Setting up a shared house with friends
the case study of a co-living house within a co-housing village (say that three times fast)
Eleven months ago, I got together with a few others to explore the possibility of renting a five-bedroom house together.
These are my notes on where I’ve got to so far: thoughts on what I would do again if I were doing this again, and the messy edges of unknown I’ve bumped against. I've also shared template versions of organising documents I’ve used along the way.
Throughout this I use ideas from the Microsolidarity framework. It’s a way of thinking about community-building that I’ve been using to make sense of what’s been emerging.
How did I get here?
I’ve been fascinated with community housing, and particularly the idea of jointly owning/renting and running a communal household with friends, for a long time. Some people have called the arrangement I’ve just described “co-living”.
While I was a uni undergrad I tried (and failed) to help set up a co-living style housing co-operative for students, and over the years since I have lived in and seen different shared housing arrangements, some formalised as co-operatives and some not.
Why am I drawn to this type of housing setup? To me they feel a secret hack that hardly anyone considers. Or there’s quite a few misconceptions. There’s a lot to say on the benefits and challenges of intentional house shares, but I’ll save that for another day. Here are a few of the upsides I appreciate:
(1) It’s often financially more affordable, as there’s more people to share costs with. This helps me to make lifestyle choices to e.g. work part time.
(2) If it goes well, I get to hang out with housemates that I appreciate, almost everyday. We could take turns cooking for each other and encourage each other in shared interests e.g. I have ended climbing more because my new housemates are into indoor climbing. I know a friend who meditated more by being in a house of meditators. It sounds simple but I feel it makes a big difference in a landscape of modern loneliness.
(3) If the house is jointly bought or formalised by residents e.g. by being bought through a company or housing co-operative - residents have more control over recruitment, over finances, and we get to do things like install a sauna, or at the least decorate the house with more liberty than in a conventional private renting situation. This contributes to longer term stability, and it’s fun to be able to paint my bedroom.
(4) I get to directly explore how practically possible it is to recreate a sense of family with less toxicity (beyond couple/nuclear/monastic arrangements). This has been a longstanding curiosity for me.
The property situation
Back to the five-bedroom house. What’s unique about the house is that it is one of 30 or so units available within a wider co-housing village.
The village (I sometimes refer to as a group or project) is located in a city neighbourhood. Its buildings are due to finish construction by this winter. Co-housing projects do not usually have ‘shared house’ co-living style units - it’s pretty normal for them to only have units for families, singles and couples.
Wait, co-housing, co-living…what’s the difference?
Co-housing is more about a group of people getting together to be neighbours. Each neighbour would typically have their own detached unit (e.g. their own house or flat) with their own bathrooms and kitchens, within a sort of shared village set up. Oftentimes there is a “common house” where neighbours get together for community meals every week or so.
Co-living is more about a group of people getting together to be housemates. Each housemate would typically have their own bedroom, and usually share bathrooms and a kitchen with others. There’s more interaction involved in co-living - for example, some groups might agree to cook for each other daily.
The shared house being embedded within the co-housing village has meant quite a few structural aspects of the set up have already been solved - there’s already a mortgage agreed, rent levels set, location set, and I know who my neighbours are going to be.
This has meant in the past months my group has been focused more on crewing, some recruitment, sorting internal household finance flows, decor, food, and all the other details that bring a household to life. It’s been pretty satisfying to witness the group slowly coming to an agreement on these things, one hang out at a time.
I feel lucky that I got to work in this unique “ready-to-go” property situation compared to groups who may be setting up from scratch. As any recent house-hunter knows, getting a physical property in place for buying or even renting can be a headacheful and uncertain process. If not cared for, it can put a lot of strain on an emerging group.
This blog post has a mix of observations that are applicable to both ready-to-go and from scratch property situations, and some notes are likely only applicable to ready-to-go situations.
