willing to rent to communal living groups

5:30 some of our weird art projects, including coasters that play albums and AI-generated art screens connected to other houses around the world

10:31 misconceptions about communal living, and how my father thinks we’re just in delayed adolescence

12:00 introducing the cast of characters

13:12 how Kerrick & I started the house. I agree with this person in the comments:

17:57 how we deal with conflict

18:57 tour of Fatemeh’s room

25:20 talking about some of our featured local artists, including Chiara Mecozzi, Caroline Guilbert (who lives in another communal house, Crown Studios), Uzo, and Josely Carvalho (who was our landlord at Gramercy House).

38:40 kitchen tour featuring our miraculous self-filling water pitcher

42:07 communal crocs (repping Live Near Friends)

For bonus credit, how many disco balls do we have in the house?

Thanks for checking out our home! And hope you enjoy Homeworthy’s other tours.

Curious about coliving? Find more case studies, how tos, and reflections at Supernuclear: a guide to coliving. Sign up to be notified as future articles are published here:

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You can find the directory of the articles we’ve written and plan to write here.

It’s always a pleasure to learn about places that have been running for 13+ years. Longevity is not the only marker of a community’s success, but it’s a notable one! Read on for insight on how this ‘unstructured’ house keeps the wheels turning.

Date founded: 2013

Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Rented or owned: Rented

Amount of space: Six bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, two kitchens (one fully equipped, a second with an oven only), a large patio, a backyard, and a detached garage.

Governance: Group consensus. We communicate via casual conversations for small decisions and on-demand house meetings for bigger decisions.

Origins

Vancouver is a notoriously expensive city — it’s common to live with housemates to save on rent, even if it means splitting living spaces by curtains. But Tall Pine doesn’t just exist to help save money. It’s an intentional community where residents have chosen to live together with the shared goal of creating an intentional space to call home.

Tall Pine (TP) is a co-ed community house of working professionals. It was established in 2013 by a group of friends, brought together by a shared faith and attending churches in the local area. While the lineup of tenants has changed over the years, we maintain gender parity to balance energies and typically seek new housemates from our church communities.

Inner workings

Tall Pine is an unstructured coliving house. That means we don’t have rigid governance rules, but are drawn together by shared values of community living and mutual support.

With six people in the house, we’re smaller than some other coliving spaces but larger than a typical roommate/housemate scenario.

To me, it’s the perfect dynamic. It’s just enough people that you need to communicate well with others by sharing spaces and decisions, but we don’t need an intense, formal structure to manage things. There are enough people around to fill your social cup, but we have our own rooms to retreat to when it’s time for some personal space.

At TP, some tenants work from home while others don’t; all of us are busy with hobbies and extracurriculars. Still, most spend downtime in the common spaces, connecting daily to debrief the day, watch a show, or just hang out.

Group Costco runs, movie nights, and post-date debriefs are all common occurrences at Tall Pine. We also host the house “alumni” for holidays, gathering past and present members to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter together. This has been a particularly special thing for me since living here, as it feels a little like each new person who comes into the house is building the legacy here.

Between holiday gatherings, our “TP Alumni (past & present)” group chat has shared news of engagements, job updates, babies, published articles, and more. There’s an ongoing sense of maintaining the community, even after people formally leave the house.

Our house has recently agreed on a monthly dinner and meeting as a chance to connect socially and talk about any house-related things. As-needed household chats can also be called if there are any pressing issues (e.g., related to the lease, neighbourhood updates).

Governance is by consensus, where we discuss things and come to an agreement together. If there is disagreement, we defer to what’s been done in the past, often relying on the longstanding tenants’ advice and guidance. Decisions about new housemates are made unanimously — we all meet potential candidates, sometimes more than once, to ensure a good fit. Vetoes have been used here and are accepted; we want everyone to be comfortable with who joins the community.

Currently, finances are handled by two household members — one collects and pays rent, which ranges between $550-$700/month, depending on the room (an unbelievable deal in the area), and another organizes shared costs. Household supplies, utilities, internet, and other shared expenses — like our Christmas tree last year — are tallied up using Splitwise monthly and paid back to the person who incurred the expense. As new members enter the house, we revisit these additional tasks and talk about whether they need to change or rotate.

Keeping the common spaces clean is managed through a chill honour system — do your part and clean up after yourself. Those who use the kitchen more, for example, are expected to take care of things like taking out the compost or unloading the dishwasher.

Additional chores are completed on a bi-weekly rotation system that’s posted on the chalkboard in the kitchen, and everyone gives themselves a little checkmark to indicate the task is done.

Lessons learned: Your environment matters — choose well

The biggest thing I’ve learned from living in community for the last year and a half is that we need people. To most people reading this, that’s the most obvious thing I could say! But even though we all know we need people, it’s another thing to actually seek them out in our living situation.

As a single thirty-something, a lot of my peers are either partnered and starting families or living on their own. Community living doesn’t follow the “normal” path we’re often sold. But it’s been the right path for me.

While there are obvious challenges to having a group of diverse people under one roof, there are so many more benefits.

I’ve found that this intentional environment — intentional in the way we interact and engage with each other — has been so positive for my mental and physical well-being. Small things make big differences. For example, having to share the TV and common room with other people means I can’t just binge-watch Netflix on my own. TV-watching has become a shared experience, which means I do it less and, when I do, it’s fun and communal. Or, just the fact that my housemates are active people who enjoy getting outside encourages me to keep up healthy habits too.

Your environment shapes your life, so choosing something on purpose can be a meaningful and transformative experience. I don’t know how long I’ll be at TP, but it’s already transformed my vision for future living situations. Ultimately, life is better with people around you, even if they don’t always wipe their crumbs from the counter.

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Suggested further reading:

These are valid questions, and we’ve written about them (cleanliness, disagreements, meetings). But I marvel at how many people are missing all the amazing things that come from living with friends and focusing on just the downsides.

Pop culture pushes us to expect ‘tragedy of the commons’ - that if people have free access to a valuable resource, it will end up getting over used and destroyed. My experience couldn’t be more different. I feel lucky to live a life I can only describe as abundant - and I owe it to the commons.

A few examples of ways that living with other people makes life better:

1. Abundant, easy, fresh food.

Most communal houses I know have recurring orders for staples, subscription to a CSA, and/or someone going on a CostCo trip periodically. Because we buy in bulk, I spend a fraction of what I would on my own. Because we encourage people to cook in large batches, ingredients get used when they’re fresh and there are leftovers to enjoy the next day. When I shop, it’s because I want to enjoy browsing the farmer’s market or need a specialty ingredient.

As one of the residents of Agape wrote in our recent case study, ‘It’s like every time we cook we’re just walking into a grocery store. There’s an infinite amount of ingredients to choose from.’

2. More high quality things.

So much of what most people own is barely used. Cars are parked 95% of the time. I vacuum about 3 minutes a week. I wish I practiced piano every day, but it’s more like an hour a week.

Living on my own I wouldn’t afford the space for a piano or be able to justify the cost of a nice vacuum cleaner, much less a car. But because I live with others I get to have all of these things. We own not only a piano but a bunch of other instruments, which means I enjoy friends playing spontaneous jam sessions while I cook. We have one of those fancy robot vacuum cleaners that would have been an indulgence if living on my own but a smart investment for a group house.

But the cars are a real game changer. Nerdwallet estimates that owning a car in the U.S. costs $11,577 per year. Since I’ve never felt the need to own my own car, I’ve saved at least a quarter million dollars over my adult life. For a couple years Casa Chironja shared a van named Eleanor, and split the costs according to usage. Other times I’ve friend-rented my roommate’s cars, reducing their monthly cost and saving the hassle of renting a car commercially. Not everyone will be able to go without a car, but most households can get away with a lot fewer than one car per person.

3. Never move alone.

How many people stay in apartments or neighborhoods they don’t love because of the cost and hassle of moving? In the last fifteen years I’ve never had to fully furnish a room or put anything into storage. Sometimes I’ve moved into a furnished room, so it was just a matter of unpacking my clothes. When I’ve moved into an empty house, it’s always been a communal project to furnish the place: we have a ‘barn raising’ party where friends bring extra lamps, desks, pots and pans, etc they don’t use; everyone brings a little bit of their own stuff and we split the cost of the rest. When I’ve moved out, I’ve left most of the furniture behind for the next person.

4. Division of labor.

In my house growing up, I was taught that ‘he or she who cooks doesn’t clean.’ In practice this meant my mom always cooked, and my dad always cleaned. But the amount of effort to cook for a single family isn’t that different from cooking for twenty people, and so we have plenty of nights where no one has to do either. At Feÿtopia, a ~40 person castle-turned-commune in France, you are expected to help cook or clean for three meals a week, which means the other eighteen meals are just provided.

Then there are the kids! There is no childcare benefit greater than living with a built-in group of trusted people to entertain and help watch your children. Phil gets into this in his post on Babies @ Radish and I dove into it in my post on families in community. From baby happy hour to baby coworking, living near friends makes parenting easier for the parents and more fun for the kids.

5. Borrowing a ‘cup of sugar’ but for anything.

Here’s a list of things people have asked for in our house chat in the last few months, all of which someone has had, saving the need to buy something new: crutches, wigs, a snow shovel, envelopes, a Pioneer DJ mixer, nail polish remover, and (apologies for being so on the nose) a copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance.

Then there are the clothes. Most community houses I frequent have a shared closet with the loose rule ‘wear whatever you want, return it clean, and don’t permanently remove anything without checking first.’ People deposit winter coats, hats, sports gear, costumes, and other seldom-worn clothes in the closet. When I feel like switching up my wardrobe, I go to the shared closet and find what I need.

6. A wide network.

There’s no shortcut to intimacy like living with someone. By sharing the in-between moments when you’re not ‘on’, you build trust whether you realize it or not. This trust makes it easy to recommend someone or introduce them to someone I think they’d like. Phil says there are many examples of people helping each other get jobs at Radish. I’ve seen roommates help each other get funding for their companies - and in at least four cases, a roommate has introduced another one to someone they’ve gone on to marry.

Any time I’m heading to a new city, I ask the communal living network for places to stay or people to meet. People have sent me to stay with their parents or friends, and I’ve ended up in gorgeous communal spaces like Newspeak, the London College of Political Technology. I get to live like a local: tied in with an extended group of friends, clued into interesting events, and paying rent rather than Airbnb or hotel rates.

8. Abundance of absurdity.

Because there are so many efficiencies to living in a group - because food, chores, childcare, expenses are shared - we end up with a bit of extra time. Sometimes that time gets invested in strange projects that bring people joy. At RGB, Ellen Huet and her roommates turned a room into a museum from the future. At Langton Labs, someone built a giant tesla coil that was hooked up to a midi player, so you could play lightning.

At Feÿtopia, we built the Sonic Sphere, a concert hall where you sit suspended in the middle of a sphere and enjoy a 360 sound experience. A later version made it to the Shed in New York City, where more than 30,000 people enjoyed this unique somatic experience.

9. And finally, an abundance of connection.

Humans evolved as social creatures - we truly are happier when we intertwine our lives with others. A study of more than 40,000 people over ten years of the American Time Use Survey data concluded ‘participants consistently rated every common daily activity as more enjoyable when interacting with someone else’.

I identify as an introvert, and I love my solo time. But I also appreciate that I can step out of my room and find people I know and love preparing food or discussing what they’re going to do this weekend.

In the words of Julia Leyrer who lives at Lightning in Brooklyn, ‘Getting our social needs met with little effort gives us with a more solid foundation for happiness and belonging, and allows us more room to apply effort to other endeavors.’

Finally, contributing to a shared goal - as simple as keeping a common kitchen clean, or as big as helping friends raise their children - builds a sense of meaning and purpose that many of us are seeking.

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is held up as a cautionary tale about human nature - proof that we’re fundamentally too selfish to share well. But the real tragedy might be the opposite: that so many of us have accepted a model of isolated, individual living that costs more, gives us less, and leaves us lonelier than we need to be. The abundant life isn’t reserved for the wealthy or the lucky. It’s hiding in plain sight, waiting to be unlocked the moment we decide to stop going it alone.

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We built Radish to be a great place to have kids. The idea was 15-20 adults, a handful of kiddos, spread across a cluster of buildings in Oakland, sharing meals and a life together.

In the first two years, that was all theory … there were no kids when we started. But then on a single evening in 2021, two different couples announced (on the same night, with the same due date, by total coincidence) that they were pregnant. And we entered a new chapter.

As of Feb 2026, there are 8 babies at Radish (with 2 more on the way). Two of them happen to be mine.

So what’s the verdict?

People talk about the first year of having a kid as extraordinarily challenging. I feel like a bit of a jerk for saying this, but it’s been much easier than advertised for us. And we think our living situation plays a huge role in this.

Of course, it took a lot of upfront work to make this year easy. Building a community is hard. None of this came for free. But the payoff is there.

We’ve had to give up very little in our life to make room for our kid. We still eat dinner with friends every night of the week. We go out on a whim. And our baby girl has a whole clan of admirers.

Living situation is not the only variable here. We are fortunate to have an easy-going baby (a variable you can’t really control) and can afford daytime childcare. But I’d credit half of the ease to the living setup.

Our approach: Parallel parenting, not co-parenting

We describe Radish’s approach as “parallel parenting.”

We try to live life together, we support each other, but no one has explicit responsibilities over someone else’s kid.

Other communities have gone further down the spectrum of co-parenting, where the non-biological parents take some portion of true parenting responsibilities. We commend this (and would welcome anyone to describe their experience on this newsletter), but it seemed like one step too complex for us.

Baby Happy Hour

The babies are in childcare until about 5:30pm. They go to sleep at 7pm.

From 5:30-7pm, it’s Baby Happy Hour.

Everyone knows the babies will be out. And people come out to the lawn to hang with them. Drinks are made, ping-pong is played, and babies are fawned over.

The tradition is one of our favorite institutions in our new life as parents. And a perfect capstone to the work day. A moment of shared joy for everyone.

What’s surprised us (positively)

Biggest surprise: The non-parents really like having babies around.

We had a fear that when babies started showing up, all the people not in that mindset would leave. Who wants to live with some boring families exchanging notes on diaper sizes?

It turns out that pretty much everyone loves being an auntie or uncle for about 30 minutes per week.

They get a rent-a-child. They get to understand roughly what it means to have a kid. They get to skim all the good parts but don’t have to take responsibility for the bad parts. It’s a pretty good deal!

In the words of one parent: “17 humans = 17 ways to entertain your kid that aren't an iPad”

The ease and joy of “Baby Monitor Distance" after 7pm

Once the babies start reliably sleeping through the night, one of the big unexpected benefits shows up: Being within Baby Monitor Distance.

“Baby Monitor Distance” means living close enough to people that you can toss them a baby monitor and they can keep an eye on your kid (while they are sleeping) from the comfort of their own home. If something happens, they can pop over in <2 mins.

This means we are free after 7pm whenever want to be.

Having 17 people within Baby Monitor Distance means we don’t have to get a babysitter when we go out. We put the kid to bed, hand someone the baby monitor, and have a night to ourselves whenever we want and without any pre-planning.

And when I say “no pre-planning,” I mean no pre-planning. We walk into the communal kitchen say “who wants the monitor tonight?” and someone always raises their hand.

It’s not much of an imposition on the other person either. They just have to carry a device around in their own home (doing whatever they might have been doing anyways).

We do this at least 1x a week if not more - if we had to hire a babysitter for this, we’d be paying $120 more a week or $6k a year (not to mention the logistical annoyances).

What’s been challenging

Space.

The space needs of young families are different than couples. Our ability to flex up in space as people suddenly need more of it is limited.

Most families go from wanting a 1br apartment or single room to suddenly wanting 2-4 bedrooms. And that’s not something that’s easy to conjure up, even with 9 months notice.

We ended up adding some capacity by building a new building for one couple (they co-designed it... topic for a future post … ). Another couple bought the place next door as it happened to come up for sale. For the next one, we may reconfigure an existing space by combining rooms.

But if a a few more babies show up, it’s not clear we’ll be able to conjure up more real estate. And building a new building every time someone has a kid is impractical.

Coordination on childcare.

We thought we’d be able to easily run a daycare out of Radish and hire a single caretaker for all the kids. It turns out that coordination of needs and timing is tricky.

One family had to start a few months earlier because they were going back to work. Also the kid’s ages don’t line up exactly right. So we’ve all ended up in different childcare situations during the daytime even though we live together. We may try to coordinate on this when they get older, but have found it doesn’t always line up.

Childproofing:

Childproofing communal spaces (primary designed for adults) is tricky. As a parent, you don’t control the space. There are competing and non-compatible uses. Dangerous stuff gets left out.

We’ve solved this by trying to make one space “the baby space” and de facto leaving some of the heavier trafficked areas (e.g. the communal kitchen) as adults only (or children under heavy supervision). This detente might stop working once the kids are more mobile, but seems to work for now.

Making it easy, making it great

People think living with others is about making your life harder.

In our experience, it’s been making our lives easier.

We cook less than once a week, we have a 17 OSOs to help with tasks, we don’t need to coordinate babysitters.

Sure we have some extra meetings, coordination, and LLC management. But net/net, life is just easier. And freer. And richer.

Even with a newborn, we see friends 5-7 nights a week. We go out to dinners and parties on a whim. And we have a dozen friends who are invested in our kid, share in their milestones, and feel 100% comfortable watching them for a hour or even a weekend.

All in all, we feel very fortunate.

And it has us wondering what it would take to make it this easy and this good for more people.

Can’t build a Radish? Don’t want to live with 17 people? There are easier versions of this…

Radish was difficult to put together, but there are simpler arrangements that might get you 50-80% of the benefit.

The first is simply choosing to live very close (like within 2 minute walk, max …) of another friend or family member in a similar life stage. I believe this is the highest bang-for-buck life hack out there … particularly with young kids.

Having even one "Baby Monitor Distance” friend can be a huge boon to your lifestyle.

Baby monitor distance is also “pop by unannounced distance” or “borrow some sugar” distance or “walk over in pajamas” distance. It’s that low friction distance that you might associate with life in a college dorm, where scheduling and logistical overhead didn’t dominate your life.

It’s the best amenity you can possibly add to your living situation. And if you live in California or Seattle, Live Near Friends can help you find a setup like this (disclosure: I’m the founder)

About this publication

Supernuclear is a guide for people who want to live with or near friends.

This includes cohousing, coliving, or just rallying your neighbors for weekly stoop coffee. It’s a 100% free and earnest attempt to help people live their best life with their favorite people.

Editors Phil and Gillian draw on their experience starting 8 different housing experiments with friends, including Radish (Oakland) and Gramercy House (NYC).

We’ve had dozens of contributors write case studies about their communities (and we pay people to do this).

Suggested further reading….

We are putting Radish, our home, up for sale.

Last year, we announced that we'd be selling in 2026. We're excited to share more details about the sale and offer the first opportunities to tour the property.

Radish is a residential compound in Oakland, California that’s currently home to 20 adults and 8 kids—including two of my own.

It’s also the place that made us realize how many people want this kind of life—and how hard it is to create from scratch.

Over the years, hundreds of people have visited Radish. The most common reaction was some version of:

“I want this. How do I do it?”

That question is what led us to start writing Supernuclear (and me to start Live Near Friends to help people create more of them).

So, if you want to takeover a ready-made compound like Radish – without having to navigate years of design, legal, and construction work – head over to our sale site. (Warning: it’s not cheap ... we are expecting a price range of $4-6m).

The sale includes seven private homes and a dense set of shared amenities: courtyards, a hot tub and sauna, an industrial hosting kitchen, and a set of spaces intentionally designed for overlap—meals, work, play, and rest. It’s set up for a group of friends, community, or extended family that wants both togetherness and private spaces to retreat to.

Why are we selling?

Radish has been an incredible home, and in many ways it’s better than ever. But what began as a group of friends thinking about kids “someday” has become a compound full of them—eight now, with two more on the way. We’re bursting at the seams, especially for families with multiple children.

As a result, the Radish community is splitting off to build three new compounds in the East Bay (two in Berkeley, one in Alameda) to better fit our growing families. No one is planning to live alone—we’re just expanding.

Not interested in Radish, but want to create your own? This year, Live Near Friends are going to be working with people, starting in the Bay Area, to build their own custom compounds. The good news: it’s meaningfully easier today than when we created Radish eight years ago. New zoning laws have opened up clearer paths for projects like this.

To learn more about Radish and the sales process, visit our sale site.

This one is a true gem.

It manages to pack almost every bad idea, tired stereotype, and well-meaning but destructive instinct about communal living into a single compact article. And yes, I know it’s all in jest. But allow me to take it way too seriously and dunk all over it anyway.

The NYT article is Alison Bechdel’s “8 Things You Need to Start Your Own Commune.” And it sort of an anti-Supernuclear.

Let’s go point by point.

Bad ideas

1. Egalitarianism is probably not the answer

We’ve profiled a lot of successful communities. Very few of them operate as true egalitarian collectives. Almost all of them have some form of benevolent dictatorship or at least a clear place where the buck stops.

Egalitarianism just isn’t a good model of practical reality.

In real life:

• people contribute unequally.

• they care unequally.

• they invest different amounts.

• they need different resources (e.g. size/type of living space).

The great harmony of community isn’t when everyone has equal everything. It’s when responsibility, investment, stake, and trust are aligned. You want the people who are most invested, most trusted, and most accountable to be taking on more responsibility and more decisions. You want people to feel empowered to make decisions without everyone’s permission.

This doesn’t mean everyone else is voiceless. It means that different decisions need different sets of stakeholders. And not everyone always has equal stake.

If you want more on this, we’ve written at length about governance structures that actually work in communities — and spoiler: they don’t look like permanent consensus meetings.

2. Chore wheels are transactional, scarcity-oriented, and guaranteed to create conflict

Don’t use them.

Chore wheels are the physical embodiment of a scarcity mindset. They assume:

• nobody wants to contribute,

• everyone must be coerced,

• and fairness is enforced through accounting, not culture.

• once you’ve done your assigned chore, you are done contributing

They turn care into compliance.

Instead, give people opportunities to voluntarily contribute in ways that match their energy and strengths — and then visibly appreciate those contributions. We prefer systems that reward initiative, status, and pride over resentment and enforcement.

Bragging is underrated.
Scorekeeping is poison.
And watch out for Cheryl

(For another perspective: Daniel disagrees with me on this ...)

3. Scope creep will kill you

Starting a community is already hard. You should focus ruthlessly on the essentials.

Outsource the non-essential parts.

The classic example is cleaning shared spaces. Pay for it. Do not turn your friendships into a janitorial union.

Every extra system you internalize is another surface area for conflict. Leave the telecom infrastructure to Verizon.

4. “Everything bageling”

This is what Ezra Klein calls the “Everything Bagel” problem: the instinct to pile every good, righteous, interesting idea into one overstuffed project.

Your community does not need to solve climate change, late capitalism, and the loneliness epidemic simultaneously. It needs to be a good place to live.

Bad stereotypes

5. Polyamory as a core institution

I know a lot of communities. Very few of them have dating within the community or polyamory as a central feature.

Housing is already emotionally complex. Adding romantic entanglement multiplies that complexity in ways most groups are wildly unprepared for. Gillian has written more about this.

6. Ideological echo-chambering

This one especially rankles me.

“Fly your freak flag”… but only if it matches an approved list of progressive values. Otherwise, please keep quiet.

