Case Study: Clarendon
This is a reader-submitted case study from Lincoln Quirk and Neil Ritter, part of an ongoing series of deep dives on coliving spaces. To see others, visit the Supernuclear directory.
We’re especially grateful for the reflections this piece provides on founder burnout and how communities transition over time.
If you want to contribute a case study of your community, please let us know at hi@gosupernuclear.com.
Name: Clarendon (named after the street it was on)
Dates operating: 2014–2023
Location: Cambridge MA
Rented or owned: rented till 2019, then owned
Amount of space: 5 bedroom free-standing single family house, 4.5 bathrooms, 2600 sqft, semi-open plan living+kitchen, plus backyard
Governance: Varied: at first totally informal do-ocracy, no meetings. When purchasing the house the owners became the governance board.
In 2014, six of us moved into a house in Cambridge, MA, and it quickly became so much more: a physical nexus and "third place" for dozens, meetups hosting thousands over the years, and the seed of a vibrant online community that's now distributed all around the East Coast. Neil met his wife through Clarendon. And even after we sold the house in 2023, the community is still going strong with spin-off houses and regular meetups. Hopefully what we learned can be useful to others trying to build similar communities.
People and the Vibe
The house had 5 bedrooms, although not all were always occupied. Several of the bedrooms were filled with couples, so we ended up usually having six to eight residents, plus up to three cats and two large dogs.
The core of the house was a pair of brothers (Neil and Daniel) and their collective friend group from high school. The group came together originally through video games and board games. Shared interests included making music, games, beer, science fiction and fantasy novels, and vegetarian cooking.
The typical guest experience: your friend invites you to show up on a Tuesday night. When you arrive, you're offered beer and home-cooked peanut noodles. A bunch of the guests are focused on an activity like playing music or Go (an ancient Chinese board game), and you're welcomed to observe or join in. But if that's not your vibe, there are other people sitting around chatting. The mutual friend will introduce you to the group, and mention a shared interest. You'll get into a nerdy discussion about a sci-fi author, computers, gardening or how to speed run video games. You stay for a few hours and have made some new connections, and are invited to the house Slack server where you can continue those discussions and be notified of future events.
Layout of Clarendon
The house is a 3 story free-standing building with a finished basement (used as bedroom and secondary hangout space) and 4 upstairs bedrooms. The ground floor was fairly open with only two main rooms: it had a large kitchen/entertaining space as well as a smaller lounge/living area partially divided from the kitchen.
The house is in a dense urban residential area surrounded by duplexes, triplexes, and some single family homes. On a 4000 sqft lot area, the backyard wasn't large, but it was tree-lined, fully fenced in and private from our neighbors, and we were able to fit in a little garden and gazebo area with a firepit. Sitting around a fire, which we did almost every week in good weather, catalyzed magical interactions—any evening ending late around the fire felt like a successful evening. We burned a cord of wood in that firepit each year and it bonded us with some of our closest friends.
The house was designed as a single family home for a larger family, but it made a pretty good group house also. The quality of the finish was quite high: marble countertops, high-end hardwood and tile flooring, nice cabinets and faucets. The kitchen in particular was ideal—spacious and efficiently organized, perfectly suited for cooking a lot of food at once while entertaining guests as well.
Our living room was small but flexible: we did a reset nearly every month. We'd clear out furniture, clean it and set it up in a totally new way whenever we had a specific gathering requirement, and then we would usually leave it that way for another month. Go, yoga, hookah lounge, chill and talk, or board games could all trigger a reset.
In terms of accessibility, Clarendon was a 12 minute walk from the subway, a few minutes from several bus lines and a major bike path. For cars, our driveway and street parking were usually available, and the house was close to a major artery coming into Boston. This was a great balance of transit and car access.
Projects & Planning
Clarendon was effectively the regional Go center, hosting a formal monthly 20–30 person Go gathering, organizational epicenter for local Go events, equipment storage—and became the address of record for multiple Go related non-profits.
We invested in a pretty nice beer brewing setup and would occasionally take a weekend to brew 15 gallons of beer. We'd invite community members to help decide on recipes, do the work to brew and clean up, and taste in-progress beer. Once marijuana growing was legalized in Massachusetts we set up a small grow operation as well.