Finding the people
I’ve learnt that while it’s helpful in some ways, it’s perfectly fine for not all of the group to have previously known each other as friends. We didn’t all begin as friends. Initially there were four of us, two strangers, and two of whom were university friends. Each of us self-selectively applied to a call out on the cohousing project’s website. The cohousing village’s recruitment process was six months, during which we were each expected to get to know our co-housing neighbours, get to know each other as a shared house group, and participate in decision-making.
Be prepared for the recruitment process to have in and out flows at varying times. Earlier on, one person of the original four dropped out of the group as they realised through our conversations they would prefer to live differently to the rest of the group. Halfway through the journey two others then joined - one self-selectively applying to the project as I had, and the other being a friend the original two university friends encouraged to apply.
If I was starting from scratch, I would find a city or settlement that has an existing scene I vibe with. At the end of the day, every group is embedded within another group, whether loosely or directly. In my case, the house and cohousing project is very much enveloped in a city with an active “green” scene with a mix of ages. If you searched the city on a platform like facebook events, you would see things like apple-pressing festivals, community choirs, cycle-powered dance nights, and protest group meetings. So while most of the people in the shared house group initially started as strangers, we had all been part of this green scene in some way and had it in common.
On scale, I can now attest that FIVE is a great number. I have organised in housing groups of sixteen, seven, two - and it’s such a relief to have a number that feels big enough to do big things and small enough to intuitively sense each other’s trust. This has helped quite a bit with the processes I describe under the subsection about vibes below.
Getting to know each other
Emotional intimacy before economic intimacy. The cohousing group date set our first meetup. We met in a casual restaurant for dinner and went for ceilidh afterwards. It was exciting and a bit nervous. Aside from the usual get-to-know-you questions, we asked each other why we were drawn to the project, and briefly chatted about preferences to do with decor, cooking, and tidiness. The ceilidh was great - dance was a way of building familiarity without just talking verbally.
From then on we collected each other’s contact details and set up a group chat just among ourselves as the shared house people. Early on I suggested we have a meetup to talk about group processes such as how we (as the shared house group) want to make decisions and what culture we’d like to create - however sensing reluctance to explore this when some of us hadn’t known each other for long yet, it ended up that for about six months we met for casual socials every two to four weeks (depending on people’s availabilities). One time we had a morning stretch in the park, and another time we went to watch a cosy open mic. We took turns hosting dinner in each other’s homes.
Two dinners were also hosted by the cohousing group, so people applying for the shared house were also getting to know the cohousing group better, and so the cohousing group could run more formal sessions introducing us to how the finances and the decision-making worked in the wider village.
Trust in the shared house group was built gradually. To begin with, we shared things like favourite music and funny cat pictures in the group chat. In sharing dinners we got a taste for how each of us likes to cook. We chatted (among other topics) about the career decisions we were considering, and our hopes for what life might look like in the future.
Later on we would have conversations more around how our recent week had been. Sometimes someone would offer to share about a problem or stress they had been experiencing, and this would be sympathetically received by the group, some of us suggesting solutions if requested.
In retrospect I can see this contributed towards a sense of “people know me and I know them, we have each other’s back”, which is a big part of creating relationships of belonging.
Vibes as a marker of success
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
After six months or so, me and others in the shared house group were accepted as members of the cohousing village. This point also happened to coincide with it becoming clear that we as a group now needed to make actual decisions. For example, the house was getting to a point where flooring could be put in, and it was undecided as to what flooring we were getting.
Having gone through the last four or so months of us slowly making economic decisions of escalating commitment, I am beginning to understand one of the main qualities I’ve valued in my collaborators has been the willingness to be hosts to each other - everyone to some degree actively valuing the experience of how a group activity is going (and not merely if it’s getting done or not, or if I’m getting my way or not).
For example, in a recent meeting we started with fifteen minutes of checking in. A small touch I liked was that instead of going around in a default circle, someone would ask someone else who hadn’t gone yet, “[Name], how’s it going?”. In the meeting I voiced that I would prefer someone else to chair the agenda since I had done my part by having written it up, and I felt cared for when someone else readily stepped up to the task. When someone raised a concern, someone else would acknowledge it and would check later on if this concern managed to be resolved before we went into a final decision.
