Charter Houses (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Charter Houses (2022)

slimemoldtimemold.com

86 pointsalexdong44 comments

> Charter houses could solve this problem neatly. A charter house or two could easily be set up with positions offered to people who are filling these roles, providing them with a minimum of support — at the very least, free rent and free high-speed internet. These people are professionals, so this may not be enough for them — but there’s no reason they can’t get support from the charter house and make additional money in other ways. They can supplement that support by consulting, getting a real job, being a bounty hunter, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sold on why this charter house arrangement is better (for either side involved) than just... paying people a salary.

Certainly it's easier to do regular payroll than to buy a huge house and be its landlord (really leaning into the "lord" part) and manage its residents' food + housing + transportation + healthcare needs. Most of that can be purchased with plain old money, and employers can offer insurance to employees without having to be their landlord too.

And then on the residents' side... it's bad enough now that I'll have to get a new health insurance policy if I quit my job, but if I had to find a new roof over my head, too? The power dynamic here doesn't sound great.

Like, in the context of "we want to fund a handful of random open-source contributors": if you have the funds to do this charter house thing, why not just open an LLC and use it to directly pay the people you're trying to support? Why does a literal house need to be involved?

I had a friend try this in upstate New York. The result? One ruined friendship and an alienated family member. The property was sold and no one ever talks about it. Leaning to the “lord” part is precisely right and the eventual “peasant revolt” is ugly.

The eventual plan was kinda cool. Offer a vacation destination as a digital detox zone for the Digital Nomad set. They knew a number of people in that space they could have marketed to. I think if they avoided the weird living/working arrangement it would have been fine.

Someone I knew died in a car crash, but somehow we all keep driving cars. Just because your friend's one attempt failed terribly doesn't mean the whole idea is rotten. I'm aware of a number of successful communities/warehomes that are making it work.

You’re taking my one added data point and extrapolating. I did not say that communes can’t work.

"People living together often butt heads" isn't even an out-there concept. (It's one reason I and others would argue that even communes should have individual living quarters—everyone having their own apartment in a shared building versus everyone having one room in a sprawling mansion. The former can have shared common areas, but the latter becomes one giant common area.)

And I'll throw another data point in the pile: I've had too many friendships soured by turning friends into roommates. In part because we were all immature and bad at handling conflict, myself included (ah, college!), and in part because there can be people in your life who you love and cherish but do not want to share a kitchen with. I'd imagine tensions would have been higher if only one of us was paying rent and the others were living there for free.

You heavily implied it by discussing a negative experience, its consequences, and speculating that the communal aspect was the root cause. I am a little bit surprised that you are denying that core point.

Is it really a commune/communal space when one person owns the entire property?

whether or not that it is the case is an absolutely fascinating question, but one that does not have anything to do with bluepizza's point.

Because community. Tossing money over the wall via an LLC doesn't automatically do that. There are no shared dinners, no impromptu coffee chats, no late night conversations without cohabitation.

Does buying a home and letting people live in it automatically created shared dinners or coffee chats though? I can't say I've ever done that with my landlord. And yeah, my landlord doesn't usually live with me, but I've also had a fair share of roommate arrangements where we were friendly but not exactly friends. Certainly not eating meals together.

In the broader picture, where most adults are lonely and can't make friends, being negative and focusing on the friendships lost thru community housing seems a bit myopic. If the multitudes of relationships gained aren't worth the ones that are burnt - and I am not minimalizing those that are being burnt - it truely sucks to lose friends - but if, over the years, you haven't managed to gain more friends than you have lost, then something is wrong.

I can't say what, because I don't know you and your circumstances, nor your morals, or lack thereof, but it's Saturday night where I am, and I'm going to go enjoy it with friends that I've been avoiding, in favor of doom scrolling.

The original question is something like, "what’s the minimum form of scholarly institution?" If you want to set up a nonprofit to support a number of researchers/students/intellectuals, it's cheapest to 1) purchase housing "in bulk" and 2) buy rather than rent. Hence buying a house.

You want rules, trust me you want rules.

I have lived in something really close to this situation – seven furries, one four-bedroom house in Seattle’s suburbs, one person with a high-paying IT job – and it fell apart. And a big part of why this fell apart is because we never even talked about things like “maybe we should set up a chore rota”.

This also sounds a lot like “fraternities” and “sororities”, which certainly have rules. Or maybe “a commune” depending on how far outside of the city is, and those certainly have rules too. If you want to actually try to make this happen I would recommend looking at rules for those sorts of organizations, and asking yourself “what horrible mess happened that lead to this rule being enacted”, because I can guarantee that somewhere in the history of the organization, there was something that happened for every single rule that threatened the continuing survival of the organization.

There is a lot of help and experience in setting up intentional communities. A good place to start is https://www.ic.org/.

What if the 6 others also had high paying it jobs. Outsource all non essential tasks ala taskrabbit? Money sounds like the issue here.

I think money is largely the issue. I lived in several different 5-7 bedroom communal houses in SF with a bunch of founders/engineers and if everyone (or even half the people) have high paying jobs then it's a very different experience. The group can easily absorb months of another resident's rent if they have volatile income which greatly reduces the pressure on relationships.

It only costs a few hundred bucks a week to have cleaners come over and take care of the house so most chores are a none issue. Dishes and trash were the only rotating chores IIRC since those couldn't be put off between weekly cleanings. There was a fridge for personal food and a separate communal fridge with a group food budget so all staples were always taken care of. Internet, insurance, water, power, were all split equally. There were no problems concerning the money even though some people were messier, some ate at home more, some worked from home entirely, etc. etc.

That's a far flung situation from the one described in TFA though. We lived together to build a community as adults, not for survival. That changes the dynamics.

Not to be a dick but there is a pretty apparent correlation between being able to hold down high paying jobs and interpersonal/emotional skills as well. Which is not to say that all people with low paying jobs are unreasonable assholes, nor that all high income people are saints.

But in my experience highly difficult people who complicate living situations tend to struggle to keep jobs for the same reasons that make them bad roommates.

Well it depends on preferences. I find the idea of paying someone to do basic tasks degrading, even though I could in principle afford it. So you would need "7 people who have similar opinions about the ethics of doing housework".

Related to the reason why I always avoid roommate ads if they advertise paying for housecleaning once a month, because I can only really imagine living with, um, adults.

(this gripe does not apply to people who are working around childcare)

Cool general idea, some of the specifics around $$ numbers are a bit... off

> Big investments generate quite a lot of money — you can draw off about 4% of an investment every year without depleting the principal, because you get back that much or more in interest.

That is not at all what the 4% rule they linked is talking about. The 4% rule means, roughly, from the original source, "95% of the time you won't completely run out of money in 30 years". Indefinite withdrawal from an endowment is a very different problem.

I’m not sure they’re considering inflation as well.

A safe withdrawal rate would be like annual rate of return - annual inflation - 1% safety buffer.

So 4% - 2% (target inflation rate) - 1% (buffer) = 1%.

If you don’t include the 1% buffer here you have no margin of safety for a market downturn.

The 4% figure comes from something called "The Trinity Study" and most definitely considers inflation.

For more information about safe withdrawal rates then you probably want see https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/

Arguably, that's better than aiming for a perpetuity. By economizing on starting capital, you can set up substantially more of these, and you avoid the pathologies of perpetuities (eg. the Hershey trust): if after 30 years a charter house actually does completely run out of money and it can't fix its finances, then maybe its time has come and it's a good thing it can't simply be a trust fund baby rentier.

Given how many communes or nonprofits go bad, it's good to have some sort of accountability to outsiders in the form of 'needing money'. (The recurrent debates over the Wikimedia Foundation's ever expanding budget being a good case in point. Are you impressed by what they have done with the many millions of dollars they've gotten in the past half-decade or so? No? Then it doesn't seem likely they're going to impress you very much more if they become so wealthy that they can operate forever off interest and have to care even less what any donators think...)

I generally love this idea but, historically, the risk with people building private communities that they're in charge of is that they may or may not turn out to be abusive tyrants and you can't do much about it and probably the abusive tyranny will come out thirty years later with a lot of "I told you so"s.

c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All in principle good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful.

It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.

Maybe I am just being unimaginative but it seems that civil society with its institutions evolved precisely to handle conflicts and allocate resources between individuals who lack a strong emotional bond. Those bonds do exist in families and it seems over the long run that families are probably the exception to the need for intermediating institutions.

I bet successful private communities, intentional communities, etc. basically speedrun the recreation of the broader civil society they exist within.

More likely they speedrun the mistakes that civil society at least in principle has fixes for.

One challenge (among many) is simply that many areas limit the number of unrelated people that can live in a house. When I owned a house in a college town in the Midwest many moons ago that number was 3, for instance.

(I have heard that this is sometimes aimed at limiting brothels, though that sounds a bit like an urban legend?)

One thing OP seems to gloss over is that there is a strong correlation between places where people want to live in, property prices, and rent prices.

In other words, the places where people pay 1k for renting a room are not usually the ones where a 7 bedroom house sells for cheap.

e.g. housing cooperatives

https://coophousing.org/

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

[1] - https://thecharterhouse.org/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)

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

A few relevant links:

• A Technology Freelancers' Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative: <https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202...>

• The Tyranny of Structurelessness: <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm>

• <https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/>

> Even if you did nothing but stick the money in an S&P 500 index fund, the historical average is about 10% per year.

* With dividends reinvested, before inflation

Say S&P dividends are always 1.5%

10% total return - 1.5% dividends (ignoring the quarterly compounding aspect for simplity) = 8.5% in equity growth

Say you wouldn't reinvest them because you want cash flow equivalent to 4% of your principal

4% drawdown rule - 1.5% dividend paid out as cash and not reinvested = 2.5% drawdown needed

You really only need to pull 2.5% with the 4% rule, no? (0.625% a quarter 4 times a year?)

However, inflation is usually 2%, so you need to pull 2.5% + 2% = 4.5% every year on top of the 1.5% dividends being paid out to you? Is this accurate?

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

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

Hippies have been doing housing co-ops for a long time, and they work kind of like this, and they are mostly (in my experience) cool places.

A bunch of people get together and buy a house which they can then live in as a community. As time goes on people move in and out, and in general these function as very cheap shared housing with no landlord and (usually) a flat, non-hierarchical structure. There are usually expectations on pitching in to maintain and run the house.

Radical Routes is the org that helped out most of the groups that I knew: https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/

Lots of homebrew country wines, asylum seekers in a raised bed above the stairs, curry, good parties and messy drama.

Of course you still find the full spectrum of human bad behavior in any place like this, but generally my limited experience was that these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things.

To the note in the article about rules, my weak impression was that the more systematic, sincere, organized co-ops tended to be the ones that survived - hands-off tended to turn rotten after a while. There's definitely some sort of alchemy involved in making the thing successful.

> these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things.

.. and overwhelmingly examples of "people don't do this for that long in the same place". I'm still trying to figure out if that is important.

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

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

Hello, Eric? This is your mother, and you are not my baby

Yes, 10% per year return “for free” by just investing it all into the SP500; except the rate of inflation makes that negative, and you’ve also got to reinvest any return to see this “10%”.

The real rate, not the imaginary rate of inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com