RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/Syhj915z0hph3DFVjz0b

Hey friends!

The Commons, Solaris, and the Neighborhood are excited to announce a joint project called City Campus.

Our goal is to turn one square mile of San Francisco into a multigenerational campus designed to help you:

- find & build your life's work

- meet inspiring collaborators

- live near friends

- raise kids in the community

- do focused work

- engage in civic life

...all within a 15-minute walk.

And this Saturday, April 20th, we’re going to go around and flyer up Hayes Valley with visions for what we want this campus to be.

This is our next big step towards a much bigger launch of City Campus in the next few weeks, so we’d love to have some of you come out & we’ll share more about what’s coming. Hint: It’s time to fix San Francisco and make this place our home.

More soon…

RSVP to the next event:

https://partiful.com/e/Syhj915z0hph3DFVjz0b

Sign up here

Living in isolation sucks. Want to live near friends or a community of like-minded people?

It's much simpler to do than you think.

On Sunday, September 10 @ 7pm, I'm hosting a session on how to live with friends or a group of like-minded people without a coliving house in SF.

I'm going to share:

- How to get started

- Who to look for

- Tools to make it easy

- Things to not do

- Where to do it

This is for those who want to live near bright people but value privacy/having their own space. My goal is to help the highly motivated make this amazing way of life a reality.

Sign up here

Below is a 280+ character tweet about my position on human connection in society today. I hope you enjoy it.

Why is society so disconnected?

In earlier times, our "thing" used to be survival.

Surviving meant working with your family and neighbors to eat, drink, and have a place to sleep.

Today, our "thing" is building companies.

Building companies means working alongside others with specialized knowledge to contribute value to a complex scaffolding of dependencies that keep society afloat, so we can enjoy a life that doesn't require us to worry about lower-level needs.

Do you know what's similar about both of these? Work. We have always spent most of our lives working. Once working for survival. Now working in a specialized role to produce a good or service.

The beautiful part about working for survival is that any tribe could reasonably survive. We can all do the skills needed (kill, cook, gather, etc.), and families/neighbors can work together under “the thing” of survival. It’s not as if your brother can’t possibly learn the skills needed to kill a deer, and so he’d have to get “fired” from the tribe. It’s intuitive and necessary; otherwise, you die, which we are hard programmed to not want to have happen to us. In these circumstances, we enjoyed deeply intertwined lives with our loved ones as it was required for survival. Low standards of living, but we had each other.

In modern times, the circumstances have changed. We're no longer trying to get by; we're continuing to build up that scaffolding of dependencies. This requires skills that we must spend a lot of time building to continue the journey toward progress. Consequently, our community has morphed from “the tribe” into “the company.” Again, most of our lives are spent working. And unfortunately, if you can no longer contribute value to the company, you’re fired. Adding to the scaffolding can only happen when value is created for others, and capitalism ensures this via free-market competition. The company is the successor to the tribe, but sadly, a company can never give you the social benefits of the tribe because of your necessary expendability.

The result?

We don’t need our family and neighbors to survive, and they don’t need us. We need the scaffolding of goods and services the market serves us. Deep human connection comes from the interdependence of the former, not as much the latter.

We've made the ultimate Faustian bargain: trading higher standards of living for human connection.

So this begs the question... how do we enjoy the benefits of high standards of living AND high degrees of connectedness?

I really don't know in the most absolute sense.

Technology is accelerating quickly, causing me to question what it will even mean to be human.

Do we solve human connection by creating AI companions? Do we change the way our brains function to not need this more primitive survival adaptation? Do we build connected communities that are aligned with capitalism? Do we create a new cope (alluding to organized religion)?

Idealistically, I hope we can solve it via the third question. However, I can't shake this:

What's changed now that would allow this to happen that previous circumstances didn't allow? Why didn’t this already happen 10 years ago? 50 years ago? 100 years ago? Why is it suddenly possible in 2023?

While I’m not certain, my belief is that with the capabilities of the internet, and even more so with the advancements in AI, we can solve the problem via connected communities aligned with capitalism.

