Various people have been talking a lot lately (here, here, here, here if you can see it, and here) about bigger cohousing projects in the rationalist and rationalist/adjacent community, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
A lot of the posts say things that I’ve been considering for a long time as well, and the discussion has really
spurred me on to try to make some of my ideas happen here – I’ve
talked to some local people and it looks like a baugruppe as described in Alicorn’s post is out of
reach for the present (nobody has the money to dump into such a big
project), but we might have enough resources to rent a house or space
that is specifically for common use!
I’m really excited
about the possibility of something that would serve as a third place for the EA/rationalist community around here. What I want in a third place is really two qualities: 1) it’s free to enter (although the community as a whole
has to pay for it somehow) and 2) nonreligious. Almost all the third places
currently available to us are missing one of these qualities:
churches are free, but you have to agree to their religious system,
and other third places are secular, but have an entrance fee of some
kind (coffeeshops, country clubs, etc.).
Some people in the
community are compensating for the lack of a free, nonreligious third
place by renting bigger homes with enough room to hold medium/large
events. I did this last year when I helped set up a group house with
really open-door norms so that the larger community (not just my
housemates) could use it, but I ended up having a lot of
sensory/anxiety issues with the noise level and unpredictability of
so many people coming in and out of my living space every day. This
isn’t a stable situation unless you have a) a house full of people
who can tolerate that environment (who are we kidding, a whole house
of extroverts with no sensory issues in OUR community? Bah) or b) enough large houses
to rotate events within everyone’s tolerance levels. What I’m
proposing is like the latter situation, but instead of everyone
paying the rent for large houses that only get used occasionally,
people pay into a common house that is capable of holding all of the
community events (with or without a couple of occupants. I know at
least one person who would be more than willing to live in such a
space and help with upkeep for discounted rent).
There would be a lot
of improvements to Seattle’s current event structure right away:
1) Scheduling events instantly get a lot simpler. There is a default location that is always
open for as long as someone with a key wants it to be.
2) It gets really
easy to accommodate growth up to a certain size, and if we start
hitting that limit often, we can change the size of space we’re renting.
3) We can customize
the space to make it work well for our needs (whiteboards, folding
chairs and tables, smaller rooms for coworking or things like that)
4) It opens the
community to more diverse groups of people: people who can’t pay
much to hang out with us don’t have to (yes, it’s true that you
can pay for someone’s coffee at a coffeeshop, but that’s a way
more socially charged act than inviting someone to a community
center), people with special needs can get their accommodations more
easily, families could benefit from a room for small children. We’re
kinda bad at being inclusive to these people.
I and some other
people in Seattle are curious about making this go. It seems like we
would need 40 people to pay $100 a month, or 20 to pay $200, and I
can get pretty close to that running through my friends list who can
afford things, but it depends on having enough interest. If you would like to use such a place or would be willing to help pay for it, could you answer this quick survey about it? You don’t have to be a rationalist or even live in Seattle, just be someone who wants to help us make it go.
sorry for asking
about names in the survey, but we just want to verify that you are a Real Human and have a way of finding you again.