In 1968, fresh off the Summer of Love, Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” introduced Americans to new forms of group living that were beginning to take place in the Bay Area. The essay’s most famous vignette was of a preschool-aged child given LSD by her parents. It closed with the indelible image of a single mother trying to stop her three-year-old from burning down the house, while her roommates retrieved “some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.” It left the overwhelming impression that San Francisco was a city of children raised by children.
Today the Bay Area is once again an epicenter of co-living. As in the communes of the ’60s, some co-living leaders advocate for new forms of kinship and communal parenting. But in interviews with more than a dozen residents and leaders of co-living communities, we found a very different culture than that of the hippies portrayed by Didion or Tom Wolfe.
The Bay Area’s sky-high rents, and its existing stock of old Victorian mansions, with their roomy common spaces and abundant bedrooms, naturally incentivize group living. There are ornate Victorian mansions converted into 20-person co-ops complete with chore schedules and manifestos, intergenerational houses crammed with bunk beds and school books, and luxurious hotels turned founder residencies aimed at incubating the next generation of startup unicorns.
Between them are vast philosophical differences. Are these houses for building long-term community, or for meeting a constant cycle of interesting new people? Is the co-living scene “tech-adjacent” or a stark rejection of the mainstream tech ethos? Are the benefits of group living — saving money, emotional support structures, professional networking — to be shared among the residents or directed toward social issues? Are these houses attempts to escape capitalism or to hyperoptimize life for a new capitalist class?
Despite this variance, many of these houses — like the 50 tracked in a shared spreadsheet — see themselves as pursuing the same cultural project. Unlike those of the flower children, these group houses are more consciously focused on balance: marrying professional success and holistic wellness. The leaders of these group houses believe that our modern environment is hostile to cultivating community, and that the single-family home is an artificially narrow ideal.
And although the scale and language of their ambitions vary, they all see co-living projects as catalysts for broader shifts in how society is organized. As one group house participant describes in an essay, “Group houses function as ‘planets’ — each has a cultural gravity that selects for a unique orbital community.” Increasingly, the denizens of those planets are thinking about building alliances throughout their solar system.
The 2010s saw a massive influx of startup founders to San Francisco, many of whom were remarkably young, recent college graduates or dropouts. They didn’t want to live alone, or couldn’t afford to, or their parents didn’t want them to. Low interest rates made taking a risk on a startup suddenly attractive, and institutions like the Thiel Fellowship and Y Combinator encouraged the ecosystem.
Startups felt exciting and novel, and the class of people building them felt a kinship to each other: they were ambitious, driven, and saw their jobs as a way of life. “Everything used to sincerely and unironically exist in/with companies: you wore their swag, you attended their parties, etc.,” says one founder and investor. In efforts to attract and retain talent, Big Tech companies invested in amenities and perks for employees, and the line between work and the rest of life blurred further. Meals, nap pods, and pingpong at the office became de rigueur in much of the industry. According to one estimate, in 2015 the ridership of the tech shuttles that ferried employees to their offices was more than a third of San Francisco’s public transit ridership.
The frothy startup feeling paralleled an idea making its way out of Burning Man. A huge event held every August in Black Rock Desert in Nevada, it draws over 80,000 people to camp out and erect (and dismantle) a whole city in just two weeks. Returning from experiences of radical love and connection, attendees wondered why they couldn’t architect the ideal living situation in their daily lives. The mission was simple: bring Burning Man back to the city.
Today, many Bay Area houses have strong Burning Man influences in both the language and values written in their charters. Some documents pull directly from Burning Man’s 10 Principles, espousing the values of “participation” and “communal effort” by encouraging residents to engage in communal living experiments and a system of “do-ocracy,” in which residents should take action themselves if they want something changed.
Many of those “best practices” are indistinguishable from the conventions of startups. Group houses use office productivity tools like Slack and Google Workspace to manage their communities, or extensive Discord chats that require daily checking, with channels segmenting general house chatter, cleaning, social events, party planning, and memes. Some houses have required meetings, complete with minutes, and open-source manifestos hosted on GitHub describing the house’s mission and procedures. Others maintain a complex chore quota system, complete with points and leaderboards. Extensive documentation on conflict resolution, consensus-making, rent models, and recruiting is circulated online.
In this new world, group houses are engineered to be productive in one way or another, either by providing a better quality of living for its residents or by allowing people to experience compounding effects on their professional and social lives. As researcher and technologist Toby Shorin describes it, “The density of networks and intergenerational capital flows is what drives SF. Group houses play a pretty key role in the social capital formation that enables it all.”