Housemates and community members pitched in to help us build shelving, Go boards, speaker systems, musical instruments, and a weightlifting gym. In our backyard, the community put together a gazebo, a Japanese style garden, and a rock climbing wall.
For Firefly, a Burning Man-esque festival in Vermont each year, we organized a Go theme camp. The house enabled us to store all the supplies year-to-year and stage the camp ahead of the festival.
In the first few years of Clarendon, we hosted annual Solstice parties with 50+ attendees. A lot of planning went into those each year and they grew quickly enough that we eventually had to move the parties offsite—we started renting cabins for weekend-long parties. This eventually spun out into a community of its own, but Clarendon remained the planning center and a major source of support.
Third Place & Community
We were excited to make the house into a third place for non-residents—someplace where you could just show up and expect to find people and social interaction. We were very clear with our friends that they were welcome anytime. We left the front and rear doors unlocked at all times. (Seriously! Lincoln lived there for 4 years and never had any keys, and never needed it or worried that he might not be able to get in. We also never had anything stolen except for a couple of unlocked bikes once.) The house had people in it probably 99% of the time; the only time the house was unoccupied was a few days around Christmas where everyone would travel to see their family.
In the first year we started a Signal chat with the house and frequent guests, and would send out notifications of events to the chat. By the time the chat grew to 30-40 people it became very spammy, so we set up a Slack server for the group.
Slack was a great platform for growing the community. Whenever someone came by who felt like they fit in with the rest of the group, we invited them to the Slack. That made it easy to follow up with others from the community, and be notified whenever anything was happening at the house. We created a channel called `is-anyone-around` which was helpful to figure out how to coordinate around meeting up with others (usually at the house).
Over the following years, the Slack server grew to 300+ people. Not everyone was deeply engaged on Slack—there were probably 40-50 people who regularly chatted—but that community has sustained itself and is still very active even without the house and the original organizers. Of those 300 people on the Slack, at least 40 lived within a 15 minute walk of the house, and another 150 lived within a 15 minute bike ride or 30 minutes via public transit. Other friends met and decided to move in together via Clarendon Slack.
We were always offering free food and drinks to our friends. Beer, coffee, tea and sparkling water were pretty much always available; snacks were regularly offered as well, and people would often come over and cook full meals for the community.
This worked quite well to create a true third place: in the best years, we had about 3 or 4 non-residents who we would expect to see multiple times per week. These people would pop in around 5pm on weekdays, grab a drink or do some emails, and (usually) discover someone to chat with within a few minutes. Combined with the residents, that meant there were ~12 people who were ultra-regulars - creating the positive feedback loop that whenever anyone dropped by in the evening, they'd find someone, realize it was awesome and want to come back.
We would let everyone coming through the house know that Tuesday nights were the default gathering nights and emphasize that they should feel free to drop by any Tuesday even if not explicitly invited. And lots of them did! Some Tuesdays were quiet, only 5 or 6 people including housemates; many were fairly busy around 15 people, and occasionally we got 40+ people to show up on a weeknight. We didn't insist that housemates attend Tuesdays, but Neil was the main instigator and he'd make sure at least he or someone trusted was there.
Problems we encountered along the way
Not everything was perfect. We had some acute pain points over noise, storage and some personality clashes; but we also had chronic worsening of the social scene over time due to our core organizer burning out. We'll start with the acute issues:
Noise-related
On Tuesdays, the music was audible throughout most of the house and tended to run late. If a resident wanted to go to bed early it was pretty tough. We did some soundproofing and set a policy that music shouldn't go past 11pm.
Another recurring noise problem was that people often woke up to human footsteps and dog paws above them when they were trying to sleep. This affected both basement sleepers and 2nd floor sleepers. We asked nicely for people to be more careful, but it didn't work consistently well, and the dogs were especially difficult to train.
