Embracing Chaos

So you’ve found some folks you think you might want to live with.  Or maybe they’re awesome friends whom you’re super excited to live with.  Either way, before signing a lease (or a mortgage!) it’s important to do your due diligence and try to figure out how well you’ll get along living together.

If it’s somebody you don’t know very well, the need might seem obvious.  But if it’s an old friend, I posit it’s even more important to check your homie-compatibility index.  Being friends and being good housemates are not the same thing.  When considering co-housing, probably the most important thing is picking the right people to live with.  My very wise housemate Heater developed this list of discussion topics to go over with potential roommates.

• Communication style
• Occupancy dates
• Noise
• Guests
• Parties
• Food
• Regular meetings
• Use of the Common Spaces
• Substances
• Nudity
• Sex
• Scheduling use of space
• Cleanliness
• Utilities
• Methods of rent
• Parking and neighbors
• Rooms
• Pets
• Kids
• Temperature
• Decor
• Chores

We recommend scheduling 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time together to discuss everything on this list.  It takes a while to talk about everything!  Discuss each topic, and write down your expectations for how a household should work.  This forms an informal social contract that you can refer back to.  Make note of differences of opinion.  Decide how you’ll deal with them, or recognize that the barriers to a happy house are too large.

My Ignite talk from April on Advanced Co-Housing Techniques has been posted.  This is my best 5-minute summary on the joys of living with friends, and some techniques for making it work.  For some deeper thoughts than what I could fit into those 5 minutes, check out the community section here.

One of the advantages to group housing is that there are many opportunities to take advantage of economies of scale. That is, there are many required activities that scale non-linearly with the number of residents. A simple example is any activity which is required for the house but only requires a single person to take care of:

• Hosting any kind of service person – plumber, electrician, cable, etc
• Grocery shopping and cooking
• Gardening
• Dealing with house insurance
• Maintenance such as painting, roofing or windows

The key here is that the amount of effort required to do this for a large house with say 2xN people is less than twice the amount of effort required to do this for a normal house with N people in it.  In some cases it will hardly require any more effort at all for a large house.  But even for something like waiting for the cable guy, the amount of effort required will probably increase slightly for a large house — because the large house will require somewhat more cable services than a small house would.  But generally, the bigger house is more efficient.  My simplified representation was “effort = tasks / people” which is reasonably accurate for a number of useful cases.

There are some ways that economics of scale can work against you.  Specifically with utility prices.  Utilities like water get more expensive the more you use, as a way to discourage people from using more water than they need.  This works against you when you have many people living in a single house which the city classifies as a “single family house” and charges penalizing prices when usage goes above what they consider reasonable for a single family.  Right now, I recognize this as a limitation that I’ll just deal with because the absolute cost is not very high.

Another factor that scales badly is relationships.  That is to say, with lots of people around, there are many relationships to be maintained.  Every additional person you bring into the house forms a relationship with every existing house member.  Each relationship has a reciprocal pair — I have one with you, and you have one with me.  So the number of relationships in a house with N people is N*(N-1).  (This assumes your housemates are sane enough to not pick fights with themselves.)  If any of these relationships sour, then there’s a problem which can make the whole house uncomfortable.  For this reason, it’s valuable to pick housemates who are low-drama.  This table numerically lists the number of opportunities for drama as a function of number of residents in the house:

There’s another limiting factor in increasing the size of a house, which is decreased responsibility of ownership.  When a valuable object is owned by a single person or two people, they typically take very good care of it.  They know that if anything bad happens to it, they need to fix it, or deal with it being broken.  But as the number of owners increases, the sense of ownership and responsibility that comes with it diminishes.  At the extreme end of this are publicly owned goods like subways or parks.  As your house gets bigger, people will care less about taking care of it.  There are aspects of our house where we feel that we are bumping up against this limit practically speaking, and if we took more residents on, we fear the quality of life would degrade.

One point I didn’t get a chance to make in my Ignite talk on Advanced Co-housing Techniques is that we are not alone.  It’s easy to listen to one guy singing on stage about how happy he is in his modern techno-hippy commune and dismiss him as a freak.  While I might be a freak, we are far from the only people setting up this kind of arrangement.

Although I’ve been talking about this kind of ideal since the 1990s, I am not nearly brave enough to try a life-defining social experiment like this without some evidence that it can actually work.  Fortunately, some of our friends are braver than me.  A few years ago we watched two couples both with pregnant wives buy a house together with the intention of raising their kids together.  It has worked out fabulously for them. They have been an inspiration and a model for many of us who have followed.  I put together this map  on the right to demonstrate how the idea has spread.  The green points show houses just like ours — where multiple unrelated / unmarried people have come together to co-own a large supposedly single family house (with a single kitchen) with the intention of raising their kids together.  The blue dots are houses of friends of mine whose that are very similar but don’t meet all those criteria.