This movement — if you want to call it that — deserves political diversity. And in practice, it has it. I’ve met immigrant families, religious communities, retirees, tech workers, artists, conservatives, radicals who choose to live in community. Some of these communities have an institutionalized set of political values … but most don’t.

Your community doesn’t need a political valence.Living together doesn’t have to be a manifesto. It can just be a statement about how life is best lived.

7. The rural commune myth

There’s a strong aesthetic bias in how communal living gets depicted: rural, pastoral, ideologically aligned, and vaguely pre-industrial.

It’s mostly fiction.

Most real communities are urban, ideologically mixed, and relentlessly practical. They exist to make modern life work better — not to escape it. They optimize for transit, jobs, schools, and human relationships, not goats and overalls.

Okay fine, this one I kind of like

One time, Radish sold out and shilled for a hard kombucha company and we all drank a little too much during the photoshoot. It was fun.

All of us should probably be drinking more hard booch. Endorse.

In conclusion….

The biggest problem with popular depictions of communal living is treating it as a niche lifestyle for a certain type of person: usually ideologically aligned and underemployed.

This is the small tent and narrow vision.

If communal living is going to matter at scale, it has to be a big tent. It has to work for people with jobs, kids, deadlines, politics they don’t want to debate at dinner, and a limited tolerance for meetings. It has to coexist with ambition, privacy, diversity of beliefs, and the reality that most adults are busy.

Most people don’t want a commune. They want their life to be easier.

They want shared childcare, reduced logistical burden, neighbors they trust, friends close at hand. They want community as infrastructure, not identity.

If communal living stays narrow and aesthetic, it stays small.

If it becomes adaptable, practical, and useful, it becomes normal.

Ms Bechdel has done us a disservice here, that this hasty diatribe hopes to correct.

/rant

Agape, the subject of the case study below, was one of the first coliving houses I visited in San Francisco. It is an almost mythologically beautiful Victorian mansion, with gilded wallpaper and intricately carved mahogany staircases. I’m so glad to finally share a bit more context on its colorful past and inner workings thanks to Nico, who lived there for three months this year.

Name: Agape

Date founded: 2012

Location: Mission, San Francisco

Rented or owned: Rented

Amount of space: 13 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, rooftop, garden, 2 balconies, 2 living rooms, basement rave cave, kitchen

Governance: Decision-making is flexible and case by case. Most decisions are handled by the relevant individuals or small groups, while higher-impact decisions are discussed as a house.

The Origin of Agape

The house is a Victorian mansion built in 1881 that’s seen many lives — from a family home to a care center for the mentally ill. In the 1970s, activists Leroy and Kathy Looper gave it the name Chateau Agape, filling the house with a spirit of love, resilience, and community that still lingers in the walls today.

The home is one of the oldest houses in the Mission. It was listed as a San Francisco landmark and part of the National Register of historic places.

Decades later, a group of friends stumbled upon the house in 2012 and decided to carry that spirit forward. They named it Agape once again, as a living experiment in an intentional community. Since then, it has become a home where creativity, friendship, and togetherness can flourish.

Learn more about the detailed story here.

Ownership & Governance

Agape means “the highest form of love” in ancient Greek. This is pretty much reflected in the way Agapeans curate this special experience of living together. The governance and decision making process is collective by design. Everyone has a say among important decisions. Also, everyone has responsibilities in contributing to the process.

The process is rigorous, thoughtfully designed, actively respected, and executed with high integrity.

Becoming an Agapean 🎓

Agape has a wide friends & family network and some of them (such as myself) populate the space as subleasers.

To be a full-time resident, someone would have to sublease first as a trial period for 3 months. The roommates would then evaluate how you communicate: how you handle conflict, whether you’re clean, kind, interesting, caring... It’s a very comprehensive process.

You have to be approved by all roommates (there cannot be a ‘no’) AND you have to be given a ‘hell yes’ from at least one roommate. This gave Agape the reputation for being “highly selective”.

When I first heard about the application process, I thought, Oh God! It’s like you gotta pass an SAT test with flying colors and have extra credit just to live together? That sounds like a lot.

But after staying here, I really do get why. Living with people long-term is more like founding a company or entering a marriage than just renting a room. Being selective isn’t about exclusion — it’s about care for the wellbeing of the community. It’s like carefully tending a beautiful garden, making sure there is diversity, great culture, good soil, kind people, awesome energy all around. There’s only so many rooms to fill, and there’s all the reason to want to find the best match.

The Culture

Agape doesn’t brand itself as a “hacker house” or “artist house” or “queer house”, but almost everyone is one of those things. Startups, AI, robots, musicians, artists, burners, performers, multi-talented builders... you name it. The shared ethos is simple: we want to live together intentionally, to do things together, and to care for one another like a family. —— said one happy Agapean

There’s also what I’d call a culture of sanity. Living together with a lot of people AND loving them is NOT an easy task, or a common phenomenon — I’ve been in situations where emotional drama devours entire afternoons. At Agape, people take responsibility for their own moods the way you’d take responsibility for doing your dishes. Emotional hygiene is as real as kitchen hygiene. That kind of awareness makes a home feel truly safe and cozy.

The house is not owned by the current residents, although the residents are in a great relationship with the owner. Other ways of ownership have been loosely discussed but it’s all very theoretical at the moment.

Spaces

Agape has 4 floors, 13 bedrooms, a rooftop, multiple balconies, and a backyard garden. On the ground floor there is a big living room with many instruments, another lounge room (called ‘the Fluff’) with workout equipment, a fireplace, couches and mattresses, and a projector screen.

There is an industrial kitchen on the ground floor, operating as the heartbeat of Agape. Being a house with almost 20 people sharing the same kitchen, the fact that it’s always spotless speaks of how well functioning this place is.

The second and third floors are all for bedrooms, with shared bathrooms on each floor.

The basement has all the laundry facilities, storage, and has been turned into an EPIC party space, with great sound isolation, a DJ deck (that always works), and speakers of great quality.

Lifestyles

As glamorous and exciting as life can be, nobody’s perfect all the time. People here carry heavy responsibilities in their careers, have relationship turmoils, family tensions, health concerns. It’s not like you’re not allowed to have bad days.

What’s beautiful is how much people really show up for one another. The roommates feel safe enough to communicate when they need support, and are mostly met with a lot of generosity and warmth.

It’s the same with maintaining a great kitchen. We all forget to wash dishes at times, but if we do that all the time, the kitchen will never be clean in a communal home. If we get into a good flow of great sanity and very rarely forget a dish by accident, it’s not that big of a deal and can most likely be met with kind and loving reminders.

Communal Food

All food is shared. Each member contributes to the budget (around $250) for all inclusive vegetarian meals. Food is collectively ordered by a housemate twice a week, and anyone can make any ingredient requests. The pantry and fridge is always stocked, the spice storage has all kinds of spices you can possibly imagine.

It’s like every time we cook we’re just walking into a grocery store. There’s an infinite amount of ingredients to choose from. —— another happy Agapean

This way of living actively proves the idea of 1+1 > 2 in communities. If I were to live alone I would’ve never had that many options. When roommates cook they usually cook a big batch -- bean soups, morning oats, big salads, Tofu & eggs, lots of delicious gluten free baked goods... There’s almost always something warm waiting on the counter. Meals turn into small rituals of care.

The People & the Culture 🤸

The house runs like a cooperative ecosystem. There’s a plant caretaker, a trash manager, a food-ordering hero, a rent collector, a handy fixer, an expert organizer. The most demanding duties — Monday family dinner cooking, cleaning, ‘fluffing’ (meaning take out plates and utensils and setting up the table) , trash -- gets distributed over a spreadsheet with rotating duties that keeps the system fair, and the food is always healthy and ridiculously good.

Every community needs some sort of group ritual, a heartbeat, something to gather everyone together. Monday’s family dinner is that for Agape. Some days friends and neighbors join, and other days it’s for housemates only, so people get to share their intimate lives. The cuisines rotate depending on who’s cooking, and somehow a dozen busy lives pause long enough to keep the tradition going, and thriving.

The people here are quirky, passionate, inventive, very diverse and different. But the one thing in common is warmth, everyone here feels warm and caring in one way or another.

On paper, Agapeans look like any San Franciscans: founders, engineers, designers, health practitioners. For the after hours, the group is packed with activity: camping festivals, outdoor adventures, board games, collaborative art, crafting, and music, even Burning Man projects that take months of tinkering.

Agape Halloween 👻

The crown jewel of Agape culture is the Halloween party. Every year, the house transforms into an immersive festival. All furniture gets moved out, rooms morph into themed art installations, and the house fills with hundreds of costumed guests.

This year, the Halloween Party theme was Morphogenesis:

In morphogenesis, we see the power of collective intelligence. each part plays its role, and—somehow—a whole emerges. We follow the enduring wisdom of a blueprint, yet still leave room for variation and novelty. We witness how structure can arise from seeming disarray, if we coax the seeds to blossom.

The house started Halloween planning as early as July. The house invited local artists from the bay to come tour the house and come up with ideas.

By the time this article releases, Morphogenesis already happened. Check out this instagram post to see how Agapeans transformed their spaces.

My Farewell

I started reading Ichigo-Ichie（一期一会）, the essence is about treating every moment with ultimate sacred sincerely, because “this encounter will never come again”. I want to take this moment to deeply cherish all the beautiful memories created at this place, and give all the people here my best wishes for the future.

👉 Check out Agape’s Instagram to find out all details about Agape.

This post is part of an ongoing series of deep dives on coliving spaces. To see others, visit the Supernuclear directory. If you would like to contribute a case study of your community, awesome! Please find guidelines for submission in this post.

In the piece below she offers a perspective on what it’s like to live with others as a single parent. Most of our writing has been on adults living together and some families with kids, so we’re grateful she’s bringing up how the needs of single parents vary - and what is universal.

Date founded: 2020

Location: Connemara, Ireland

Rented or owned: initially rent-to-own, purchase finalized 2022

Amount of space: two in-house units, each designed for a single parent family: one long term residence and one short term

Governance: sole decision maker owner

When I became a single parent on my baby’s first birthday, I was isolated and essentially homeless. I went from a domestic violence center to a hotel to a friend’s guest room before I finally found a rental I could barely afford for myself and my baby. One of the first ways I figured out how to survive was through coliving: I offered to host a student and give them writing mentorship in exchange for some help with childcare and writing-related administrative tasks. The student who came to stay with us became a dear friend who my kid still calls Tía Natalia.

As I figured out how to scrape together a living as a single parent, I started fantasizing intensely about homeownership, scrolling through real-estate listings I couldn’t afford when my baby woke me at night to nurse. My dream of a home always came with a bigger dream to offer other single parents what I wished for myself: rest and support, specifically with childcare.

I eventually found a place that let me combine those dreams in 2020, a historic knitting factory on the west coast of Ireland. I started sharing online about my dream of turning it into a family home and a childcare-inclusive residency space for other single parents. I crowdfunded the purchase of The Old Knitting Factory over the course of a year and a half and welcomed my first funded single-mom resident in 2022. Since then, I’ve had both paying and funded guests living with my son and me at the knitting factory, as well as friends and acquaintances who have co-lived with us in the spirit of mutual aid, for just a week sometimes and for months at others.

Finally, five years after we moved into the knitting factory, I am having major renovations done here thanks to yet more community support. Everyone in the house has shared one ancient, decrepit bathroom this whole time, and I cannot tell you how excited I am about the prospect of having a second bathroom. Peace and love and fellowship get a bit old when there are multiple potty-training kids in a one-toilet house, or god forbid when a stomach flu runs through it.

It’s changed my life and my child’s -- saved our lives, really -- sharing our home with other people. My kid gets something like the extended family we don’t otherwise have: there are several people who’ve stayed with us that he now calls Auntie, in addition to Tía Natalia. I’ve gotten help with childcare, shared meals, a laugh at the end of a hard and lonely day.

But I’m also still both a working single mom and an introvert, and I need my alone time; all the gifts of coliving, that I wouldn’t change for the world, can’t change that. Plenty of the overworked, touched-out single parents who come here for solace – many of them also survivors of domestic abuse or other trauma – need it too. So I’m making sure that as I renovate the knitting factory, I’m considering the ways we can live together but still offer each other space for solitude.

Space Considerations

1. Private, comfortable, accessible bathrooms

When you have young children, a bathroom can be shared space a little too often, so in my renovations I’m making extra-sure that each bathroom is a comfortable, private place. The bathroom for the residency space is being fully renovated into a spacious, wheelchair-accessible wet room. The new bathroom in my and my kid’s unit is getting the extra-long bathtub of my dreams – at long last it’s going to be a bathroom just for us, and the design, down to dark moody decor that I love but wouldn’t force on a stranger, reflects that. I want both bathrooms to be comfortable for adults to hang out and supervise kids without having to worry about another family waiting impatiently for their turn.

I’m also working toward making knitting factory residencies accessible to wheelchair users, and the design of the residency bathroom reflects that: a wet room with a stool in the shower, grab bars, and space to maneuver a wheelchair. I will need to do more fundraising (or sell a lot more books!) to get the outdoor space fully accessible – in this rocky part of Ireland it will involve intensive landscaping! – but in the meantime, I’m making renovation decisions with that goal in mind. The bathroom is where it starts.

2. Separate kitchens, with optional communal eating spaces

There are great reasons not to have multiple similar kitchens in your coliving unit, as this do’s & don’ts list argues – but I’ve found that for single parents, individual private kitchens really make life easier for everyone. We have to feed our kids at roughly the same times every day, and plenty of those kids have mutually incompatible allergies or food aversions or sensory sensitivities. Getting meals on the table is hard enough for a working single parent without having to worry about who gets which time slot to use the oven and whether you’ve definitely removed all traces of peanuts, all while both sets of kids are getting hangry!

That said, private cooking spaces and private eating spaces are two very separate concepts, and I’m making sure to have picnic tables in the garden that accommodate kids and families eating together – and coloring and playing and talking together, too.

3. Separate and communal recreational spaces

The name “knitting factory” is historically accurate – it’s what this building was built for in 1906 – but it suggests a larger space than the average-size house The Old Knitting Factory really is. I love the “caves and commons” philosophy in this pyramid of coliving needs, and the knitting factory’s layout reflects that: a cozy upstairs loft room in the residency unit, and a combined living room/kitchen for my kid and me. With those “caves” established, the outdoor space becomes our commons: a lakeside garden with areas for both private and shared use. The big windows that I’ve just installed will also allow parents to keep an eye on kids playing together while we do our own thing inside – something else I’ve dreamed of for a long, long time.

All of these renovation decisions get at something crucial about The Old Knitting Factory: it’s a coliving space designed very specifically for single parents. A space for single adults, like the youth hostel where I did work exchange when I first came to Ireland, absolutely benefits from different features, like one communal kitchen and living room.

But while I look forward to having other Tía Natalias, and individuals and families with all kinds of structures, come to stay with us, centering the needs of single parents, and especially other working single mother artists like me (here’s a note on why I focus on single moms in my language sometimes, even though single parents of all genders are welcome here), really gets to the heart of what The Old Knitting Factory is all about.

Single parents so rarely get our needs put first, by ourselves or by anyone else. This space is about us, and the kinds of support we really need to be comfortable: both fellowship and longed-for solitude included.

Author’s Note: I am planning to re-open the knitting factory for both paid and funded residencies in spring of 2026, after renovations are complete. In the meantime, if you’d like to support our work, please consider joining us on Patreon to help make space for single moms to make art.

Suggested further reading:

If Supernuclear is thinking out loud about how life could work, Live Near Friends helps people make it real.

Which brings me to this: we’re officially launching Live Near Friends in Los Angeles.

—

LA is full of people who love each other but live an hour apart in traffic. Friends who only see each other when someone goes through a breakup. Grandparents who miss everyday moments. New parents who wish they had a real village to help with the kids.

If you think about it, Hollywood has been on this trend early. Keeping up with the Kardashians is basically a show about living near family. Kim is even building a five-home compound in Hidden Hills so her favorite people can be close by.

Most of us don’t have $35M to build a private compound. But the desire behind that move? Wanting your closest people nearby? That’s universal. And that’s where we come in.

LA is one of the toughest housing markets in the U.S.—but it’s also changing. New California laws are making it easier to create what we call multiplayer housing (aka friend compounds, modern-day family compounds, and multigen setups).

We want to help Angelenos find, coordinate, and buy those properties so more people can enjoy the benefits of living near friends and family.

What we are offering in LA:

• Hand-selected properties perfect for living near friends – duplexes, triplexes, buildable land, ready-made compounds

• Expert guidance for co-buying, multigenerational living, and creative ways to make LA housing more doable.

• Custom-designed compounds for people that want to take on the challenge of building from scratch

Know someone in LA?

This is the moment we need your help. If you have friends, family, coworkers, or a group chat in LA who dream of living closer together, share this link.

Check out Live Near Friends in LA

(Sharing really makes a difference for us — most of our best stories start with a friend telling a friend.)

You’re part of a community that believes life is better when the people you care about aren’t an hour away. Los Angeles needs more of that. And with your support, we can help more people build the connected lives they want.

We can’t wait to meet the groups you send our way.

Thanks for being part of this movement.

- Phil & the Live Near Friends team

A sneak peek of our favorite current LA friend compounds

Historic Pasadena Craftsman with brand-new ADU

This lovingly maintained Craftsman was built as a triplex and still has that flexible living setup—perfect for a multigenerational family or friends who want to share a property.

Silver Lake duplex with reservoir views

This mid-century duplex gives you a 2-bed/2-bath unit upstairs and a 2-level unit below, plus a bonus lower level primed to become a third unit.

Eagle Rock compound with pool & converted garage

This 1950s California compound includes the main house and a converted garage guest house that works perfectly as an extra spot for family.

Check out other properties

I can’t believe we are here.

We started Supernuclear when Radish was 2 years old. It’s now 8, and we’re getting ready to move on. Those who have followed our story will know that we always planned to sell before year 10. It’s crept up on us faster than expected. The current plan is to find buyers mid-2026 and move out by the end of 2026.

This is a one-of-a-kind property—we knew it the moment it hit Zillow in 2018. We made an offer before ever stepping on site. Since then, we’ve added several buildings, completed major renovations, and built out amenities that support a thriving, happy community.

Interested in buying it?

We are looking for a buyer (or group of buyers) who wants to continue the legacy .

In January, we’ll be distributing a full packet of information and hosting tours for interested buyers throughout the spring of 2026.

The packet will include floorplans, timeline for sale, and some ideas on how to structure a purchase (e.g. LLC, TIC). This is not a typical property, and we won’t be running a typical quick sales process. We want to give groups plenty of time to form and explore a purchase.

If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for this interest list and we’ll send you the information packet next month.

Radish has been the best home I’ve ever had. It has witnessed 7 weddings and the births of 8 (soon to be 10) kids, and housed dozens of our closest friends.

So why leave? Nothing’s wrong — this was always the arc. Radish was designed to be the ideal home for 10 years of our life. As expected, our families have simply gotten too big and need larger suburban-style homes. The community is staying intact, and moving into 3 new communities with larger units to house bigger family size (more on that soon…).

The plan is that all of the Radish residents will move out end of 2026 and move into one of these three new communities. And we will sell Radish to a fresh group of people.

Interested in buying Radish? Join the interest list to get more info.

We’ll send a full packet in January and start tours in spring 2026.

Timeline

• Now–Jan 2026: Sign up for interest list

• Jan 2026: Full info packet released to interested parties

• Spring 2026: Tours + buyer groups form

• Late Spring: Submit offers

• End of 2026: We move out / sale completes

What should you do in the meantime?
Start chatting up your friends. Send them this post. Invite them to dinner to discuss. Now could be the time to make your ultimate “live near friends/family” dream a reality.

Disclaimer: This is preliminary info, not a formal listing or advertisement. Nothing should be construed as a warranty or representation. Details may change. Please do your own due diligence.

Nicole Reese is an ecovillage designer, community consultant, and writer behind Terrenity, a Substack publication on regenerative village building. She has advised 17+ ecovillages, colivings, and neighborhood-scale projects worldwide, helping founders design resilient communities. Her last contribution to Supernuclear explored Why it’s worth having a community wiki.

Date Founded: December 2020

Location: Dulzura, CA (about 45 min from San Diego)

Rented or Owned: Rented to tenants, shared ownership offered after 1 year of living there

Amount of Space: 4 acres of rural land with 3 large buildings: the Main House (3 mini apartments), “Barn” (7 mini apartments), and Quad (4 mini apartments), 3 kitchens, a cabin, a tiny home, and vanlife spots with hookups. Total living capacity: 25 people

Governance: Owned by the founder’s S-Corp, operated by the founder and a circle of Stewards who live onsite, volunteer special interest committees, and majority/consensus decision making in community house meetings.

I’ve been traveling to and living in different intentional communities, ecovillages, and colivings for 7 years now. I was searching for the one that felt like home. In the summer of 2023, I met the owner of Wild Seeds Ranch at a residency at MOOS in Berlin (see the MOOS Supernuclear case study). I visited in May 2024, moved there in September from an ecovillage in Costa Rica, and have been calling it home ever since. Here’s what’s up with Wild Seeds.

Origin Lore

Wild Seeds Ranch has had many past lives. Situated outside San Diego, California, it has been home to a bed-and-breakfast wedding venue, a working farm, and, believe it or not, an actual, real-life cult that my old friend grew up in. It’s part of the reason why there’s so many spaces oriented for communal living.

Then the pandemic hit. The American Conservation Corps (the most recent owners) had to shut down operations during lockdown. That’s when Wild Seeds sprouted. The founder, Jordan Hammond, is a three-time community builder. He acquired the ranch, and then financed it through community investment. Close friends and family invested as owners, and he was able to take the banks out of the equation and build a shared ownership model that’s now paying out its first round to the initial owners. He’s applying this model in his 4th community project, Castle Quest.

Wild Seeds was born as a small business accelerator and a sustainable, affordable live-work community for eco-preneurs and creative professionals.

The Layout

Our spaces include:

• The Main House: The first floor is fully communal. There’s two cozy living rooms, a commercial kitchen, and coworking nooks everywhere.

• Organic Garden & Outdoor Spaces: A mini-vineyard, fruit trees, a green meadow lawn, nature chill spaces, and an outdoor event venue with outdoor bar, kitchen, and multi-level patios

• Seasonal Creek: A natural swimming hole we practically worship on hot summer days.

• The Art Room: A glorious mess for painting, candle-making, costuming, and chaotic creativity.

• The Music Room / Gym: This basement room has great acoustics, but also ends up as de facto storage for instruments and gym equipment.

• Housing: A collage of private rooms, mobile homes, a tiny home, and a cabin.

It’s rural here. Like, thirty-minutes-to-the-nearest-real-grocery-store rural. But it’s an interesting blend of modern lifestyle and owls crossing the starry skies.

For example, we don’t have time for animal husbandry, but we do get farm-fresh duck and chicken eggs from our neighbor for $5/dozen, which frankly beats the “egg crisis” America lost its mind over. The old goat pen we turned into a private dog park. The peacock cages that burned down in an old fire are now vanlife parking spots.

Most members work from home or have irregular schedules. Residents include 2 full-time musicians, a retired filmmaker, an e-waste business owner, 2 nurse/caretakers, a coder, a construction worker, and me, a professional community-building nerd.

How We Leverage Community Without it Consuming Our Lives

The Ranch Population is currently 17 humans, 6 cats, 4 dogs, and 1 bunny.

One of the main perks of living here is that we get to enjoy so much more together than we could afford by ourselves.

We buy essentials in bulk, like TP, paper towels, laundry detergent, etc. That way we can ensure that they are plastic-free and eco-friendly without paying a premium retail price. We have a community food program so that we always have salt, cooking oils, spices, condiments, and legumes/pasta on hand. One of our residents is the director of a farmers market, and he brings home weekly goodies from our food budget.

The property is large, so everyone has to play their part in caring for it.

Every community member is expected to contribute 12 hours a month to the ranch in the form of community hours. This could be anything from raking pine needles, to hosting an open mic event, to organizing a main house deep clean.

But besides the 12 hours and the monthly community meeting, everything is optional to participate in.

Governance: Vertical Works

Our governance model is definitely hierarchical, and it works for us:

1. Landowner Leadership: The property owner has final say on major investments and infrastructure decisions. In the end, he’s financially responsible and liable.

2. Steward Circle: A group of 6 dedicated residents receive rent discounts in exchange for operational responsibilities, from groundskeeping to hospitality. You can only become a steward after living at the ranch for 3 months.

3. Special Committees: Volunteer focus groups for events, food programs, and other shared priorities to accelerate results.

4. House Meetings: Once monthly community-wide gatherings where decisions that affect everyone are made by consensus or simple majority.

5. Blitzes: We also host community-wide “blitzes” when a big boring project needs to get done (e.g. raking leaves for fire abatement), by making it a fun group effort, usually with music and someone preparing food for everyone. Anyone can organize one and they’ve been an effective way to move the needle on community maintenance.

This works because not everyone has the time or passion to dedicate to running the ranch. Stewards are expected to contribute 27.5 hours on top of the 12 hours in the form of specialized labor and dedicated tasks. The stewards meet 2-3 times a month in person to stay in sync and make decisions, and we resolve urgent issues through a stewards group chat.

We also built micro-earning opportunities into the ecosystem, like $35 for flipping guest rooms offered to residents before outside cleaners or pick-up jobs for construction/electrical tasks. This keeps participation high and wealth circulating within the community.

What’s Working

✅ Vibe Check Mastery

Our resident vetting and onboarding process is now rock-solid. I helped develop it when I arrived, and involved building an onboarding process and a community wiki. Previous residents who were less aligned with the community intention have left, and now the energy here is palpably good, with original residents saying it’s the best it’s ever been.

✅ Hands-Off Income Models

Passive hospitality from Hipcamp for vanlifers and campers who pretty much fend for themselves has been great. We barely notice their presence, and some of them have even converted to longer-term community members.

✅ Culture Building

A regular cadence of events keeps people deeply connected and committed. Our weekly family dinner is BYOD (bring your own dinner) every Wednesday, and we’ll try for one Wednesday a month to be a big public potluck or more elaborate dinner. In addition, we’ve had a Christmas Murder Mystery party, big birthday celebrations for everyone, trips to local hot springs, extravagant holidays, and regular D&D or game nights that leave us cackling.

What’s Hard

⚠️ Rural Reality

Our remote location can be tricky. In the past, event attendance has been sparser than the hair on your grandpa’s head. Most people don’t want to make the 30min-1.5 hour drive it takes to get here. Recruiting new residents can also be hard with this factor. Some people don’t have the privilege of such a long daily commute into town. We’ve accepted that this is a unique living situation and are upfront about this with new residents.

⚠️ Mindset Shifts

In the past, some people treated Wild Seeds like a landlord-tenant situation, which was frustrating for both sides. We added a What to Know Before Moving to Wild Seeds disclaimer document to our community wiki so that people would be fully debriefed on the dynamic of the ranch.

⚠️ Conflict Navigation

Like all coliving projects, interpersonal friction is inevitable, and a continuous learning curve. We’ve held workshops with community members using the Conscious Communication in Community training, and working with the most naturally talented mediators to adopt a structured approach to conflict.

Lessons for Community Builders

1. Income loss is better than a bad resident. Every time that we’ve accepted someone we didn’t feel good about, but wanted to remain open to try them out for the income potential, it has turned out poorly. Every. Single. Time.

2. Governance doesn’t have to be completely horizontal. A blend of ownership authority, stewardship, and democratic decision-making keeps things flexible and functional.

3. Design for participation. Micro-earning, decision-making opportunities, and creative outlets deepen investment and belonging. This was the first thing I noticed when I arrived. The ability to participate and make the community my own was what captured my heart.

Final Thoughts

I don’t think there’s a best community out there, but there’s certainly a best-for-you coliving out there. There aren’t any perfect, foolproof ways to run your community either, but there are some ways we’ve made it work here at the ranch. Come on over for a visit!

If you’re curious, you can learn more about Wild Seeds here.

Curious about coliving? Find more case studies, how tos, and reflections at Supernuclear: a guide to coliving. Sign up to be notified as future articles are published here:

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You can find the directory of the articles we’ve written and plan to write here.

It’s usually said half-jokingly, with a dash of “blink twice if you need help.” Once Megyn Kelly asked Gillian something like this on national TV .

And fair enough: coliving houses do often involve shared rituals, charismatic founders, inside language, and a sense of belonging that outsiders don’t always understand.

But where’s the actual line?

When does a tight-knit community cross from “we cook dinner together and talk about values” into “we’re living in a controlled social experiment that’s starting to feel weird”?

To explore that, I spoke with Ellen Huet, an author and Bloomberg reporter whose new book, Empire of Orgasm, investigates OneTaste, the San-Francisco-based wellness company that sold Orgasmic Meditation and ended up accused by the U.S. government of being akin to a sex cult.

Ellen has spent years studying what makes a group drift from idealism into control, and what separates ordinary devotion from manipulation.

Our conversation starts with definitions and ends with signs your coliving house might be edging into cult territory.

1. What is the formal definition of a cult?

Ellen:

The short answer: There isn’t one universally agreed-upon definition.

Cults aren’t a binary thing, and they can’t easily be divided into “cult” and “not-a-cult.” Cult researchers agree that high-control groups exist on a spectrum from fairly benign to deeply harmful.

Plus, “cult” is a loaded term. It conveys a moral judgment, and it can get thrown around as an accusation.

But if you want to get close to a definition, imagine a checklist of 20 cult characteristics. A kinda-culty mission-driven startup might have 4 or 5. And a decidedly dangerous group might have 17.

These characteristics differ slightly depending on which cult researcher’s framework you follow, but here are some largely agreed-upon key traits:

• A charismatic leader – yup, you’ve heard this one before – who claims they have special or divine knowledge

• Isolation from outside influences such as friends, family, or other sources of advice and information. Insiders stick tightly together, while outsiders are feared, pitied, or shunned

• An overarching belief system, in which the group’s philosophy is used to answer most or all of life’s questions

• Increasing levels of control over members’ relationships, time, or finances

• A sense of awe or wonder, like you’ve discovered a secret to life that others don’t know

• And often, some kind of exploitation, whether financial, emotional, or sexual

The tricky thing is some of these traits can show up in benign communities too: charismatic leaders, strong ideals, shared language.

Here’s one helpful rule of thumb to get a sense if you’re in a danger zone: Can you walk away freely without punishment if you decide the group isn’t working for you?

That being said, not everyone in a cult-like group necessarily has the same experience. Some people are able to walk away freely, while others who are more deeply enmeshed might feel extreme penalty or intimidation if they suggest they want to leave. Again – there’s no one agreed-upon definition.

2. Your book is about the OneTaste community. What made OneTaste cult-like?

Ellen:

When I started reporting on OneTaste, I expected to learn about an edgy sexual wellness startup offering female empowerment. But what former members described to me looked a lot more like a classic high-control group.

OneTaste was built around Orgasmic Meditation, or OM, a practice in which one person, usually a man, lightly strokes a woman’s clitoris for fifteen minutes as a form of mindfulness. The company marketed the practice as a wellness revolution and positioned its founder, Nicole Daedone, as a powerful CEO, complete with celebrity endorsements and speaking gigs at SXSW and TEDx.

But former members told me that inside, it operated on a very different logic.

• Charismatic leader: Founder Nicole Daedone, the founder, was treated as a near-prophetic figure. Her teachings shaped her followers’ beliefs, sexual behavior, and personal lives. “You stop trusting yourself and start trusting Nicole,” one former member said

• Overarching belief system: OM and sex were presented as the answer to every problem: frustration, poor work performance, or interpersonal conflict. If it didn’t work, the issue was on you. “The authority figure would say, ‘You’re fucked up,’ and sex was always the solution,” a former employee told me

• Increasing level of control: Those deeply involved in OneTaste often left their old homes and moved into communal OM houses, quit their job and began working on the OneTaste sales team, and began paying OneTaste tens of thousands of dollars to buy advanced courses

• Isolation: Members distanced themselves from family and friends who didn’t understand the OM practice and lifestyle

• Exploitation: Former members told me they felt pressured into sex and unpaid labor, all in the name of personal growth

• Awe and wonder: Amidst all this, OneTaste members felt the thrill of discovery – they believed they were part of a special group that was going to heal the world through OM

In 2023, federal prosecutors charged OneTaste’s leaders with forced labor conspiracy, and this summer, a jury found them guilty of the crime. Nicole Daedone and her second-in-command, Rachel Cherwitz, are in a federal jail right now awaiting sentencing, where they could each face up to 20 years in prison.

3. When does a coliving community veer into cultiness?

Ellen:

I get why people ask “wait, is it a cult?” about coliving! There are a lot of surface similarities: living together, shared rituals and meals, a broad life philosophy, and (sometimes) a tight social circle.

Let’s try to address this via a light-hearted self-diagnostic quiz.

You might be in a culty coliving house if:

• The “house values” document doesn’t merely discuss dishwasher etiquette but also preaches about “the best and only way to live life”

• People start dating exclusively within the group because “outsiders don’t get it”

• Criticizing the founder feels socially dangerous

• Former housemates who move out are socially shunned and denigrated

• Household duties keep taking up more of your time, resources and energy

• You find yourself asking permission to have independent thoughts

Seriously though: coliving gets weird when the house’s culture replaces your agency. Healthy communities create more freedom; cultish ones shrink it.

The good kind of coliving says, “Let’s experiment with better living and see what happens.”

The bad kind says, “We already figured it out. Just follow our path, and if you don’t, you’ll regret it.”

Why this matters (Phil)

Okay, cults are bad. But “not-quite-cults” might actually be good.

Coliving is trying to rebuild something modern life has lost: belonging, ritual, shared purpose. Those are beautiful human needs. And organizations that provide them take a couple small steps in the culty direction. A little intensity and some strong opinions can give meaning. And “not-quite-cults” create an environment where real behavior change can happen — is CrossFit a cult? Probably a little bit, and that’s okay. But they need to stop short of manipulation.

For anyone building intentional housing, the challenge isn’t to avoid some of the opinionated aspects. It’s to build transparency, autonomy, and exit ramps into the structure.

The more a community normalizes disagreement, the safer it gets.

Ellen Huet’s book Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult is out now!

You can order it here. And if you like audiobooks, Ellen narrates the audio version!

Suggested further reading

I’ve discovered a group trip format that I really love, and I wanted to share it with others because (a) you might find it fun to host or join something like this in the future and (b) selfishly, I would like more people to organize trips like this so that I can join them!

The basic idea simple: live in an interesting new place for a few days or weeks with friends in walking distance, as if we were neighbors. I pick a walkable neighborhood in a city, tell friends what dates I will be there, and then draw a circle of a 5-minute walk from my AirBNB and recommend to friends that they book within it. I’ve now organized half a dozen of these trips to places like Chautauqua, Buenos Aires, Las Catalinas, and beyond with groups of 8-40 people each time. It’s a blast and I can’t wait to do more.

