If you like this idea but have nothing much to say please comment under this comment so there can be a record of interested parties.
I am ecstatic about this idea and would participate in it at a good deal of personal inconvenience.
How around is around, and can you say more about what about a baugruppe would satisfy your desiderata that the existing group house network can't?
Cohousing, in the US, is the term of art. I spent a while about a decade ago attempting to build a cohousing community, and it's tremendously hard. In the last few months I've moved, with my kids, into a house on a block with friends with kids, and I can now say that it's tremendously worthwhile.
Cohousings in the US are typically built in one of three ways:
The third one doesn't really work in major cities unless you get tremendously lucky.
The major problem with the first plan is, due to the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s, which was passed because at the time realtors literally would not show black people houses in white neighborhoods, you cannot pick your buyers. Any attempt to enforce rationalists moving in is illegal. Cohousings get around this by having voluntary things, but also by accepting that they'll get freeriders and have to live with it. Some cohousings I know of have had major problems with investors deciding cohousing is a good investment, buying condos, and renting them to whoever while they wait for the community to make their investmen...
The cohousing conference ( http://www.cohousing.org/2017 ) is a great place to get questions answered and learn from the folks who've been doing this for a while. The Bay Area definitely has a handful of solid cohousings, and often they give tours and talk to folks who are interested in setting them up.
(I'm happy to talk about this further, but may well lose track of this thread. feel free to email me or catch me on the slack.)
There are a handful of developers who specialize in building cohousings so that folks interested in living in one can focus on building community and then all moving in together. In Portland one of the longer persisting ones is Orange Splot. http://www.orangesplot.net/ I'm sure there are Bay Area ones, and it's possible the folks at Orange Splot know them. I'd expect they'd also show up at the Cohousing Conference.
Doing both community development and building development is, of course, three times as hard as just doing the community development part and moving in to a building that someone else prepares for you.
As a rationalist who had kids while within a deep community, I will say that only some of the community (that mostly said they wanted to stick around) actually stuck around after the kids showed up. I think there's a whole series to be written about that, but I'll sketch towards it now:
I have recently read Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, which is a book containing experience and advice for people wanting to build a community. The book is about ecological communities, which may differ in some aspects from the rationalist ones, but I believe most things are valid generally.
Some points I remember:
Do not overestimate people's commitment, no matter what they say. When the moment comes to actually put down the large amounts of money, don't be surprised if most of them suddenly change their minds.
Do your research in advance -- how much the project will cost, what kinds of documents and permissions you will need, and whether your plan is actually legal. (Ask people already living in similar communities. Actually, visit them for a few days, to get a near-mode experience. All of you.)
Good fences make good neighbors. Whatever were your original agreements, expect people to change their minds later and to remember something different than you do. Then you will need a paper record.
For any kind of group decisions, you need very precise rules for (1) who is and who isn't a member, how to become one and how to stop being...
Additionally: if only one member seems enthusiastic about thinking/planning/enforcing this kind of stuff that is a very bad sign. In such a situation when that person burns out the community slowly dies.
I've looked into housing prices for multi family complexes and they scale sublinearly with number of bedrooms. The biggest obstacle is that people aren't really willing to invest significant fractions of their income in them currently (because you don't want to have to gather 8 investors for an 8 unit, chaos/life happens). Ideally something like 3 people/couples who think they are relatively stable would take on responsibility for an 8 unit with a significant fraction of their income. This is a risk, but one of the top regrets of old people is becoming socially isolated. I think investing a significant fraction of ones income in what will eventually turn partially into semi-passive income (once the mortgage is paid) and partially into their community it is okay to invest a larger than usual fraction of income in. This will still likely take an individual slightly more wealthy than your average techie to eat a larger chunk of the down payment than others and thus own more of the equity in the income stream.
I suspect this is fairly impossible in the bay area which has the lowest conscientiousness people in the US AFAIK.
Edit what I mean by pointing out low conscientiousness is that many people are incredibly short sighted and will defect when short term opportunities look better ie they will not tough out a few years of sub-optimal financial arrangement ie people don't actually grasp the concept of investing in a community. Related to why our kind can't cooperate.
