You might have heard that an eviction in Massachusetts takes 4-6 months. While this is technically an accurate average across all eviction proceedings, it's skewed by most cases settling within the first month or two, usually through mediation or payment. If a case goes to trial to have a tenant removed, it always takes 6+ months.
A tenant with no valid defense who loses every motion, hearing, and appeal can still delay the eviction repeatedly, sometimes a dozen times or more. Each delay adds weeks or months and they can add up to years.
( Read more... )

Here's an update on the state of various major situations affecting my life.

The Estate of Mind intentional community coliving project ended late last year. I tried to find a way for some subset of the community members to stick together in the dorm and pine house, operating on a smaller scale after the loss of the manor. Unfortunately all the ideas we pursued didn't pan out and almost everyone moved on to the next part of their life in the months after the fire.

There are two tenants still living in the dorm, Lisa Pepin and Matthew Carr. I am 9-11 months into the processes of evicting them, with 75% confidence I'll have them out 2-8 months from now. For context, the average length of an eviction in MA is 4-6 months without an appeal or delaying tactics. There are also up to half a dozen 2-6 week delays available, and an appeal automatically adds an additional 2+ months, both regardless of merit. They have declined offers including $5-30k in cash, moving expenses, and/or vehicles, from myself and from interested buyers of the property. They are collectively about $17k behind on what they owe me, about $8k of which they are already under court order to repay. I am currently legally required to provide utilities including heat to a 15 bedroom building for the two of them, as well as to continue maintaining the whole building including vacant bedrooms and private bathrooms. I am far behind on those costs, and they far exceed my income. Matthew's eviction has gotten to a judgment and past the reconsideration delays, and now we're going into the appeal process. With Lisa, I got a default judgment when she didn't show up for trial after giving the court short notice of a doctor's appointment, then she got another judge to undo that decision, and then when we finally got to trial a second time the judge noted that I didn't put her bedroom number (the one effectively destroyed by the fire) on the eviction notice so he was dismissing the case and I had to start all over. That second attempt is currently at the early stage where she gets ~45 days to prepare for a mandatory mediation session.

My attempts to sell the property have been stymied a few different ways. First by the manor fire and nature of the property. I was able to resolve that somewhat effectively by subdividing the property so the value proposition of each piece is much more straightforward, and this attracted multiple offers in a very short span once the new listings went up. Second, the presence of non-paying tenants who refuse to leave. I'm working on that in housing court as described above. Third…

A man named Lee Jundanian has brought a civil suit against me to force me to sell him the property and prevent me from selling it to anyone else. He's also demanding what might be hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. We had a contract for him to buy the property, a sale that was due to close in August of 2024. He has refused to close ever since then, only responding with new attempts to renegotiate the contract. In the fall of 2024, his outstanding contract scared my agent away from accepting new offers or re-listing the property. Now his lawsuit means that no title insurance company will insure a sale, so no mortgage company will lend on it. While a pure cash buyer with a tolerance for legal risk could still buy part or all of the property, that is unlikely. I was a week from closing one sale and two months from closing another when he locked the property up, and those deals are now falling through. I am pursuing a few legal strategies that have some chance of unlocking the property in ~1 or ~9 months, but more likely I will need to endure 18+ months to the end of that trial before I can get a judge to terminate that contract. The faint bright spot at the end of that long tunnel is that I am counterclaiming against him for my own hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, which increase every month the trial goes on. I may have to doubly break the corporate veil to effectively collect on a judgement of that size, which would take additional years.

The second time I found that one of the tenants (Lisa) had moved into someone else's bedroom without permission or even telling anyone, and with the local police declining to "get involved in a civil matter", I physically removed her from the room. This allowed her to get a restraining order against me. This has made it difficult for me to manage the property; now I'm having to hire people to do simple things in the dormitory, and next week I'm going to have to spend $400 to hire a cop to escort me in so I can meet a health inspector. I'm pretty sure the part of the domestic violence law that led to the order is a violation of the MA constitution; there's no way I have less right to defend my property from trespass just because I live there. I'm appealing that order, but the courts are letting her delay that process by months as well. There's a chance the order will expire before the whole appeal process finishes, but I'll still see it through regardless.

If you're local and want me out of town, the fastest way to make that happen would be to help resolve one of the problems described above so that I can leave sooner. If you just want excuses to keep complaining, feel free to sit back and enjoy the show.

I lost my job in September of last year. I was spending too much time dealing with problems at home, and when the sale failed to close in August I wasn't able to keep my commitments to put more time into work. It took about two months to get approved for unemployment benefits, during which time I also couldn't get approved for other public benefits, so that was a really tough time. I have about 10 weeks of unemployment benefits left now, so those tough times are on the horizon again. The effort and stress for everything going on has made it infeasible for me to take on new full time work, so I've mostly been pursuing gigs that haven't panned out. Fortunately I'm finally making some headway on interviews for a "real job", and there's a decent chance I'll find work in the next couple of months. It's going to take a very rapid transition to turn money from a new job into an ability to stop spending all my time on the problems here at home; fortunately just a couple of paychecks will be enough to retain an attorney for the civil lawsuit, and less than that would hire one for the evictions.