I love these trips because they are a way to explore the world while staying connected to friends. In some ways it’s even better than living in the same city as a friend, because the intensive nature of an extended trip with a small group gives you focused time to see the same people every day or at least multiple times a week. This builds friendships quickly, compared to the typical rhythm that happens when you live in the same city as a friend, where you might see each other for dinner once a month but never really build up that velocity of the friendship.

An important aspect of this format is that it is very much “choose-your-own-adventure”. Here is the basic recipe:

• Throughout the year, I tell friends that I’ll be in X city (e.g. Buenos Aires) for a particular timeframe (e.g. the last three weeks of November) and that if they happen to be free, I’d love to see them there. If they seem interested, I send them an email with some basic details about the trip and a spreadsheet for them to sign up if they’re interested.

• It’s very low-key. Basically I just put a pin on a map saying, “Here’s where I’ll be staying. You should book an AirBNB within a 5 min walk”.

• I create a simple spreadsheet where everyone puts the dates they plan to be in Buenos Aires, so they can coordinate with each other. Some folks choose to book together in group houses, some do not.

• Everyone comes for different lengths of time – some for the whole month, some for less then a week, and everything in between.

• Most people work remotely from Buenos Aires over the course of the month, though some folks take the time off to explore the city. It’s very much choose-your-own adventure.

• We join up for meals most nights, and everyone is welcome to coordinate their own activities together throughout the days, but there’s no expectation that everyone hangs out all the time.

• It’s very low-commitment. Lots of people show up last-minute, and other people drop out last-minute. Think of it more as a transient neighborhood rather than a big group tour.

Tactics

I’ve now hosted a bunch of these and have learned a lot about how to make them fun. Here are some of the tactics I’ve learned over the years:

• Chat group as the primary coordinating mechanism: Telegram with channels + viewable history

  • Viewable history is important because people join at different times, and they often have questions that have already been asked. Unfortunately Telegram is the only chat app I’ve found that has this feature.

  • Once you get past ~10 people, channels are important because they reduce the amount of noise people have to deal with from irrelevant messages.

• Share the list of people who are coming ahead of time: When inviting someone, it’s helpful to give them a curated list of others who will be coming so that they get excited to see them. This becomes less important for folks who’ve joined on one of these trips in the past, but for folks who don’t really understand the format yet, it’s especially helpful.

• Curation is key: At this size (10-20 people at any given time in the city), it’s really important to curate the group. People often ask me if they can bring people they don’t know, and I’ve found that it can really bring down the vibe, because it’s hard for me to tell if they will jive. It’s a bit uncomfortable to say no to your friend asking if they can bring someone you haven’t met, but I can assure you it’s much more uncomfortable to spend days/weeks with someone you haven’t met who turns out to be difficult or unpleasant. (I have learned this lesson the hard way.)

• Group size: I’m considering doing a larger size so that it would actually feel more like a neighborhood. The 10-15 in the neighborhood at a time is a bit of an odd number because it’s too large for 1 dinner table but too small to feel like everyone can genuinely break off and not get to know everyone on the trip.

• Decoupled bookings: It’s important that everyone books on their own rather than you booking accommodation for everyone, because otherwise you (a) bear a lot of risk and (b) are stuck in the middle of people’s preferences, which is a surprisingly unpleasant place to be. (The alternative to this is to be extremely hardline about what dates everyone needs to be there, more like a wedding, and try to do something like book a hotel block. But that still creates a lot of work for you and not necessarily much benefit.) If people want to share AirBNBs or something like that, you can still put them in touch with each other, but I don’t recommend getting in the middle of the transaction because it likely won’t contribute much and it’ll get messy quickly. (Again, a lesson I’ve learned the hard way. If things go well, people don’t really notice all the work you put in; if they go poorly, they get angry at you.)

• Light structure: I’ve found the trips are even more fun and special if you add some optional structure around them to nudge people to share what they are working on or thinking about. My friends tend to be people who care deeply about their work, and I love learning from their expertise. Here are a few things I’ve tried, and I plan to experiment with other ideas too in future trips:

  • Dinner leads: One of my goals for this trip is for its organization to be fairly decentralized. There are two reasons for this: (1) it makes it more interesting if different people provide their ideas and energy to plan how we spend our time, rather than me doing all the central planning, and (2) it takes some of the coordination load off my shoulders, which allows me to not spend 100% of my energy planning and allows me to have more fun. One way I achieve this is by asking people to volunteer to organize at least one of the nightly dinners during the trip. They are responsible for picking the restaurant and getting a reservation, which means we end up going to a broader diversity of restaurants than if I were to pick all of them. The organizer also has the opportunity to bring something extra to the dinner, e.g. start the meal with a prompt for everyone to discuss to make the conversation go a little deeper than it otherwise would. The organizer is encouraged to get creative to make it interesting for everyone!

  • Lightning talks: Fun opportunity for everybody to show off their expertise in a particular area, and I ended up learning interesting things about everybody. One thing I’ve experimented with is having an evening where everyone gives a lightning talk, but after a few of them it gets a little boring to sit still like that, so in the future I’m going to experiment with doing 1 lightning talk over dessert each night instead.

  • Group workouts & sports: On one of the recent trips, a friend suggested that we all go play Padel, which was something I never would’ve thought to suggest to the group. It was the highlight of the trip for me! I’m so glad he recommended it, and it was a great instance of how having the schedule emerge rather than being planned centrally by me makes the trip way more fun.

Challenges

• Group dinner size: Group dinners are a bit unwieldy. Natural instinct is for everyone to gather together each night, but dinners of >6 people are not so fun in my experience. Ideally we’d find a natural way for people to break off in groups more often. This is one downside to me being the primary hub of the group rather than everyone individually having relationships ahead of time, although many of these people do know each other from other contexts too.

• Effectively signaling that the invite is very low-key: Most people have never participated in trips with this format before, so when I invite them, it’s hard to credibly signal that it’s totally fine if they don’t come. This has gotten easier though as these trips are getting better known in my social circle, since they have more context for it.

• Remember you’re not a tour guide company: It’s sometimes hard for me not to feel really responsible for everyone’s experience, which is a bit stressful especially as the group gets large and the problems people bump into grows with the number of people, but it’s critical for me to make it as decoupled as possible and not play “tour guide”, because otherwise I will not have fun. Plus a big part of the purpose of these trips is to experience what it’s like to live together in a place, and they’re grown adults who can take care of themselves. I’m not getting paid, so if I let myself get sucked into playing tour guide, it can really ruin it for me

If you’re interested in organizing a trip like this, I’m happy to share the materials I’ve created over time as a starting point for how to explain and coordinate a trip of this sort!

As my friends are more and more scattered across the globe in different cities, finding ways to be together has become more important for cultivating those friendships. These “traveling neighborhoods” have been an incredible way to not only stay in touch with people I care about but also get to know them much more deeply than before, and I hope to see more people organizing trips like this that I can join too!

Suggested further reading:

And yet at some point most of us leave that behind. In the US, 28% of people live alone; in the Nordic countries over 40% of people do.

But you, dear readers, are interested in something different. Maybe you’ve read the research on the importance of living near friends for your health and longevity. Maybe you never stopped living with your community, but are looking for tips and inspiration for how to thrive together.

For whatever reason, you found your way to Supernuclear! And thanks to the ~900 of you who have filled out our intro questionnaire (if you’re reading this and haven’t, please do!), this is what we know about our reader base.

Compared to five years ago when we wrote a post like this, more of our readers are community-curious rather than already living in community (back then 37% of our readers were already living communally, compared to 26.7% today).

I’m not surprised to see the vast majority of communities are on the small side, though we don’t think there’s an ideal size for a community.

Phil and I are both solid millennials and know this appeals to our cohort, but are happy to see that a significant portion of our readership comes from Gen X and beyond. We’re surprised we don’t have more younger readers because we know a lot of Gen Z are living communally - if you know any who might want to read this please pass it along!

Share Supernuclear

Most of you are based in the US and Europe, but hi to our one subscriber each in Uzbekistan, Zambia, and Venezuela!

The majority of our readers want to buy property with friends. I hope you’re checking out Phil’s company, Live Near Friends.

We really appreciate learning what motivates you to read Supernuclear. A few comments that stuck out from the intro survey when we asked ‘Why are you interested in coliving?’.

There’s a hard to reconcile contrast between the depth of friendship I want to maintain, and the physical opportunities to see each other. Coliving is a way to facilitate these opportunities, and build a stronger network of mutual support and empathy. - Louis-André (Québec)

Check out Logan’s story about how ‘other significant others’ helped her and her husband get through his cancer treatment.

I think we need to very radically change the way we live “in the west” (highly individualistically), and move towards some deeply necessary, at times awkward, but in many ways profoundly rewarding shared spaces/resources/power/experiences. - Karim (Toronto)

Read Patty’s post about embracing the awkwardness of being ‘those people’ who started waving down neighbors to share coffee on their stoop - and ended up transforming their neighborhood.

Nothing is more pressing in our current American society than rebuilding the foundations of connection that once allowed us to make this place great. Seeing the pieces on the different ways you are exploring that aligns with some deep values I have. - Simba (Texas)

We love Chris’s Dispatches from the commune about the many different ways people are building intentional communities in the US.

Life is short and worth being spent with the family you’ve chosen, i.e. friends. Living as a community has been a recurring topic with some of them, for a couple of years now, each time passionate discussions that ended up with us splitting apart and flying back to one part of the world. Time to change that, especially with a toddler and another one on the way :) - Anonymous (Lisbon)

Check out ‘How and why to do pop-up communes’ about how these passionate discussions can become a stepping stone to long term community.

Because living alone or just with 1 partner seems depressing and isolating, and like a road to co-dependence. Because I think coliving will give me support when I have kids. Because it’s cheaper. Because big houses and yards are cool but I don’t actually personally need that much space. Because I love cooking for people and I want live-in dinner party guests. Because I’m an introvert and this gives me social interaction without having to leave my house or make a particular effort (tbh). Because I love my friends. Because I want to keep learning and growing in my adult life and not just petrify in my own little bubble. - Freya (Massachusetts)

Check out ‘Life at Selgars’ for a take on life in a big house where community comes to you.

I’m not planning to have kids and I want the latter half of my life, especially as I start considering retirement (I’m in my 30s so there’s some time) to be spent in community with other adults and maybe kids, especially as I age. Plus, economically and from an environmental perspective, it doesn’t make sense to live in a single family house and to have everyone buy one of everything. Like, do we need one lawn mower per every 2 adults? No, that’s silly. You need one lawn mower per like, 10. Same goes for appliances, yards (10 tiny yards or one cool big yard?!), etc. - Lael (Idaho)

Monique Giggy and her partner bought a home they planned to retire to with their friends - but ended up using it a lot sooner as a place for their community to retreat during COVID.

I love the interdependence and fusion of personalities in co-living homes. They’re without a doubt the best model for a future sustainable way of living, socially and environmentally, both on this planet and others 🚀 - Anders (Arizona)

I’m still obsessed with Mars College and their experiment building our solar punk future.

I’m 50something professional living with a few physical disabilities, and I have no partner or surviving immediate family members. I rely on friends and community for support when I need it. I believe in mutual aid as the best (and only viable) paradigm for a world with smaller families, more disabled people, and more political and climate instability. I’m interested in coliving as a form of mutual aid and as a means of resource conservation. Basically, I’m just done with hyper-individualism and demographic isolation. As I get older, I would like to live in proximity to people of all ages and demographics. - Anonymous (Colorado)

Check out the story of Open Field Coliving for a deep dive on a house designed for accessibility and climate resilience.