Some see their communal living projects as part of a larger and bolder project. Thomas Schulz the founder of Solaris, a campus in Hayes Valley designed “to help ambitious people find and build their life’s work” — specifically within AI. In 2023, the neighborhood took on a new moniker, Cerebral Valley, to describe the multitude of artificial intelligence startups being founded there. Schulz insists, “In the scope of history, people will look back on what’s happening in Hayes Valley and be like, ‘This was the first example of people living in an environment together that was very much oriented around self-actualization.’”
Neall Seth, another Solaris member, describes the promise of founder-oriented houses as bringing to home life what startups brought to the workplace: “bundles of services that reduce overhead associated with lifestyle needs,” or as Seth calls it, “lifestyle infrastructure.” Solaris is one of a set of co-living projects explicitly designed for founders. Until recently, like several other houses or networks of houses, it listed the founders who live in one of its seven neighboring apartments. It also highlighted amenities, including “a meal prep service for high performance” and “a hackathon to accelerate progress in SF,” as well as a directory to find potential housemates.
Bundling is a core premise of the group house; buying bulk resources is cheaper and more efficient for everyone involved, and the mental load of maintaining a property and planning social events is theoretically lessened when shared among a group of people. Founder-targeted houses take this further by providing things like access to food, cleaning services, office and lab space, even compute power for training large language models, under the assumption that the mundane aspects of daily living only serve to take away from work.
Schulz says his houses are a good fit for people who are “very, very, very, focused and basically want to set their life up in a way where the only thing that they’re thinking about and focusing on is moving the needle forward on whatever it is that they’re doing and being in an environment of people that are trying to accumulate resources and work together to get something done.” He’s not the only one with a grand vision of the San Francisco future. The website of AGI House, arguably Silicon Valley’s most well-known hacker house, which has attracted the likes of Sergey Brin to its weekly hackathons, reads, “Welcome to a new golden age.”
Just north of Cerebral Valley sits the Archbishop's Mansion, built in 1904 for Patrick William Riordan, the second archbishop of San Francisco. When the official residence moved, the building became a reform school for Catholic boys, then later a psychiatric clinic, and finally, a bed-and-breakfast. Today, it hosts the startup accelerator Hacker Fellowship Zero, or HF0.
HF0 co-founder Dave Fontenot is similarly committed to paring away the distractions of quotidian life for startup founders; he describes HF0, which offers three-month residencies for founders, as a “monastery of code.”
An older model of the “hacker house” was popularized less than a decade ago by Silicon Valley and The Social Network: one of dire bachelor pads, complete with desks stood up by cases of Diet Coke. When Schulz first arrived in San Francisco in 2019, he stayed in The Crypto Castle. “There were rooms with four bunk beds in them,” says Schulz. In 2016, Fontenot lived in Mission Control, a house described by Nellie Bowles: “Residents, who pay between $950 and $1,450 and range in age from 18 to 23, keep their mattresses on the floor with plain white sheets tangled at the feet.” At the time, Fontenot’s possessions fit in his backpack.
Today, Fontenot and others who came out of an earlier era of hacker houses are creating a more luxe, programmed version of that experience. The perks in many of these houses run less toward the “pingpong and beanbags,” Big Tech office end and more toward relentless optimization. HF0 covers the costs of freezing eggs for female founders. Another house, Longevity Castle, promises infrared saunas, luxury suites, and intimate dinner series. The 20-year-old founder of The Residency, another group house/residency combination, highlights notable features of his house: red lights after 10 p.m., a meditation area, and “a crap load of whiteboards.”
While monks in the HF0 monastery tend to be working on AI, just a few years ago, many of them were building crypto projects. Although the house currently runs three-month-long programs, Fontenot has grander dreams. “How do we create an institution that just takes care of the most creative people in the world, that takes care of the builders and just allows them to build?”
Much of the promotional language for these houses is similar. Fontenot, like Schulz, refers to co-living houses as places where founders can birth “their life’s work.” Schulz blogs that, “with the advancements in AI, we can solve the problem [of human disconnectedness] via connected communities aligned with capitalism.”
