I Want To Live In A Baugruppe

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.

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:

• Condo buildings, each condo sold as a condominium
• Condo/apartment buildings, each apartment sold as a coop share
• Separate houses.

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 investment more valuable.

The major problem with the coop share approach is that, outside of New York City, it's tremendously hard to get a loan to buy a coop share. Very few banks do these, and usually at terrible interest rates.

Some places have gotten around this by having a rich benefactor who buys a big building and rents it, but individuals lose out on the financial benefits of homeownership. In addition, it is probably also illegal under the Fair Housing Act to choose your renters if there are separate units.

The other difficulties with cohousing are largely around community building, which you've probably seen plenty of with rationalist houses, so I won't belabor the point on that.

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:

• Parents schedules are different. If you really want to see them, you have to show up, not just invite them to your nonparent parties.
• After a dozen invites that we don't make it to, nonparents stop inviting us parents, and then we're cut off. Even if we don't show up, we appreciate the invitation - I have occasionally made it to a nonparent invitation, but only from those who persist in inviting me.
• Immediately after the baby arrives, the best things to do to help parents are chores. Prepping and making food, laundry, cleaning, etc.
• Now that the kids are old enough for a consistent bedtime, I'm probably best available to hang out at 5:30pm or 9pm, but not 8pm. The 9pm one relies on you visiting me, or my partner hanging out in case the kids wake up. (I love 9pm visitors). If you're a nonparent who wants to help, you can always offer to hang out after the kids are asleep so parents can go out (if they're not going to sleep by 10, which is pretty common, so don't be surprised if that doesn't work for many parents)
• As a nonparent, expect to build familiarity with the kids over a handful of events before you can babysit. Kids warm up to adults just like people warm up to other people - often slowly.

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 one; and (2) what happens in case of prolonged disagrement. Outside view says that "we will do everything by consensus" is magical thinking predictably leading to a disaster.

It helps to identify your vision, and describe it in "vision documents" as clearly as possible. You might be surprised that people who previously seemed to agree with non-specific details, will suddenly find things they object against. (Better to find it now than after you have all moved.) Also, this will be helpful in future to explain your community to potential new members.

It is a bad idea to introduce power imbalances, such as "the rich members volunteer to intially pay for the poorer ones" or "someone can lend their unused private building to the community", because that can make later intra-group negotiations really unpleasant (e.g. when you have a vote about something the rich members have a strong opinion about, and they end up in the minority). If there is a need to lend money between members, do it completely officially, so that the fact that "X owes money to Y" cannot be used as a leverage against X.

It is probably a good idea to have together some lessons on communication skills. You need to be able to talk about sensitive topics where you disagree, without it making you feel disconnected. But you also need to hold each other accountable for things you agreed upon.

Filter people for emotional maturity. Seriously. Some people can cause insane amounts of unnecessary drama. And that applies not just for founders; you should also agree on some selection process for new members in the future. Also, newcomers should become provisional members first, participate in the community life and contribute some work, before they become full members. (Good interview questions: how have you supported yourself financially in the past? describe your long-term relationshops, school and work experience.)

There are different options: You can buy or rent several houses or flats for individual members of families, and then one extra place which will be common. Or you can buy a piece of land with several houses. Or a piece of land without houses, and build them. Or you could buy an office building or an abandoned factory, and then rebuild it. Members can own their places; or you could together create a legal entity that owns everything, and all members rent it from that entity. That entity may be able to take a loan.

Have a debate about what is your position on:

• preferred distance from: schools, shops, nature, traffic nodes, other important places
• lifestyle: vegetarianism / veganism, families, pets, sexual behavior, drug use...
• financial issues: will everyone contribute equally, do member rights depend on their respective contributions, which property or expenses specifically are shared
• politics: what about religion, is it okay if members are politically active, is it okay to publicly support politically active people

Have monthly meetings, with an agenda and a facilitator; only members can vote; take notes and archive them. (The logs will be useful to show to new members in the future.) Specifically, keep records about agreed upon tasks and dates. To make sure everyone is trivially involved even before you buy something, require a symbolic financial contribution from the members (remember, only those can vote), e.g. $100 for joining, and $10 as a monthly fee. Keep financial records.

How to create positive emotional bonds: talk about your life; cook and eat together. (Once in a while.)

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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 several bedrooms, a bathroom, a living area, and a kitchen, with larger communal hangout spaces in a basement and everything connected by flights of stairs in the back. While we were there, the people living there spoke of other similar spaces in the city that they had contact with. More casually, my own living situation also resembles a baugruppe - I live in one of eight duplexes on a private lot, half of which are populated with good friends of mine. If rationalists bought out the landlord, it would not be much work to transform it into a baugruppe. I bet there are other apartment buildings or lots that would fit the bill, if we put in the legwork of finding them.