I grew up in a blended family, with grandparents nearby. I relied on friends and friends’ parents for a lot of emotional support growing up. I went to summer camp. I enjoyed all these experiences. They’re some of the most important parts of who I am today. I believe the nuclear family, in most cases, is set-up to fail and I want more people to see it’s not the only way. I am considering applying to a design thinking program to put some of these ideas to work. - Sarah (Toronto)

You might enjoy Jackson Steger’s Pyramid of Coliving Needs.

Having a child over the last 6 years has been so hard and isolating. I miss my friends. We live all over the country and we can’t see each other anywhere near as often as I want. At the same time, I feel like the safety and comfort of our little house is kind of all I have in the world, and I’m reluctant to share that with anyone. And I know I need community. All these ideas are in tension with each other. - Anonymous (Toronto)

Check out my piece on families living in communities to see if anything there helps make this more approachable.

So much of what we’ve been told about the nuclear family is not working for so many different reasons for different people. Coliving comes with its own problems but so does the nuclear family. With coliving, I would rather have the problems of community than the problems of isolation. - Anonymous (California)

One of the most common questions we get about communal living is conflict resolution. Phil wrote a great piece on how to manage decision making in groups.

As I grow older I’m starting to believe it’s wasteful for my spouse and I to be a single household. The duplication of my like-minded friends paying the same bills that we are paying every month, like utilities, and maybe owning a car. I don’t know if my mental health would allow me to live with other people, but I like the idea of like-minded people joining up and having more resources left to do something positive with, not just spend the money because everyone else is. - Kate (Missouri)

I wrote a piece on common misconceptions about communal living that might help dispel some of your worries about living with other people.

I’m interested in urban planning, and I see this as an extension of other values I have about making our built environment better serve us. Most of the media I consume is about transportation (public transit, bike lanes, and parking reform), but I’m eager to think more deeply about examining and changing the modes of places where we need to be in the first place. - Karen (New York)

Phil wrote a great piece on the dos/donts of coliving architecture and design. Evy also talked about how to adapt existing spaces (in their case, a multi unit apartment building) to, in your words, make their built environment better serve them.

Pretty sure Epicurus was right and it’s the (actual) key to happiness. Hard to build, but very worth it. Also modern families need to progress way beyond the nuclear model-- Family 3.0 should be your network of support and who you want to build a life with, and that has nothing to do with romance or being related. - Anonymous (Florida)

We are so excited to dive into all the topics and tensions you brought up in the intro survey (you can still fill it out!). Thanks for being with us on this journey.

I first heard of Danielle seeing some of her posters on the streets of San Francisco. And then from news reports about the world famous (and totally fake) Mehran’s Steakhouse in New York City. And then Reddit posts about Sit Club.

Danielle documents her schemes in the fabulous raw & feral Substack which you should subscribe to right now.

-Phil

Scheming my way to community

How do you go from throwing silly parties for your friends to summoning thousands of strangers to participate in a joke and amusing millions on the ‘net? So glad you asked.

I call these projects schemes.

—> Merriam-Webster defines a scheme (/skēm/) as “a plan or program of action, especially a crafty or secret one.”

—> I define a scheme (/skēm/) as “a silly project that sparks joy, typically one with interactivity (the audience is actively involved), contrarianism (parodying some status quo), and a resistance to being a means to an end (there is no goal of profitability or prestige).”

These schemes are both enabled by and foster community.

Riffing off inside jokes

I started small — by doing bits in my coliving home. For example, living with 12 young adults, the girls claimed a bathroom. Yet the boys did not respect this. So us girls fashioned a tampon curtain to mark our territory, which had a 100% success rate. We also turned our living room into a ball pit.

Working on silly projects with your friends or housemates builds camaraderie, and it’s the easiest place to start, since you have a lot of support and little judgement. You probably already do these!

Creating public spectacles

Doing schemes in my coliving house gave me the confidence to think bigger, bolder. I started with a campaign to Beancome the World’s First Beanfluencer, plastering the city with Bean-themed flyers that linked to a survey about one’s bean habits (i.e. are you a beany, beany boy?) I thought - I’d be thrilled if 50 people filled out my survey. In just two weeks, 260 people had. People had more of an appetite for weird shit than I thought.

Next I created The Advice Line, the world’s first reverse advice line that asks the caller for help.

Strangers were delighted, confused, and mildly helpful, and I took their voicemail recordings and turned them into a silly little song in Garageband.

Since these projects involved the public, they were a bit more intimidating, but it was so cool to see people interacting with and shaping work I seeded. People tend to enjoy something more when they get to be part of it, and it’s magical to see your art transform as people engage with it. However, these projects foster more of a 1:1 dialogue with strangers, as opposed to creating a sandbox wherein strangers can interact with each other.

Organizing immersive comedy

I threw many silly parties with my housemates, but after moving to a one-bedroom, I didn’t really want randos in my home. So when we organized Sit Club, which was like Run Club but without the bad parts (running), we decided to do so in Golden Gate Park. I created ridiculous flyers, wrote an absurd Partiful invite, and gathered a couple hundred people in the park to BYOC (bring your own chair) and sit. After an impromptu speech, I guided the sitters through sitting warmups, like butterfly stretches and squats, to prepare for a long afternoon of sitting. Then we played musical chairs to find the fastest sitter.

I met many cool people at Sit Club, and people kept asking how they could stay updated on my schemes. And I was like, idk just keep an eye out for flyers on lampposts. Then I figured I should make an actual mailing list. I included a section to make offerings to me, and someone named Fischer offered their venue, The Nook, for future events.

This was a gamechanger. A real, genuine venue. I cautiously broached the idea of “Strippers for Charity,” a plan that had been on my mind for awhile, but never had the right space. A scheme in which regular folks (not professional strippers) pick a charity to strip in honor of, perform a routine themed around that charity, and then all the dollar bills thrown at them go toward that cause. Fischer said absolutely. And so the most charitable strip show in history was created.

From there I hosted the Death Duel, in which I had tech bros oil up and fight each other to even out the gender ratio in SF. I also put together with some friends a city-wide scavenger hunt that 12,000 San Franciscans played over a month.

These sorts of projects, this “immersive comedy,” I would say are the highest echelon of schemes, but the most difficult to pull off. You’re bringing together a bunch of strangers, and you really have no idea what will happen. And that’s nerve-wracking but thrilling.

They foster community the most, because they involve physically going to a location and engaging with people under an absurd premise. This absurd premise is key, because it motivates people to actually take action, as opposed to thinking it’s something they could always do later (and subsequently never do). It also breaks the ice - you already know everyone is lowkey down to clown, and you have a built-in conversation topic that’s much more interesting than work. These elements create a transient third space (usually in the middle of Golden Gate Park because venues are expensive).

A scheme can evolve through these designations

Take for example, Mehran’s Steakhouse, a parody fine-dining restaurant that went viral. It started as an inside joke, when I listed my coliving house as a restaurant on google maps, after my housemate who cooked great steaks. Then it became a public spectacle, as friends-of-friends and strangers saw the google maps listing and contributed their own absurd reviews, or read through them, or were inspired to try to dine at our house. Finally, it became immersive theater, when we brought the spirit of these absurd reviews to life for one night only, in a feat covered by the New York Times that went internationally viral.

A silly inside joke among friends picked up and became entertainment for hundreds of people, then millions of people. There’s more people who are lowkey cool than you might realize. And this incremental validation makes you more comfortable putting yourself out there - while sharing something on an international stage outright is intimidating, you can start small, and gradually open up more and more to the public arena.

The symbiosis of schemes and community

Schemes create a positive feedback loop of community. They’re enabled by community, and they foster community.

They’re enabled by community because creativity is contagious. You can bounce ideas off each other and invent things you wouldn’t have thought of alone. And you’re more comfortable taking outlandish leaps when you have friends to support you. For example, in organizing Strippers for Charity, I created a group chat with all the folks stripping, and this ended up being instrumental. They chatted, exchanged tips, encouraged each other, and it made them much more comfortable with doing something offbeat. A few commented that without the group, they may’ve gotten intimidated and backed out.

Having a support group also makes me as the organizer feel more comfortable - sometimes I feel a bit anxious that the turnout of an event will be disappointing. But worst case scenario, I’m just hanging out with my friends, which is gonna be fun regardless. So it helps take the pressure and fear off.

Schemes also bond communities. Humor brings people together - it gives them a shared context, even if they have little in common. Laughing puts people at ease.

There’s also something powerful in creating ambient community - people in the same space, doing the same thing, in which they can simply enjoy existing around others, or choose to interact as much as they want, without the interaction necessitating maintaining a conversation. An interaction where the primary basis is conversing can often be intimidating, tiring, or just boring. It’s nice to exist in comfortable silence and engage in sort-of parallel play, like you would with a close friend.

And on the organizer side, there’s a particular joy in creating something with friends. It’s not just a meal and a catch-up, but actively building something together. Not just maintaining friendships, but deepening them.

I’d call scheming a genre of play theory, but that’s a whole other discussion to get into, and we do not have time for all that.

In conclusion:

Go forth and be silly! And if you don’t quite know where to start, get a few friends together to scheme :)

How many of us live in cities, dream of moving out to the countryside, but worry we’ll be isolated and lonely once we do? Morgane and her partner took the brave, brave leap to build a dream home for themselves and a wider community - read on to find out how.

Dates of operation: Seasonal (usually mid-October to the end of April for coliving) since Jan 2023.

Location: Uffculme, Devon, UK

Rented or owned: owned.

Amount of space: 8 acres of land. 3 buildings for living + event barn, 1 vegetable garden.

Governance: Anton and I, the owners, run the venue, with the “emotional help” of our Bernese Mountain dog Zuko. We host and live with the coliving residents (up to 17), all the while leaving space for everyone to propose activities, lead, and suggest improvements.

Origins

Selgars has been around for a while. We do not have many details about its history prior to the mid-1800s, but we know it was once a paper mill that later became a pig farm for a while before being converted into an event venue. While beautifully renovated before we arrived, the house still retains a lot of the features of the past, such as the old wheel and the stone grinder in the kitchen, which we now use as a sharing table for community dinners, giving it a lot of character.

Life as Selgars as we know it is quite new. Anton, Zuko, and I only took over less than three years ago.

Technically, however, it all started back in 2017, when we met while living in a 50-person, self-run residential community in the heart of Stockholm, K9 Coliving. It was a strange and unheard-of kind of community, which to this day I refer to as a UFO in the coliving world. It is in that shared living room that Anton and I met. I had been in Sweden since 2009, working for the French government and later on as a community manager for a startup hub. Anton had moved to Stockholm specifically to support the team in opening K9 Coliving, or Tech Farm as it was called at the time. That experience profoundly changed me and inspired me both professionally and personally. I even wrote a whole book about it, Have Your Cake and Share it Too, and a guest post here on Supernuclear.

Among other things, Anton and I bonded over our shared passion for untraditional housing solutions and dreamt up a future where we would have community, events, and nature under one roof - an aspiration we at times struggled to keep alive during the two and a half years we spent cooped up in a flat in London during Covid. We were lucky. We had a beautiful space, but it was isolating and, at times, truly depressing for me. We looked everywhere. But we never found a solution that matched our dream. Until one day…

Serendipity

When the world reopened after the lockdown, Anton and I found ourselves traveling frequently for work (and to see our families in Holland and France). He was visiting different projects working as a consultant for real estate companies and mixed-use properties, and I was supporting different coliving spaces in Europe with marketing, content, and copywriting. All the while, Anton also had made the risky (mid-pandemic) but brilliant (it turned out to be very successful) move to refurbish and open a small nature-inspired event space in the vacant office above our flat in East London, House of Transformation, where a team can host day long workshop or individuals can have gatherings and wellness classes. Finally, we were also working on a mini festival project called Enchanted that would bring people interested in regenerative practices together in nature for four days. We were busy.

So when July of 2022 came, we told ourselves: no trips this summer. Of course, that is when we got invited to a retreat in a cohousing-eco-village in Belgium by another K9 Coliving alumnus. Impossible to refuse.

