Case study: The Village (San Francisco)
A 14-adult, 4 kid multigenerational home
This is a reader-submitted case study from Evy who’s been living at The Village since April 2022. They’ve also written several blog posts about community housing on their own website. You can subscribe to these writings (about once a month) here. Check out the bottom of this post for links to some of our favorite writing from Evy.
The Village
Date founded: March 2022
Location: San Francisco Panhandle Park
Rented or owned: Rented
People: Currently four kids (2-4 years old) and 14 adults (ranging from mid 20s to early 40s).
Amount of space: Three floors, each separate units with their own living room, kitchen, and three bathrooms. Combined, this “20-bedroom house” is used as fourteen bedrooms, three offices, a playroom, and two common-space rooms that have access to the back stairs. We also have a backyard and a small patio porch on the top floor. We strive to keep the three floors connected and move seamlessly between them.
Governance: We aim for non-hierarchical decision-making using do-ocracy for small and reversible decisions, unanimous consensus for big decisions, and "ask for feedback and proceed unless people have major concerns" for everything in between.
Origins
Two couples came together to start this house: Anna and Derek, and Bill and Hilary.
Anna had been interested in coliving since she learned about it in the documentary Happy. She had been interested in the coliving houses in SF but felt like they were for people in their early 20s that loved going to lots of parties, and she wanted to live somewhere she could settle down. She especially wanted a home that would embrace living with kids -- including their noises, messes, need for kid-proofing, and so on.
When Anna started dating Derek in 2020, he was living at RGB and she was living alone. They wanted to move in together, but first they wanted to find a community home where they could raise a family. They didn’t feel experienced enough to start a new house, but they couldn’t find the kind of house they wanted so they decided to create it.
They hosted a kid-friendly coliving picnic, and many people expressed interest. There was a massive downpour on the day of the picnic, but several people still showed up from all over the bay -- clearly people were interested! Though none of the people that showed up ended up living at The Village, this outpouring of interest built Anna and Derek’s confidence that they could make their dream a reality.
They were looking to start a community of around seven people, and in December 2021 they found a fantastic place in the Bernal Heights neighborhood. Just before they signed, the landlord backed down -- it was his family home and he wanted to be able to move back in easily, so he decided to keep renting it on Airbnb. Anna and Derek were very sad to lose this place.
Meanwhile, Bill and Hilary had been interested in starting a community house centered around kids since their son River was born in 2021. They knew that parenting would take up a lot of time and make it harder to socialize, so it felt important to them to have housemates they could see every day. Bill shares: “it also feels important to create a chosen family for River to grow up in (and for me to belong to!) that goes beyond biological connections.”
Around the same time that Anna and Derek found the Bernal house, Bill and Hilary had gotten together with a group of friends to purchase a huge former nursing home in Alameda (a city near Oakland), but after a lot of work and negotiations, the place fell through. They were devastated.
The couples met when Hilary had seen Anna and Derek’s event advertisements. She reached out to them in October 2021 to see if they wanted to join their project, but it was important to Anna and Derek to stay in San Francisco. Both couples lost their dream homes, but at least they had met, and they got together to commiserate. They kept looking for places.
At the start of 2022, Bill found a 20-bedroom house. “That’s crazy,” Anna said, “I would never start a house that big.” But the four of them talked about it more, Bill toured the house, and within two weeks they’d signed a lease starting exactly one month from then -- March 1st.
In those two weeks they talked about:
shared values
their non-negotiables, i.e. the bare minimum that they needed to feel comfortable in the house
what they hoped their kids would say about the house in 20 years
worst case scenarios for financial loss, and taking on different amounts of financial risk based on their incomes
Filling the House
They had one month to fill the twenty rooms in the house before the lease started. But luckily, they were able to get a month of free rent from the landlord to buy them time. They also filled the house a lot faster than they expected -- after posting anywhere they could (examples here, but also groups for e.g. single moms), over fifty people applied! The first two people who signed up to move in did so without ever having seen the house.
It was fairly clear who was a good fit for the house. They looked for people with:
active interest in living with kids and excited about their vision
community housing experience (to help set up the house systems)
warmth and friendliness
job diversity, i.e. not everyone working in tech
A values & vision document was sent to all potential residents. This communicated things like:
Kids are welcomed rather than tolerated. We’re generally willing to be a little bit inconvenienced in exchange for the joy of having kids around.
We all pay into the food plan and share meals together.
We keep a clean home -- all of us contribute to day-to-day cleaning, we hire professional cleaners every few weeks, and we’re serious about not leaving dishes in the sink.
We’re committed to working to understand each other’s needs and resolve conflicts by discussing them openly.
We do our best to have sensitive conversation topics in contexts that give people a chance to intentionally opt in rather than need to opt out.
Finances
Every month we each pay rent and $500 extra in dues, which pays for food, utilities, house savings, and other miscellaneous costs. People pay reduced dues for their children, and people sharing a room pay a double occupancy fee (reduced for children).
All rent and dues are paid through apartments.com, which goes to Bill who then pays the landlord and puts the rest of the money in a shared bank account. We used Braid before it shut down, and now pay for everything else with personal funds and get reimbursed from the shared bank account through Venmo. We have a spreadsheet where we keep track of all spending and reimbursements, and our House Bursor uses this spreadsheet to regularly send out reimbursements. We’re also working on generating dashboards to make it easier to see how much money we’re spending and saving each month.
To protect the four people on the lease, we’re working on building up a move-out fund. After hearing some covid horror stories, there was fear that The Village could fall apart with vacant rooms in the months leading up to its final end. If this were to happen, the financial burden would end up on whoever was living at The Village at the end, and especially the leaseholders. It’s also possible that the landlord would not return any of the security deposit during move out. We are aiming to save one month of rent for the whole house plus the full security deposit, which totals about $40k.
Chores
Our current model for chores is fairly structureless -- we clean up after ourselves, and tidy things as we notice they are dirty or need cleaning. But there are a few things we do that help:
We have a strict Sink Zero policy. No dishes left in the sink, ever. We can leave dishes on the counter if we aren’t able to clean them right away, but when we do this we attach a clothespin with our name to take responsibility for it and show that we plan to return.
Since it’s sometimes hard for parents to do dishes for their kids right away, we have a special bin for kid dishes. There is an understanding that these dishes might stick around longer than other people’s dishes, but they still stay out of the way.
We strive not to store personal items in common spaces without a note explaining why it’s there and when we expect to remove it. We have a #village_tidy channel where we post photos of things that may have been forgotten about, which acts as a sort of virtual lost and found (and return) channel.
We have a #village_toot_your_flute channel where we post about things we do for the house, as a way of celebrating all we do for each other! It’s not required that people post there, but it’s used fairly regularly. We love posting silly selfies alongside our completed chores! (You can read more about why we love brag sheets in Phil’s Supernuclear post here).
We hire cleaners to do a deep clean of common spaces every three weeks. This lets us focus on daily chores like taking out the trash and doing dishes, and also reduces bickering about the degree of cleanliness that we want to live by.
We’ve been considering adopting more formal chore structures, like rotations for tasks like kitchen cleaning and taking out the trash. Some people in the house prefer the ebb and flow of stepping up to do chores when we have bandwidth and stepping back when we’re feeling stressed or tired. Others prefer to be motivated by clear expectations for work they will do. We’ve also noticed a greater need for structure when most people in the house happen to be feeling particularly stressed or tired. We expect our systems will continue to change over time as we change and our needs change.
Lessons Learned
Parents asking for childcare help is a great way to facilitate adult-child relationships. When parents are busy or need to do a task, they’ll sometimes ask if anyone can watch their kid. Several Villagers spent their first extended hangout with a four-year-old by signing up to watch them for 30-60 minutes. Just like in adult relationships, once these bonds started to form, the connection carried on to moments of interaction outside of scheduled times.
Leaseholders should have a clear understanding of what’s important to them and communicate that to people before they move in. The values communicated during recruitment provided a clear shared vision for The Village from the start. Issues arose, however, when leaseholders (who had put in so much work to start the house) had strong preferences for ways the house would function. For example, we discovered that we had a wide variety of opinions on food shortly after moving in, including strong opinions from some leaseholders. Because the leaseholders were in the minority, creating house rules beyond what was communicated during recruitment could have resulted in most of the house moving out. Luckily, we took a lot of time to talk about our feelings and came to a compromise. It took us months to figure out a solution to the food disagreement that we could live with, and you can read more about that here.
Trial periods can be helpful but have some drawbacks. We have trial periods for new residents, with assigned buddies and regular check-ins. After three months, permanent members vote on accepting the new person to live at The Village indefinitely with full voting rights. But even with a trial, people become a part of The Village as soon as they move in and have their own needs that are sometimes different from others’. Caring for them can influence house norms regardless of membership status, since it would feel bad to ignore their needs for three months. Trial members can also form friendships with permanent members, creating situations where rejecting them would lead to social fractures. Lastly, trial periods are less useful in a newly formed house because trial members form the majority and their shared opinions can hold a lot of weight.
A house centered around raising children and settling down can involve a lot of upfront investment. Several people that moved into The Village planned to live there for a while, so we wanted it to quickly feel homey and comfortable. Our first year involved a lot of conversations, logistics, decorating, developing norms, and did I mention conversations? Many of us cared a lot about the decisions we were making because they could impact us, and potentially our children, for a long time. But so much discussion to understand each others’ needs and create solutions was time consuming! Especially for those with kids and full-time jobs, it was hard to always be present for important conversations. On the other hand, there were also lots of fun parts of this process -- many of us enjoyed investing in our spaces through painting murals, getting nice furniture, and putting plants everywhere.
Many of us wish we’d socially invested in the house earlier on. Making lots of decisions up front, though necessary, can lead to conflict between housemates. Conflict is more easily handled by people who feel well-connected to each other, but conflict makes it harder to connect in the first place. Without explicit focus on getting to know and care for each other, it was difficult for us to talk about challenging things. And it made living in the house way less fun! We now prioritize getting to know each other and have regularly scheduled connection evenings where we do authentic relating activities like Hot Seat. We also try to regularly connect with the outside community through pancake parties and, more recently, bonfire nights! Sign up for our mailing list (click “ask to join”) to learn about future events!
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Thanks for the case study, Evy! You can subscribe to more of this kind of writing from Evy here!
Here are some of our favorite posts:
actually doing do-ocracy: the nuances and stumbling blocks of getting stuff done in a big community
the double occupancy dilemma: should you pay more to share a room?
speak up, speak together: decision-making that values the individual and the collective
nickel and diming: when getting into the details hurts the overall goal
To learn more about The Village:
https://villagehousesf.org/
Mailing list (click “ask to join”)