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 really don't know much about this. But this might make a good starting point.
There does appear to be one NASCO co-op in the bay area, called "Cooperative Roots". Or you could talk to the Berkeley co-ops (not a NASCO member), though from what I know about them I'm not sure how great a model they would be (I hear they're very centrally run, with individual houses having little autonomy).
Also thought: Some of the ICC houses in Ann Arbor were originally frat houses before the ICC bought them. That might be one way to get houses. Unfortunately the ones I've seen that were obtained this way generally didn't have layouts that were really optimized to be a good co-living spaces, for whatever reason, but such a house will likely still be better for such than houses not really intended for co-living at all.
Hullo, I'm at the other ICC (Austin TX) and will be visiting ICC Ann Arbor next weekend for my fifth NASCO Institute.
NASCO is specifically about student housing (though it doesn't need to be 100% students and has helped with a couple non-student co-ops), and all the big organizations I know of are as well, but Austin has maybe a dozen or so independent co-ops that tend to have many more older (as in, >22yo) members. I suspect independent co-ops are closer to what we'd want when scoping viability/structure anyway, since they manage this without dedicated...
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.