Lessons from Estate of Mind

I have learned a lot from fifteen years of organizing coliving intentional communities, none more so than my most recent project at Estate of Mind. Although it's not fully wrapped up yet, I think I can see all the plausible paths to the end, so this feels like a good time for at least the first iteration of writing down what I am taking away from this experience. Some of these are brand new discoveries, but most of them are things I had hints of far sooner that have more fully crystallized now.

If you are new to my posts and life, a quick summary... Estate of Mind (http://est8ofmind.com) was a 42 bedroom historic Victorian estate near Worcester MA USA, housing 15-20 full time residents and some visitors and volunteers. The community focus was on arts, makers, event hosting, and project collaboration. In the third year of the project a fire rendered the largest nicest building unusable, taking away half of our bedrooms and almost all of our function space. The community dissolved shortly thereafter. Wrapping that up is currently my full time job.

First and foremost, I am now committed to having a long financial runway for whatever I do next. The larger the project, the more important it is to be able to to be selective about people and opportunities in the early years. When I was putting four or five figures into starting a project, the possibility of it failing after a year didn't faze me. Move fast, break things, try again. Now that my personal financial investment is seven figures, and I am slowly running out of decades to try, I care more about longevity and certainty. When a project like this reaches the point of "we must accept the next income opportunity that becomes available (investor, renter, event, etc)", it has already left the realm of safety and is probably on the way to failure. That point came about two years in at Estate of Mind. If I had this to do over again, I would commit slightly less of the total budget for the initial outlay and ongoing expenses, with a larger buffer for unexpected expenses and drops in income, to push the plausible uncertainty out a few more years.

Almost as important, I won't do this again without a solid legal plan for removing problematic participants. On the one hand, I love blue states. I want everyone to have the social safety net that comes with a progressive political atmosphere, in terms of healthcare, food security, political representation, etc. On the other hand, MA and CA are havens for professional tenants who cause a variety of problems for years with no recourse for the people stuck with them, and that's even if you ignore the tens of thousands of dollars of financial loss. I have seen this failure mode from afar many times, but this was my first time experiencing it first hand. My next project with a coliving component will be organized in a way that eliminates this possibility. That means either moving to a red state, or adopting the structural framework of either an educational or secular religious institution, although I am also investigating other options. Both of those paths are compatible with my other large scale goals of community, project collaboration, economy of scale, events, shared interests and passions, etc. I was very excited when I organized a tour of intentional communities across the US in 2024 and found a significant fraction of the longest lived ones used one of those two institutional models.

With over 50% compliance to our best attempt, the efforts here to design a large scale household chore system went better than most I've seen, but still not what I would call a success. Allowing people to choose their own chores worked well. Ditto for reserving particular chores weeks to months in advance for people who want a reliable schedule and level of commitment. We also saw positive effect from making an explicit checklist for each chore. All of those are features I would replicate next time. Where the system here fell down was not having any effective enforcement mechanism, and not having a way to prioritize or incentivize chores that were falling behind schedule. Those are where I would focus my efforts to improve in the future.

The scale of the property was nice, and we made good use of a bunch of amenities we wouldn't have had on a smaller property. This project has reinforced my feelings about economy of scale; more people pooling their resources can get far more than proportional benefits in the amenities they share. Having large indoor event/activity/craft spaces was great. Having large clear and forested outdoor spaces was great. I would do all of that again, even larger if possible.

The location may have spoiled me. Just looking for properties this big is already a strong filter. There might be just a few dozen on the market across the country at any given time, and far fewer once price becomes a factor. So, within that context, being able to walk to town amenities (post office, bank, mechanic, salon, diner, sushi, etc etc etc) was not at all on my bingo card when I was searching five years ago. These sorts of things are a given when searching for a home in a city or town, but I assumed they were not possible when looking for something big. Now that I know this particular combination of size and location exists and this one has prompted me to find other examples, it's going to be hard to consider going back to less.

Having multiple buildings and segregating people based on some lifestyle choices and needs worked pretty well, and I will almost certainly do that again. The three categories here were "has a pet", "willing to trade noise and temperature comfort for a room in the beautiful building", and "everyone else". I am already planning similar divides around pets and loudness in my next project, with another potential category for families with children.

In my 20s, I was a stickler for the exact wording of contracts. There might have been five years where I didn't sign an agreement longer than a sentence that I hadn't amended. Society beat that out of me in my 30s, as longer and longer boilerplate contracts came into my life, and that bit me hard here. I've lost about two years of my life to taking bad advice from some professional agents about how everything will turn out fine if I just go with the flow and do things how everyone else does them. I won't be making that mistake again.

On more personal notes... This has been yet another experience cementing my preference to live with a romantic partner where we both have private personal space large enough to share when we choose and far enough apart to not feel overwhelmed when we need time to think. Especially with enough common amenities that we can have guests that aren't compatible with each other, socially or otherwise. I remain confident that I want to live my life surrounded by like-minded people who regularly build things and teach classes and host parties. I have a better understanding for my comfort level in risking my life savings toward a large project.

Once things are fully wrapped up here, I'll probably write something with a bit more scope and reach, covering not only these lessons but integrating them with all the things I already knew from previous projects. I might write it with the intention of reaching new coliving organizers, or perhaps as part of the planning for my next project. I'm looking forward to what comes next. I anticipate putting all this experience to good use, hopefully for the benefit of many people. Wish me luck!