Hacker houses may command more attention at the moment, but the vestiges of the ’60s push toward more radical, communal living arrangements still exist. Zarinah Agnew is a long-time stalwart of the Bay Area group house scene. Agnew is the founder (they prefer “steward”) of Haight St. Commons, a collective of more than two dozen intentional communities in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. Members regularly host interhouse mixers, write primers for starting intentional communities, and use a Google Form that acts as a “Common Application” to apply to live at any group house in the collective. Haight St. Commons has also had a hand in creating two intentional communities in the network with special missions: Treehouse and Template are respectively for people co-parenting foster kids and for the formerly incarcerated.
“Living in community,” Agnew tells me, “you garner a lot of surplus. Buying groceries for one person is way more inefficient than 12x for 12 people, for example. You get this surplus of space, and then you also have a surplus of sociality. And then the question becomes, what do you want to do with your surplus?”
The “surplus” can come at a cost. “There are so many sides of me and this house doesn't capture all of them. It takes up a lot of my time and energy in ways that doesn’t leave necessarily a lot of room for the other ones,” says Winter Ku, one of the founders and current residents of Treehouse, which is currently home to six adults and three children.
Ku sometimes shares a room (other housemates have at times slept three to a room). They also cover less financially stable housemates’ rent. Ku describes these decisions as efforts to support the house’s “anti-capitalist” approach.
Lots of time in Ku’s house is spent on conflict resolution, especially regarding co-parenting and how their actions affect the kids. Conflicts can be time-consuming and emotionally challenging, but Ku suggests they can also be “generative”; in other words, conflict, and the commitment to get past it, is an integral part of bonding the group together. In a co-living wiki, Agnew provides resources for “generative conflict.”
Agnew cites anthropologist David Graeber’s ideas about small-c communism. “The home, whether the family or otherwise, is a moment of everyday communism.” For Agnew, group houses are a way to expand the traditional circle of “family” to include people from vastly different backgrounds. The processes of sharing food and knowledge, pooling resources, and conflict resolution baked into your everyday life with a tight-knit group of people have benefits that are hard to see until it all comes together.
When asked about the tension between that vision, and the hypercapitalist, founder-focused version of group living, Agnew chooses their words carefully: “Yes, it is a tension. And I think it's an interesting one.”
Phil Levin is a co-founder of several group houses, including RGB, a Victorian mansion in Hayes Valley, and Radish, a six-building Oakland compound “for people who believe in the ‘Obvious Truth’ — that we are happiest and healthiest surrounded by people we love and admire.” When creating a group house, he explains, “You're always taking real estate that was not built for this and trying to adapt it.”
Levin is both a friend and collaborator of Agnew’s. Unlike Agnew, he’s in favor of free markets — and has founded multiple companies trying to make co-living more accessible. His project Live Near Friends, a housing search platform that’s “multiplayer instead of single player,” makes it easier for groups to buy and rent housing together. Levin has seen several companies built around co-living rise and fall. “No one wants to be a part of their landlord’s community … and there’s only so much margin you can make on top of a renter in their 20s, in a city, who’s already paying a lot of rent. It’s not like you can double the rent.” His newest venture, Culdesac, avoids that problem by actually building housing — in what the company describes as “car-free neighborhoods built from scratch.” Its first site, which includes over 600 apartments as well as restaurants and retail shops, just opened in Tempe, Arizona.
The modern hacker houses and the more lifestyle-oriented houses share a philosophy with an increasingly large set of San Francisco residents: call it a commitment to shared civic spaces, or to neighborhoods, or to up-close, in-person community, or to “human flourishing.” A recent profile in Tablet highlighted The Commons, a “metaphysical speakeasy” and community hub in Hayes Valley. The Commons, which features a variety of warmly decorated basement rooms, including a coffee shop, is intended to serve as a “fourth place”; that is, a more intentional gathering point than “third spaces'' like libraries and bowling alleys. Patricia Mou, Commons co-founder, describes how “community design should be oriented around creating many surface areas to acquaint with the same people consistently.”
In March, the Commons hosted a “gathering of the gatherers,” bringing together co-living founders, including Agnew, Schulz, Levin, and Fontenot, with a range of philosophies. Also in attendance was Jason Benn, founder of the Neighborhood, a 501(c)(3) that coordinates and supports group living: “Our goal is to reproduce the vibes of a university campus, but for all generations.” But Benn is careful to distinguish between types of group houses. “There’s a couple of associations that I’m keen to avoid in my work. The Neighborhood is not about building AI hacker houses.”
Benn concentrates, as the Neighborhood’s name suggests, on a square mile in the heart of San Francisco. Benn helped set up The Commons, and sees his project in generational terms. “There’s a bunch of people, like myself, that just don’t like the idea of going to the suburbs in a good school district and starting a social life over with young kids and then having it die in a bind like we observed with our parents. That seems terrifying.”
The theme of a campus, or recapturing the magic of college, comes up often in conversations with interviewees. Many cite college as their group living inspiration; the late-night talks, the art projects, and the self-organizing extracurricular groups were often more influential than coursework. These “community” projects are pitched as a chance to recapture the agency and spirit of collaboration many people only experience once.
For some, the college-style rotation of young talent through group house institutions is a societal good. In a 2019 tweet, investor and founder Sahil Lavingia argued, “Long-term, cities like San Francisco will resemble colleges. People will spend 4-10 years to learn, gain credibility, and build a network. Then they’ll leave and settle elsewhere, making space for the next ‘class.’" Others, responding to Lavingia, saw the same dynamic, but were less fulsome, pointing to a lack of long-term investment in the city. It is a common lament that San Francisco is a “transient” city, in which tech industry residents often travel or work remotely. “It has been exactly this way for decades, & that has to factor into its present dysfunction,” responded journalist Jon Stokes.
The Commons, and spaces like it, serve a population of San Franciscans who, by all accounts, are hungry for authentic community. “People were lonely before coming to SF,” says one co-living house organizer. “It’s often, yeah, not people who thrive socially beforehand, and who would have a really hard time making friends.”
In that world of transients and social misfits, the cluster of co-living leaders we spoke to are increasingly thinking about putting down roots. In late April, Benn, Schulz, and the founders of The Commons published a manifesto. It announced the establishment of City Campus, a joint effort to “fund more social and community infrastructure in the heart of SF.” The manifesto explains that City Campus aims to invest serious capital into the shared spaces of the Hayes Valley and Alamo neighborhoods, and presents itself as a model for the world: “By accomplishing this vision for just one neighborhood, we believe we can reinvigorate new ways of living, playing, working, and thriving for neighborhoods everywhere.”
Although the Neighborhood includes a co-living house, Benn is increasingly thinking about the next step: growing up. “Co-living is a good fit when you want to meet dozens or hundreds of new people a year, and not really otherwise.” He’s more interested these days in “co-housing,” which refers to models of communal living that incorporate private housing as well as shared common spaces. He points to a co-housing community where multiple families own individual houses next to each other and have knocked down the fences in the backyards, creating one larger shared space.
Schulz, Solaris’s founder, now lives in a more traditional roommate situation: “You know, I’m 27 now, and I don’t have much of an interest in living in large group houses anymore. I don’t enjoy living in places with like 30 people in them anymore.”
Levin, the Live Near Friends founder, doesn’t invoke the college campus as an ideal. He says, for a significant portion of people, the group house project is now, “how can we keep the magic of this going, but adapted to our current life circumstance, which is often trying to start families. And so I think you’re starting to see people trying to start versions of the group house that are fit for a different stage of life.”
I asked Benn about San Francisco’s carrying capacity: If the co-living scene is wildly successful, how many of these people would choose to live this way? “Probably one-third to two-thirds.” Benn proposes one more feature of San Francisco’s ethos: “You just have to take seriously crazy ideas, because you never know. The things that sound stupid are often the best ideas. That’s part of the common knowledge here.”
Schulz, Agnew, Levin, and other co-living house founders share a set of distinctively Silicon Valley ideas. They believe there is limited downside to meeting the wrong person, and uncapped upside to meeting the right person. As a result, what matters most is identifying the right people to be founders, friends, and family. Some group houses do this through a trial period: a potential member will sublet for up to a few months before residents of the house vote on whether to extend an offer of full residency. But the ethos of Bay Area group living is generally one of bright-eyed optimism toward adding new members: Benn refers to interactions between venture capitalists and young founders: “You never know which kid is going to make both of you millionaires.”
There are other shared philosophies across the co-living cohort. Good things can be iterated and scaled. Human needs are, by and large, knowable, easily articulated, and resolvable. The future belongs to men and women of action and entrepreneurial spirit. With more dedicated resources and networks, everyone can self-actualize, and everything can be optimized.
Agnew isn’t sure she agrees with my view about the scene’s commitment to optimization. “I think people are more interested in experimentation,” she says. But she acknowledges “a neoliberal tilt to a lot of the motivations: how do I improve my wellness? How do I make my life better? How do I become more productive? There’s a lot of that.”
Ku agrees: “This is how I want to live for the rest of my life, and I have to be part of creating it.”
