Raemon's Shortform

Strategic use of Group Houses for Community Building

(Notes that might one day become a blogpost. Building off The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission. Inspired to go ahead and post this now because of John Maxwell's "how to make money reducing loneliness" post, which explores some related issues through a more capitalist lens)

A good village requires doing things on purpose.
Doing things on purpose requires that you have people who are coordinated in some way
Being coordinated requires you to be able to have a critical mass of people who are actually trying to do effortful things together (such as maintain norms, build a culture, etc)
If you don't have a fence that lets some people in and doesn't let in others, and which you can ask people to leave, then your culture will be some random mishmash that you can't control

The strongest fences are group houses, and organizations. Group houses are probably the easiest and most accessible resource for the "village" to turn into a stronger culture and coordination point.

Select people who actually have a decent chance of wanting to be good friends
Don't stress overmuch about getting the perfect set of people – overly stressing about finding the 'best' people to be friends with is one of the pathologies in the Bay area that make friendship harder. If everyone's doing it, no one has the ability to let a friendship actually grow, which takes time.
DO find people you enjoy hanging out with, talking to, and share some interests with
It may take multiple years to find a group house where everyone gets along with everyone. I think it makes sense, earlier on, to focus on exploring (i.e. if you've just moved to the Bay, don't worry about getting a group house culture that is a perfect fit), but within 3 years I think it's achievable for most people to have found a group house that is good for friendship.
Once you've got a group house that seems like a good longterm home, actually invest it.

Do things with your roommates.
Allocate time, not just for solving logistical problems, but for getting on the same page emotionally
"Deep friendships often come from striving and growing together." Look for opportunities for shared activities that are active rather than passive and involve growing skills that you are excited about.

But, probably don't try to force this. Sometimes you're at the same stage in a life trajectory as someone else, and you're growing in the same way at the same time. But not always. And later on you may want to keep growing in a direction where someone else feels that they've solved their bottleneck and growing more in that direction isn't that relevant to them anymore. That's okay.

I think this is an important "lower Maslow hierarchy" level than the strong friendships one. If your house isn't a nice place to live, you'll probably have a harder time forming friendships with people there.
"Nice place to live" means different things to different people. Form a group house with people who have similar desires re: cleanliness and approaches to problem solving and aesthetics, etc.

What sort of environment you're in shapes what sort of ways you grow. You might care about about this for reasons other than incidentally helping deepen friendships.
This depends both on having people who want to cultivate the same sorts of incentives that you do, and on actually coordinating with each other to hold each other to those incentives
Be wary of your, and other's, desire to have the self-image as someone who wants to grow in a particular way. I've seen a failure mode where people felt vaguely obligated to pay lip service to certain kinds of growth but it wasn't actually what they wanted
Be wary of "generic emphasis on growth". A thing I've seen a few group houses try is something like "self improvement night" where they try to help each other level up, and it often doesn't work because people are just interested in pretty different skillsets.

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