Sound isolation methods can work to some degree; we had some success with sealing gaps and hanging foam panels. Mass loaded vinyl (MLV) panels like this one work pretty well for hallways and doors (Lincoln has these in his current house but we didn't know about them at Clarendon). If you have flexibility over the choice of building, consider prioritizing construction methods which better block interior transmission of sound – default wood and drywall framing doesn't do such a good job at this, but MLV can be installed behind drywall, and heavier construction like concrete blocks isolate sound a lot better.
Storage
Projects can be really great for a community, and draw people in who wouldn't otherwise stop by just for socials. But project people will by default end up using up all available storage space for random project related stuff.
Over the years we ran clean-outs for certain parts of the house, but never fully cleaned out the space until selling it at the end. Over the years a ton of junk built up. Most of it was old projects, but there was a lot of individually owned stuff from past residents and guests too. We ended up storing a lot of other people's stuff for years—we had occasional cleanouts, but in the end we were still forced to do a highly stressful and difficult triage and toss process.
We recommend aggressively monitoring/policing storage usage for projects, and not let people use the house as their official address. (We ended up with stacks and stacks of mail and packages for more than a dozen different businesses, non-profits and people who never lived there.)
Incompatibilities
In 2019, we had a deep conflict between two of the residents, which wasn't solved through discussion, and we had to kick one of them out. Our landlord (who was very chill, and we knew well) didn't want to settle the dispute, but had already been thinking of selling the property, and offered to sell it to us so we could evict them ourselves. We had also already been thinking of buying a place but hadn't gotten very far on figuring that out. The timing ended up being quite lucky that these 3 factors were in place all at once, and that confluence made it an easy decision to buy. (See "House Purchase" section)
Chaos & Cleanup
Any place with a lot of visitors attracts mess and other forms of chaos. In the case of Clarendon, we regularly had plates and cups left lying around; objects out of place in the common rooms; overflowing trash; dirty pillows/sheets/blankets from guests and pets; doors left open and the pets getting out; late-night and early-morning noise; visitors eating/drinking everything; visitors treating kitchen utensils poorly (e.g. not taking care to keep chef knives sharp); the fire pit being left burning instead of safely extinguished at the end of the evening; difficulty finding parking at the house; stuff left by previous residents taking up storage space.
Also, at various points when we were (legally) growing marijuana, the whole house smelled of weed. This bothered a few of the residents, and we started to be sheepish about inviting our parents or other respectable folks over.
As the primary organizer, Neil was the one who mainly dealt with this chaos. He regularly and without complaint did all the dishes, arranged furniture, took out trash throughout the evening, supplied the house with beer and snacks, organized clean-outs, and sometimes gently nudged the guests about how to be more respectful towards the house. We ended up hiring a professional cleaner, who we built a nice relationship with and who ended up coming regularly every few weeks for 4+ years. But even with that, the Clarendon social scene couldn't have survived long term without Neil's tireless input.
Trajectory of the Social Scene
The first 4 years of the house blossomed into a social golden era, where we had a core group of about a dozen who were constantly around, and new exciting people were continually joining our orbit. As the primary organizer, Neil put in a lot of effort into planning events and guest lists to ensure that the core people would want to show up as often as possible and bring their friends.
"Leaning into the good" was Neil's strategy for this, and it worked fairly well. He would find ways to encourage anything that was working well: someone he particularly wanted to be there, or a behavior that he saw as productive. This encouragement came in a few forms: verbal—praising someone's work to their friends; energy—Neil would put in additional time and work to make something happen to make someone feel special; and resources—allowing and sometimes even buying equipment that would live at the house.
The strategy worked well for Neil—"largely because I am deeply conflict-avoidant," he says. When purely positive feedback couldn't solve a problem, Neil asked someone else to be the bad cop.
Our core dozen tended to be a mix of extra- and introverts, with extraordinary talents and expertise: musical improv, exceptional storytelling, top tier Go skills, world class video game skills, PhDs with deep technical knowledge. Frequent topics of conversation were technical topics, games, storytelling and science fiction, projects and music.
Every week at the peak we had musicians coming over to jam and improvise. We managed to attract a small group of seriously skilled improvisers, and the musical quality bar rose quickly. This was fun for the high velocity musicians but lots of the "longer tail" folks started to feel like they weren't contributing as much musically, so they drifted off. And then one of the core musicians moved away around 2017 and the weekly jams stopped quickly after that.