I've also been working on re-launching my CoDwell project, which was one of my efforts to acquire property for a large coliving intentional community before I succeeded with the est8. There's a lot more details on that on the project website at http://CoDwell.org. The short version is that I want to buy an old boarding school near Portland OR and have 5-10 intentional community groups with different focuses (permaculture, maker, coparent/homeschool, etc) all share the property and use its amenities. I'm going to be spending the next 6-12 months finding people and money to try that project idea again.

As soon as I can disentangle myself even partially from the property in MA, I'll be headed west. Maybe a short or long road trip. Maybe aiming for Portland or SF initially or for a while. Lots of variables there. Get in touch if you want updates on more personal matters like health, family, relationships, work, etc. Especially if have novel ideas related to anything above. Otherwise, I hope to have more time in the coming year to visit and catch up with friends and acquaintances.

I attended Sleep No More for the first time recently and I was not disappointed. A lot of work went into the show, and it's worth seeing before it shuts down later this year if the cost isn't prohibitive for you. I avoided spoilers because that is how I prefer all of my entertainment. Now that I've been, I'm looking for spoilers for next time, and I'm glad I didn't search before because most sources (including Wikipedia) put deep spoilers right next to high level information about the show. So, for future versions of my past self, I'm writing this short guide with only the information I would have wanted to have in advance to improve my experience without spoiling much of the show.

There are more bathrooms on the 5th floor, you don't have to return to the bar.
You are allowed to turn doorknobs and open unlocked doors.
Sitting on the same elevated surface as performers doing intense action sequences might curtail their performance.
Standing at the front of the crowd makes it much more likely you'll be chosen for a personal interaction.
The performance runs in a one hour loop with minor variations.
Everything happens three times, except the finale which the staff will guide you toward so you don't have to worry about missing it.

And I'll close with a high level story spoiler which you should stop reading if you want to avoid, but I'd like to have known going in… The story is mostly and broadly based on a combination of Macbeth and the Paisley Witch Trials. Reading a little about each will give some insight to what the characters of Sleep No More are doing, which otherwise would require many viewings to resolve into a coherent understanding.

Estate of Mind

The Estate of Mind project is mostly wrapped up. We were struggling for a while, for lack of residents and money and engagement, but the structural fire plus the ensuing water damage to the manor was an irrecoverable final blow to our chances, and problematic residents provided the icing on that particularly painful cake. I tried to organize a plan to keep some people living here in the dorm and pine house under a new owner, but that didn't work out. As I write this, half of the residents have left, most of the ones remaining are in the process of moving out, and I'm between the beginning and middle of the ridiculously slow processes of evicting the last few.

I found some buyers who wanted to restore the manor, but they were unable to come up with investors or financing to get it done. I have accepted an offer from a buyer who intends to demolish the manor and build ~16 new houses on the property, each using historic elements preserved from the manor. The fireplaces, bar, stained glass windows, pipe organ, etc should all have a future here. This isn't the outcome I had hoped for, but it's better than I feared. If this offer goes through, I'll get enough money in August to satisfy my outstanding obligations and return donations that were made toward us repairing the house, and then more in 1-6 years as the new houses are sold. I intend to offer some shares of the proceeds to the people who tried to make this project a success, although the split nature of the payments means I'll have to get more creative with those offers than I've posted about previously. If this offer falls through, I'll be pursuing subdividing the property into three pieces (manor, dorm+house, forest), each of which will have a more obvious story and be a more straightforward business proposition to new owners, and I am confident I can sell at least two of those pieces in short order later this year.

Work

I am working for a startup that does online computer science classes for high schoolers, and some other markets adjacent to that. The day to day tasks are unfulfilling, but I love the mission and want to see this company succeed. If we are successful and the company grows, I hope I can dive deeper into my niche for more fulfilling projects as we hire more engineers.

They want me in an office in San Francisco or New York City (or maybe Los Angeles) most of the time. I followed through with my plans to drive to SF in March, but failed to relocate in April due to the fire and other problems back in MA. I'm overdue to meet their requirements, and this is motivating some of my current life choices. There's a chance their tolerance for the delays runs out before I can settle down, but hopefully not.

Summer and Autumn

It will take 2-6 more months to sell the property in MA, and probably that long to get at least mostly through the evictions. Once my own personal belongings are all off the property and all the bulky things have been disposed of, I can spend more time away from here. In the mean time, I'm spending most weekends in MA and most weekdays at the office in NYC, which is a bearable once-per-week commute from MA. I've been subletting or staying at a hostel, and may continue to do that, although I'm looking at some options measured in months instead of days. I'm also considering vehicle dwelling, although that seems less common in NYC than in other cities I've lived in. I'll stick to less permanent arrangements until things in MA are wrapped up.

I recently did a whirlwind tour of a few different events to see old friends, make new ones, do some social and project networking, lay some groundwork for moving and other future plans, etc. I have a few more similar plans later this summer. I intend to be in San Francisco before/after the weekends of July 19 and August 31 when I'll be at camping festivals a few hours north of the city. If you're going to either event, I'd love to hear from you and make plans to share logistics or a camp. If you'll be in the city, let's connect.

2025

In order of descending probability…

70% chance I'll be in San Francisco full time. As of right now SF has, by far, the largest and densest cluster of people I want to be around and who want to be around me. Work has an office here and the job market is strong if I need new work. All of my hobbies and communities have strong hubs here. I have multiple prospective romantic and intimate partners in that region, and it's the best environment I've found for seeking new such connections. I am familiar with the legal and real estate situations, as they bear on my future plans. This probability is going down as other probabilities go up, but so far it remains the clear leader.

20% chance I'll be in New York full time. I've always wanted to try living in NYC, but the timing was never right before. This chance was near zero until recently, but between new friends, discovering events and communities, exploring the city while working, and the potential to work in the city, it has rapidly increased. I expect it will continue to go up over the next couple of months, although it would probably take some outlying surprises (e.g. a new romantic partner or job) to fully tip the scales.

3% chance I'll be west of Portland Oregon. The boarding high school I pursued three years ago may be available again. Interest from friends and strangers in some version of that project has increased since I last pursued it, and I will be better equipped and experienced to make it happen this time around. I still dream of that property and the projects and events that could happen there.

2% chance I'll be in Puna, Hawaii. The property I pursued there with a dozen cabins and adjacent fresh laval flow may also be available again. As with the Oregon property, there's more interest and ability to make that project happen now than there was three years ago. I discovered last time that getting people to visit and move to Hawaii is significantly easier than almost any other remote location.

The remaining 5% is an assortment of unrelated possibilities that would take some exceptional changes in circumstances to bring about. Friends keep asking me to buy property together in Central America. I could end up with a partner who wants me to move overseas with them. I could be stuck in MA indefinitely if something goes very wrong with the property here. I could retire and backpack around Europe for a few months or years. I could find a dream property somewhere else in the US and manage to put together money and people to turn it into a project that I'm not already planning. I could …

Regardless of *where* I end up, there's also the question of what I'll be doing with my time and how I'll be living. Some of the locations and specific properties come with answers to that question, but it's mostly open. I might go back to vehicle dwelling, live a mobile life again for a while, explore and have fun. I might get an apartment or house, for just me or with a partner. I might join an existing coliving community; I might know a dozen who would accept me for at least a trial period, and there are hundreds more in my target locations that I could apply to. I might start a new coliving project again, something small or large. Or I might do something entirely unexpected. These possibilities will remain in flux probably until I commit to a location, and possibly for a while after. A lot of them depend on specific circumstances coming about, such as meeting the right people, or the right property being available, etc. Some of them could last for months, while others would hopefully last for years. I look forward to whichever way this works out.

Beyond

Given my history of moving mostly every 3-5 years as an adult, there's a decent chance that whatever I do in 2025 is what I'll be doing for a few years afterward as well. Alternately, if 2025 is something temporary, 2026 would even more likely be something that lasts at least a few years, and probably from a very similar list of possibilities. Of course, all of that can change as life throws surprises my way, so watch this space for wildly different plans if that comes to pass.

In the second half of March 2024, I led a tour of 3-6 people across the country from Massachusetts to California, visiting intentional communities along the way. Through some advance and some last minute planning, we ended up with 27 stops along the way, spanning a pretty wide gamut. We spent between 30 minutes and 36 hours at each community, with a typical stop being 2-4 hours for a tour and conversation, sometimes a meal, sometimes some other activities. My daily(ish) updates along the way were mostly just a travelog, and you should be able to find them in the same place as this post. This post is the first of a few followups, and will focus on the breadth and variety we saw along the way. A lot of the details here deserve and will get their own further investigation, so the goal here is just to outline the shape of the conceptual space we were exposed to. Due to some vehicle shenanigans I missed a few stops, so 90% of this is first-hand observations and a bit is second-hand from my travel companions.

The communities we visited ranged in population from one person in the agricultural off-season of an intermittent community to over a hundred people in full-time urban coliving. Most of our stops were more cohousing than coliving; the ones with individual single family homes had as few as 8 to as many as 40 buildings, with one community planning construction of 140 units in a mix of detached homes, townhomes, and micro apartments. The largest community where everyone shared all the non-bedroom space had about 60 members in 8 houses in a larger city neighborhood.

In terms of age and stage, a couple of communities we visited were just plans and empty land, most had been in existence for 1-2 decades, and a few were approaching a century. There are major hurdles in the early years of building a new community, so seeing so many of them well beyond that was refreshing, although I understand survivor bias. My personal experience is mostly with communities in their 0th-3rd years with those challenges still ahead. One community lost their former land to lava and was starting over in a new state, with grand plans and solid prospects to skip some of the growing pains their second time around. Many had only vestiges of their original founding principles and plans, having morphed into something substantially different in the intervening decades. I would love to see a timeline comparing many different communities over their histories, but that would require far more research than I could do on this trip.