At the end of the meeting we thanked each other and celebrated that we did whatever we managed to do. Sometimes we wouldn’t get to a final decision or only managed to do the first topic on the agenda, and us celebrating this meant that this was OK - what was important was that we made the space and time to hear each other and not feel like we were forced into agreeing for the sake of timing convenience. Even if things get done quickly by rushing, in the long term it leads to group burnout and low participation - particularly in a voluntary setting like this.
I learnt to notice and value this quality of hosting mainly from attending the Microsolidarity gathering in Belgium earlier this year. Something clicked with me and I find it hard to put into words. My valuing of this quality has also come from past experiences of collaboration that felt frustrating over time. Recently I found listening to this podcast episode about dealing with burnout has also helped.
Decision-making
In the spirit of creating the conditions for partnership culture, we’ve been practising a mix of decentralised decision-making methods. This wasn’t a deliberate decision - it’s sort of a default we came to as the wider co-housing project aims for and practices this as well. If I had a go at describing what we’ve been doing, it sort of looks like this:
Being aware of the difference between preference (what I’d love) and tolerance (what I’m okay with) has been pretty helpful for me to voice where I’m at with an option. For example “I prefer flooring option A, but I could tolerate option B and D, and I object to option C.” One step further is this case study from a coliving house in San Francisco with more discerning degrees of agreement - I’d love to experiment with this at some point.
Using emoji reacts has also been so good - they’ve made it easier for people to be responsive to messages, to date set for meetups, and to gauge opinion on smaller decisions.
Disagreeing with care
Disagreeing itself is great! If it’s not happening at all in the group, chances are there might not be much psychological safety in place. However, I would pay close attention to How disagreements are happening though. Here I am going to opine on a specific unhelpful form of disagreement (that I may be overly senstive to detecting).
My ears twitch when I hear when people say that a part of consensus or consent decision-making is that, “if someone objects, the whole thing falls” (as in, the proposal cannot continue at all, even in any iterated way). Experience has lead me to believe this is an unhelpful oversimplication.
If this way of thinking has been the case for a group, or becomes so, it leads to a stagnant culture down the line and misuses these decision-making processes. Overpowered disagreement discourages people to come forth with more personal or creative requests, and just stick to what’s predictably approvable by whoever tends to object. But the point of these decision-making processes is Not to give excess power to a person who objects - it is for each person in the group (this including BOTH the person proposing, and the person objecting) to find a way forward that takes into account their needs or desires.
It can be quite vulnerable for any person to propose, or to object. When proposing, you’re telling the group what you want or envision, and hoping they’ll be considerate of this. When objecting, you’re also trusting that the proposer and group care about your opinion.
Earlier on, the shared house group did operate with flavours of shut-down style disagreement, and I can see now that it’s understandable why it’s more likely to happen when people know each other less well. We don’t want to step on each other’s toes, we don’t know if when making requests how likely the other person will hear us. I feel the six months+ of getting to know each other I describe above has made more helpful forms of disagreeing easier.
What would be more helpful forms of disagreement? We’ve been exploring this, and it’s likely one of those questions that are good to hold continuously. I hypothesise that this goes back to what I said earlier about being hosts to each other. And practicing at disagreeing well - when objecting, doing this with care towards oneself and others at the same time, and doing this with with open-mindedness to exploring solutions instead of only putting down what has been proposed. The proposer not seeing disagreement as threat but an opportunity to understand the other and iterate the proposal for mutual benefit.
I’ve witnessed things close to what I describe above as ‘disagreeing well’ and it actually doesn’t take long or look huge or anything - it can happen so fast hardly anyone notices. Building trust beforehand helps loads. Moments of disagreement can help strengthen trust in an antifragile way too - but I’ve yet to understand this in a way I can note here.
Work and power distribution
I haven’t many “pointers” to give to myself here at the moment, just a load of questions.