Around the same time, Neil started to burn out on organizing. He had been doing a ton of work just keeping the events going. During these first few years, it was fun for him to make the place ready for all the events and guests we had, and to clean up after them; but as a few of the core people moved away, they didn't get replaced with similarly exciting people. Neil was unable to sustain it by himself—setting up for events and cleaning up after them became less fun for him and more draining, and he wasn't left with enough energy to figure out how to do the guest- and event-curation strategy that had worked in the past. The scene started to erode; the most exciting and dynamic people weren't coming as often, and that fed back into itself to make events more of a bore than a draw.
Neil was burnt out, the house was waning, things clearly needed to change... but then in 2020 the pandemic hit. The community was surprisingly well-prepared for this: we leaned heavily into our online tools. For tons of people, the Clarendon Slack immediately became a primary social outlet in a world with few other options. The community again started to grow, and people became more connected through the Slack than they had ever been in person. It also required a lot fewer inputs from Neil.
Lessons on organizer burnout
There is an "organizer energy" required to keep your home functioning as a community house that we never really figured out how to sustain and this contributed to Neil's eventual burn out. Looking back, it is easy to identify a number of factors.
Ideally, the folks living at a physical community nexus should all want to be actively working together on the role of the space in the community. There was support and remarkable tolerance for the inconveniences of having such an open home, but never much communication about or particularly enthusiastic buy-in to a shared vision of Clarendon. This lack of alignment caused some friction and resulted in a lopsided distribution of responsibility for the community role of the house.
At the level of individual house events, there is a sweet spot where an event generates more energy than it takes and it would have done a lot for all residents if we were able to more reliably make this happen. The equation is certainly multidimensional, but a large contributing factor is related to the resonance of the event with the people actually living in the house. Examples:
For Neil, Go events often landed in or near the sweet spot. A lot of things contributed to this. Most residents agreed some greater community good probably comes from the effort to spread Go. The events were catered by a mutual house friend who was incredibly excellent at food so everyone ended up being well fed. The house was always left cleaner and more organized than before the event. All these properties felt - at least to Neil - like they added up to a net positive and something to look forward to (or at least considered "worth it") for residents and that feeling really helps recharge the organizing battery.
Events around music often landed far away from the sweet spot. There was clearly value to and interest from the greater community, but for the most part no residents really resonated and the noise and physical space required to store equipment was a regular source of stress and annoyance.
Video games were likely a missed opportunity. A topic with incredible house resonance that we spent very little energy organizing around and - we think - had the potential to unlock significant resident enthusiasm and energy.
Clarendon had at least dozens of people floating through it every week and this level of traffic had an impact on the state of the house and generated a lot of chores. There are a lot of ways to address this, and in particular friction should be proactively communicated. (Aside: Ray Arnold incisively addresses burnout in a post on Less Wrong: "Young organizations, communities and other groups tend to run on hero power - a couple people who care a lot who put in most of the work to keep it going…think of it as a resource being slowly burned down.") Some problems may be solved with a chore chart, others may be clues to deeper issues that are worth identifying early.
We were privileged enough to be very chill about resources used to make Clarendon a community node. Guests regularly contributed, but we baseline spent hundreds of dollars every month on food, beer, firewood, house cleaner, etc in addition to sponsoring many individual events and projects. We were ok with this but are left with the thought that a healthy community should probably put real thought into how resources are distributed and consumed.
House Purchase
In 2019, after having lived at the house renting it for 5 years, we decided to buy it from the landlord. Since we knew the seller pretty well, we didn't negotiate a price and simply agreed to use an independent appraiser's price.
The purchase was made by 3 of the tenants (the two brothers Neil and Daniel, plus Lincoln). We drafted and signed a tenants-in-common agreement (without lawyers - just did it ourselves starting with standard language that we found online) and agreed on ownership percentages based on invested capital and burden of forward-looking monthly payments. [note from the editors: for those who want more insight into legal documents for co-buying, Dreamship, a co-owned property in San Francisco, has shared their legal agreement and some considerations here].
