Phil Levin on living near friends and family

America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness: marriage and birth rates, the number of close friendships, time spent with friends, and community involvement more broadly are all in decline. Phil Levin, my guest on this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, is helping to lead an interesting new movement away from all this self-imposed isolation and back toward social reconnection.

Operating on the principle that every social problem is an entrepreneurial opportunity, Levin sees housing innovation — in particular, making it easier for family and friends to live with or near each other — as a promising way to help reknit the social fabric. He helped to start Culdesac, which builds car-free neighborhoods from scratch, and he is the founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people build or buy housing with people they know. And these business ventures grew out of his own experience with “co-living” arrangements in the Bay Area. Levin and I discuss Levin’s personal housing experiences, the barriers facing people who want to follow his example, the factors driving growing interest in co-living, the disparate groups of people attracted to this lifestyle, and the prospects for group living arrangements to seed broader social revitalization.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m really excited about today’s episode because it represents a new direction for the podcast. Thus far, all the podcasts I’ve done so far, I’ve had guests on that have helped me analyze and figure out what’s going wrong with the world, and that’s a big subject with a lot of different angles and it’s an important subject. I don’t think we can get going in the right direction unless we figure out what wrong turns we’ve made. But spending all your time on the world’s struggles is a bummer. And then ultimately the reason to figure out the world’s troubles is to make them better.

So, I’m happy today to pivot towards thinking about how to actually move things in the right direction and talk with someone who’s doing that. If you’re familiar at all with my work on the Substack and my book, The Permanent Problem, you know that I argue that the 21st century malaise that the rich advanced democracies are in is due to the fact that we’re in a kind of no man’s land between achieving material mass affluence and translating that into spiritual mass flourishing. I argue that one of the most important priorities for getting from here to there, moving towards a world more amenable and conducive to mass flourishing is to revitalize our face-to- face communities. We’ve had a real contagion of disconnection and social disintegration over the 21st century and we need to be moving in the opposite direction, re-knitting those frayed ties and reconnecting with people because that’s ultimately the foundation for wellbeing for Homo sapiens. We’re a hypersocial species and we need other people.

I’m delighted today to have as my guest, Phil Levin, who has devoted his career to revitalizing face-to-face communities, one family and set of friends at a time. He is the co-founder of Live Near Friends, which we’ll talk about more, a founding member of Culdesac, which is a set of co-living communities, and also, on top of that, helps to run the Substack Supernuclear. So Phil Levin, wonderful to have you on the show.

Phil Levin: Yeah, great to be here.

Lindsey: So, tell me, first of all, your story. Were you on another career track before you made this pivot? And then tell the pivot of how you got interested in housing and making housing something beyond single-family housing, which has become the utterly dominant norm in American life.

Levin: Yeah. I was on a totally different career track. I was working in the developing world trying to get people mobile banking on their phone. So back around 2010, let’s say, you had roughly... Everyone at that point had a mobile phone, but only about 20 percent of people had bank accounts. So the idea was you could use the mobile phone as a way to get people financial services. So that was my first career. I was living in a bunch of different countries. Actually, when you live in a bunch of different countries, you really feel like you’re in a community because you quickly find the expats, and the expat community becomes your community and they take care of each other because no one has family there. So, I came back to the US at that point and actually felt the absence of community, felt like I didn’t really have anyone. I was this anonymous person in the big city of San Francisco, but then I met my wife.

Lindsey: Had you grown up in a tighter knit community or big family or has this not come out of your own biography?

Levin: Yeah. I grew up in the traditional American suburbs and a very loving family, a nice neighborhood, but nothing out of the norm. But the real turning point for me and really the change in my career is I met my wife, Kristen. She’s a professional behavioral scientist, so she studies what makes people happy and healthy. We like to experiment in our own lives. So when we were having the conversation how do we want to live, I thought we would do “the normal thing,” which was go get a one-bedroom apartment by ourselves, just live the two of us somewhere, and she said, “I’ve read all the research. Absolutely not. And that is not going to make us happy.” What we did instead was we rented a nine-bedroom mansion in San Francisco and moved in nine of our friends. So that was our move-in together moment as a couple.

Lindsey: How long did it take to assemble the nine participants?

Levin: A few months. We were on a sales tour. Luckily people in San Francisco are fairly open to ideas like this. It’s a good place to experiment here. So we started moving together. I’m like, “Okay. We’ll do this as an experiment.” It ended up becoming my career. At that point, I got interested in real estate and housing and asking the question, “Why is it our housing not helping more with our happiness, our sense of belonging, our health? It just seems like our housing is working against us.” So I ended up meeting two guys, Jeff and Ryan, who were starting a company called Culdesac. Culdesac was set out to build car-free neighborhoods in the US. We ended up building this car-free neighborhood that got a lot of press, a lot of attention in Tempe, Arizona. It is open now. People are living there, but people thought it was crazy to build a car-free neighborhood.

Lindsey: I’ll just mention quickly that this is the first time you and I have chatted, but we did email a couple of years ago because I was going to be in Phoenix and wanted to check out Culdesac, and you helped line me up with the people there.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. So that was my entree into housing. My wife and I ended up then starting a second community, for ourselves again, called Radish in Oakland, and we thought of this as like, “Oh, we’re…”

Lindsey: Was this because you outgrew the first place or because there were problems with the first place?

Levin: Because people were starting to talk about having kids, and living in a big mansion in San Francisco is not the right setup for kids. So, we were saying, “Hey, let’s take the parts we like about this, which is living in community with friends and try to translate this into a new era in our lives.” We bought this property in Oakland, which had a bunch of space. We now live there with 20 friends, 10 kids all who were born there under the age of five, and spread across 10 private homes. Most people have their own private units.

Lindsey: If you walk from the farthest one to the other side, how far away is it?

Levin: A 40-second walk. So they’re all in a tight cluster. Yeah. So it’s like you don’t have to put on shoes. So we ended up starting this community and we thought about this as just, “We’re unique people. We want to live in a unique way. We’re going to set up this one-time experiment in this thing.” What ended up happening to our great surprise was we discovered along the way there’s this fairly universal interest in this. We started getting emails and calls and people like, “I want to do this. How do I do this? Can you help me?” We realized that actually there are a lot of people who want to live this way. There’s just no way for them to do it. There are no offerings out there. Our built environment’s just not set up for it. It’s not on the menu for people. So that motivated me to start this company, Live Near Friends, which is trying to take the way we live at Radish and make it available to a lot more people.

Lindsey: Tell me, so what does Live Near Friends do? How does it work? How does it help people and what’s the scale of it?

Levin: Yeah. The mission as a company is to help people live in close proximity to the people they care most about, friends and family. What we do practically is we help people purchase and also develop, build from scratch, housing where you can live next door to friends and family. So on the purchase side, what this might look like is two sisters who want to buy a duplex together and we will help them find it, figure out the financing, figure out the legal structure. And then on the developing side, which is really what I’m interested in, I’m a housing developer, we’re helping people actually build from scratch housing that is specifically designed for neighbors that know each other and want to be in a relationship rather than neighbors that want to be strangers. I’ll talk more about what that actually looks like, I’m sure, later.

Lindsey: Right now, what’s the split in your clientele between the off-the-shelfers and the people who want to build their own place?

Levin: I’d say probably two-thirds off-the-shelf, one-third want to go building. It takes a very specific personality who wants to do that, it’s a big project. But it’s more people than you might think. I mean, not that many people build their own home, but about a third of my clientele is interested in that, which I actually think is an indication that the real estate industry is maybe a little too, “We’re just going to hand you the products,” as opposed to actually having people participate in the process.

Lindsey: So your Radish, the second of your co-living arrangements, you’re in the process of selling that now, aren’t you? So you have a third act in mind, right?

Levin: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. We built Radish for what we call the shoulder years. So it’s like the few years before people start having kids up to age maybe five when there’s a set of needs you have. You don’t need a ton of space for kids to run around. They’re not that old yet, but you still want to be connected to the city and connected to restaurants and bars. The third act is going full suburban like our parents did. I can’t believe I’m here, but I got here. So we’re building actually three new communities that are basically three new spinoffs of Radish. Everyone who lives in Radish is going to move into one of those three. These typically are just places with bigger units, a little more space, a little more focused on schools, all the reasons people tend to move into the suburbs.

Lindsey: Right. So with Radish, you told me the number of people and families in the compound, but my understanding is you had other people just move into the vicinity as well to get in on the fun?

Levin: That’s right. And this was unexpected. Radish is where we live. What we didn’t expect is it turned into a third space for the wider neighborhood in some ways. So, we had actually a bunch of other friends. We basically ran out of space really quickly at Radish. We just have only so many units and people who wanted to participate would end up buying or renting nearby. So we had eight friends who bought homes near us within walking distance and they use it as their third space.

What we learned, which is interesting, is that proximity really matters. We have this natural experiment of seeing people move next door versus a five-minute walkaway versus a 10-minute walkaway versus a 15-minute walkaway and there are huge differences at those distance scales as far as how they participate. So it’s like the distance that I think is most relevant, we like to call Crocs distance, which is the distance you’d be willing to just throw on Crocs and walk on over and not have to call up and say, “Are you there?” But to actually just walk on over to have a look and see who’s around. There’s another distance that we call baby monitor distance, which is even closer, which is when you leave your kid in your house, bring your baby monitor and come hang out and feel okay that your kid is in the house. It’s within the range of the baby monitor essentially. We found that there’s enormous differences in the utility of being baby monitor distance than Crocs distance versus I actually have to make an event of coming over.

Lindsey: If you’re a five-minute walk away, is that Croc distance or is that more of an effort? Do you really have to just be kind of next-

Levin: We call it Crocs distance. You can finish a meeting, walk over, walk back.

Lindsey: But basically if you have to get in the car, it’s over, right?

Levin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you might as well be on the other side of the city if you need to get in a car.

Lindsey: Okay. Let’s talk a little about terminology. I think you use co-living most often, but there’s co-housing, there’s compounds, there’s co-ops. And then as we get into the fringier vibes, you get communes and intentional communities. So, tell me your terminological choice and the thinking behind it.

Levin: Yeah. I actually don’t use any of those terms now. The term I use is just living with your friends and family. I think all the terms you mentioned are... They come loaded with some mental image of who is doing this. So if you think of the commune, there’s a thing in your head right now when you think of the word commune. I think our mission as a company is that we want to make this a universal thing on the menu. We want to make it for normies. We want to make it for just your average people. So, we’re trying to use terminology that I think is just universal and doesn’t come loaded with some idea of some specific person that is doing it.

Lindsey: I’ll say that when I was cooking up the ideas that led to the Substack and then the book, I was much clearer on what was going wrong than what to do about it. The ideas about what to do about it, which were novel to me and weren’t the kinds of things that I’d been thinking about before, they didn’t grow out of seeing some reform movement on the ground and say, “Ooh, wow, that looks promising.” They just grew out of thinking, “Okay. What’s wrong? And then how do we undo that?” So that led me towards thinking that we really need much more face-to-face connection.

And that, in particular, the reason we are disconnecting from people is that once upon a time, when the world was poor, other people, your face-to-face relationships, played vital, practical roles in your life. Your spouse was your helpmeet in economic production. Your kids worked on the farm and took care of you when you were older. Your neighbors were help against danger, and an insurance policy against bad times, and the only alternative to listening to the crickets for doing something to unwind. As we’ve gotten richer, a lot of those functions we’ve outsourced to the market or to the welfare state. So people, our face-to-face relationships have just become one consumption option amidst a sea of expertly marketed alternatives, and the marketing seems to win more often than not.

So I had this sense that we’re being led away from our better selves and our longer term interests by short-term dopamine hits, and we need something that will institutionalize reconnecting with each other. When I first started to share these ideas with people, I would just get eye rolls and like, “Oh, so you want everybody to go back and live on a commune again?” “No, no, that’s not what I want.” So when I finally discovered that there were real people who weren’t communards, who were just regular folks who thought, “Wow, it’d be nice to live, not next to strangers, but next to people that matter to me.” Anyway, that was just a huge pick-me-up that, wow, there are things going out in the world that are connecting with what I’m up to.

So yeah. The two models we now have for group living are the ‘60s commune or the college frat house, right?

Levin: Those are the two.

Lindsey: Neither of those is really what you want to pitch to Joe and Jane American.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. I think you’ve actually said this in a very similar way to how I describe it. I think the question we’re trying to answer is, who is your support structure as a person in this world? I think maybe on one side of the aisle, the answer would be that it’s the market or it’s the individual. You are your own support structure. The other side, it might be that the government’s your support structure. I don’t believe in either of those. For me, the natural support structure is your local community. It’s the people around you, in close proximity to you, your friends, your family, your neighbors. It seems that we just hollowed out that sort of mid-level organism. The individual is very well understood. The government’s well understood.

Lindsey: Yeah. Civil society, all those intermediate institutions between the individual and the state, is hollowed out a lot.

Levin: Yeah. I think the work I do, it’s one vector of response to that problem. I think there’s probably many, and I hope you’ll probably have them on your show. But for me, it starts with the fact that I think your support structure really needs to be local. So many of your physical needs are local needs. It’s like, who’s going to drive you to the hospital when you have an emergency? Who’s going to come over and watch your kid? There’s a natural geography of support. For me, it starts with housing, because that’s what really sets up the ability for that to happen.

Lindsey: So, why is this happening now? Why are you happening now? Why are people like you happening now? Why did your Culdesac co-founders come along now? In the ‘60s, we had a very different dynamic, right? It was a cultural break by young people, wanting to break from the conformism and the perceived cookie-cutter oppressiveness of bourgeois life and get back to the land and get back to something authentic. So it was a real revolutionary attempt to break beyond consumerism into a radically different kind of lifestyle and a kind of a throwback back-to-the-land lifestyle, and that turned out to just not work. Subsistence farming is hard, brutal work, and there’s a reason everybody left the farm as soon as they could, and so that ran out of gas.

In big cities for a while now, it’s pretty common for young professionals to deal with high rents and low starting salaries by having roommates and having group homes, and that’s a pretty common thing. It’s probably more common in the Bay Area than maybe anywhere else because of the insane housing prices and also just the hacker culture group-house thing. It just seems there’s a cultural vibe that supports group living at any rate. But when you started doing your idiosyncratic weird pioneering kind of lifestyle experimentation, you immediately started having people say, “Wow, I want to do that.” So you immediately started sensing this latent demand. Where is that coming from? Why is it showing up now and not before?

Levin: Yeah, good question. So I think there are a couple factors, and you’ve already mentioned a few of them. One is that housing is broken. Everyone understands housing is not working. You see this most clearly in prices, but I think it’s a more general feeling. No one thinks this is going well. They’re open to other ideas. The second, like it says, is more people are having roommates, related to the housing costs, and so the idea that you would have other people... When my wife and I started dating, we were living with roommates and I started our feeling was like, “We don’t want to give up our roommates. We like living with them.”

The third, which I think will continue to reverberate, is the pandemic. So the pandemic was this once in a century moment when everyone simultaneously asked themselves the question, “How do I want to live in a new world?” It was this moment when people were actually just open to other ways of life. I worked on a company that was trying to actually do band life stuff and get people to form communities around bands. Didn’t work, but people were open to ideas like that in the pandemic. I think it just scrambled everyone’s default path, the mindless, “Oh, I’m going to get this home next and this home next,” and left people open to other ideas.

Lindsey: It also promoted a huge step increase in remote work, working from home. So during the pandemic in particular, 40 percent of work hours were in the home for a while in 2020. And then people expected it all to pop back, and it didn’t, because people liked it. People liked cutting that hour and a half, two hours out of commuting time out of their life. People liked being able to go deal with a kid’s doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day without trauma. So there’s been enormous amount of resistance. So you had this dynamic where managers wanted everybody back under their control and under their watchful eyes, and people wanted to stay home. A lot of them did. So there’s been a durable increase in remote work, which was accelerating a long-term secular change.

From the first factories until 1980, the entire trend was the other way. It was work moving out of the home and into factories and then moving into shops and offices. Before that, everybody was a farmer, they worked at home. The home was a site of economic production. It evolved over time where the only production you do there is cooking and home maintenance, and it’s just a site of consumption, and everything moved out of the house into offices and factories. So by 1980 in America, we hit the nadir. Only 2 percent of people reported the home as their primary workplace, but now it’s up to 20 percent. There was a big jump in COVID, but it’s been gradual since the 1980s. It’s all basically online, either facilitating remote work for employees or facilitating doing online internet businesses. That struck me as a huge structural change in the way the economy is working that opens up possibilities for people to live near family and friends. It divorces the living decision from the work decision, from where you work. So, how important is that with your clients? Are you seeing that most of them are remote workers, or how does that work?

Levin: Yes, 100 percent. I think you hit the nail on the head here. The starting point for the housing decision used to be, where’s my workplace and how do I commute to it? Now people need a new starting point, and what’s that going to be? The claim I want to put forward is you should start with the who. You should start with your support network. You should start with the people that you love and admire, and that should be the starting point for your housing decision if you’re fortunate enough to be able to be divorced from your place of work, which not everyone is yet, but many people are. So there’s a lot of people we live with are. We happen to be easily commutable to downtown San Francisco, so we don’t really have to give that up where we are, but I think more and more you might actually see communities like this that actually are not in reference to where the office cluster is.

Lindsey: It seems like once you have that population of people who truly are footloose and fancy free in their housing decisions, that could start bleeding out into the people who are actually still going to work in an office to think, “Hey, maybe I’ve got more flexibility about this than I thought.” So you’ve got plenty of different location options. If your workplace is in location X, there’s a bunch of different possibilities for where your residence could be. If you start out thinking about how to coordinate with family and friends, then it makes it easier. But if they’ve got two different workplaces and people are changing jobs, then that really is a significant barrier. So it seems to me that the biggest friend you have as far as pushing this trend forward is the trend towards being able to work wherever you want to.

Levin: Yeah. I think actually one of the things we were really thinking about when we started Culdesac is, the other secular trend you’re going to see is how changes in mobility are going to change people’s behavior of where they are able to live. So I think the self-driving is going to be big here, so investment follows, right? The idea that you can sit in a self-driving car with a great suspension system, driving very smoothly, doing your work as you go to work. Right now, people’s commute fringe for the typical person is about 30 minutes, and it goes up to an hour for other people, and I think you’re going to see that commute fringe being pushed out quite a bit in a world with self-driving cars and other technologies, and so you might actually... I think that’s going to have a sprawling effect, which actually could also influence the types of housing that people start choosing.

Lindsey: No, that’s an excellent point and I hadn’t really focused on that, but for sure, once the commute isn’t lost time where you’ve got to be staring at the road, you could be doing anything, then commuting is less awful than it was before and is less of a constraint on where you want to live than it was before.

Levin: It’s Marchetti’s Law. Have you heard this before?

Lindsey: No, I have not.

Levin: It’s a fascinating rabbit hole. So there’s a physicist named Marchetti, I think in the ‘70s maybe, was studying basically how long people are willing to commute throughout history going back to the Roman times. He coined this thing called Marchetti’s Law, which basically said that the time that people are willing to spend commuting is invariant. So the median person will always commute about 30 minutes. But what changes is the technology that transports you. As you get basically faster transportation technology, cities grow because the commute tolerance allows them to get further places. So you could basically measure the size of cities and back into what is the dominant transportation technology that creates that city. So, a train scale city will have a certain size, a car scale city will have a certain size. Anyways, a bit of a side tangent, but I think Marchetti’s Law is important to understanding what self-driving cars will do to how we live.

Lindsey: Good. So you’ve got another law that you cite sometimes in describing the importance of what you do. It’s the law of proximity. So, explain that.

Levin: Yeah. The law of proximity, and this is really what behavioral science would tell you, is that the things that are closest to you, lowest friction to you, are going to be the things you do and the things furthest away from you are going to be the things you don’t do. So the things within a five or 10-minute proximity of you are going to…

Lindsey: But this has got a lot of teeth, doesn’t it? And people don’t face up to it at all.

Levin: It does. If you live next to a gym, you’ll work out more. If you live next to a pizza place, you will get fat. I think people tend to overrate the amenities in a city and they tend to underrate the things within a five or 10-minute walk of where they live, which to a much greater degree determine how you live.

Lindsey: What can you tell me about trends in terms of this group-focused living, people buying and building homes together rather than just as single-family units? What do you know about trends in the United States?

Levin: I think what’s been interesting at Live Near Friends is observing the kinds of audiences that show up wanting this, and there have been some surprises on my end. The audience that we knew would show up, who have shown up, are people who actually look like me. The problem that they’re trying to solve is there are two working parents in a very expensive city and we want to have kids and how on earth do we do this? It seems impossible. So, what they’re looking for is, they’re looking for support in raising kids, and that’s the thing they’re trying to solve by living near their friends and family. The friends thing is important because not everyone has family that can move near them. So that is for sure a chunk of an audience that we see a lot.

There are two other audiences that I think are fairly interesting. One is empty nesters. There’s a specific kind of empty nester, and it’s largely women and largely single women. I was curious because these people started showing up to us and we’re not marketing to them. We have millennial marketing. It’s clearly targeted at people like me. But we kept getting these older single women showing up. I talked to a bunch of them and I learned a couple things. The first is that I didn’t realize how many women above the age of 60 are single. It’s over half of women over the age of 60 are single. So, men die younger. When there’s a divorce, men tend to marry younger. The women tend to not remarry on average. That population appears to not like their housing options. They don’t actually want to live independently. They want to be in connection with people. They want to live interdependently. So that’s a second audience.

There’s a third audience, which is child-free adults. I had no idea. I mean, it turns out 20 percent of adults in the US are child-free by choice. People don’t think about them as a segment. It’s a large thing. It turns out actually on average, they’re higher income. They are not trying to save up money to give their kids an inheritance. They don’t have kids. So they spend down their money before they die. They try to die with zero. They are higher consumption housing spenders and they rent, they don’t buy. So it’s actually an interesting segment of people to think about housing offerings to. I don’t think anyone’s really thinking about them.

Lindsey: When you have kids, you have a built-in social life of a kind with your kids. It’s intensive and demanding and tends to squash the social life you used to have outside of one with your kids. But if you’re in kid-free adulthood, then that’s a big space that opens up that otherwise gets consumed. So the emptiness of solitary living, I would guess, just stares at you in the face more if you’ve not been going through the hectic years of child-rearing.

Levin: Yep. I think kids also help with your social circle. I think the classic thing is, you meet the parents of your kids’ friends. So there’s a social need in that segment, I think it’s really, really sharp.

Lindsey: When did you start Culdesac? When did you start Live Near Friends?

Levin: Culdesac was 2018. Live Near Friends was 2023. Yeah. So we’ve been at it for a few years.

Lindsey: How do you assess how you’re doing and what does success look like?

Levin: Yeah. I think, both of these companies are trying to create a new category of housing. I think in the United States, we see so much innovation, category innovation in different industries Say electronics, think about the number of different electronics products they release every year. Some work and some don’t work. Housing is just so stale.

Lindsey: Yes.

Levin: I think we learned why. It’s really hard to create new categories of housing. You pay what somebody called the new concept penalty whenever you try to start something new in the housing space, which is the insurance companies, the banks, the equity providers, the regulators. You need to do extra work with each of them in order to make your product exist, whereas if you’re building the same thing that’s been built before, they’ll just roll out the red carpet and be like, “Oh yeah, let’s get more of that. We understand that. We know how to make that happen.” So it’s just an uphill battle you face when you start a new category of housing, it’s really sharp, and that’s before you even get to the consumer side of it where people are fairly conservative about their housing decisions, especially when they’re buying because it’s such a long-term investment. So, we haven’t seen enough innovation and experimentation in housing. I think it’s a huge friction on our civilization that we can’t do more of it.

I’ve always been interested in this because I think it’s just really important. Both Culdesac and Live Near Friends are basically category innovations in housing. I think what we’ve proven with both of them is that the demand is there. It’s like we have not had problems getting people interested in living this way. The problem is more on the supply side. It’s how do you actually create it.

Lindsey: You can see the stagnation of the housing sector in the numbers and it’s astonishing. Arresting numbers of decades of negative productivity growth in both residential and commercial construction. So that’s just absolutely incredibly, exotically, inexplicably weird, right? That’s not the way capitalist economies work. They have positive productivity growth over time. That’s the whole ballgame. So there are just deep conservative forces that have things stuck in particular ruts that don’t seem to be serving us very well.

You face a fair amount of resistance then in busting out of those ruts. Tell me specifically about what legal barriers can crop up if you’re wanting to live with family and friends.

Levin: Yeah. Specifically family and friends. I think the good news is that the main barrier is starting to fall. The main barrier if you want to live next to family and friends is just that on most lots in the United States, you cannot build multiple homes. That’s the basic prerequisite for this. Can you build multiple homes on a single lot? The good news is that is changing. So, a dozen or so states have passed what are called missing middle housing laws that essentially what they do is you can take a lot of single-family lots and turn them into multifamily.

For example, my wife and I right now are building basically our third chapter after Radish. What we’re doing is, we took a large single-family zone lot in the Bay Area where we have two homes on it already and we’re going to subdivide and create four new micro lots and build four new homes, and then we’re going to sell our friends those four homes.

Lindsey: How large is the total property?

Levin: It’s a fairly unique one. So it’s about 24,000 square feet. It’s a big one for the Bay Area. But you can do this on a 6,000 square foot lot and build maybe three or four homes. So, what’s crucial about this is that when you do these subdivisions and you end up with these micro lots with individual homes on them, at that point, those are just single-family homes on what are called fee simple lots, which means that they can just be financed with all the normal Rocket Mortgage loans that normal people get when they buy a home. So there’s nothing exotic needed. You’re just buying a single-family home. It just happens to be a single-family home that you created next to your single-family home.

The ability to do these small lots subdivisions is really going to be the thing that... it’s the reason we started this company now is that it unlocks the ability to create these things in a methodical, scalable way in a lot of different parts of the United States. Whereas when we had to create Radish, we spent two years looking for a property we could put Radish on because we needed to have the right zoning, the right set of buildings and it took years for us to find it. Now when we work with clients, we can send them a dozen options that work for them today.

Lindsey: What’s going on outside of the United States? I’ve read about in Germany, there’s this thing called Baugruppen, or building groups, where it’s pretty common apparently for groups of people, friends or family members or whatever to... There’s an established process where they get together, and get together with a builder, and they build according to their specs. So there’s already this separate category that has somehow or another gotten into existence there, so that you’re not just completely innovating a totally new way of doing housing. This idea of a group of people getting together and designing their own space with a builder and in so doing apparently achieving some not insignificant savings is attractive to people. It seems like the lines are going up for that type of housing decision in Germany, but I don’t know about... Americans are very parochial. We rarely look at what clever things other people are doing outside that can make things work, but I’m just curious if you’ve seen any inspirations from beyond your shores.

Levin: Yeah. I was also interested in the Baugruppen thing. It seemed unlikely to me. I’m like, “How is this actually happening?” It’s like the amount of coordination and the amount of... I found it hard to believe when I first read about it, but it’s true. I dug into it more. I think the key thing that people don’t tell when they tell that story is, there’s quite a bit of industrial policy going on from the state there, where they’re able to access financing at terms that normal people, people in the US aren’t able to access because the government is basically supporting it.

Lindsey: There’s preferential financing for this kind of housing there.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m not a Baugruppen expert. I don’t actually know the specifics, but I think for that sort of thing to work, you’d probably need some sort of similar effort. I’m not optimistic on that exact model translating. I think the question is how do you get something that looks like the end result through means that we are able to access in the US?

Something I’m interested in, and Brink, I know you talk about this in your book a little bit, is that one thing that we think of as a problem in the US that I actually see as an opportunity in this space is that we do have this big wealth inequality in the US. You have rich people, you have poor people. But in the US it’s like we see this... I live in the Bay Area, and it’s like, again, in a friend group, there’s the friend that got rich off the AI IPO and there’s the friend that works at the nonprofit, and you have this great wealth disparity within a friend group or within the family. I think it’s obviously very extreme in the Bay Area, but you see this story elsewhere because we actually do have a fair amount of income mobility. So even within a family, you’ll see a lot of...

So the question I’m asking myself is, how do we make use of the fact that, within a social circle, some people have more means than other people? Actually, can the people with more means almost become like the patrons and the subsidizers of the lifestyles of the people they care about, and do we want mechanisms for that to express itself?

What we actually typically see in a lot of the projects we support is there’s one person with more motivation and more financial means, and they’re in essence cross-subsidizing the people they care about and sometimes it’s just a risk cross-subsidization. So it’s like, “I’m going to buy the thing and take it through the zoning process and things could go wrong, but I’m then going to sell you the house at cost after that. I might finance it for you myself.” So I think these mixed income, mixed wealth setups, which inherently friend groups and families are just by nature, do present a way to do that.

Really, that’s just a cultural question. It’s like, do people see that as a thing that’s okay to do? Is it on the menu for them to do that? Does it feel awkward for them to present that as a possibility? Actually, something I’m going to try to work on over the next year is that idea and framing that as not a thing that you should be embarrassed about, but actually a thing that you’re using your wealth to do a great service for the people you care about, and actually we should encourage this and we should be talking about this more.

Lindsey: But you’ve seen real-life examples of this? It’s a collective action problem, and they’ve got the resources to solve it, so they’ll be the lead actor.

Levin: The most common place you see this all over the world is multi-generational, extended family living. It’s just seen like basically every country for the most part. It’s like the grandfather with the wealth buys the compound and the family moves in. It’s a very common setup.

Lindsey: Over time, what’s the most favorable route for growth? Is it figuring out how to get people buying existing structures? So you’ve got your role is as a a platform for DIY group livers versus corporate developments like Culdesac or developing neighborhoods that were built in mind that you’re going to have some people living in proximity and have shared spaces, et cetera. To what extent do you see a role for a more top-down corporate, “Hey, let’s provide this great product for you. And if we build it, they will come,” versus people figuring out for themselves and you helping them?

Levin: On a land level, I think every single-family home on a reasonably large lot near a city is the opportunity, but I think what you’ll see is probably a similar story to Airbnb. So when Airbnb started, it was not what it is today. It was a bunch of people basically sharing their homes and sleeping on couches. It was for a specific kind of person, and it was the DIY mentality people, they were the initial Airbnb customers. Now, Airbnb is essentially a bunch of corporate actors that are providing Airbnb housing to people and it feels more like a hotel in some ways. You just go on and buy it like you buy a hotel room. I think you’ll see probably a similar story here, which is with any new social movement, with any new products, you always have the true dyed-in-the-wool believers who get it going and become the people I look at as the aspiration for it, and then over time, the thing to scale it needs the help of a lot of parties in the wider ecosystem who see an economic opportunity to scale it.

So, my hope with Live Near Friends is we’re going to start with this more DIY style development stuff, but eventually I think it’s going to be real estate developers who today are building subdivisions, tomorrow will build any sort of Live Near Friends style housing and people will buy it and rent it just like they do normal housing today.

Lindsey: For driving things forward, it seems like this is something that when people hear that a real human being has done this, it flips a switch in them. It’s going, “Wow, that’s a fantasy.” Everybody’s had this fantasy since college. After you break up with all your friends and you scatter all over the country, you have this fantasy. Wouldn’t it be nice to stay connected? And here’s somebody who’s living the fantasy. This existence proof is a huge part of spreading this in terms of an actual social or cultural movement, right? You’ve got businesses, but you’re also kind of a lifestyle evangelist, aren’t you? You’re trying to spread the good word about this new way of living.

I saw something very interesting that you did an update on Supernuclear about selling Radish, and you were talking about how you’ve been doing these regular tours. The tours attract 90 percent tourists and 10 percent prospective buyers, so there’s a lot of people who just want to gawk, “Wow, this is cool.” This is a cool thing people are doing and they want to know more about it, so that seems like... And you’re kind of kicking yourself, “Man, we should have been doing tours from the get-go to raise consciousness about this.” So, how do you spread the word? How do you get this seed planted in more people’s minds?

Levin: I think the existence proof is absolutely crucial. Something I didn’t mention is we didn’t invent this idea out of whole cloth. People have been living this way for a long time. We were actually very inspired by another community that came before us called the Embassy. The thing that put it in our minds was going to dinner at the Embassy and being like, “Wow, this is what dinner at home could feel like. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have dinner at home like this?” So, I think that’s right.

My hope at Radish is that for every... There’s one Radish, but hopefully there’s a thousand Radishes that get created because of the existence proof and because the people that visit and see it’s possible. What we see actually at Radish is often people, for the tours, will bring the less believing party with them. So they’ll bring their parent, they’ll bring their spouse and they’ll be like, “See, look, I want you to look at this.” It’s like somebody’s trying to show it off to someone else. Live Near Friends as a company is never going to have 100 percent market share in this space. My hope is that we build a successful company, but really we’re both a media company that gets the lifestyle out there, but also for every one of these that we get to do, it inspires 10 more that we don’t get to do, and for me, that would be a huge success.

Lindsey: Tell me a little bit about the sociology of the people who are doing this already. Geographically, are they concentrated in particular parts of the country, socioeconomic status, red versus blue? Is it all over the map?

Levin: It is refreshingly all over the map. I was looking at our map of our users from all over the place, and there’s not even a red versus blue thing. I thought that this would be a blue thing. It is not a blue thing. If you think about it for a second, it’s like there are red versions of this all over the place. It’s like the way Mormons live, the way people form church groups. I talked to people about communities where everyone lives within five minutes of their church and then they have a similar community. Something I like about this, this is refreshingly non-political. This is another reason I try to steer away from the whole commune imagery is that is left-leaning imagery. I do not want that a part of this. I want this to feel sort of intentionally apolitical.

Lindsey: What’s bringing people together? Do you have people who really do have some kind of ideological or cultural intentionality, some particular way of life they want to pursue with others? Do you have any of that, like the classic intentional community kind of people? Is it just normies who don’t want to be atomized? How much of it is extended family?

Levin: It’s surprisingly normie. It really is. I think the one characteristic that exists among everyone who wants to do this is they’re natural contributors. When they think about why they want to live this way, the thing they have in their head is like, “I want to be a positive force on the people around me.” When we look at people who are going to move into Radish and we’re trying to figure out if we want to live with them, I have a test, which is we have dinner with them. At the end of the night, it’s like are they doing the dishes or not? Because that’s usually a leading indicator if they’re going to be a good community member. I think it’s people with a contribution mindset. One of the lessons this has taught me is I think we don’t actually ask enough of people in our civil society. We’ve all become such consumers of everything that we’re not asked to put anything into it aside from our money, usually, and I think the way people really feel a part of something is…

Lindsey: We’re all abashed to ask. If somebody does asks you, you say, “Sure.”

Levin: Yes. I grew up in a family where my family was always very scared to burden anyone with anything. Let’s not burden anyone, let’s make sure. I think what I’ve actually come to learn is, you are doing people a favor by burdening them. Burdening someone is the way you connect with them. That’s the way that they get to feel a part of you and a part of the thing you’re a part of.

So, my wife and I call this Tom Sawyering. When we have a garden project or whatever, instead of going to do it ourselves, we call out to the people who we think want to be closer to us and closer to our community and we’re like, “How about you come and build a garden with us?” It sounds like they’re doing us a favor, but we are doing them a favor because then they feel part of our community and our place.

I think at a society level, I think we don’t do enough of this. So this is a micro lesson from our living situation, but the the idea of service to anything has really been lost. I think if you look at all these different forms of civil society that have gone away, there’s a pretty big service element to it. There’s a pretty big contribution element to it. The place where you really see this performing well is Burning Man, where the reason Burning Man works, it’s really because people are asked to contribute to it. That is the main ask of the attendees. It’s like, you build it, you create this thing, and then you get to participate in it, and that’s why people feel so moved by it and so part of it.

Lindsey: I was going to ask about this on the sociology question, how often is it that people are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make raising kids work and thinking that being in proximity with family and friends would make that a lot easier. But you’ve told me, interestingly, you’ve attracted both sides. You have a specific attraction for people who are starting a family. It’s obvious, you’re sharing the costs, you’re getting that village to raise the kid. But then also the child-free folks have a need because they’ve got a social part of their calendar they need to fill. So you’re attracting people from both sides of that.

Levin: Yep, that’s right. Yeah. I think it’s an underlying shared thing, which is that we need a support structure. That’s who this appeals to. We need a support structure. It’s not necessarily that we need a best friend. The people I live with are not necessarily my best friends. They’re the people that are going to come and drive me to the hospital if I need a ride to the hospital. That’s what a local support structure does.

Lindsey: Once you’re living next to people you like, the spontaneous opportunities to do stuff together and help each other out are … they’re just going to hit you in the face, right? In particular, I’m curious about the nexus between people living with family and friends and the trend towards homeschooling pods and micro-schools.

Levin: Yeah. It’s not something I know a whole lot about. I think we’re actually going to experiment a little more with this in our next chapter. I’m excited by it. And this is really just a placemaking question on the whole. I think the people who are trying to build new cities and new towns now are asking the same thing, which is like, “Well, what is the basis of a new proximal human community? What’s the centerpiece of it? Why should I move there instead of somewhere else?” I think putting a school at the center of these things actually strikes me as a very strong way of getting something started from nothing. I would actually love to see communities like this with a micro-school in the center. We haven’t done work on this, but it’s a very exciting opportunity to me.

Brink, I think it gets to something that, leveling up a bit, the things you talk about in your book, about our stagnation. People talk about our inability to build housing, but I think about our inability to actually build new cities, new towns, new villages – and not only our inability to do it, but our lack of desire to even try. I’ve seen California Forever. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with California Forever.

Lindsey: Yes.

Levin: When people try to do it, people actually get upset. They’re incensed that somebody’s trying to create a new place. It just strikes me that we are just capping our ability to evolve if we can’t try a new city in the year 2026.

Lindsey: Yeah. I was going to ask you about the connection between the co-living, just to put it in one word, movement and this recent sort of experimentation with pop-up villages. You got this yearning for community. You can satisfy it on the cheap with the pop-up village. You can get together for a month, right? So there’s the huge ask of living permanently with other people, that’s big. This is smaller, so it’s less demanding. It gives you less, but there seems to be a nexus between some of these pop-up villages and they’re trying to start to create new communities. I know there are the Edge City pop-up villages, and they’ve got an ongoing connection with this. Esmeralda is a new town, smaller scale and lower profile than California Forever, that seems to have run into less of a buzzsaw of hatred and opposition. Have you run into that circle of folks and do you see a way in which your vibes intersect?

Levin: Absolutely. Actually, one of the founders of Edge City is here with me. I think both of those are super cool experiments. So, just to describe them. So, Edge City is a pop-up village that various times in a year will say, “We’re all going to go live in this town together.” People fly in from all over and spend a month together in a town. So it started…

Lindsey: I went to one in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Levin: Oh, great. You went to one. How was your experience?

Lindsey: It was great. It was awesome. I came away really hopeful. I was around a bunch of smart people who were really interested in ideas and interested in connection. It was in the weeks right before the 2024 election, and that didn’t come up one time with anybody the whole time, which for a DC policy wonk was a great blessing. So yeah, I found a lot of energy, a lot of hopefulness, and so it fired me up.

Levin: Yeah, it’s a very cool experience. So they’re basically trying to solve an agglomeration problem. It’s like, how do you create an attractor which gets a lot of people to a place? Which, if you’re going to create a new place in the world, a new town, new city, that is your core challenge. Basically, how do you turn the middle of nowhere into the middle of somewhere? You bring up schools as a way that this has been done in the past, like college towns have been ways of forming towns. But if we’re going to create new places, we’re going to need new ideas of what can be an attractor. I think the Edge City folks have done a wonderful job basically figuring out how to do this, using that brand of Edge City as being a flag that you plant on the ground and say, “We’re all coming here” and they’ve gotten that to work.

Lindsey: I talked about your need to play the role of evangelist because you’re carving out a whole new sector of housing. But to what extent are your customers evangelizing on your behalf? I would think once people are doing this thing and it’s working for them, they’re going to want to show off. How much are these people... Is it just all just a thousand points of light, people doing their own things, or are they connecting with each other? Is there any kind of movement where people are trading tips with each other, or is there any kind of group consciousness about people who are living this new way of life and connecting with each other?

Levin: Yeah. You know the joke? It’s like how do you know someone does CrossFit? They’ll tell you. I think the same story applies here. People that end up living this way end up talking about it a lot because it becomes such a central part of how they live and they just want to proselytize because they just see everyone else not doing it and they’re like, “They need to know. They need to know how easy, useful life can be.” So yeah, I think you do get a thousand points of light thing. In terms of connecting people, I think that’s something that the blog I write with Gillian Morris tries to do. Supernuclear. So we try to play host to the people running these experiments in different ways all around the world and allow them to publish stories.

Lindsey: Yes, you publicize them.

Levin: Yeah. There’s an interesting sort of union of all the San Francisco co-living houses called the Haight St. Commons, where there’s some coordination across the houses. I think most of the proselytizing is not house-to-house. It’s really just the people that do it to all the people in their social world who don’t do it. That’s the relevant communication point.

Lindsey: Okay. My final question. Stephen Stills back in the ‘70s told us that if you can’t be with the ones you love, love with the ones you’re with. So I’m curious about the kind of penumbra of your movement or your new housing sector. If you’ve got people living with each other and living more intensively and clearly sharing their lives with each other, to what extent do you see that possibly encouraging a revitalization of just good old-fashioned American neighborhoods? They were much more cohesive, convivial places once upon a time than they are today. So, how much running room do you think is there just to restore community right now with the people who just happen to live next to you after seeing the example of people who are choosing to live next to folks?

Levin: Yeah. I think each of these will become a neighborhood institution on its own, right? Because these things tend to be hosting spaces by nature, it’s like you’re creating a hosting space because you’re hosting four households or six households. That just naturally becomes a neighborhood hosting space as well. You have more events. You have more people over. I’ve always been curious, where did all these neighborhood associations come from in the first place? How do they start? I’ve read the history of this. My suspicion is it probably started just as a couple of neighbors who knew each other and had some sort of feeling of joint purpose together and maybe they just planted a tree to start with. Who knows?

I’m hoping each of these is a proto-neighborhood association perhaps in its own. That’s one theory about how that could happen, but if you have a bunch of neighbors... People right now don’t know their neighbors. There’s crazy statistics out there of the number of people who have even met their neighbors. The idea that somehow that’s just going to magically change and people are just being encouraged to go out and meet their neighbors with no other prodding is just sort of a fantasy.

Lindsey: Right. But if there’s a compound that’s functioning basically as a de facto neighborhood association and a community center, then that can get people out of their shells.

Levin: Yeah. And it’s not the only way. I’m sure you have ideas for other ways of that happening, but I think it’s like one vector that if you have one of these in every neighborhood, a couple of them, it’s very plausible that they could actually form something interesting.

Lindsey: So that’s an exciting and alluring prospect that these little developments can be seeds of broader social revitalization. That’s a nice thought to end on. Phil Levin, wonderful to have you on the show. Great talking to you. Best of luck in all your endeavors.

Levin: Thanks, Brink. Great chatting.