The fact that I live in San Francisco and feel immediately connected to thousands of strangers is special. We all love to build. That’s our “thing.” The internet acts as our commons to converse and coordinate. And we can do a better job of solving our own problems to build great things for the world. This means that we can build more meaningful communities that serve our goals. For example, so much more can be done in the nebulous phases of our careers where we have no idea what to work on. Most people don’t know how to navigate this.

Eventually, the work part could change too if AI keeps its current pace and commoditizes intelligence–opening up most of our time to a new way of living and thus changing the dynamics of our relationships. What would “the new thing” be that replaces work in this scenario? Who the hell knows. That’s like trying to guess what our lives in capitalism would look like during feudalism. Possible but still theoretical. However, it does seem far more possible that the deep & meaningful parts of human connection can return while still maintaining higher standards of living.

My only counter to this reality creating stronger human connection would be that this is further out than AI girlfriends & perhaps the “Metaverse.” If both of these things reach maturity and strongly satiate human connection, then I’m not sure we’d have the desire to solve a problem we don’t have.

In which case, is this, albeit weird, potential future all that bad? I’m genuinely uncertain.

In my case, I want to live in a world with other humans. I love us, and so I will continue to make progress on Solaris. I believe it’s the only path towards humanity staying at least partly human.

Sign up for DirectorySF

Sign up →

What is DirectorySF?

DirectorySF is a private directory of vetted people looking for housemates and group houses in the SF technology scene. It’s kinda like how Facebook took the IRL Harvard social network and brought it online, but instead, DirectorySF is taking an online social network and bringing it offline to help people find a great place to live.

Why build this?

Over the last few months, there’s been a large wave of people moving back to San Francisco. This is the best city in the world to build, and people are starting to see that again. On any given day, five new people need my help finding a place. That’s 35 people a week. I can’t tell you how overwhelming this has become—if I stopped responding to your messages, I’m so sorry. I’m building this because I think DirectorySF will do a much better job at helping people find a place than I ever could. If you have sent me cool people over the last few months, I greatly appreciate you, and I think they’ll be in much better hands here.

Who is this for?

If you’re reading this right now, it’s probably for you. DirectorySF is for founders, builders, researchers, writers, designers, and anybody related to tech/startups. I believe this will be especially helpful for people newer to the city, those trying to coordinate with friends on securing an apartment or coliving space, and existing coliving community organizers looking for a helping hand at finding highly qualified roommates.

How do you use it?

It depends on who you are! Let’s break down the three scenarios.

Looking for housing

If you’re looking for a short-term rental or don’t want to lead the efforts at organizing a group, then you can add your information to this part of the directory. It’ll be a great way for future house and existing community organizers to spot you.

Also, if you click around the other tabs of DirectorySF, you can reach out to the other groups of people that are handling all the housing.

It’s good to do both to find the right place for you.

Starting a new house

If you’re a person that cares deeply about cultivating the environment you want to live in, then this is the spot for you. Your responsibility is to find people of similar interests as you & lead the efforts at securing an apartment or house. Add your information to this tab of the directory. Also, outreach to people seeking space to speed up the process.

Existing communities

If you already have an apartment or coliving community but need more high-quality inbound to fill your rooms, this is definitely the spot for you. The DirectorySF’s main purpose is to bring in our scene exclusively, so every person that reaches out has a significantly higher chance of being a fit. Add your information to this part of the directory for looking residents to discover you, and just like the others, I encourage you to do outreach to others you see in the directory.

Built on top of Twitter

Honestly, I could’ve just made a Facebook group and sent people there, but I don’t use Facebook and that’s not where our people live online anymore. All of my internet friends are on Twitter, so I thought it’d be a cool way to discover people I probably know who are looking for housing. Going to do some cool stuff with the “Followed by” metric.

Open-source

If you live in another city & wanna fork this for your own community, then go right on ahead: https://github.com/tjschulz2/sf-housing-app.

Would love to see this help more people.

How do I signup?

Submit your information here: https://airtable.com/shrBmKG0e4fxr8hAp. Or go to https://directorysf.com and press “Apply”.

We’re prioritizing people looking for housing within the next 3 months.

We’ll also add you if you know many people looking for housing & want to help by sending referrals.

Special credit to Neall Seth

Neall and I worked on this together, and he was crucial in making this happen. I haven’t programmed in a few years, and Neall brought a lot to the table in architecting how all of this would come together.

Enjoy! If you have any feedback or any questions, then feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.

Thomas

Today, we’ll cover how to do the same thing for San Franciscans. For context, over the last nine months, I coordinated 20 people to live on the same block in the Lower Haight neighborhood and I’m here to help many more people do the same.

Let’s dive in.

Let’s reimagine community living

The San Francisco coliving staple has forever been the large multi-family Victorian home, which in some cases can fit up to 50 people. Throughout San Francisco’s many generations, people have used these large homes to save on cost and live in a community. And until recently, this has been the only urban solution to get all the benefits of living in a modern-day tribe after college. These benefits range from close friendships, honest feedback, mutual help to accomplish great things, and more. I’m one of the few people that have lived in a tight-knit community for most of my life (I grew up in a tight-knit neighborhood in Troy, Michigan), and I loved living in large group houses in my early 20s. However, now that I’m in my mid-20s, its downsides don’t make it a viable solution for me in the long term and it doesn’t work for most other people too.

Before I get crucified from the coliving diehards, group houses are great when they’re done right. Unfortunately, coliving diehards, you are in the small minority of people where they are done right. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to do them well. And so when a low bandwidth individual attempts to do a group house, constant boundaries are crossed, strangers come into the home, the commons become dirty, financial stress consumes the mind, and there’s an endless need to fill rooms. And that’s just doing operations. There’s still a community that needs attention. Fortunately for the majority of people, the world is changing and group houses are about to become far less necessary to live in a community.

San Francisco is going through A Great Change. COVID-19 killed FiDi/Downtown’s magnetic pull due to the grand departure of offices and the introduction of hybrid working schedules, so people are no longer forced to live around an extremely disastrous part of town. This change has caused tech and tech-adjacent workers to move to neighborhoods like Hayes Valley, Lower Haight, Duboce, Pac Heights, Marina, Alamo, the northern parts of the Mission, and Panhandle en masse—all areas highly walkable, green, and safe (relatively speaking). Just move to one of these places and you’ll be in proximity to lots of like-minded people. This trend will only continue to accelerate.

Well, now that thousands of people are centralizing into a few walkable neighborhoods, that solves the coordination problem that group houses addressed in the 2000s-2010s. Back then, there wasn’t anywhere near the degree of density forming now. We’ve gone from Silicon Valley to Cerebral Valley (trust me, I understand the cringe). You can reasonably assume that most people moving to the city will want to move into one of these areas, so more likely than not, you could be within walking distance of dozens of people that could become good friends. So how can community living be done differently?

You can now start a “group block” rather than a “group house”, whereby lots of people choose to live in many smaller apartments all near each other. In this formation, one person doesn’t need to become the manager of all the properties and keep the whole thing intact. People sign their own leases and create a geographical cluster of friends. Not one house is the center of gravity. The block is. I compare this to a college dorm, whereby you have lots of microcommunities sharing the same geographical location.

Here are just a few benefits of starting a block:

• No property management relationship between you and community members (unless you collect payments for your apartment specifically)

• The amenities and space scales consumeruate with the number of people on the block

• Your community can be much larger than 50

• There’s less likely to be drama because there’s far more privacy and boundaries

• You can invite people that want to live alone, but still be part of the community

• Couples and families can take part

Basically, you can focus on just building a good community without all the design failures of shoving dozens of adults into a single unit. You can now enjoy community and privacy, simultaneously.

Please note: If you love living in large group houses, continue to do so! I only speak so harshly because I see too many non-committed people think this will be a walk in the park to only ruin their lives and the lives of others.

Start with one apartment

When coordinating with a few friends, I didn’t want to live in a large community house for the reasons mentioned above. This caused me to think a bit more creatively about how I can solve the issue of privacy and community. I canvassed a few neighborhoods and saw several clusters of neighboring Victorian apartments (not the high-rise type apartments). At the time, I had a group of about ~6 friends looking for a place, so apartments with 3-4 bedrooms were perfect. We secured a pair of neighboring apartments in one of the clusters and began the community.

For transparency, I’m working on this full-time with ambitions to start something like a college campus but for people building things, so I was supported financially to help sign both leases to get this off the ground. Still, I don’t think money is a bottleneck. I could’ve done what we did but in a slightly longer time frame.

Here’s how:

Start with one apartment. All you need is another friend or two and sign a lease with the intention of doing lots of hosting in an area with a good amount of housing + like-minded people. Any of the neighborhoods I mentioned above would suffice. I know it isn’t the big community that you want to be a part of but trust me, with time, it will grow. Over the last 9 months, we grew our community organically to 6 neighboring apartments without my financial support or management after the initial few.

Alternatively, you can coordinate with existing friends in the city and get an apartment near them. Much easier to do. Again, people are starting to move en masse.

Host dinners often

Priya covered this and I’ll reiterate it here. Host dinners often.

Once you begin your first apartment, you may or may not have a large network of pre-existing friends. Let’s assume you only have the friends you started your apartment with. You can still build the community of your dreams.

Start by going out to events in your area, then inviting some of the people that stand out to your dinners. If you and your 2 housemates invite 1 person each, that’s 6 people for your first dinner! If two of those people come back and invite 1-2 each, then that’s 10+ people for your second dinner. Don’t worry so much about not enough people coming or making the dinner perfect. Just do it and enjoy good company. Your dinners will eventually get to the point where there are too many people coming. Trust me.

Doing it every week is crucial because people then integrate your dinners into their weekly routines, and each following dinner will get easier to coordinate. Compounding is real. After a while, these new friends of yours will want to move near you. 99% of them are on one-year leases and aren’t emotionally tied to where they live, which means that when the time comes, they’ll want to move where their friends are, so keep up the consistency.

Also, once you have more than one apartment on your block, you’ll find that you don’t see everybody every day because you all live in different apartments, so it’s important to build a consistent routine for the broader community to connect.

Start a Slack/Discord channel

As you host more dinners, events, and other forms of gatherings. Pay attention to the people that come to everything. They love you. And you probably love them. They want to stay up-to-date on everything and you should invest in clear pathways of communication so that they can come out to things.

Our Slack channel contains all current residents, past residents, and friends that come out to our activities. If done correctly, this can be an amazing pipeline for awesome people that will eventually want to move near you.

Share awesome housing opportunities

We have a channel in our Slack where we share awesome houses opening up nearby. I love going on Zillow, so sometimes I’ll check to see what’s nearby and share it with everybody. This led to our fourth apartment, where I saw an amazing house and shared it with friends in a deep search for an apartment. This place was literally 2 blocks away from the original 3 apartments. If you can help people find housemates + share great properties—people will take care of the rest.

Split amenities across apartments

This section is more about “block” design, than recruiting. It’s a new way to live with friends and different than group houses, so this is good to know.

We designed our neighboring apartments in a way where we’d see each other often. In the beginning, we set a thesis where if each house has a different purpose, we’ll be more likely to cross paths serendipitously and have more amenities at our immediate disposal. In many respects, this worked.

We installed an August lock on the three founding apartments so we could have easy access to each other without needing to text someone. There’s a huge mental barrier for us Millenials and GenZers where just going over to a friend’s house unannounced is a faux pas, so the installation of an August lock solves this. This is the 21st-century version of knocking on a friendly neighbor’s door.

Apartment 1 became a place for coworking and house dinners. Apartment 2 had a sauna (we got sooo lucky). Apartment 3 had a big backyard for hosting & workouts. However, as time progressed, we found that instead of visiting all apartments equally, Apartment 1 became the Schelling point. Backyard events and sauna nights don’t happen frequently enough for there to be a lot of crossovers. We also tried to make Apartment 3 a place for casual hanging out, but it just didn’t manifest. People like going to one place. I suppose this checks out, I grew up in a tight-knit neighborhood & my house was always the Schelling point for the neighborhood. Prepare for one apartment doing more communal gatherings than others. Ensure that the people in that apartment want that lifestyle too.