For the closing, we managed to come up with about 23% of the purchase price ourselves—a mix of personal savings and unsecured loans from various friends and family. The rest was borrowed as a 30-year fixed mortgage. We carefully planned how we would cover all our loan repayments, including deferring some of them for a few years since some of us were expecting to get salary bumps. We didn't raise the rent of the existing tenants—although we probably should have (there was one year where we were barely going to afford all our monthly payments if the salary bumps didn't happen). Regardless, we stayed solvent through the end.
Once we owned the place we made two changes: we installed solar panels, and we changed the official street number of the house to reduce visitor confusion and frequent misdeliveries (there was another house on the same street with a very similar address). Beyond that and a few repairs, we didn't really end up doing much as homeowners. We did set up a board of directors majority vote governance system between the three of us, but it was only used for issues of ownership.
In 2023 we moved out and sold the house: Lincoln and Daniel had already moved away, and Neil wanted to as well, so it was an obvious decision. We gave the remaining housemates plenty of notice and sold it a few months after putting it on the market. We managed to miss the peak of the post-pandemic market run-up, and sold it for a small bump over our original purchase price.
In the end we didn't learn anything all that interesting about rent vs buy. Buying was a lot of work and medium stressful. Lincoln was excited to be able to improve the house in various ways but didn't end up doing all that much customization. We hope that we can learn more next time. We had a fairly easy setup—3 mutually trusting people who weren't worried about money long term. We’re not sure this would scale particularly well.
Lessons about setting up a third place in a house
Firstly, ensure there are enough people—at least twelve, we think—who live there or close by, can get into the house on their own, have incentives to be in the primary public space even if nobody else is guaranteed to be there, and have enough confidence/ownership of the space to be there autonomously and welcome people to that space. We recommend an open-door policy or unlock code, rather than physical keys, and also setting up a default time where people are welcome and offering free drinks.
We know that our living room+dining room layout (with spillover into the back yard) can work. Having light and easily-movable furniture was a big plus. The layout was helpful: our semi-open plan made the living room feel cozy and not-overwhelming with only 2 or 3 people using it, but social gatherings could easily expand into the kitchen/dining area when expecting 20 or 30. And having a large, excellent kitchen where people also wanted to hang out made hosting and cooking easy and fun. We would definitely lean into the kitchen being a major part of the social space, not isolated, wherever possible. (Lincoln has a blog post on this, and Phil wrote a post about ideal architecture for communal living here).
We also know that it doesn't have to be large, and in fact our space's smaller size may have helped centralize things enough to make it so people who came over reliably ran into the people already there.
We learned that it's possible for one person to cultivate a community with consistent effort over time. This should be someone who has a vision for what the community should be like, is aware of different social dynamics, puts energy into encouraging the specific people who they are most excited about seeing, and sets a consistent schedule so regulars can predict and reserve the time.
Find a way to offer different social options, especially including just chatting. Have a "welcomer" who is responsible for orienting newcomers.
Set up a form of community governance! It seemed unnecessary for so long, but when we had to kick someone out, it was impossible without buying the place, which is an overkill solution to such a problem. We recommend setting up a way for housemates to remove each other in dire situations.
The wind down
By late 2021, Covid was less of a concern, and the newly revitalized version of the community that had been communicating over Slack wanted to meet in person again. Clarendon as a house never fully came back online to host big events, but in its place a few other group houses of people in the area jumped in to fill the void. Wednesday replaced Tuesday hangout night, and hosting responsibility began to rotate between houses to lessen the load on any one place. Now Clarendon the house is out of our hands, but the larger community that began here is still kicking and shows no sign of stopping (we're writing this from a Clarendon meetup in Puerto Rico).
Thanks to Daniel Ritter, Joel Shor and Alex Long for comments on drafts of this.
From the editors: we’re so grateful to Neil and Lincoln and all the Clarendon folks who contributed to this piece. It’s a great reminder that even if a house gets sold, a community can live on in different forms.
Co-ownership is hard! We recommend these resources and Case Studies of other co-owned houses:
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