How to Live Near Friends (SF edition)

Recruit & design good living systems in San Francisco

This post is inspired by my friend Priya Rose. She wrote an amazing post covering much of the essentials of living near friends in NYC right here.

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