I seeded this map with just my friends’ houses around Capitol Hill.  If you know of others and want to add them, feel free to go edit the Google Map yourself.  For security reasons, I haven’t included any identifying information about the houses, and have only located them as accurately as the closest intersection, and I encourage you to do the same.

The point of all this is to show that we might be crazy, but we’re not the only ones.  As another point of support, the map below comes from cohousing.org showing the locations in the greater Seattle area of larger planned cohousing developments.  Click through to find similar communities across the country.

In my Ignite Seattle talk about Advanced Co-Housing Techniques, I mis-spoke about governance.  I said that our house is run as a democracy, which actually isn’t a very accurate representation.  Democracies are clearly sustainable forms of governance, but they tend to leave a bunch of people unhappy in many decisions.  Up to half the residents can get out-voted on anything, and then decisions move forwards that they disagree with.

Our house actually operates on consensus for most decisions. Operating on consensus is short-hand for everybody has to agree before something happens.  Another way to put this is that everybody has veto power over everything.  It is this fact which most leads to the slowness of decision making that I alluded to.  It can take a long time to reach consensus on issues.  But people are generally happy when they do.  The biggest source of stress is often that things aren’t moving quickly enough.  This leads me to joke sometimes that an issue is “working its way through congress” before it gets decided, which I think contributed to me mis-representing the governance system that we use.

We do have a separate politburo-style committee which is responsible for financial decisions.  For issues like when to refinance it makes sense for only certain members of the household to contribute: those with a direct vested interest in the outcome.  Maintenance and repairs of the house similarly get dealt with in this sub-group, not because other residents don’t have a vested interest, but because it’s our responsibility and we generally figure the other residents would rather not deal with things like hiring a painter.  Even if they did, their incentives would differ slightly.  Sometimes meta-issues around residency like how many people the house should have sometimes get taken up by the politburo, but we do our best to keep these discussions open.

I know of other group houses which operate with similar multi-tiered governance systems.  The hierarchy often seems to follow legal ownership of the house, which makes sense.  Sometimes more power is reserved by the owners.  Clearly there’s a continuum of possibilities here which would get unhealthy on either end.  A strict dictatorship by the owner would probably make all other residents unhappy fairly quickly.  On the other side a house where the owner has no more power than the other residents, and gets out-voted on issues pertaining to physical maintenance could lead to the house falling into dis-repair.  I’ve heard that the Evergreen Land Trust model sometimes has this problem.  ELT is something I don’t know very much about, but deserves its own write-up.

One closing comment about house governance relates to communication.  When decisions need to get made, how will your house communicate the discussion?  We use a combination of an email list and periodic in-person house-meetings which are fairly formal and infrequent.  I know other houses rely fairly heavily on SMS, or chance discussion.  As in most things with co-housing, there are many right answers.  The key is finding a system that works well for everybody you live with, and being open to change if it seems not to be working.

Here’s my presentation for Ignite Seattle 13.  It’s lessons from the trenches of living in a large group house.

The topics I touch on are:

• Raising kids in a group house
• Choosing your housemates
• How to deal with somebody needing to sell their share of a house
• Hiring a lawyer to write a Tenancy in Commons contract
• How to get a crazy loan
• Living with lots of people
• Governance systems for a house
• Capitalist vs Communist chore systems
• Gamifying chores
• Hiring a housekeeper
• Economies of scale in a group house
• How cooking scales up
• Sharing food in general
• Limitations of accounting
• Letting go of control
• Mis-behaving furniture

And when I say “touch on” I mean it.  Each of those topics are lucky to get a full sentence in my 5-minute talk.  There’s so much more I had considered including, but with an Ignite talk, you’ve got to make tough choices about what gets included.  I could write an entire blog post about each of the topics above, and I just might.  (Leave a comment if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about.)  Here’s the list of topics I had included in earlier drafts of this talk, but all got cut before the final version:

• How relationships scale in a big group
• What does privacy mean, and what really matters
• Analogy to college dormitory lifestyle and its limitations
• Personality traits to seek or avoid in co-housing partners
• Social vs. Legal Contracts and what belongs in each
• Balancing preservation of house sanctity vs. owners’ rights in contracts
• Financial ownership models and associated accounting techniques
• How living in a group can minimize interpersonal differences
• Wanderlust in desk accessories
• Analogy between marriage and co-housing
• Personal efficiencies through livability sustaining systems
• Techniques for dealing with clutter
• Architectural features that support group living

And each of these could easily get a 500 word essay as well. Encourage me, and I’ll write them! :)