<aside> ➡️ Comment on this post
</aside>
This is cross-posted from my semi-monthly newsletter. I'm the first (but not the last!) person to work full-time on the Neighborhood, an open collective of 200+ builders, founders, researchers, artists and more living within a single square mile in the heart of San Francisco. Our goal is to create an intergenerational campus full of radical agency, inspiring people, and unplanned encounters with friends. Check out past updates at jasonbenn.com.
It's been almost two months, so you know what that means: time for my monthly update.
To close the loop on the last update's cliffhanger: we did pick a location! We chose it unanimously and have only grown more confident in the two months since, which is helpful to me as I justify my slightly obsessive-compulsive choice to spend 300 hours researching it and consulting with a board of advisors. I want to post it here, but I’m going to refrain, if you’ll forgive me, because the area does have very limited housing inventory. But it's a bit of an open secret and I'm happy to tell you if you DM me.
We also made a landing page - sign up for our mailing list at neighborhoodsf.com. It includes bios of most of the people that have most helpful in coordinating this project so far. We'd like to rotate these bios on a regular basis, to better showcase our diversity.
Contents:
The Neighborhood has entered a slightly surreal phase where ~25% of the people we meet at parties have already heard about it. To be fair, sometimes that's because Kanjun got there first and already told everyone. But not every time!
We had our first low-key Neighborhood Meetup last Sunday. I asked everyone to divide into two groups - one for people that wanted to move to the Neighborhood in the next year, and another for people that were not. The groups were like 27 and 3. I’d thought they’d split ~50/50. Belated apology to everyone whose personal nightmare is standing up to introduce yourself to a group of 30 strangers.
Next time I’ll pay more attention to invite diversity
I also made a major update these last two months. I wasn’t initially sure how I could be most helpful to aspiring residents. I figured I’d end up matchmaking people to housing opportunities. Turns out that when you live in a city full of hyper-competent people that they’re far better at finding places for themselves than I ever could be. Not to bury the lede, but our first group bought a 6BR in the Neighborhood a couple weeks ago, and another group signed a lease for a 4BR this weekend!
That people are so good at finding their own housing is frankly a big relief - it means I get to focus on all the other ideas we have for making the Neighborhood great.
Another pleasant surprise has been the Voltron of wholesomeness that is Patty Mou and Adi Melamed, who are joining forces to create a new third space in the Neighborhood called the Commons. If the term “third space” doesn’t mean anything to you, then check out Patty’s introduction to the idea - essentially, it’s a “community’s living room”. See also Patty’s Twitter thread about the first meetup.
Third Spaces brainstorming
You know, I had kinda hoped that after spending 9 years teaching myself programming, computer science, and then machine learning, I'd get work on... you know, all the mind-blowing shit now coming out of OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind on a weekly basis. But I felt I had to quit my AI engineering job last June because I couldn’t shake the feeling that my marginal impact on AGI is pretty tiny compared to my marginal impact on long-term community. AGI is going to happen, with or without me, no matter how hard I work on it. A long-term community like the Neighborhood, on the other hand, probably wasn’t going to just appear. So I’ll pour all my energy into this for 2+ years instead, and we’ll see what happens.
Now, 9 months after that decision, it seems that the Neighborhood will be significantly better off over the long term if I become a hyper-local real estate expert. So fuck it, that's what I'm going to do.
Here's the situation: the Neighborhood is composed of renters and buyers, including folks living alone or with family, large coliving homes, DINKs in epic coliving mansions, third spaces that may or may not be independently profitable businesses, and "pocket neighborhoods", which are adjacent homes that merge common spaces (like backyards). Houses in the Neighborhood will be independently governed, because a decentralized structure creates both diversity and resilience. Fortunately, for most of these property types, people can procure their own housing. But some housing types - epic coliving houses, unprofitable third spaces, cheaper coliving houses, etc - we'll need to coordinate to procure. At least, unless there are any charitable billionaires reading this. Nah, just kidding. Go cure malaria instead, please.