Yeah, when I looked into cohousing this is what I concluded too. My husband and I ended up buying a house with 6 bedrooms and occupying two of them (then adding two more family members and building two more bedrooms.) None of our housemates would have bought in because they're not sure how long-term they want to be here, but they're happy to be renters and we're happy to own the building.
To us it's important that the arrangement be flexible; rather than a single big house we bought a house that had been divided into two apartments, so if we ever want to stop having housemates or we can't find housemates who want to live with us, we can pick the smaller or the larger apartment and rent the other one out. There's also some possibility of our kids wanting to rent from us in 20 years, which we think will work better if they can have their own apartment. I wouldn't have wanted to sink our savings into something that would really only work in one configuration.
All the higher conscientiousness people realize how bad of an idea it is financially to try to live in the bay and move elsewhere
I feel a little bit morally obligated to point out the following.
The FBI estimates that each child has almost a 25% chance of being molested, that 4% of adults are sexually attracted to children, and that 70% of children were molested by people they knew and trusted. These number seems to at least roughly comport with my personal understanding of the world and my knowledge of the lives of people close to me.
The horrifying ubiquity of sexual predation of children must at least be mentioned under "Obstacles".
The unfortunate reality is that invitations to group living situations select for predators. No, your radar is not tuned to keep them out. No, you cannot sufficiently vet them after a few hours of interaction and observation of their children. If you think I'm being paranoid, I would argue that no, if 25% of children are likely to be molested, you're probably not being paranoid enough.
I would love it if this weren't true, but this is the world we live in.
I'm sure there are measures that can be taken to ameliorate this issue, but just ignoring it is not one of them.
I want to urge people to not dismiss this without a thought. And it's not just about children.
There are already a few sexual predators hanging around with the rationalist community. I can't say names, because it is typically a "they said, they said" situation, and these types usually have a lot of practice at threatening legal consequences for "slander". (But if you know someone who used to be around and suddenly lost all interest at coming to your meetups, it might make sense to ask them discreetly whether they had a bad experience with someone specifically.)
I personally often don't care much about the statistics for general population, because we are obviously not average. Problem is, "not average" doesn't in itself show the direction. For general intelligence, we are obviously smarter, and that generally correlates with lower (detected?) crime. On the other hand, we also seem to score quite high for unusual sexual behavior in general.
As long as each family has a door they can close (and everything necessary to survive the day is inside), living in a community doesn't seem worse than simply living with neighbors. But there are good reasons why neurot...
Source on those statistics, please? I find the claims dubious: in particular, the 25% figure seems to come from this "information packet", which is unsourced and uncited, suggesting that it may not exist. The two Jensens, Cory Jewell and Steve, seem to build a career around inflating the numbers associated with child sexual assault. I can't find sources for either of the other figures.
My stake in the game: I strongly distrust statistics given about child sexual assault unless they are highly specific about what is being discussed, for two reasons.
One is that the definition is incredibly vague: some sources mean "an adult engaging in intercourse with a minor under 13", others mean "touch intended to be sexually gratifying, of a minor under 18, by another party of any age", and definitions run the gamut. Another example: under this website's definition of child sexual abuse, "any sexual activity between adults and minors or between two minors when one forces it on the other (...) like exhibitionism, exposure to pornography", I was sexually abused at 11 when a chatroom troll sent me a link that turned out to be Two Girls, One Cup.
My second reason for reservation around these statisti...
Note also that "4% of adults are sexually attracted to children" is a very different statement from "4% of adults are likely to molest children if left alone with them".
(I suspect rather more than 4% of adults are sexually attracted to Angelina Jolie[1], but that doesn't mean they'd molest her if left alone in a room with her.)
[1] Chosen by putting "famous actress" into Google and picking the first name it gave me. If she isn't your type -- she isn't particularly mine, as it happens -- feel free to imagine I chose a different name.
Rationalists like to live in group houses
... wha? Can someone explain this? I have absolutely no idea what this is reference to, or why it might be. I consider myself a rationalist, and I very much prefer living alone. I like my privacy. Same goes for many other rationalists I am friends with in real life. Not everyone likes having roommates.
More to the point, this seems entirely orthogonal to rationalism. What is Alicorn talking about here?