An ongoing question I’ve been exploring in the back of my mind is - if decision-making is spread and formally decentralised between the whole group, but the work of organising has been concentrated on one or two people within the group, what might this lead to down the line? If this pattern continues?
While we have had regular meetings to decide on things together, so far it’s been mainly one or two people (me and another) who have been writing up the proposals we discuss in the first place. I feel like this has given someone like me more a bit more power and responsibility, alongside with the use of time this can take up.
Looking over some of Microsolidarity’s suggested principles for leadership, I feel one next step for me here is reflecting on what conditions could enable leadership in the group to be more temporary and liberatory.
Temporary: nobody leads all of the time, everyone leads some of the time. We take turns and share roles with a peer or understudy.
Liberatory: your maturity as a leader is measured by the degree to which you help others activate their own agency and come out of domination-submission habits.
I would like to leave work of this nature for others to do, or be better at asking for this happen. My housemates are aware of it, and so far having co-working sessions has helped. I have also been working on myself as to why I often seem to fall into this role. (hint: family training, lol)
Balancing my own desires with valuing opinion diversity
One reason I have been typing up these proposals in the first place is that I am a fan of systems that work well and have an idea or two about how I can improve on the systems I have experienced in my previous co-living situations.
So I acknowledge it is a bit about control, although I do want to take into account feedback and concerns raised. I try to practice seeing that my ultimate aim is not an outcome that I think is objectively perfect, but an outcome that everyone in the group (including me!) feels took their wishes and intelligence into account, even if these were thoughts and intuitions different to my own.
Appreciating difference doesn’t always come naturally to some parts of me, and it has helped to have inspiration. Earlier in the year, compelled by a podcast clip where Rich talks about the power of collective intelligence, I’ve found other media that has stirred me to more deeply appreciate that it’s kind of amazing that people tick differently. And that my own differences compared to others can be something to celebrate.
I’ve also come to understand that appreciating diversity in opinion or ways of being doesn’t mean I must be completely unselective when it comes to housemates, or that I cannot say what I personally want. There are methods for dealing with polarity, and differences can be accommodated in multiple ways e.g. by having systems run in parallel instead of bending the minority to go with the majority. Related to disagreement practice, this is another recurring question area I chew on now and then.
Discussion templates for some of the decisions we made
To save time for groups out there also setting up their own shared houses or co-living situations, here are a few template docs that might help with specific decision topics.
Room allocation
Rent was initially assumed to be equal per room. But the house has unevenly sized and differently lit rooms, as most houses do! This was the one of the first significant decisions we made as a group, and we did it over the period of four or so weeks (more if you count the time we allowed for people to make sure they had visited the property).
In the first week we decided how we wanted to go about talking about it (the meta of the discussion), as we knew it’d have an impact. People then had time to prep for the actual meeting. In the third week we had the meeting following the structure we previously agreed on. One of us requested another week to sit with the decision, and we confirmed our official allocations in the fourth week with requested adjustments.
This document outlines the two stages we went through at the actual meeting. Firstly we had a go at just talking our wishes and reasonings out, and see if we could negotiate our way to room allocations of equal rent people would be happy with. We ended up moving onto a second stage where rents were differentiated, but it was helpful to do the first stage anyway as this collected useful data that helped us differentiate the rent further.
> Doc: Room allocation template
Finance design
This template is not about the mortgage, although that’s a big part of finance design. It’s more to do with internal finances.
Two things to discern:
(1) Apart from bills, what different types of expenses do you want group money to cover? E.g. In my group we will be having a one-off set up deposit, monthly rent, and a small monthly house maintenance kitty. In development is a monthly food kitty. They will each cover different types of costs. (A kitty is a pot of money everyone contributes to and is spent on things we will share or use together.)
(2) What amounts of money are you proposing? What will the different types of costs look like when all put together?
> Doc: Finance design template
Bonus! Not covered in the template though - (3) How will this be logistically administered? Could there be a ‘balancing’ spreadsheet that keeps track of what’s been spent and therefore who owes money to who? (I know SOMEONE out there has a template for this, I just haven’t found them) Could you open a business bank account? Is there enough trust for someone to hold a personal bank account on behalf of the house, with controls in place?
Decorating together
This document took the longest to compile and make. It is a long list of potential things you could want to furnish a given room, with columns for budgeting, who’s shopping for it, and if it happens to already be in possession. Admittedly it’s pretty custom to the situation my group is in: we have an empty house to furnish and budget for, and personal bedrooms will be left to individuals to cover apart from curtain rails. Feel very free to copy and edit according to your situation.
> Doc: Inventory sheet template
Another thing we’ve done as a group is use a google jamboard to compile 4-5 images from each person that represents how they would like the communal area to be decorated. This has been so fun. The idea was that we could see where our preferences overlapped, how we could maybe mix them together, and that we’d each take these tastes into account when furniture shopping/hunting. I don’t have a template for this - just open a jamboard.
Food
Watch this space. I’m hoping we’ll eventually have an inventory sheet for food items. If you happen to have one, do share! All I’m noting here is that buying and cooking food are separate activities, and I don’t think there’s a need to communalise either fully, or even both of them, to gain the benefits of communalising.
Being hosted among neighbours
The cohousing village (read: our future neighbours) hosted the recruitment process, and they ultimately decided if they would accept our membership applications. Now that the shared house is established, the shared house group will have a say on recruitment (but not ultimately - it is alongside the rest of our neighbours).
The recruitment process having been hosted externally to the shared house group itself has been an interesting scenario. It has drawn my attention to how the wider cohousing group provides a sense of external accountability and is a source of support to the shared house.
For example, as part of the cohousing village’s typical 6 month application process, there were certain tasks all prospective residents were expected to do and share reflections on, such as: attend a general meeting, attend a social, visit another cohousing village. This sets a baseline for participation from the get go and has helped attract people who are more likely to participate. The cohousing village has been established for a number of years and that has lended credibility when attracting applicants.
Another example: the shared house has autonomy to choose how we want to spend, say a certain flooring budget allocated from the wider project’s funds, and we DO need to tell the relevant working group within the co-housing project what we’re spending it on with a bit of reasoning. Not that we’d splash it on a holiday to Berlin and live without flooring, of course :)
The experience of being enveloped among wider neighbours that we have in-person contact with regularly has felt very tangible compared to when I have been part of shared houses that were enveloped in a geographically distributed secondary group.
It’s not all been flowers! There had been some tension around the support we received from one of the working groups. As it hadn’t been discussed, there were mismatched expectations of where the shared house had autonomy and where the working group controlled the process. While it’s settled down at the moment, we’ll probably clarify things in this area once we have moved in.
Conclusion
I began this journey full of uncertainty. Now I feel like I’ve got to a point where I look forward to seeing where things go, even knowing it’s going to be a mix.
I hope these notes will benefit any person who is curious or wishes to do something similar. There is quite a bit of writing to sift through - feel free to take whatever helps and leave the rest for now.
May all community housing groups and organisers have the skills and resources they need to bring belonging and joy to the world.
Further resources
Supernuclear - Articles on co-living. It’s pretty good!
Diggers and dreamers - A directory for coliving and cohousing projects in the UK
Tasshin’s podcast chat with Rich - How I was introduced to Microsolidarity
Squad wealth - Great memes and cool non-housing example of the potential of crewing
Silvia’s post on sharing circles - including an example of crewing with flatmates
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Thank you to my housemates and co-housing neighbours, whose determination and patience have enabled the whole project to happen. Thank you to Rich and Nati, whose work on Microsolidarity has renewed my hope and interest in community-building. Thank you to Russel, who did writing sessions with me and held listening space. Thank you to Tasshin, who hosted the essay contest that prompted me to try write this up.
The art in this post was created by Sílvia Bastos, and is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You can support her work on Patreon.
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Awesome essay! Informative, resourceful, and your heart shines through it. =)