Case Study: Template House
An intentional community supporting folks coming out of long-term incarceration
[Gillian speaking here] I am very excited to share this case study. The work done by the Embassy/Second Life/Template community is the most impactful and inspiring example of coliving I’ve seen. It’s taken a tremendous amount of effort and heart to bring Template to life and I hope you reading this will also be inspired to help it continue to exist.
Zarinah, who helped found the Template and Second Life Community, has been a particular inspiration to both Phil and I on our coliving journeys. They take on harder and more transformational projects than anyone we know in the space and yet do it successfully.
The Template community has included an financial ask at the bottom. Usually we wouldn’t do this on Supernuclear, but we felt this was a uniquely worthy case.
Thanks to Evy, a repeat Supernuclear contributor, for adapting this into a case study based on an interview with Zarinah .
Support making Template permanent by donating here!
Date founded: Dec 2019
Location: Lower Haight, San Francisco
Rented or owned: Owned, transitioning to a land trust.
Amount of space: 4-unit mixed use building, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, large garden with redwood deck & fish pond, two commercial spaces. On average 6 people live there, and they’d like to eventually have 8.
Governance: Do-ocracy for basic things like ordering food, consensus in biweekly house meetings for big decisions like new residents coming in.
In 2019, Eldridge was released from prison after 29 years. He was exonerated - found not guilty of the alleged crime that led to his incarceration - and so he came back with no resources whatsoever. No parole, no nothing. He got $200 on a debit card and dropped off at a train station in a prison tracksuit. Luckily, somebody knew to bring him to the Second Life community, and so he came home to Sigil just before Christmas. They had a Christmas tree up and Eldridge slept on the couch next to the Christmas tree on their first night. Template House started soon after, and Eldridge decided that he wanted to be part of its founding team.
Template House is the second intentional community in SF for people coming out of long-term incarceration. It is primarily BIPOC led, and about half of the residents are formerly incarcerated and half of them are not.
Template is a hub for not just the intentional communities, but also for the Second Life Project and for transformative justice values in general. Template’s focus is not just building life together, not just building home together, but also on the models of justice, care, and kinship.
Origins
The Second Life Community
Second Life is the name that was given to an evolving set of friendships and community that was built around meeting, serving, and understanding the needs of people coming out of long-term incarceration in California into San Francisco. It started simply, with people gathering and getting to know each other through potlucks, dinners, hanging out, and playing Dungeons & Dragons (see this short film by ABC’s Localish for more backstory). They often met at The Embassy, a community home in the Lower Haight. Those who had not been formerly incarcerated got to understand the dire and extreme situations that people coming out of long-term incarceration come home to. Similarly, people coming out of long-term incarceration got to see what was happening in the community houses of San Francisco.
After hanging out for a while, some of the previously-incarcerated folks started saying, “Despite the fact that I've spent years living in an unintentional community, i.e. prison, what I’d really like is to live in an intentional community home like the ones we’ve seen around here.” And so Zarinah (long-time resident of The Embassy) sat down and talked about it with them. When asked what they wanted it to look like, and how it would work, four things came up:
Residents being not only people coming out of prison
Residents being a mix of genders and ages
Sharing dinners together
The house being self-determined (making their own decisions, self governing, figuring out their own finances)
Sigil was the first house they started together, founded six years ago as the prototype of a Second Life community home. Sigil was important because it proved that something like this was possible.
When we started on this journey, a lot of people thought we were absolutely out of our minds to create mixed communities of people coming out of long-term incarceration and those who weren’t. But Sigil very quickly became a very popular place for the broader community, and we saw how easy it was to build a life together. It was both heartbreaking, in that it was devastating to see how simple it was to build integrated lives together, and inspiring at the same time.
-- Zarinah
Starting Template House
The house was named Template because the founders wanted it to be a template, an example of how to purchase a building specifically to serve people in underserved populations and then transition it to collective community ownership or a land trust.
The building came on the market in 2019. Some friends of the community found it, and when Second Life folks went to look at it they got very excited. A few of them decided they were all in, and the purchase went through in December. The people at Sigil at the time were very much part of the driving force, as the community budded from one house into two. The first two residents at Template were Eldridge and Bert, who moved from Sigil to become “seed residents”.
Financing for the purchase came from values-aligned members of the community who were willing to put risk capital where banks and other traditional institutions would not. Owning allowed Second Life to build a proof of principle, without deposits and background checks, just done on pure trust.
The reason that these houses have been so successful is that we have genuine trust in place, and so we've been able to bypass all of these surveillance mechanisms and control mechanisms. Genuine trust is perhaps not mass-scalable, but they are scalable in a fractal way. We’ve been able to build these extraordinary projects and prove that they work and that they are viable and meaningful and life-saving.
-- Zarinah
The group scoured Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for free furniture. They cleared the building, and had community days where people came from all over to help paint. People from Radish came over and had the floor redone in the downstairs area. The wider community really came together to help create Template House.