That trip made me really sad. They were living the life I wanted: community, nature, space, exciting projects and events… I remember telling myself: “if we don’t figure this out within a year, I’ll move to Belgium”.

Two months later, Anton was informed by the venue where we were planning to host Enchanted the following summer that the owner was selling and they were closing down. We got our deposit back, back to square one.

At least that is what I was thinking. Anton had something else in mind. Having visited the venue before, he had taken some pictures and drone shots for marketing purposes for our event. He used them to create a website and reach out to the owner with a pitch and a proposal: rent us Selgars for two years, let us prove our business concept, and after two years, we’ll buy it.

In December of that year, we were moving to Selgars for good.

The hard work

Let’s be honest, we had no idea what we were doing. We had dreams and plenty of castles in the air, but we had never run such a business, and more importantly, we had always lived in the city. Big cities.

The first year and a half was hard. We had to prove to the bank that our mixed-use business was a brilliant idea: hosting events and retreats from May to October, and offering coliving for digital nomads and remote workers from November to April.
Running an event venue with numerous buildings and extensive land also presented a challenge. We knew nothing about growing vegetables, cutting trees, maintaining a building (so many leaks!), regulations… and so on. We had to learn it all while hosting people, while getting our bearings, and finding our new routines in this brand new world.

Days were long and nights were short. We had to find companies, institutions, agencies, and other associations to host an event at Selgars, which was Anton’s responsibility.

All the while, my job was to find people crazy enough to ditch Portugal and Bali to instead spend the winter in the UK countryside, coliving with us. It felt far-fetched. But after our first few colivers came, we realised that the coziness and the sense of home we had managed to create really appealed to this group of people always on the road: the board games by the fireplace, the long walks, the charm of the English countryside, only two hours away from London. We, together with these people, were creating a place that became special for them. They have since come back two, three, even four times for some.

Finally, after many challenges and adventures, with the support of many old and new friends and family, we officially became the owners of Selgars in December 2024.

Running a coliving…business.

Selgars is an interesting take on community because it has two distinct seasons: the event season and the coliving season (similar to Feÿtopia. Anton had previously met Jessica, the founder, and the Chateau de Feÿ concept inspired us when we got started). While Anton and I are the only year-round residents, we are constantly surrounded by people coming and going.

Because we host a certain type of events (such as Food is Medicine, the first Carbon Dioxide Removal Retreat funded by Oxford University, Hyper Sensitive People retreat, yoga and breathing retreats…) we tend to attract people who come back or their friends and friends of friends. We have built a network of facilitators and chefs who have become friends as well.

During coliving, we are now so lucky to welcome returning and new friends every season. Residents who come for the people and the vibe rather than for the weather.

The biggest challenge for me was to have people “pay” to experience community. Especially since the very first guests were our friends. And then the first “strangers” slowly turned into friends too… but they were also clients… and I got lost in this loop for a long time, always asking myself the same question: how do you create a community that is experienced, not bought, when you have a business to run?

I am still not sure I have the answer at times, but I try my best. And I have learnt to enjoy the journey. From living at K9 Coliving to working with several coliving spaces, I realised that what is key is making residents feel a sense of belonging and ownership, or “control”, over their experience and space.

To this end we try our best to leave space for anyone to come up with their own goals, projects, and activities. We do have a loose schedule that is up for debate every week with Monday Masterminds, Wednesday wiggles (a dance in the barn we take turn dj-ing for, followed by sauna session) or the Sunday pancakes tradition (the only one that always happens no matter what) during which we share how we feel and what we want to do in the coming days. We also have some small chores we take turns doing, like watering the plants, making sure leftovers are being used, or washing up the kitchen towels.

I personally love coliving season as it allows me to try all the random ideas that cross my mind, from Murder Mystery dinner to opening a pop-up French crêperie for one night. Our residents also have amazing ideas, such as secret Valentines, spring tea parties in the garden or an 8 am club for craft activities before work! I think the biggest surprise so far was a completely spontaneous co-created festival we called Selgarnia during which every resident held a workshop from reflexology to magic tricks and even a dog show!

Who Comes to Stay

That is a question we get a lot when talking about what we do outside of the “coliving bubble”: who are these people? Contrary to some beliefs, they are not a bunch of long-haired hippies (while we would have nothing against that).

Their main common trait is that they can work from anywhere. They are either freelancers, entrepreneurs, artists, or employees with “remote-first” companies. But not all of them work; some are still studying, and others are retired. Indeed, we have guests as young as their early twenties and as late as their mid-seventies. We have people who have been coliving for years and some for whom Selgars is their first coliving experience (the pressure!). They are coming from all over the UK and all over the world as well.

And for those who like data: based on season 3 (November 2024- April 2025), we had 33 residents over the six-month coliving period. The average stay was 1.5 months, and the return rate was 36%.

The physical space

The heart of the coliving is the old Mill with seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, a coworking area, a big kitchen with long dining tables for daily community dinners, an art corner, a music room, a library, and a cosy living room with a fireplace and a projector for movie nights, skillshares, and masterminds. We also have a laundry room that everyone can use.

Right next to the Mill, the annex, a duplex with an individual kitchen, bedroom, and bath, is perfect for anyone wanting a bit more privacy.

Just across the courtyard, we find two lodges with their own living spaces, kitchens, and two extra bedrooms each. Anton and I share one with our dog and cats, and the other one is another coliving option.

During the event season, we also have 10 cabins and a shepherd’s hut that can accommodate up to 22 additional guests. They are hidden away on the 8 acres of land (green fields and forest), next to the stream and by the veg garden where we grow (or try to) leeks, squashes, potatoes, tomatoes, and strawberries.

The workshop and the barn are the spaces where creativity can go crazy with lots of space, tools, art supplies, and gym equipment, and of course, we cannot forget the sauna, which is a weekly (at least) occurrence that few of us would miss.

And what is to come

As we prepare to close Event Season 3 and start Coliving Season 4, we know much more about what we are doing now and have more time to be present, with the land, with our guests, and with each other, and what we want Selgars to become. The progress we’ve made, both in terms of events and coliving, is visible and palpable. We might not be a conventional digital nomad coliving: we do not have direct bookings online, or a dedicated community manager ( I still have my work as a content and copywriter), we let guests move things around, redecorate in their room, paint furniture, or bring their friends and parents over. Hopefully, making them feel at home.

We do not fall under the term “eco-village” either, since we are seasonal and we do not share ownership. I guess we have turned into our own UFO. But it does feel more and more like a village, season after season. We cannot wait to see what the next one will bring!

To stay at Selgars or learn more, check out their website.

Suggested further reading:

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Co-housing has always felt obvious for me. At the start of the pandemic, I left my downtown Toronto studio and launched Le Host in a small town in Ontario. More recently, I’ve joined the Fractal NYC orbit which has given me a sense of belonging through repeat connection fostered in third spaces. But what does “community” look like beyond living together, showing up, and sharing expenses?

Having recently left my full-time job with maybe too much time to wonder “is there more,” this September I dove into the deep end of community.

I discovered communes are alive and well in 2025 — though most now prefer the term “egalitarian communities” or “intentional communities.” These go beyond rent sharing or dish rotations; some enforce minimum labor, some even share income.

As part of this deep dive, I trialed living at 3 communities around Louisa, VA — a hub for intentional communities:

• Twin Oaks: the most established intentional community in the U.S., founded in 1969 with about 100 members today. They run ventures including making and selling tofu, ceramics, and more. Their main cash cow, a hammock business, was destroyed in a forest fire in 2024.

• Acorn: a community of 9 current full members (capacity up to 30) operating a nearly $3 million annual seed business, enabling full income sharing.

• Living Energy Farm: a small, fully off-grid community that raises revenue through seed growing and helping other communities build complete off-grid systems with unique applications for solar energy and methane biogas (from compost and human waste).

Beyond those, I visited 5 others and met 100+ people representing 50+ other communities at Twin Oaks’ annual Communities Conference. Here are five observations that surprised me.

1. There’s a community for almost everything

At one table at the Communities Conference, you could see the whole taxonomy: a queer spiritual commune, a Christian farmstead, a Staten Island live-work community, a horse-drawn homestead in North Carolina, epicurean enclaves like Baybranch in Louisa, VA, and more.

At the conference alone, 50+ communities had representatives currently accepting members.

These communities exist globally. Check the Foundation for Intentional Communities directory: it lists values, membership or visitor status, and dozens of metadata.

2. Social capital and interpersonal skill are ≥ financial capital

In my recent interview with Priya Rose she flagged “in our 20s we tend to over-optimize for financial capital and overlook social capital.” I can relate, having spent my 20’s chasing promotions and 401K maximization. At this conference, I saw the opposite: people in their 20s maximizing for inter-community and social connections.

When life gets hard, it’s the people around you who matter. In intentional communities, financial capital helps launch or sustain, but interpersonal dynamics can make or break your experience. When you share gardens, food systems, land projects, finances, businesses — conflict is inevitable, and being able to work through it productively is essential.

At a simulation hosted by Cambia (a community down the road from Twin Oaks), each participant was given a “quirk” and operating logic on a card, which others didn’t know. People behaved wildly, and it was fascinating to guess one another’s hidden assumptions. Differences in neurotype, background, and values surface under pressure. Many folks in this scene cherish a style of communication known as Non-Violent Communication.

As we approach more post-capitalist modes, money alone won’t suffice.

3. Legal and financial models supporting intentional communities are more robust than expected

Communes often feel utopian — how do they survive under existing legal, tax, financial systems?

Sandra Bedigis from Les Passages presented a hybrid model: everyone holds equal ownership (one person = one vote, ensuring egalitarian governance), but newcomers issue a “bond-like” financial instrument reflecting initial unequal contributions (so when a member leaves, they can take out what they originally put in). This prevents power accumulation while reducing barriers due to unequal entry burdens.

In the U.S., the 501(d) tax code (originally written for religious and apostolic associations with community treasuries) allows pooled incomes in a nontraditional household setting. Twin Oaks and Acorn use this structure.

4. Community-oriented people make better lovers

Anyone who’s seen a nuclear family struggle with raising kids knows this: raising a family in isolation is misaligned with human evolutionary norms. At Twin Oaks, children appear unusually socially adjusted; many former members return as adults.

Communalists often develop higher emotional intelligence. With multiple relationships filling different needs, they place a lower burden on a single romantic partner. In my observations, this has led to an above average prevalence of secure attachment styles among friends and romantic interests. Dating people who have deeper communal ties and an existing rich network of friendships tends to reduce possessiveness and anxiety in relationships.

Also with such an abundance of fresh food, how can the air not be full of love?

5. Egalitarian communities are not fringe — they point to future modes of living

It’s not a conspiracy to say the systems we’ve known in “developed” Western societies are unstable. Many point to “late-stage capitalism.” With AI and automation displacing labor, and rising digital fatigue, tight-knit communities that grow food, maintain housing, and run businesses together become more viable.

Interest is rising globally. One of the most attended sessions was on nomadic and expat communities. With rising land costs, political pressures, and U.S. suspicion of communalism (think McCarthyism, cultural distrust of collective models), some are looking abroad for more permissive jurisdiction.

Conclusions

This one-month deep dive widened what I thought was possible in how people could live together. Before this, community was an abstraction — something that existed in theory or nostalgia. Now it feels like a prototype for the next social operating system: one where capital is relational, governance is horizontal, and sustainability is built into the daily act of living.

In the coming months I’ll be in Europe and New Zealand, visiting and sharing more experiments in communal life. For those following the same thread, especially from a queer lens, Beau Gordon is tracing parallel journeys from Bali to Spain — a reminder that this isn’t a fringe curiosity but a movement quietly building its own future.

Thanks Chris for this post, we love learning from our readers. If you have something you’d like to share, we pay our contributors! Guidelines here.

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