Rationalists don't all like group houses, but compared to the rest of the population they disproportionately like them. There have been several in person meetup groups that have started houses, and these have generally gone pretty well. (Ex: Citadel in Boston)
I don't ever plan to move to the Bay Area, as I like where I live and have a spouse with strong preferences about staying here and never California, but I support this project and others like it (like Bendini's Kernel Project). Let me know if there's administrative stuff I can do to help coordinate the project.
Things I can do:
-Research into cooperative housing
-Editing any docs the project needs if things like conflict resolution are going to be formalized
-Making phone calls if/when property is found and scheduling viewings
-Helping navigate the finance side (I'm currently working as a financial analyst)
EDIT: I have spousal support for trying to facilitate something much like bendini's project in Boise, ID. For people who don't want to live in the Bay or the UK, Boise is a nice little city with a medium-sized tech industry and a fairly libertarian culture, if that matters to you. We're willing to host people here and show them around the city, as well as put out feelers for job opportunities. The cost of living here is also incredibly low compared to the Bay Area.
Thought: You might want to look at existing cooperative houses for possible models of how to run things. Here in Ann Arbor we have a number of them -- although since most of them are part of a central organization (the Inter-Cooperative Council) which takes care of a lot of things, some of that might not generalize very well. Still, there are plenty of other ones not part of such organizations.
NASCO may have a number of relevant resources here -- both in terms of, what other co-ops are there to look at, and also more direct resources on how to run a co-op (sample bylaws, lease documents, etc.). I think they have lots of stuff for helping out new co-ops, people trying to start co-ops, etc.
Unfortunately they seem to be focused on student cooperatives, but it looks like as long as your co-op is near a college campus it can join, whether it's for students or not, and that condition can likely be satisfied. But that's for existing co-ops anyway; not sure how it works if you want their help starting a new one. But I'm pretty sure they have some way of helping with that? Maybe not NASCO itself? Apparently co-ops which are "development service member" help with this? I re...
I would totally live in a Bay Area rationalist baugruppe if it were brought into existence!
I think that it would be totally possible to find an appropriate space pre-existing in the Bay somewhere that we could acquire and populate without having to worry about construction or the like. Evidence: something becoming more popular in the Bay Area is the idea of a "co-living" space. I toured one in San Francisco with a boyfriend of mine during his last housing search, and it was a charming dormitory-like multistory arrangement where each floor had sev...
I am organizing a project that is 95% this, and people are flying to the selected location later this month for a 3-day meetup
My project: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wmVZJiDjTjxmVshSFSk2rH-b8GLiQ0DJ0Cw1hyOnswM/edit?usp=sharing
Anyone who would be interested in this is welcome to join us
I don't live in the Bay Area, nor do I wish to move there, but I have some thoughts.
It may be that the way to accomplish this is to start a housing co-operative, or a non-profit organization.
The Rochdale principles, which many co-operatives adopt are: Open, voluntary membership. Democratic governance. Limited return on equity. Surplus belongs to members. Education of members and public in cooperative principles. Cooperation between cooperatives.
If that seems like something you can live with, then you might want to go the co-op route. If you want to have m...
Rationalists like to live in group houses.
Do they? I personally hate sharing living spaces. Am I the weirdo? I suspect it's an American custom, not something proper of rationalists per se.
This is interesting and I am interested in it. (I live in the distant far reaches of southbay which makes my interest maybe less relevant than it could be.) I see a few major sticking points.
This probably won't make sense in the early stages when there's just a small team setting things up, but in the mid term the accelerator project (whirlwind tour) hopes to seed a local rationalist community in a lower cost location than the bay (current top candidate location is the canary islands). I imagine most would prefer to stay in more traditional places, but perhaps this would appeal to some rationalist parents?
Seattle is thinking about putting together a Community Center. This would basically be a house that we collectively rent out, with maybe one or two people living there at below-market rates to take care of the space and do upkeep. Here's a post on Tumblr outlining the thinking so far by one of the people spearheading the effort: http://fermatas-theorem.tumblr.com/post/158612649028/what-if-seattle-earationality-got-a-community
So that's like a hippie commune, but middle-class? ...oh, you want to live in San Fran? Sorry, upper-middle-class :-/
Rationalists like to live in group houses.
Do they? This seems like a pretty strong claim to make.
How does befriending the neighbors, rationalist or not, fit on this scale? This reduces monoculture, opening everyone in the neighborhood to more perspectives. It saves time planning, too. You just go around the neighborhood and see what happens. Maybe you do scoping out beforehand to find a good place to live. That could take a while, but sounds like a lot less work than designing an intentional community.