Just because each house isn’t a center of gravity doesn’t mean the shared amenities aren’t valuable. They are. Massively. The fact that we have a gym, sauna, large backyard, firepit, coworking space, and large kitchen for communal dinners on one block is amazing. I highly recommend structuring your community of neighboring apartments similarly.

Finally, learn from our mistakes

If I were to go back and wave a magic wand I would change just a few things:

1. Host things for just the community more often

   1. One of the peaks of our block was a retreat we did last October. We all went to Lake Tahoe, spent a few days disconnected from our phones, and got to know one another very well. Everybody misses this and we’ll be doing it again soon.

   2. We did too many overpopulated dinners. Remember when I said, “Trust me” about dinners getting too full? Our dinners have had too many people coming to them for too long. We all want to spend more time together, so we’re allocating more time for our things.

2. Start a recurring activity meant only for helping people find housemates

   1. There’s always going to be a supply of neighbors that want to invite their friends to the block. However, they have full-time jobs and can’t help their friends find housing + housemates. If we had a bi-weekly housemate matching event, Solaris would probably be at 50+ friends on the block.

   2. Like the dinners, build momentum behind this and it’ll take care of itself. Solaris is starting this tomorrow.

3. Get feedback more often

   1. This seems obvious, but talk to people in the community and help them live a more fulfilling life. I have a personal tendency to keep things all in my head at times and it’s led me to forget that I need feedback to get better and serve people.

4. As the number of apartments grows, clarify who gets access to what apartments

   1. Solaris is now undergoing a discussion on what Solaris even is. Is it the original 3 neighboring apartments? Is it the OG 3 + the 3 new ones? Is it the broader ambition? This lack of clarity confused who gets August Lock access to what house & where the boundaries are on future things added to the broader project.

   2. As a general rule of thumb, refer to this beautiful graphic by Robin Dunbar:

      

   3. Ring 1 = you. Ring 2 = your apartment. Ring 3 = your closest neighboring apartments. Ring 4 = all nearby apartments. Ring 5 = The Block… and so on… Each layer should have different provisions and access points. We ultimately decided that base access to all amenities would be reserved for the OG 3 apartments, and additional apartments can still get access but need to check in with the owners of each apartment first. We imagine that more small communities like our OG 3 will come onto the block and have their own August lock systems.

That’s all for now! If you enjoyed this then share it with a friend. I’d love to see more neighboring apartments + blocks formed. If you want to get involved in the campus we’re building at Solaris, get involved here.

Best wishes,

Thomas

I will only be selecting a handful of people to keep the event high-quality.

If this is of interest, sign up here: https://partiful.com/e/AzDOoa9NrqZJtPAzP7lF 

Feel free to send this to friends too

One major update this week: The Solaris Newsletter is now private. Max and I had a conversation and decided that it’d be best to reserve this mode of communication for just friends and friends of friends. Ultimately, we want to create a tight-knit and connected environment, so legibilizing too much may ultimately do the opposite of what we’d like.

If you have friends looking for a place to live or interested in coming to Solaris activities, then feel free to refer them to the Substack. Just let me know who you referred so I know who to accept. I’ll accept people directly within our networks.

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New properties on the market

4brs

681 Page Street / 4bd / 2ba / 1,200 sqft

$5,895 / $1,475 a room

Note that space has poor pictures taken, but is probably a nice space. Need to see in person.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/681-Page-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2073927695_zpid/

3brs

Tom’s Favorite (Both Henry St houses are neighboring)

70 Henry St #A / 3bd / 2ba / 1,975 sqft

$7,350 / $2,450 a room

https://www.zillow.com/b/70-henry-st.-.num.a-san-francisco-ca-9NKpPH/

Tom’s Favorite (Both Henry St houses are neighboring)

52 Henry St #52 / 3bd / 2ba / 1,500 sqft

$7,500 / $2,500 a room

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/52-Henry-St-52-San-Francisco-CA-94114/2059317073_zpid/

