Welcome! I’m Jason Benn, and these days I’m mainly known as the 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. The Neighborhood is part of a local 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, Lower Haight, NoPa, Duboce, and Hayes Valley).
When I co-founded the Archive coliving house in 2017, I didn’t suspect that it would have such an impact on me. Living around people that inspire me destroyed my limiting beliefs even as we all grew more connected. But I also knew I’d never be able to raise a family in a coliving house. So, after the Archive, I began to experiment. As I stumbled upon little successes and educational failures, my aspirations have grown. I share those lessons here in the hopes that others will also be inspired to live closer to their friends!
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Here are my past updates:
Feb 24
#11: the Village Retreat, Treehouse, and Cohousing
Jul 23
#10: The Unconference to Community Pipeline
Mar 23
#9: The Neighborhood’s First Unconference
Nov 22
🤯 #8: The Summer of Spaces
May 22
#7: Launching The Commons
Apr 22
#6: Becoming Hyper-Local Real Estate Guy
Feb 22
🧐 #5: Derisking the Neighborhood and choosing a location
Nov 21
#4: A glimmer of product-market fit
Sep 21
#3: Writing about a Web of Questions
Aug 21
#2: NYC coliving would look very different than SF
Jul 21
#1: A new understanding of community
Selected writing about community. My favorite posts, essays, and tweets about community that are representative of my thinking at the time: