6 ms·

Charter Houses (2022)

86 points by alexdong 3y ago

pjs_ 3y ago
https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/
- pjs_ 3y ago
  Hippies have been doing housing co-ops for a long time, and they work kind of like this, and they are mostly (in my experience) cool places. A bunch of people get together and buy a house which they can then live in as a community. As time goes on people move in and out, and in general these function as very cheap shared housing with no landlord and (usually) a flat, non-hierarchical structure. There are usually expectations on pitching in to maintain and run the house. Radical Routes is the org that helped out most of the groups that I knew: https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ Lots of homebrew country wines, asylum seekers in a raised bed above the stairs, curry, good parties and messy drama. Of course you still find the full spectrum of human bad behavior in any place like this, but generally my limited experience was that these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things. To the note in the article about rules, my weak impression was that the more systematic, sincere, organized co-ops tended to be the ones that survived - hands-off tended to turn rotten after a while. There's definitely some sort of alchemy involved in making the thing successful.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    > these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things. .. and overwhelmingly examples of "people don't do this for that long in the same place". I'm still trying to figure out if that is important.
semireg 3y ago
e.g. housing cooperatives https://coophousing.org/ https://coophousing.org/
dmoy 3y ago
Cool general idea, some of the specifics around $$ numbers are a bit... off > Big investments generate quite a lot of money — you can draw off about 4% of an investment every year without depleting the principal, because you get back that much or more in interest. That is not at all what the 4% rule they linked is talking about. The 4% rule means, roughly, from the original source, "95% of the time you won't completely run out of money in 30 years". Indefinite withdrawal from an endowment is a very different problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- almost_usual 3y ago
  I’m not sure they’re considering inflation as well. A safe withdrawal rate would be like annual rate of return - annual inflation - 1% safety buffer. So 4% - 2% (target inflation rate) - 1% (buffer) = 1%. If you don’t include the 1% buffer here you have no margin of safety for a market downturn.
  - AbeBW 3y ago
    The 4% figure comes from something called "The Trinity Study" and most definitely considers inflation. For more information about safe withdrawal rates then you probably want see https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/ https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/
- gwern 3y ago
  Arguably, that's better than aiming for a perpetuity. By economizing on starting capital, you can set up substantially more of these, and you avoid the pathologies of perpetuities (eg. the Hershey trust): if after 30 years a charter house actually does completely run out of money and it can't fix its finances, then maybe its time has come and it's a good thing it can't simply be a trust fund baby rentier. Given how many communes or nonprofits go bad, it's good to have some sort of accountability to outsiders in the form of 'needing money'. (The recurrent debates over the Wikimedia Foundation's ever expanding budget being a good case in point. Are you impressed by what they have done with the many millions of dollars they've gotten in the past half-decade or so? No? Then it doesn't seem likely they're going to impress you very much more if they become so wealthy that they can operate forever off interest and have to care even less what any donators think...)
ShamelessC 3y ago
[flagged]
- I_cape_runts 3y ago
  Don’t forget Tony Hsieh
- ajkjk 3y ago
  I don't think this kind of comment belongs on HN, but I do agree basically agree with it.
  - rexpop 3y ago
    A similar sentiment with a different tone is in another comment: > It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires". OP could have invested more energy in writing out their reasoning, I agree.
    - ajkjk 3y ago
      That other tone was my comment which I posted to offset this one :p
egypturnash 3y ago
You want rules, trust me you want rules. I have lived in something really close to this situation – seven furries, one four-bedroom house in Seattle’s suburbs, one person with a high-paying IT job – and it fell apart. And a big part of why this fell apart is because we never even talked about things like “maybe we should set up a chore rota”. This also sounds a lot like “fraternities” and “sororities”, which certainly have rules. Or maybe “a commune” depending on how far outside of the city is, and those certainly have rules too. If you want to actually try to make this happen I would recommend looking at rules for those sorts of organizations, and asking yourself “what horrible mess happened that lead to this rule being enacted”, because I can guarantee that somewhere in the history of the organization, there was something that happened for every single rule that threatened the continuing survival of the organization.
- slv77 3y ago
  There is a lot of help and experience in setting up intentional communities. A good place to start is https://www.ic.org/ https://www.ic.org/.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  What if the 6 others also had high paying it jobs. Outsource all non essential tasks ala taskrabbit? Money sounds like the issue here.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    I think money is largely the issue. I lived in several different 5-7 bedroom communal houses in SF with a bunch of founders/engineers and if everyone (or even half the people) have high paying jobs then it's a very different experience. The group can easily absorb months of another resident's rent if they have volatile income which greatly reduces the pressure on relationships. It only costs a few hundred bucks a week to have cleaners come over and take care of the house so most chores are a none issue. Dishes and trash were the only rotating chores IIRC since those couldn't be put off between weekly cleanings. There was a fridge for personal food and a separate communal fridge with a group food budget so all staples were always taken care of. Internet, insurance, water, power, were all split equally. There were no problems concerning the money even though some people were messier, some ate at home more, some worked from home entirely, etc. etc. That's a far flung situation from the one described in TFA though. We lived together to build a community as adults, not for survival. That changes the dynamics.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> Even if you did nothing but stick the money in an S&P 500 index fund, the historical average is about 10% per year. * With dividends reinvested, before inflation Say S&P dividends are always 1.5% 10% total return - 1.5% dividends (ignoring the quarterly compounding aspect for simplity) = 8.5% in equity growth Say you wouldn't reinvest them because you want cash flow equivalent to 4% of your principal 4% drawdown rule - 1.5% dividend paid out as cash and not reinvested = 2.5% drawdown needed You really only need to pull 2.5% with the 4% rule, no? (0.625% a quarter 4 times a year?) However, inflation is usually 2%, so you need to pull 2.5% + 2% = 4.5% every year on top of the 1.5% dividends being paid out to you? Is this accurate?
- fbdab103 3y ago
  I think it is more a rule of thumb meant to be simplistic for modelling purposes, less a perfectly calculated system. I also believe the 4% rule is with the intention of keeping the principle mostly intact over 30 years of retirement.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
firedaemon 3y ago
One challenge (among many) is simply that many areas limit the number of unrelated people that can live in a house. When I owned a house in a college town in the Midwest many moons ago that number was 3, for instance. (I have heard that this is sometimes aimed at limiting brothels, though that sounds a bit like an urban legend?)
spondylosaurus 3y ago
> Charter houses could solve this problem neatly. A charter house or two could easily be set up with positions offered to people who are filling these roles, providing them with a minimum of support — at the very least, free rent and free high-speed internet. These people are professionals, so this may not be enough for them — but there’s no reason they can’t get support from the charter house and make additional money in other ways. They can supplement that support by consulting, getting a real job, being a bounty hunter, etc. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sold on why this charter house arrangement is better (for either side involved) than just... paying people a salary. Certainly it's easier to do regular payroll than to buy a huge house and be its landlord (really leaning into the "lord" part) and manage its residents' food + housing + transportation + healthcare needs. Most of that can be purchased with plain old money, and employers can offer insurance to employees without having to be their landlord too. And then on the residents' side... it's bad enough now that I'll have to get a new health insurance policy if I quit my job, but if I had to find a new roof over my head, too? The power dynamic here doesn't sound great. Like, in the context of "we want to fund a handful of random open-source contributors": if you have the funds to do this charter house thing, why not just open an LLC and use it to directly pay the people you're trying to support? Why does a literal house need to be involved?
- Moto7451 3y ago
  I had a friend try this in upstate New York. The result? One ruined friendship and an alienated family member. The property was sold and no one ever talks about it. Leaning to the “lord” part is precisely right and the eventual “peasant revolt” is ugly. The eventual plan was kinda cool. Offer a vacation destination as a digital detox zone for the Digital Nomad set. They knew a number of people in that space they could have marketed to. I think if they avoided the weird living/working arrangement it would have been fine.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Someone I knew died in a car crash, but somehow we all keep driving cars. Just because your friend's one attempt failed terribly doesn't mean the whole idea is rotten. I'm aware of a number of successful communities/warehomes that are making it work.
tpmx 3y ago
Hello, Erlich Bachmann! Damn, you're still alive!
- sdwr 3y ago
  Hello, Eric? This is your mother, and you are not my baby
armatav 3y ago
Yes, 10% per year return “for free” by just investing it all into the SP500; except the rate of inflation makes that negative, and you’ve also got to reinvest any return to see this “10%”. The real rate, not the imaginary rate of inflation.
ajkjk 3y ago
I generally love this idea but, historically, the risk with people building private communities that they're in charge of is that they may or may not turn out to be abusive tyrants and you can't do much about it and probably the abusive tyranny will come out thirty years later with a lot of "I told you so"s. c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All in principle good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful. It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.
- jackcosgrove 3y ago
  Maybe I am just being unimaginative but it seems that civil society with its institutions evolved precisely to handle conflicts and allocate resources between individuals who lack a strong emotional bond. Those bonds do exist in families and it seems over the long run that families are probably the exception to the need for intermediating institutions. I bet successful private communities, intentional communities, etc. basically speedrun the recreation of the broader civil society they exist within.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    More likely they speedrun the mistakes that civil society at least in principle has fixes for.
angarg12 3y ago
One thing OP seems to gloss over is that there is a strong correlation between places where people want to live in, property prices, and rent prices. In other words, the places where people pay 1k for renting a room are not usually the ones where a 7 bedroom house sells for cheap.
moffkalast 3y ago
Ok guys which one of you bought the missile silo and what exactly are you planning on doing with it?
focusaurus 3y ago
If you are curious and sincerely interested in this general concept, check out what we are doing at https://focusretreatcenter.com https://focusretreatcenter.com and ping me if you want to set up a prototype trial run scenario for your group/concept. We already did the "buy a giant house for cheap" part and are still experimenting on exactly what to do with it.
teddyh 3y ago
A few relevant links: • A Technology Freelancers' Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative: <https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202009_Johnson%20etal_Tech%20Freelancers%20Guide%20to%20Worker%20Co-ops.pdf https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202...> • The Tyranny of Structurelessness: <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm> • <https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/ https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/>
rikroots 3y ago
On a tangent. My partner worked for several years as a healthcare assistant at the (possibly?) original Charterhouse[1] in London. One of the infirmary residents he looked after was Dr Bill[2] - a truly remarkable and fascinating person who was still studying and working well after his 100th birthday! [1] - https://thecharterhouse.org/ https://thecharterhouse.org/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)

86 points by alexdong 3y ago

pjs_ 3y ago

https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/

pjs_ 3y ago
Hippies have been doing housing co-ops for a long time, and they work kind of like this, and they are mostly (in my experience) cool places. A bunch of people get together and buy a house which they can then live in as a community. As time goes on people move in and out, and in general these function as very cheap shared housing with no landlord and (usually) a flat, non-hierarchical structure. There are usually expectations on pitching in to maintain and run the house. Radical Routes is the org that helped out most of the groups that I knew: https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ Lots of homebrew country wines, asylum seekers in a raised bed above the stairs, curry, good parties and messy drama. Of course you still find the full spectrum of human bad behavior in any place like this, but generally my limited experience was that these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things. To the note in the article about rules, my weak impression was that the more systematic, sincere, organized co-ops tended to be the ones that survived - hands-off tended to turn rotten after a while. There's definitely some sort of alchemy involved in making the thing successful.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things. .. and overwhelmingly examples of "people don't do this for that long in the same place". I'm still trying to figure out if that is important.

semireg 3y ago

e.g. housing cooperatives https://coophousing.org/ https://coophousing.org/

dmoy 3y ago

Cool general idea, some of the specifics around $$ numbers are a bit... off > Big investments generate quite a lot of money — you can draw off about 4% of an investment every year without depleting the principal, because you get back that much or more in interest. That is not at all what the 4% rule they linked is talking about. The 4% rule means, roughly, from the original source, "95% of the time you won't completely run out of money in 30 years". Indefinite withdrawal from an endowment is a very different problem.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
almost_usual 3y ago
I’m not sure they’re considering inflation as well. A safe withdrawal rate would be like annual rate of return - annual inflation - 1% safety buffer. So 4% - 2% (target inflation rate) - 1% (buffer) = 1%. If you don’t include the 1% buffer here you have no margin of safety for a market downturn.
- AbeBW 3y ago
  The 4% figure comes from something called "The Trinity Study" and most definitely considers inflation. For more information about safe withdrawal rates then you probably want see https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/ https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/
gwern 3y ago
Arguably, that's better than aiming for a perpetuity. By economizing on starting capital, you can set up substantially more of these, and you avoid the pathologies of perpetuities (eg. the Hershey trust): if after 30 years a charter house actually does completely run out of money and it can't fix its finances, then maybe its time has come and it's a good thing it can't simply be a trust fund baby rentier. Given how many communes or nonprofits go bad, it's good to have some sort of accountability to outsiders in the form of 'needing money'. (The recurrent debates over the Wikimedia Foundation's ever expanding budget being a good case in point. Are you impressed by what they have done with the many millions of dollars they've gotten in the past half-decade or so? No? Then it doesn't seem likely they're going to impress you very much more if they become so wealthy that they can operate forever off interest and have to care even less what any donators think...)

ShamelessC 3y ago

[flagged]

I_cape_runts 3y ago
Don’t forget Tony Hsieh
ajkjk 3y ago
I don't think this kind of comment belongs on HN, but I do agree basically agree with it.
- rexpop 3y ago
  A similar sentiment with a different tone is in another comment: > It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires". OP could have invested more energy in writing out their reasoning, I agree.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    That other tone was my comment which I posted to offset this one :p

egypturnash 3y ago

You want rules, trust me you want rules. I have lived in something really close to this situation – seven furries, one four-bedroom house in Seattle’s suburbs, one person with a high-paying IT job – and it fell apart. And a big part of why this fell apart is because we never even talked about things like “maybe we should set up a chore rota”. This also sounds a lot like “fraternities” and “sororities”, which certainly have rules. Or maybe “a commune” depending on how far outside of the city is, and those certainly have rules too. If you want to actually try to make this happen I would recommend looking at rules for those sorts of organizations, and asking yourself “what horrible mess happened that lead to this rule being enacted”, because I can guarantee that somewhere in the history of the organization, there was something that happened for every single rule that threatened the continuing survival of the organization.

slv77 3y ago
There is a lot of help and experience in setting up intentional communities. A good place to start is https://www.ic.org/ https://www.ic.org/.
Racing0461 3y ago
What if the 6 others also had high paying it jobs. Outsource all non essential tasks ala taskrabbit? Money sounds like the issue here.
- civilitty 3y ago
  I think money is largely the issue. I lived in several different 5-7 bedroom communal houses in SF with a bunch of founders/engineers and if everyone (or even half the people) have high paying jobs then it's a very different experience. The group can easily absorb months of another resident's rent if they have volatile income which greatly reduces the pressure on relationships. It only costs a few hundred bucks a week to have cleaners come over and take care of the house so most chores are a none issue. Dishes and trash were the only rotating chores IIRC since those couldn't be put off between weekly cleanings. There was a fridge for personal food and a separate communal fridge with a group food budget so all staples were always taken care of. Internet, insurance, water, power, were all split equally. There were no problems concerning the money even though some people were messier, some ate at home more, some worked from home entirely, etc. etc. That's a far flung situation from the one described in TFA though. We lived together to build a community as adults, not for survival. That changes the dynamics.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> Even if you did nothing but stick the money in an S&P 500 index fund, the historical average is about 10% per year. * With dividends reinvested, before inflation Say S&P dividends are always 1.5% 10% total return - 1.5% dividends (ignoring the quarterly compounding aspect for simplity) = 8.5% in equity growth Say you wouldn't reinvest them because you want cash flow equivalent to 4% of your principal 4% drawdown rule - 1.5% dividend paid out as cash and not reinvested = 2.5% drawdown needed You really only need to pull 2.5% with the 4% rule, no? (0.625% a quarter 4 times a year?) However, inflation is usually 2%, so you need to pull 2.5% + 2% = 4.5% every year on top of the 1.5% dividends being paid out to you? Is this accurate?

fbdab103 3y ago
I think it is more a rule of thumb meant to be simplistic for modelling purposes, less a perfectly calculated system. I also believe the 4% rule is with the intention of keeping the principle mostly intact over 30 years of retirement.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

firedaemon 3y ago

One challenge (among many) is simply that many areas limit the number of unrelated people that can live in a house. When I owned a house in a college town in the Midwest many moons ago that number was 3, for instance. (I have heard that this is sometimes aimed at limiting brothels, though that sounds a bit like an urban legend?)