750 14th Street #A / 3bd / 1ba / 1,101 sqft

$4,795 / $1,598 a room

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/750-14th-St-A-San-Francisco-CA-94114/2076975660_zpid/

741 Oak St / 3bd / 2ba / 1,700 sqft

$6,550 / $2,183 a room

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/741-Oak-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2083485794_zpid/

2brs

243 Pierce Street / 2bd / 2ba / 1,471 sqft

$5,500 / $2,750 a room

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/243-Pierce-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/61288321_zpid/

775 Page Street / 2bd / 1ba / 700 sqft

$3,000 / $1,500 a room

Note that space has poor pictures taken, but is probably a nice space. Need to see in person.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/775-Page-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2071220240_zpid/

701 Fell St #8 / 2bd / 1ba / 834 sqft

$4,195 / $2,098 a room

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/701-Fell-St-8-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2059350671_zpid/

370 Fillmore Street Units 1 & 2 / 2bd / 1ba / 900 sqft

$3,995 / $2,000 a room

Note that space has poor pictures taken, but is probably a nice space. Need to see in person. Also note that there are two units open so 4 people can get 2 units.

https://www.apartments.com/370-fillmore-st-san-francisco-ca/e7t2cwn/

Studios

309 1/2 Scott Street / Studio / 1ba / 400 sqft

$2,195

Note that space has poor pictures taken, but is probably a nice space. Need to see in person.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/309-1-2-Scott-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2060733179_zpid/

After reflecting on my previous newsletter, I wondered how this could be a way for us to provide value to you all. As a reminder, our goal is to create a campus in Lower Haight/Duboce dense with people and activities that help you explore and build things that give you life.

Here are some ideas:

• How to live near friends

• Housing recommendations

• Design layouts that create a thriving community

• Events in Solaris/SF

• Writing about productive exploration for those early in the idea phase

I’ll be exploring different formats over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you like anything from above or have other suggestions. Your feedback goes a long way:

Leave a comment

The strength of dinners

Today, we’re talking about our community’s strongest tradition. Weekly group dinners. Every Sunday night, Solaris residents and friends gather in one apartment to enjoy a meal and engage in lively conversations.

The importance of the weekly dinner cannot be understated. San Francisco possesses the most productive culture in the world, so making time for friendships is difficult. A dedicated dinner sets a consistent routine for our community and friends to come together and catch up. The best part about Solaris is that residents live within a block or two of each other, so making the effort to come out is pretty trivial. Proximity unlocks rapport, and rapport unlocks all the wonders of human connection.

Our dinner starts later in the evening. It begins by hiking up our stairs, taking shoes off at our cubby, and walking down our long Victorian hallway to enter our unusually open space. When entering our kitchen, you’ll be greeted with fresh smells and forward-thinking ideas. Chances are you’ll hear chatter about GPT-3, GPT-4, embeddings, AGI, search, and Magicform—which our very own Will Brown is quite the evangelist for. You’ll also commonly hear conversation about all the week's happenings—products, news, ideas, progress, you name it, we’re probably discussing it. This week we talked quite a bit about the upcoming American Renaissance, and it’s creations like Cam Wiese’s World’s Fair and Mo Mahmood’s More Monuments.

The way we do dinners is collaborative. Each week, one apartment takes on the responsibility of preparing the meal. This means choosing the guest list, creating the menu, and setting the vibe. It’s cool because we get to experience the creativity and personality of a different Solaris house every week. It was Helios’ turn last week and they decided to host a Trader Solaris night. Max + crew decided to purchase lots of groceries from Trader Joe’s and turned the whole place into an ambiance of a market. We’ve done poke, barbeque, pizza, and Italian in previous weeks.

One of my favorite things from the dinners is seeing talented people cross paths. It’s amazing to watch when a new idea emerges, someone lights up with energy and jumps into work. This has happened at a dinner before, and it’s completely doable because we have a coworking space at the house, so when inspiration strikes, you can get building. Moments like these are so unique to the Bay Area because the excitement lies in the idea of going back into building as opposed to merely the outcome. I love living in SF.

Join us at the next group dinner by filling out this form and mentioning the Sunday dinner under “Anything else?”. We can’t promise a spot will be available, but we’ll continue to involve as many people as possible.

We want to help more builders live in community and create great things, so if you know someone looking for a place to stay or an environment to build in, please share the Solaris Newsletter with them. It will go a long way. I appreciate you for reading this all the way through.

Until next time,

Thomas

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Housing options

Top 5 properties near Solaris (in order of how good they are):

• 3br — https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/52-Henry-St-52-San-Francisco-CA-94114/2059317073_zpid/

• 3br — https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/750-14th-St-A-San-Francisco-CA-94114/2076975660_zpid/

• 2br — https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/201-Divisadero-St-203-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2059824442_zpid/

• 4br — https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/53-Potomac-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2062446894_zpid/

• 4br — https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/681-Page-St-San-Francisco-CA-94117/2073927695_zpid/

Events

Sign up here for this week’s events:

• 2/19 - Sunday dinner @ 7pm

• 2/17 - Friday Startup Salon @ 7pm

Specify what event you want to attend in “Anything else?”

Hey everyone!

Welcome to the Solaris newsletter. This is the first email I'm sending and I'm excited to tell you all about Solaris.

For those who don't know, Solaris is a community of friends who live in 6 neighboring apartments in Lower Haight. Our goal is to build a campus-like environment where friendships are part of daily life and you can explore your passions alongside others.

Solaris started from my previous project, Together Casa. It was an Airbnb for coliving where we connected young technologists with property owners. My aim wasn't to create a coliving marketplace, but to help people live in an inspiring environment with like-minded people and a shared goal to build meaningful projects. But, after trying for a year, I realized that coliving houses aren't designed for longevity, so in November 2021, I started exploring what could last longer. After some tinkering, I realized that what I was looking for was right in front of my face (I was visiting UC Berkeley) and thought building something like a campus could be the next step to making this dream come true.

Why a campus? Well, traditional college campuses bring people together with a common purpose through education and a community of peers. Both purpose and people are important to our well-being. I mean, my three best friends all came from college and many people miss those years. Sooooo.... why not have this experience throughout life? I initially considered building a small city on a fresh parcel of land, but after I learned about other ambitious projects like Praxis, it seems difficult. I looked into smaller scale operations near SF, but the red tape in California was a turn-off. That's when I stumbled upon Balaji Srinivasan's network state and the idea of using existing city infrastructure to coordinate people to live near each other caught my attention.

A few months later, I was renting an Airbnb in Lower Haight trying to figure out where to live long-term and Max Krieger suggested a coliving house, but I knew from Together Casa that I didn't want to manage one nor did I think it’d work long term. Instead, we came up with the idea of getting lots of neighboring apartments with 1-4 people each. You could have all the benefits of community, while still keeping a sense of privacy because not everyone shared the same amenities. This sounded cool, but seemed difficult. But, after a lot of effort, we ended up with two neighboring apartments just one block away from our Airbnb. Awesome, right?

Since then, Solaris has grown from two apartments to six and amazing relationships have formed, with great projects being built. We have a weekly accountability group, a daily workout group, a weekly dinner series, a coworking space, popup events, hackathons, people collaborating on projects, parties and more. It even surprises me at times. It's starting to feel like a real home and slice of Silicon Valley. But, it still feels like we've created the dorms, and not a place for people to learn and grow yet.

Fortunately, people come to SF to build things and that's what most events and activities revolve around, so at least people have outlets to do their learning. But, I find that many people are alone in figuring out what they want to create and don't have the freedom to do so. Young people have so much energy and it's a missed opportunity to require them to have financial independence before exploring. What if you could give people the time to explore? What if you gave 10 people that blessing and they lived a few doors from each other? These questions are on top of mind for me now and what will be guiding me throughout this upcoming year. I think figuring this out + bringing more people together & we'll have a small startup campus.

That's all for now! I don't know what future updates will look like, but I'll keep you posted. Let me know if you want to come to one of our dinners. They're every Sunday evening and it's a great opportunity to meet the Solaris community and learn more about what we're building here.

If you made it to the end, you’re awesome.  And if you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to reach out.

Cheers,

Thomas

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