Inner Workings
Building connections with previously and currently incarcerated folks
There are a few ways folks coming out of incarceration get connected to Second Life:
Second Life hosts weekly online support circles, and people often join the community by first going to these.
Sometimes people who were incarcerated recommend their friends that seem like a great fit for Second Life, who become penpals with folks like Zarinah while they’re still in prison.
Second Life is in community with folks in transitional housing at 111 Taylor, which is a residence for people coming out of incarceration in San Francisco, joining them for things like walking brunch on the weekends.
Rent and Financial Accessibility
Affordable rent is a really important part of housing marginalized populations. One big piece of lowering costs is offering beds in a shared bunk room. People often have very intense and toxic bunk life in prison, so it was important to Template to create a better bunk experience. The bunk beds are custom built, sturdy, queen-sized, have high ceilings to make them more spacious, and have curtains for privacy.
If someone's really stuck and they can't afford their first month of rent, usually residents will either chip in for that person or ask for financial support from the wider community. They also don't take deposits, which reduces the barrier to entry.
Both Sigil and Template also have a small private room that they offer out for free as temporary emergency relief. They use it as a guest room for friends too, and they decide together what and who they want it to be used for over time.
Daily Life
Zarinah shared that one of the most positive parts of being at Template is the experience of finding deep commonality and shared values with people who have had very different life experiences. Template and Sigil are extraordinarily diverse, from age to gender to sexuality to life experience to socioeconomic class. And in a world that encourages competition between in-groups, these houses are places of kindness, love, and collaboration. You can see a window in their lives here.
A huge part of our theory of change that you can visit these houses and live in them, and really see that despite what society tells you about a certain group of people, at the end of the day you're just human beings. You can still cook dinner together, make difficult decisions together, take care of each other, and form deep loving bonds with people. And that experience is very much present on the minute to minute level.
-- Zarinah
There are also challenges, of course. Everyone in this world is recovering from difficult circumstances of some kind, and at Template there are some particularly intense things that people are recovering from. Living at Template involves learning and practicing how to take care of people who are dealing with difficult and different circumstances.
Folks at Template also regularly provide temporary shelter for folks who’ve been kicked out of their house, are coming out of ICE detention, escaping violence in their home, and so on. Template is able to offer safe shelter for a chunk of time while they recover and get back on their feet. They want to be the safety net for others, because many of them nearly fell through the net themselves.
Transitioning to a Land Trust
For Template, the main goal of transitioning to a land trust is to help the Second Life housing project persist long beyond our lifetimes. The house was named Template because they wanted to create a template for how people could buy buildings for intentional community and transition from a first phase of collaborative private ownership to a second phase of long-term preservation of land.
Due to changing circumstances, the current ownership wants to sell the building on an earlier timeline than previously planned. The current owners are value aligned and are in deep collaboration on this transition to the land trust.
What is a land trust? What are its benefits?
A community land trust is a non-profit entity that stewards land for the long-term preservation of the community that it serves. The land, often with a building, goes into a trust with a board of directors and bylaws that say things like how the property can be used and what groups of people it can serve. Until the trust is dissolved, that property is beholden to those bylaws.
Also, buildings owned and operated by a community land trust are exempt from property taxes, which is usually a tremendous cost.
This project will also enable Second Life to more easily transition other houses in the future. Once the land trust is stewarding one house, it can take a loan out on that house to transition a next house into the trust.
Will residents still need to pay rent?
It's different in every situation. Lots of people leave buildings in their will to a land trust, and they own the building outright, so when it goes into the land trust there’s no mortgage or loan to pay off. At Template they’ll be purchasing the building with a loan, and rent will continue to be collected from residents for some time to pay off the loan.
How can people help?
There are a lot of important things that have already been put into place:
A lender
An incorporated land trust
Support from the city of San Francisco, and the department of public defenders
Support from existing community land trusts in the bay, who have been helping with advice and paperwork and incorporation
The one urgent thing this project really needs is the $400k-500k down payment, and they need to raise this money in the next three months.
You can help by donating any amount, but you can also help by spreading the word, and by making warm introductions to funding bodies or people who might be willing & able to donate larger sums for a truly transformational project. Every time someone shares this story, it both shows people that these kinds of projects are possible, doable, and life-changing, and it also gets this fundraiser under different eyes.
To donate more than $10k, or to get involved in organizing, schedule a call with Zarinah or email zarinahagnew@gmail.com or humansofsecondlife@gmail.com.
To learn more about this project, this document includes the budget, pro forma, some history on the building and the project, as well as details on the team overseeing this transition!
Follow Template on Instagram
Read & learn more
For Some Parolees facing homelessness Communal Houses fill the gap - KQED article about Template House
Thanks Evy and Zarinah for putting this case study together. Evy has also written several blog posts about community housing on their own website. You can subscribe to these writings (about once a month) here, and you can see Evy’s other writing for Supernuclear here:
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