I was surprised at the number of communities using some form of sociocracy for internal decision making and governance. The depth and varieties there could be a book or two, so I won’t try to cover it all here. We found a couple of benevolent dictatorships, a few complex governance structures with multiple layers, and perhaps a dozen cohousing communities organized as traditional Home Owner or Condominium Associations with their typical membership and management structures. Community meetings, official or otherwise, ranged in frequency from never (sadly common) to daily, with participation from low (again, sadly common) to near total in more than a few cases. Most communities seemed to have a significant amount of unstated do-ocracy, with a lot of projects taking place simply because some residents were motivated to pursue them.

Community-run businesses were delightfully frequent, appearing about 1/3 of the time. We saw a community with a single business worked by every member that paid the majority of the expenses of the community. Some had large agricultural operations worked by most members, almost all who weren’t occupied tending to the other members. A couple of communities ran multiple local businesses in cities, staffed entirely by their resident members, paying them wages which they might then turn around and spend some of as their membership/rent costs. This was my first exposure to this concept in person rather than just reading about it, and I intend to borrow a lot of ideas for my future projects.

Recruiting and filtering ran a wider range of situations than I expected. I had no idea so many cohousing communities have no power to select new members / owners. When someone sells, they pick a buyer themselves, and the rest of the community is stuck with that new person. This was the case at about 1/3 of our stops and blew me away. A lot of those groups were suffering from dilution of their community goals, with increasingly many residents not participating in community organization or activities. Other communities had various processes, including years-long trial periods, tiered membership, right of first refusal on sales, and some more esoteric solutions. Each of those could be the subject of an article on its own. One stand-out community operates a large farm and welcomes new members by a vote, taking them through two or three layers of trial that can take years. At the end of that process, if someone is voted to the final level, they become a full stake shareholder in ownership of the property with no financial investment; the community organization owns the land and doesn’t take cash from members for shares.

Overall this trip greatly broadened my perspective on the possibilities and actualities of intentional communities. I feel far better equipped to discuss these topics now, and to make plans for my own future projects. I look forward to visiting some of these communities again, organizing more tours of more communities, and eventually doing some international version of this trip as well.

We started the day with a visit to Lost Valley Educational Center (http://lostvalley.org/) in Dexter Oregon which is a permaculture school combined with an intentional community. We saw their class spaces, cabins, and communal kitchen and activity spaces. I had to bow out of the tour early, so I missed their larger outdoor spaces and a chance to meet more of the residents. I expect to be filled in by the others in followup discussions.

After this we made the long drive to Chico, skipping a planned stop along the way. This allowed me to get on a bus to Sacramento to continue the bus repair debacle, while everyone else continued the tour. They spent the night at Valley Oaks Village (http://www.chicocohousing.org/), then visited for a full day, then spent another night. I am eager to hear about this part of the trip. As usual, tales of the bus rescue will be in their own post later.

In my absence, the tour group visited Ananda Village (http://www.anandavillage.org/) in Nevada City California and Southside Park Cohousing (https://www.facebook.com/SouthsideParkCohousing) in Sacramento California. I caught back up with them after a long drive during a visit to Muir Commons (http://www.muircommons.org/) in Davis California. Muir Commons stands out for being part of a much larger development project which included apartments, homes, a school, greenways, etc. The city and developers said “we want something physically and conceptually in between the apartments and the single family homes”, and someone said “cohousing”, so it happened. I didn’t get much time to speak to them, arriving late and being tired, but they were nice folks with a nice common space that we narrowly missed community brunch at the next morning.

Having reunited the bus and the tour group, we spent the night in the bus. The final days of the tour will be in my next post, then the longer followup writings will begin.

We started the morning with breakfast and a longer tour at Trillium Hollow Cohousing Community (https://trilliumhollow.weebly.com/). I had to sit out most of the tour for work reasons, but everyone else got to see some of the individual units and meet more of the residents.

Next up we took a detour off our planned route to look at the Laurelwood Academy property in Gaston Oregon. This was one of my dream properties in my search to purchase somewhere to build a community three years ago. The buyers then got it for a steal, and don’t appear to have done much of anything with it. I met one of the previous residents and current neighbors and intend to follow up with him and try to track down the buyers to see if they would be interested in selling it.

We proceeded to Labishire Homestead Commons (http://labishire.weebly.com/) in Salem Oregon. Our host there runs a self sufficient homestead frequently populated with wwoofers and other travelers, with an eye toward finding more permanent residents to build a persistent community. We got to see his many garden and animal efforts, and shared a meal. We cooked mostly groceries we brought, and he contributed pasta and sauce and vegetables, fresh and canned from his gardens. He invited us to spend the night, so we did.

The next morning we made our way to CoHo Ecovillage (http://www.cohoecovillage.org/) in Corvallis Oregon for a very quick tour. Unfortunately due to work and school commitments only one of us got to take it, so I hope to learn more from them later.