Actually, it occurs to me that I know the founder of Radio Eden (a co-living space in the Bay Area aimed at temporary or transitional tenants who just need to crash somewhere in the Bay for a few months). I'll talk to her about how she made that happen and see if she has any advice on how we could make this happen!

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 more control over who joins, and the "open voluntary membership" is a sticking point, then a non-profit might serve your needs better.

In Canada, where I live, becoming a registered charity is much more difficult than becoming a non-profit. In the United States, it is easier to get charity status. My friendly neighbourhood local makerspace, founded by a bunch of my friends, decided to be a non-profit rather than a registered charity or a co-op.

You might find resources related to housing co-operatives or non-profit governance that could help. They have some experience with being able to resolve disputes and keep community standards. I know of some where I live, but I'm not familiar with what's available in the Bay Area. Resources about intentional communites might help too. This is anecdata, but I've heard mostly horror stories about intentional communites, and mostly good things about co-ops, and co-ops near where I live in Ontario are sought-after places with long waiting lists even when they don't include government-funded subsidized housing, so if I was going to set this up I'd lean more toward the co-op side of things.

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.

• If not everyone is paying their own way, a sticking point is the arrangement of who pays how much, accounting for the fact that individual people's desire to pay for individual other people may change over time, and people's financial situations may change over time, and kicking people out of their housing on short notice is bad, and housing in the bay area is already very expensive so the prospect of paying a premium to subsidize others, especially unspecified others, may be unpalatable.
• As you say, dispute-resolution: It will be necessary to regulate people's behavior and it will sometimes be necessary to expel people, and this is the usual problem of expelling people from communities -- which is already so hard that communities typically handle it poorly it and are sometimes destroyed by either doing it or failing to do it -- except that money and people's housing will be at stake in this case, which not only raises the emotional stakes significantly (as if they weren't bad enough), it adds financial and maybe legal stakes as well.

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 may or may not be missing stairs -- it's a lot harder to filter beforehand, but on the flip side, maybe it's easier to filter once you get there, because you're not so pressured to relate to neighbors. Proximity is an issue, though.

Some of these desiderata seem hard to get fully with the "just go into a neighborhood" solution. People might have each other over for dinner, but it's not the same as just pooling a bunch of food.

Like any strategy, befriending neighbors still carries the risk, which many have discussed so far, of hanging around people who want to exploit you. Does mingling with the neighborhood expose you to exploiters more than hanging around in a community? One reason to expect it might is that people in the neighborhood are more likely to just have different morals than you. On the other hand, a predator could more easily target a monoculture because one tactic is more likely to work on all of them. Also, a predator sounds much more devastating to a close-knit community than a loose-knit neighborhood.

I do not know how to build a dormpartment building and probably neither do you.

Hi.

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 bit silly for personal use and difficult to share with strangers. I am not interested enough to do the heavy lifting of initial organizing.

(I do like the idea of having neighbors pre-selected to be inclined to be "neighborly"--I am happy to watch a child/water plants/play in your garage band/copyedit your report if you will do similar things when I need it. I know little enough about most of my current physical neighbors that we don't know what we can ask of each other.)

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 investor is that it's a socially responsible investment that will pay itself back with some risk and low ROI but that nonetheless delivers social value by growing the rationalist community. But what projects would be run from such a venue, and what is my case for such? I could imagine mitigating the downside risk by arranging a Free-State-Project--like signup, with some deposits. I could increase the upside by promising to make a chain of such houses. I could buffer the EV by just already being a proven competent impressive startup founder. The hard mode version of the project does seem valuable, but not necessarily that valuable compared to how hard and expensive it is. It would take a serious leader to actually drive it.

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.

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.

There is now a Google group organized around attempting a Bay baugruppe.

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 import a large extended family to live with them if that family doesn't share the values/concerns of the other people living in the community.

Basically, I think the degree of control you want over who lives in the building may be incompatible with various non-discrimination laws. However, one could probably find 20 families that could jointly purchase the building as condos to avoid this problem.

But I don't see any way around these problems in the long run. As the original group breaks up it will be hard to replace them without legally problematic screening.

As far as I understand the Accelerator project is supposed to go in this direction: https://www.facebook.com/groups/664817953593844/

That sounds wonderful. I've lived alone almost my whole life... It'd be nice to have a family.

Heh. So many people came out of the woodwork...

"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.