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 with a sufficient amount of money that it's worth actually looking into pooling money and purchasing it.
I don't know about California, but here in Michigan at least I believe it is legal so long as the building is a "shared dwelling space". If it consists of separate apartments, then no you're not allowed to discriminate like that. (Note: Not a lawyer, there may be subtleties I'm missing. Just stating this as a potentially useful starting point.)
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.