Our next stop was at Alpha Farm Cooperative (https://www.ic.org/directory/alpha-farm/) in Deadwood Oregon. Their community of currently 10 people grows in the summer and shrinks in the winter as the farm needs dictate. We had a tour of their various private and common buildings and most of their food production spaces. The most surprising aspect here is that the property is owned by the corporation of which the longest term residents are members, controlled by them after the passing of the community’s founder. They vote in new members based on participation and contribution to the community, without a financial buy-in component, which stands out as relatively unique among non-secretive communities. Another interesting feature was their community business which is as a USPS rural route contractor; about half the residents are approved as drivers and take turns to deliver mail across the local towns each day. We got to meet about half of their current residents and had a long conversation with a few. We also saw some samples of their 50 years of recorded-on-paper meeting minutes, providing insight into the history of the community.

We ended up at a hotel in Eugene Oregon for the night, with a stop nearby planned for the morning.

We woke up at Water Birch Co-Op (https://www.ic.org/directory/marion-street/) and had breakfast, a tour, and some conversation about their history. Their home has a single owner, with plans to reorganize with co-ownership once all the legal entities are in place. We got to see what could be multiple discrete units with kitchens in the house, and some construction in progress.

In the middle of the day we visited Meow Wolf Denver, Convergence Station (https://meowwolf.com/visit/denver), which is a huge interactive art installation project.

Later we visited Nyland Cohousing (https://www.nylandcohousing.org/) who kindly rescheduled their community potluck dinner to coincide with our visit. We got to walk around and see their houses, garden spaces, communal areas, and their common house. Dinner with over a dozen residents involved a lot of great conversation about them and about us and intentional communities in general.

We spent the night at a hotel between Nyland and our next stop.

Our planned stop in Fort Collins CO ended up not working out, so we pivoted to visiting Polestar Village (https://www.polestarvillage.com/). Their community was displaced from Hawaii by lava damage to their common house and gardens there a few years ago. They have purchased land and prepared a design for a cohousing community, with more than a few of their prior residents and newcomers already on board. I look forward to seeing what they accomplish in the coming years.

After that we visited Nyland again for a longer conversation with a few residents. We got more insight into the long term communication and decision making processes there, and some community approaches to conflict and concern resolution.

Through both of these days, we discovered the bus would be out of commission indefinitely thanks to UPS losing a relatively unique replacement part. To keep the trip alive, we decided to adjust our travel plans. We’re skipping a few scheduled stops in Montana and Washington in order to cut down on long drives with no stops. As I write this, we have just flown from Denver to Portland and checked into a hotel east of the city. We will pick the trip itinerary back up in Carson Washington on Sunday or Monday, with a dozen stops still ahead of us before we reach San Francisco in about a week.

Today we drove into Denver and dropped the bus off at a mechanic who specializes in this rare make, with parts en route. We switched to a rental car again for the day.

Our first stop was at Highline Crossing Cohousing Community (http://www.highlinecrossing.org/). They are a townhome HOA with shared pedestrian ways, gardens, outdoor social spaces, and a common house with kitchen and dining and recreational amenities. We had dinner with a handful of their residents and met a couple more, with conversation about their history and organization. My favorite part of their property is the direct connection to a 70 mile long canal trail for biking and walking.

Our second stop was at Water Birch Co-Op (https://www.ic.org/directory/marion-street/). We met a few residents then got settled in to spend the night. Our further interactions with them will come in the morning, with breakfast, a tour of the house, and a conversation with more of the residents.

Tomorrow we see Meow Wolf and one intentional community, and hopefully get the bus back!

Ongoing bus saga will, once again, be covered in another post or series. I’m combining two posts to catch up and because I am lacking insight into a couple of stops and legs of the trip.

The trip participants traveling by car spent the night outside Chicago then started Day Five with coffee and a tour at Jesus People Chicago (https://jesuspeoplechicago.org/) which is a nonprofit that houses the homeless and runs a coffee shop in addition to their many other projects. I hope to get more info about this visit from the trip participants later.

They proceeded to a second stop at Arizmendi Ecovillage (http://arizmendiecovillage.com) where they had a tour, conversation, and spent the night. Again, I hope to learn more later from the folks who were there.

On Day Six we reunited in St Louis, returning the rental car and all traveling by bus again. After breakfast we shared a trip to City Museum (https://citymuseum.org/), one of my bucket list stops on this trip. This place combines some actual museum exhibits (plants, animals, history, etc) with the most impressive collection of climbable and otherwise physically interactive exhibits I have ever seen in one place. A dozen different different 5% slices of the building would fit right in at Burning Man. At least a thousand feet of slides and a mile of crawl/climb/shimmy tunnels of stone and steel and wood with a dozen different styles. More branches and choices and chances to get lost than any maze I’ve explored, let alone so densely packed in 3D. Oh, and no maps (until you find the one at the top of the space). I strongly recommend a visit for anyone with children, and any adventurous adults as well.

I am writing this as we drive west from St Louis from the afternoon into the evening of Day Six. I failed to find a community to host us for a visit between here and Denver, so we have most of a day of driving and sight seeing and sleep ahead of us before our whirlwind tour of central Colorado communities starts tomorrow afternoon.

Today the trip participants and bus parted ways for at least two days. The bus is still running fine, but needs repair on a wheel hub and I’ll have them address a few less critical concerns at the same time. Further details of the comedy of errors surrounding that situation will come in longer posts outside this series once that situation is resolved.

We rented a car near Pittsburgh PA and drove to our next stop, Maker House (https://www.mkr.house/). This single house was built specifically to accommodate maker endeavors and a small coliving community. On our tour we saw their common spaces including a large office, living and dining area, gym and rec rooms, and a large garage workshop housing what would be an impressive small makerspace in its own right. Their community moved a couple of times before this house was built, and they focus on long term residence with space for hosting occasional events and pursuing frequent maker projects. Unique among our stops so far, they accept new residents based on unanimous consent of the current residents.

I stayed in Pittsburgh to oversee further efforts on the bus, while the other folks took the rental car ahead to Chicago. They are a few hours behind schedule and will have to skip one of the planned stops there, but I anticipate reports of success otherwise from them tomorrow. If the bus repairs go quickly I hope to catch up with them at planned stops in St Louis or Kansas City on Wednesday. Otherwise I’ll be driving a long straight leg to Colorado to meet them between Thursday and Saturday.

This morning the flat tire was defeated. After a very slow drive through Valley Forge for the second of three times, the helpful folks at Norristown Tire Center made short work of the problem, mounting the spare tire on the rim quickly. The other trip participants stayed at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills (http://www.camphillkimberton.org/) for breakfast and further conversation with our host there. I picked them up on my way past and we proceeded further west. Our first stop of the day canceled due to a COVID outbreak in their community, fortunately giving us enough time to resolve the tire problem without falling behind schedule.

We moved on toward Hundredfold Farm Cohousing Community (http://www.hundredfoldfarm.org/) for our second stop of the day. Unfortunately, along the way, disaster struck again. One of the wheel hubs failed, flattening the bearings and winding up red hot before I could pull over to diagnose it. Another casualty of the missed maintenance cycle due to the house fire eating all the time I had planned to spend on trip prep in the last two weeks. I sent the other participants ahead in a cab while I started working the problem. They made it there about an hour late and spent the evening on tour and conversation and a meal.

I called a mobile mechanic to come while I hitchhiked to the nearest open hardware store to buy some chain and other hardware. The mechanic opened up the hub, extracted the now-flat bearings, and unmounted the wheel. When I got back in a cab we coordinated to jack the hub up so I could chain it up in a driveable position. Then I got underway to Hundredfold Farm. I met half the community there, had a bit of dinner, shared a recap of my adventure and heard about what they had been doing with the tour group. Then we parted ways, accidentally leaving them more bread from other communities than we intended, and taking more snacks from them for the road.

I called a few truck stops with 24 hour service along the way to Pittsburgh and one said they could help us. 90 minutes later we made it there, just to find out they wouldn’t do any of the work we needed. As I write this, we are going to sleep in the bus. We are two hours behind schedule now, since we were supposed to sleep in Pittsburgh tonight. Again “fortunately”, my friend who was going to host us had to cancel for family reasons. Tomorrow morning, very early, I’ll start the remaining two hours of drive to Pittsburgh, then search for a mechanic that can do at least some of the needed work. I may stay with the bus while the others take a cab to our Pittsburg community stop, or I may go with them. The mechanic will have about 4 hours until our scheduled departure, or longer if we use one of the alternate plans we’ve been brainstorming. More on that tomorrow. Good night.

This morning we woke up in the guest rooms at Ganas (http://www.ganas.org/). Two of us participated in their most-mornings planning meeting while the other two had coffee, did laundry, got some work done, etc. The meeting involved a lot of status updates from various members and groups, and some discussions toward decision making. We departed around 10AM and crossed out of New York for the last time on this trip.

Our first stop today was at Bryn Gweled Homesteads (http://www.bryngweled.org/), a community of dozens of homes on separate parcels, with the land owned by the community and leased to residents who own the houses. We saw their community center and walked around seeing many of their houses, in a variety of architectural styles. Some of the houses have small amounts of livestock and some other aspects of living in connection to nature, which is a common theme across the community that is embodied differently by each of the residents. We talked a lot about their history and governance model and trials in dealing with the local government.

Our second stop was at Altair EcoVillage (http://www.altairecovillage.org/) which hasn't been built yet. We met the founders, saw their model of the community, and walked around on their land for a tour in our imaginations. "Over here imagine there's a two story townhouse" etc. They are building a 55+ community with a focus on sustainable living in modern construction housing. We talked mostly about their planning process, buying and re-zoning the land, etc.

Our third and final stop of the day was at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills (http://www.camphillkimberton.org/), a huge community that is part of the larger Camphill Village meta community. They have many communally owned buildings with many elder and mentally challenged residents, couples that manage the households, and younger "co-worker" residents who assist with all aspects of the community. They operate a small dairy farm and have a variety of workshops including a bakery, weavery, pottery, fiber arts, and others. We split up to each have dinner with a different household, which seemed to produce a bunch of different experiences that we'll be sharing with each other in the coming day(s). My group asked me a lot of questions about myself and my trip, and I learned about their history as a househole and with the larger community.

Unfortunately on arrival at our final stop one of the bus tires was punctured. Due to the location and timing we are currently semi-stranded and waiting for either roadside assistance to become available in the morning or for me to hazard a 15 mile drive with a flat tire (fortunately on a dually axle) to a shop also in the morning. I have a spare tire but not a spare wheel (which the bus has 3 different types of anyway), which will hopefully increase our odds of getting help. We're about to go to sleep in the bus, and that decision will come in the morning after breakfast with one of the residents here who was shepherding our visit. Wish us luck!

PS: "Fortunately", our first planned stop tomorrow canceled due to a COVID outbreak in their house, so we have some wiggle room on timing that will hopefully accommodate one or more tire repair efforts in the morning.

Thanks to the recent house fire at Estate of Mind, I couldn’t spend the week before the trip on preparations as I had originally planned. Due mostly to that, last night and this morning were a hectic rush of just the most high priority steps before we could hit the road. The bus seats got vacuumed and bleach wiped instead of gone over with the upholstery cleaner. We brought coolers instead of a chest freezer. I had to fuel up at a local station rather than on the road, spending an extra $30. I didn’t get to make a briefing for the trip participants describing what to expect or who we were meeting at each stop. I also failed to coordinate with the first few people joining the trip, to confirm who was arriving when, so it was a mild surprise that two folks arrived on Thursday night (as they had said they would, days and weeks earlier).

Despite all of that, we still departed just one hour behind schedule, an hour of delay I had already baked into the plan. With two great copilots the drive from Estate of Mind in Whitinsville MA to the Fellowship Community in Chestnut Ridge NY went pretty smoothly and relatively quickly. The bus is most efficient around 50-60MPH but we mostly kept up with traffic doing 70-75 for this leg of the trip in order to catch up on lost time.

We were greeted by a few members of the Fellowship Community and had a short tour before sitting down for lunch. They told us a bit about their community and its history. I won’t know which parts are most unique until the end of the tour, but what stood out to me was their focus on intergenerational living, employing younger members of the community to provide necessary services to everyone and the older members in need of care, and a refreshingly forthright attitude and acknowledgement of death. The lunch was great, the same being served to dozens of other residents and their families and other visitors in their dining hall. The dining hall, along with many other core amenities, are located in a central building which also houses their most mobility-impaired members. Other members live in houses and lodges spread across part of their 80 acres. In addition to the living facilities and amenities, they also have separate communal studios for pottery, weaving, baking, etc. The folks in the bakery sent us away with a heavy bag of fresh baked breads, savory and sweet. We haven’t dug into them yet, but look forward to doing so tomorrow. Our tour ended with a drive around the farm occupying the rest of their acreage, with cows and sheep and a small dairy operation.

Our second stop was planned at the Lakeland Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Wayne NJ which is a church with residents and an artist-in-residence program. Unfortunately there as a miscommunication regarding our arrival time and the person that was to meet us, so we did not manage to catch them in person. We saw the facility and walked around outside, including their cozy outdoor spaces and an impressive walled sunken garden area that I suspect will be beautiful in the spring.

Missing out on the second stop allowed us to take a stop for groceries and other supplies. We picked up some food for the next few days and I got a chest freezer to put in the bus. With us driving multiple legs every day it should be able to keep cold through the stops and obviate our need to buy ice for coolers. I also got some tape to reattach a few fiberglass panels that detached from the bus when we encountered too steep of a grade on a driveway earlier in the day.

Our final stop of the day was at Ganas in Staten Island NY. They welcomed us to their regular communal dinner which was an amazing spread with a dozen options including a salad bar, chicken, pasta, vegetables, bread, etc. We chatted over dinner then segued into their regularly scheduled visitor night. We spent about an hour on Q&A in both directions. Their community owns 8 houses mostly adjacent to each other, with private space in most of them and some common amenities spread out, and has a 44 year history of developing their various intentional community experiments. I hope to find time to write more about all that we’ve learned, a bit later in the trip. As I write this, I am in one of the two guest rooms we’ll be sharing tonight. I have just showered, two of our trip participants have started doing their laundry, and the fourth is off watching TV with a regularly scheduled social group here. I’ve been sleeping early recently, so I’ll probably nod off soon (it’s only 9PM) and get relatively early to get started on final planning and communication for tomorrow’s stops as well as earlier steps of planning for some of the final stops on the trip about two weeks from now that I didn’t get to in advance.

