Hi! I’m Jason Benn, founder of the Neighborhood, a one-square mile community of communities in SF that aims to recapture the vibes of a university campus, but for all generations. We’re part of a movement composed of coliving (one big rented house), cohousing (multiple adjacent owned houses), third spaces (community centers), and good vibes (I bump into friends once every 40 minutes around Alamo Square and Hayes Valley). For past updates, and to subscribe to this newsletter, see jasonbenn.com.

So long 2023, and thanks for all the fish. Before I talked about what we learned in the last 6 months and what we’ll do in 2024, two calls to action:

<aside> ▶️ Neighborhood Meetups. If you want to raise a family or buy a home near friends, but those plans are worryingly abstract, then you probably have two problems: you don’t know exactly who’d be in your community, and you don’t know how to confidently evaluate community-friendly real estate. These meetups should help you solve both problems. They’ll also be fun: we’re aiming for 50% adult summer camp, 25% info session, and 25% relating games. Feb 17 at Noasis, apply here.

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<aside> ▶️ HammingBio Symposium. Bio: so hot right now. Also, bewilderingly complex. This event is for the explorers and founders that want to have impact but aren’t yet sure how to help. The other half of the people are the serial entrepreneurs, researchers, and funders that have strong opinions about the most important, tractable, and/or neglected problems. Features our popular AI meal matchmaking, with polished lightning talks complementing the freewheeling unconference, while maintaining the same high bar for attendees, plus a new set of experiments in collective intelligence. $250, 100 people, 3/15-3/17, Alamo Square, apply here.

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In 2023, we learned how to organize real communities. We went from haphazard meetups in 2022 that didn’t really add up to anything, to hosting 3 large unconferences in 2023, one of which turned into a new coliving house. This post is mostly about what I learned.

2024 is about adding real estate and building cohousing. Cohousing is when you have multiple adjacent owned houses that are part of a single community, and they’re much better for raising families because you have your own private space. They’re also in short supply because they’re hard to build, but now (I think) we’ve got the prerequisites in place: a community-building strategy, a platform, aligned real estate professionals, and housing supply.

What I learned from the Village Retreat (September)

This is why our third major unconference last year, the Village Retreat on September 15-17, was cohousing-themed. I teamed up with my friend Phil Levin (of Supernuclear and Radish) and we rented a 50 person bus, hired 3 nannies, and piled 7 kids and 40 community-oriented adults on similar kids timelines and drove to a 21-acre retreat center near Yosemite called Camp Earnest. There, we presented what we’ve learned, played improv, hiked Calaveras Big Tree National Park, and enjoyed the most incredible chef-made food (s/o to Raman of Camp Earnest for being an impeccable host). Here are some photos. A few takeaways:

• The 80/20 of cohousing is having friends live within Baby Monitor Distance. Phil and Kristen put their infant to bed at 7pm. If they want to go out, they can message the groupchat, volunteers offer to sit with the baby monitor while they do whatever they were going to do anyway, and now Phil and Kristen get to have normal social lives without finding babysitters. Phil, about life with an infant: “I feel like kind of a jerk for saying this… but it’s been far easier than advertised”.
• Folks say they’re down to lead. We asked people if they cared enough about cohousing to will a project of their own into existence, or if they’d rather join someone else’s group. To my surprise, the majority (25+ people) said they’d be down to lead a project.
• However, that hasn’t exactly translated to action. In my interviews since, people say that they don’t really have a strong top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel for building their group, and they don’t know how to evaluate real estate.

If you wished you were invited, well, I do too! Camp Earnest is a small venue and we didn’t even get to invite all of our friends that we know are interested. We’ll continue the cohousing-themed events on Feb 17th at Noasis with an info session, get-to-know-you game, and happy hour at El Rio, and there will be more ones after that.

Phil on building Radish

What I learned from launching Treehouse (April through September)

Meanwhile, I learned about what it takes to launch a single great coliving community. Treehouse emerged from Califlorence Climate, our first unconference back in March. One of the goals of that event was to kickstart a climate-themed coliving house. It’s exceptionally gratifying to report that this actually worked :) The house is warm, fuzzy, full of ambitious and inspiring people, many of whom were previously on the fence about rearranging their lives to move in together (or to live communally, period).

It wasn’t easy. After the event, myself and a core group met every week for nearly five months, often for 3+ hours, to make arrangements and recruit other housemates. None of us suspected it would take nearly so long, which caused morale to ebb and flow like the tides. This is what y’all meant when you said do things that don’t scale, right? Some lessons: