The Neighborhood
The Neighborhood is an unconference series and real estate fund that makes amazing coliving and cohousing communities.
- Califlorence Climate kickstarted Treehouse
- Califlorence AGI would have kickstarted a community, had the house not been foreclosed. (Be careful who you work with in real estate!)
- Califlorence Village began a 6-month cohousing business exploration
- HammingBio kickstarted an all-women bio house.
- Our next event will be about the future of education, and will kick off Phase 2. Date TBD. Apply here.
Phase 1 of the Neighborhood was about iterating on the unconference format
We're quite pleased with it:
- They are unconferences, which are choose-your-own-adventure, participant-driven bonanzas.
- They're majority sourced from chains of warm introductions. The remainder are inbound, which we review with a college admissions-style board of experts.
- We curate groups that reliably satisfy 3-5 diversity constraints.
- 10-30% of attendees are open to coliving after meeting each other.
- Attendees snapshot the frontier of an industry crucial the next decade of progress with our Idea Ranker. Attendees collectively rank user-submitted problems that attendees think are impactful, tractable, or underrated using ELO scores.
- The format builds community by hitting 5 key cultural notes.
- Their most popular feature is our Meal Matchmaking service, where we facilitate introductions to the people you most wanted to meet, either according to you or as predicted by AI based on your goals.
- Attendees nominate each other for superlatives using a homegrown knockoff of Gas App. Besides being wholesome, it helps us select the initial coliving group.
Phase 2 will begin once the San Francisco landlord market recovers
Concretely, we'll begin raising the fund when there are at least 3 listings per quarter in our buy box.
- A good opportunity is a 3-4plex, is a 5.5% cap or higher, has a layout conducive to either coliving or cohousing (or could), and is within striking distance of the Neighborhood zone.
- We underwrite every listing on the MLS with our proprietary AI underwriting pipeline. As of Q3 2024, we estimate that there are 3 listings like this per quarter.
- Coliving houses will gracefully transition to cohousing communities after the natural life of a coliving house (3-7 years), which also returns the LP capital that enabled the purchase of the house.
If you'd like to be emailed when we do find a deal we're excited about, add your name and email here.
In the meantime, if you'd like to buy a house yourself:
They were each president of the Alamo Square Neighborhood Association and they revitalized Divisadero St in the 2010s. I'd be happy to introduce you.
Why go through all this effort?
We're building a pipeline that creates squads of lifelong friends.
We do this by curating containers from which strong groups emerge. An unconference spins out a coliving house. A coliving house spins out a cohousing community. Cohousing communities allow friends to raise their kids together for decades. Great cohousing can make your whole life, but it takes years of living together to build the requisite trust.
By doing all of this within a single walkable square mile, encouraging chance encounters, and building common knowledge of the most interesting problems at the frontier of progress, we hope we can also kick off a little scenius in central San Francisco. Living within walking distance of so many friends and communities makes life serendipitous.
- To request an article for this wiki or to give feedback (thank you!), leave a comment here.
- About the Neighborhood Notes.
The Neighborhood is a 501c3 generously supported by Schmidt Futures.