Overall I’d say the first day of the trip was pretty awesome. Fellowship Community and Ganas have set an exceptionally high bar for interactivity and hospitality and put our trip off to a great start. I am looking forward to what we discover next.

There's a sampling bias in pedestrian / cyclist / driver discourse that I don't think gets enough attention. Assuming similar speed in each group, but grossly different speed between groups, each group will encounter far more examples of various behaviors from the other groups than from their own group.

Imagine 100 drivers, 100 cyclists, and 100 pedestrians all travel a few blocks down the same city road, spread out evenly. Each driver passes 90 cyclists and 100 pedestrians. Each cyclist is passed by 90 drivers and passes 90 pedestrians. Each pedestrian is passed by 90 cyclists and 100 drivers. So, they all see almost all of the people of the other types and whatever misbehavior they get up to.

However, the average driver only passes 10 other drivers, the average cyclist passes 10 other cyclists, and the average pedestrian passes 10 other pedestrians. So they see relatively few of their own type of person.

So, if 1/10 people misbehave across the board, then drivers will see 1 bad driver, 9 bad cyclists, and 10 bad pedestrians. But cyclists will see 1 bad cyclists, 9 bad drivers, and 9 bad pedestrians. And pedestrians will see 1 bad pedestrian, 9 bad cyclists, and 10 bad drivers.

Everyone is going to experience far more examples of misbehavior by the other groups than by their own group, but nobody seems to account for this in evaluating their own perceptions. Of course, the 1/10 remains constant, but the absolute observations of misbehavior will often have far more impact than the proportions.

I'm organizing the first camping event at my new(ish) place in Whitinsville MA. The nature of the event will depend on what you bring and do, with no specific theme or agenda. That said, there's a good chance you'll find folks engaged in song and dance, making and enjoying acoustic and electronic music, yoga and acro-yoga, circus and flow arts, fire performance, shallow to deep conversation, maker-y endeavors, and a variety of other pursuits.

This first event is invite-only. Please don't just show up based on the information in this post. Comment or send me a private message for an explicit invite through another platform (not Facebook!). You'll get further details in the invite and later communications.

You are also welcome to join us on our Discord at https://discord.gg/rrBe32ftA2 to talk about this and other events, art, collaborations, and goings on at the Est8.

PS: I went to LJ to see if it would be worth manually cross posting, since automated cross posting died a while ago, but it feels like a ghost town over there so I didn't bother and that's probably the last time I'll ever log in there.

An ex(?)friend(?) is trying to convince people that it's dangerous to live and work with me and my latest #coliving project, mostly by connecting them to detractors from my past. They have targeted a new resident and friend who is otherwise very motivated to be part of this project. That new person wrote this thing I am calling a review of reviews of me, which I was quite happy to read.

https://www.facebook.com/Marumari/posts/pfbid0fSB7Jam6PhidKSw9AbY2DnFTyZGqV69HQpz8XDvmuGEKMpvJZmhcKeh4LFAoBbDGl

I'm planning a weekend campout at my place south of Worcester MA in a few months. Nothing too formal, but I anticipate there will be music and dance and revelry, conversation and marshmallows over fires, etc. If you'd like to come. help me pick a date: https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/bDqQmNyd

If you'd like to help make it happen, comment or get in touch otherwise and I'll add you to the mailing list.

( Read more... )

Do you, person who blocked or exiled me for arguing with you in the early 2010s, still hold the beliefs that I was arguing against? If so, have you noticed that almost everyone who supported your development of that belief has changed course, that almost everyone around you is supporting the positions I argued for a decade ago? Or, if not, have you considered apologizing?

(This is a rewrite and elaboration on a private post I made about two years ago.)

Analogy: If you switch your fandom from American Football to Soccer, are you willing and able to set aside at least some of your past conclusions about soccer fans who tried to convince you to switch?

Deep in the comments of a recent rehash of an old discussion, I had an epiphany that some of the people I was trying to talk to might never have witnessed or considered the sorts of consequences I was concerned about for others and had experienced myself. This is my first attempt to drill down into that particular detail, but it probably won’t be my last.

( Read more... )

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

February 2025

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

Recent Entries

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How a "4-6 month" eviction takes 2+ years in MA

Life Situation Status Update

Sleep No More, a Minimal Spoiler Guide

My next 18+ months

Estate of Mind

Work

Summer and Autumn

2025

Beyond

Variety of Communities on our IC Tour

Intentional Community Tour Days Fourteen through Sixteen

Intentional Community Tour Days Twelve and Thirteen

Intentional Community Tour Days Eight and Nine

Intentional Community Tour Day Seven

Intentional Community Tour Days Five and Six

Intentional Community Tour Day Four

Intentional Community Tour Day Three

Intentional Community Tour Day Two

Intentional Community Tour Day 1

Drivers / Cyclists / Pedestrians aren't as bad as you think

Campout at my place, April 21-23 2023

A review of reviews of me

Campout date poll

Do you still hold the beliefs that led you to exile me?

They Know Not What They Do (Consent Hypocrisy)