Whether some of your desiderata are fulfilled depends a lot on trust. Kids can hang out at neighbors' houses, if the neighbors are trustworthy. There ma...
This would probably have to be less expensive long-term and at least as convenient as my current living situation (apartment in the south bay) for my partner and I to be interested, but it is something I think we would consider. (I would be more interested in the social group aspect, and he would want low social obligation but would be interested in resource-sharing. I have not yet actually asked him about this post.) In particular, there are plenty of things that are reasonable and useful if shared in small groups (tools, recreation equipment, etc.) but a...
Two thoughts:
1 - Why buy? Can't you rent? Personally, I'd get most of the value by living with friends across two floors of a large house (Event Horizon) or in two nearby houses on a street (The Bailey). A few stable families could buy a big house later per Romeo.
2 - Suppose you actually buy a small dormitory or an old tiny hotel. Call this the hard mode version of the project. Such a building would accommodate at least the 20 you're looking for. But it would require commensurate investment. If I imagine pitching this project, my story for some rationalist...
Are there legal barriers to renting property you own only to people in your ingroup? I feel like there must be, especially in California.
Also I second the housing co-op idea, there are a bunch of them here and they seem to work pretty well for the people who live there.
A possibly useful hack for this is kickstarter/tinder type thing, where people can propose buildings, and people announce how much money they would be willing to pay to own what percentage of, a specific place on the market where the next step is only triggered if enough people sign up wit...
Strange that this kind of thing almost never happens where you get people with similar worldviews deliberately coordinating to live in the same building or neighborhood. It might be easier to start with a rationalist group vacation home.
I worry such a plan will face significant legal hurdles. As suggested the building would probably not fall into the exceptions to the federal fair housing act (is that right) for choosing roommates (it's not a single family dwelling but a group of apartments in some sense).
But you EXACTLY want to choose who lives there based on political/religious beliefs (almost by definition it's impossible to be a rationalist and a dogmatic unquestioning conservative christian). Also by aspects of family makeup in that you don't want people living in this community to...
As far as I understand the Accelerator project is supposed to go in this direction: https://www.facebook.com/groups/664817953593844/
"a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing)
Has anyone tried this? While it doesn't give a very integrated solution, it seems very easy to do. Why do you say that it is vulnerable to minor fluctuations? Having separate units on the same street seems quite robust to me.
I would live in this if it existed. Buying an apartment building or hotel seems like the most feasible version of this, and (based on very very minimal research) maybe not totally intractable; the price-per-unit on some hotels/apartments for sale is like $150,000, which is a whole lot less than the price of independently purchasing an SF apartment and a pretty reasonable monthly mortgage payment.
Rationalists like to live in group houses. We are also as a subculture moving more and more into a child-having phase of our lives. These things don't cooperate super well - I live in a four bedroom house because we like having roommates and guests, but if we have three kids and don't make them share we will in a few years have no spare rooms at all. This is frustrating in part because amenable roommates are incredibly useful as alloparents if you value things like "going to the bathroom unaccompanied" and "eating food without being screamed at", neither of which are reasonable "get a friend to drive for ten minutes to spell me" situations. Meanwhile there are also people we like living around who don't want to cohabit with a small child, which is completely reasonable, small children are not for everyone.
For this and other complaints ("househunting sucks", "I can't drive and need private space but want friends accessible", whatever) the ideal solution seems to be somewhere along the spectrum between "a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing) and "a dorm" (sorta hard to get access to those once you're out of college, usually not enough kitchens or space for adult life). There's a name for a thing halfway between those, at least in German - "baugruppe" - buuuuut this would require community or sympathetic-individual control of a space and the money to convert it if it's not already baugruppe-shaped.
Maybe if I complain about this in public a millionaire will step forward or we'll be able to come up with a coherent enough vision to crowdfund it or something. I think there is easily enough demand for a couple of ten-to-twenty-adult baugruppen (one in the east bay and one in the south bay) or even more/larger, if the structures materialized. Here are some bulleted lists.
Desiderata:
Obstacles:
Please share this wherever rationalists may be looking; it's definitely the sort of thing better done with more eyes on it.