spondylosaurus 3y ago

> Charter houses could solve this problem neatly. A charter house or two could easily be set up with positions offered to people who are filling these roles, providing them with a minimum of support — at the very least, free rent and free high-speed internet. These people are professionals, so this may not be enough for them — but there’s no reason they can’t get support from the charter house and make additional money in other ways. They can supplement that support by consulting, getting a real job, being a bounty hunter, etc. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sold on why this charter house arrangement is better (for either side involved) than just... paying people a salary. Certainly it's easier to do regular payroll than to buy a huge house and be its landlord (really leaning into the "lord" part) and manage its residents' food + housing + transportation + healthcare needs. Most of that can be purchased with plain old money, and employers can offer insurance to employees without having to be their landlord too. And then on the residents' side... it's bad enough now that I'll have to get a new health insurance policy if I quit my job, but if I had to find a new roof over my head, too? The power dynamic here doesn't sound great. Like, in the context of "we want to fund a handful of random open-source contributors": if you have the funds to do this charter house thing, why not just open an LLC and use it to directly pay the people you're trying to support? Why does a literal house need to be involved?

Moto7451 3y ago
I had a friend try this in upstate New York. The result? One ruined friendship and an alienated family member. The property was sold and no one ever talks about it. Leaning to the “lord” part is precisely right and the eventual “peasant revolt” is ugly. The eventual plan was kinda cool. Offer a vacation destination as a digital detox zone for the Digital Nomad set. They knew a number of people in that space they could have marketed to. I think if they avoided the weird living/working arrangement it would have been fine.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Someone I knew died in a car crash, but somehow we all keep driving cars. Just because your friend's one attempt failed terribly doesn't mean the whole idea is rotten. I'm aware of a number of successful communities/warehomes that are making it work.

tpmx 3y ago

Hello, Erlich Bachmann! Damn, you're still alive!

sdwr 3y ago
Hello, Eric? This is your mother, and you are not my baby

armatav 3y ago

Yes, 10% per year return “for free” by just investing it all into the SP500; except the rate of inflation makes that negative, and you’ve also got to reinvest any return to see this “10%”. The real rate, not the imaginary rate of inflation.

ajkjk 3y ago

I generally love this idea but, historically, the risk with people building private communities that they're in charge of is that they may or may not turn out to be abusive tyrants and you can't do much about it and probably the abusive tyranny will come out thirty years later with a lot of "I told you so"s. c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All in principle good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful. It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.

jackcosgrove 3y ago
Maybe I am just being unimaginative but it seems that civil society with its institutions evolved precisely to handle conflicts and allocate resources between individuals who lack a strong emotional bond. Those bonds do exist in families and it seems over the long run that families are probably the exception to the need for intermediating institutions. I bet successful private communities, intentional communities, etc. basically speedrun the recreation of the broader civil society they exist within.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  More likely they speedrun the mistakes that civil society at least in principle has fixes for.

angarg12 3y ago

One thing OP seems to gloss over is that there is a strong correlation between places where people want to live in, property prices, and rent prices. In other words, the places where people pay 1k for renting a room are not usually the ones where a 7 bedroom house sells for cheap.

moffkalast 3y ago

Ok guys which one of you bought the missile silo and what exactly are you planning on doing with it?

focusaurus 3y ago

If you are curious and sincerely interested in this general concept, check out what we are doing at https://focusretreatcenter.com https://focusretreatcenter.com and ping me if you want to set up a prototype trial run scenario for your group/concept. We already did the "buy a giant house for cheap" part and are still experimenting on exactly what to do with it.

teddyh 3y ago

A few relevant links: • A Technology Freelancers' Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative: <https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202009_Johnson%20etal_Tech%20Freelancers%20Guide%20to%20Worker%20Co-ops.pdf https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202...> • The Tyranny of Structurelessness: <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm> • <https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/ https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/>

rikroots 3y ago

On a tangent. My partner worked for several years as a healthcare assistant at the (possibly?) original Charterhouse[1] in London. One of the infirmary residents he looked after was Dr Bill[2] - a truly remarkable and fascinating person who was still studying and working well after his 100th birthday! [1] - https://thecharterhouse.org/ https://thecharterhouse.org/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)