Why Buy Land With Your Friends?
"Living on land with your friends is tough!" – Everyone I've talked to who is living on land with their friends.
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Hi!
This newsletter is still relatively new, and still feels oozy and primordial.
It’s kind of nice, kind of like a loaf of bread, baking in the oven, filling the house with that warm, bread-y aroma.
One of the themes of this newsletter that is emerging is “acceptance”.
For instance, I’ll be 37 in a month. 10 years ago, I envisioned having a house and a family of my own.
Since then, I’ve gone on many adventures.
At 27, I traveled the world shooting video for a corporate MLM-scheme.
At 30, I moved back to NYC to attend a 10-week course at School for Poetic Computation.
At 32, I moved upstate to live at a Sufi retreat center.
Throughout, there was the occasional fling or romance. I changed careers a couple of times, and have been working remotely since 2017.
I operated with the hope and intention that these moves would lead to something: a better job, a long-term relationship, some sort of deeper “rooted-ness”.
Everywhere I went, I looked for love and community. Sometimes I found it, but only briefly. Or I found it, but something was missing. Maybe the dating scene was sparse, or there was simply somewhere that seemed more fun to live. And then it was on to the next city/experiment.
It’s been hard for me to accept that I’m not where I’d like to be, according to standards I set for myself a long time ago.
I still want those things, but I’ve loosened my grip. If they are meant to be, they’ll be.
I also have to accept that I’m not living in the world that I was raised in.
I’m grateful for all of my adventures, and more to come I’m sure.
But I am ready to settle down.
That said, I’d rather die than buy a house in the suburbs and rot.
Settling in down in NYC seems like an impossibility as well. Too expensive, will never own anything. Also, I want more space, and more quiet.
And so I travel on–hopefully with a more realistic idea of what I’m looking for, and what I’ll do when I find it.
I Want to Buy Land(With Friends) Because I’m Tired of Moving
I think that it’s my rootlessness that drives me to want to buy land with friends. I want something permanent. I have been evicted by at least two landlords for standing up for myself–stuff like “hey, you need to call me before you come into my apartment”.
I want to live on land that I partially own, and have rights to live on.
I’d like to find or build a community too. Ideally, it’s a group of people who have similar beliefs about how to treat each other, who want to live on land and build relationships with the land and surrounding communities.
I’ve heard it said that those that seek to form or join an intentional community are those who are seeking a family, and didn’t or do not have a great relationship with their family of origin.
That tracks for me.
If I had a better relationship with my family, I doubt I would be seeking to start or join an intentional community. Rather, I imagine that I would live close to my parents and would be working to deepen those bonds and plan our lives together.
Millennials Are Quiet-Quitting (Their Families)
From what I can tell, I am not alone in distancing myself from a dysfunctional family of origin.
In 2022, the decline of the family seems to be about as American as apple pie.
For instance, the late Terence T. Gorski, a therapist studying addiction, estimated that 70-80% of American families are dysfunctional. The term “dysfunction” is somewhat subjective here, but that sounds about right.
There is plenty of data to support the narrative that the American family has been in decline for some time:
Two-parent households are on the decline and family size is shrinking, according to this study by Pew Research
In 2022, there were 37.9 million one-person households, that’s 29% of all U.S. households. In 1960, single-person households represented only 13% of all households. (US Census 2022)
Millennials are also waiting longer to have children, with most answering that they don’t have enough money to pay for medical costs associated with childbearing
Some have said that what we’re experiencing in America is a polycrisis: a “meta-crisis” comprised of numerous other crises. The polycrisis includes the decline of the American family, the cost of medical care, drug addiction, housing cost and availability, not to mention supply chain issues, climate weirding, the pandemic, and so on.
So, to me, buying with land with your friends seems like an entirely rational response to everything that’s happening in America right now, and to where this country is headed.
I’ve talked to a lot of people, and it’s apparent that I’m not the only one who wants to live on land with their friends.
Buying Land With Your Friends: The Book
With all of that, I am writing a book about how to buy land with your friends.
While I’m not an expert in this topic, I’ve learned a lot from talking to people IRL and online. Writing this book will give me added incentive to do that.
Since starting this blog, I’ve have 7-10 zoom conversations with people I’ve met via the newsletter and Twitter. I’ve started an email correspondence with a new friend who lives on a land project with their friends. I’ve talked to strangers in coffeeshops.
If you’re interested in this topic, give me a shout!
I continue to be impressed by how much this is in the air. People see the writing on the wall. Seems every other person I talk to in NYC would love to live on some land with their friends if they could just figure it out.
Their objections, if you could call them that, are mostly that it’s too risky, and too expensive, to buy some land with a bunch of people they do and don’t know.
This is true–it is risky, and land is expensive.
If you make less than $100k/year, it would be a high-risk thing to do to pour all of your savings into cobuying land with friends and acquaintances.
That said, it seems to me that the cost-of-living in America is going to steadily increase until buying land with your friends is a no-brainer.
And the cost of land will continue to increase as well.
I’m going to publish this book, chapter by chapter, in this newsletter. Probably, the chapters will be published “out of order”, or the order of the chapters may shift. Each chapter will function as it’s own self-contained essay.
Here’s the outline for the book, How to Buy Land With Your Friends. Once the book is finished, I’ll put it on Amazon as an eBook.
Outline:
Why I’m writing this book (DONE)
Why I want to buy land with my friends
Why do you want to buy land with your friends?
Are you doing this for the “right reasons”?
Self-inventory: How to check yourself
A word of caution: Doing the inner work
Reasons to consider buying land with your friends
Common mistakes in buying land with your friends
Things to keep in mind/common mistakes
Dianne Leaf Christiansen: “90% of intentional communities fail”
Napkin math for buying land with your friends
Financing options and subsidies
Things to do before gathering your people
Gathering your people
But I don’t have any friends (that want to buy land with me!)
Start online – communities you can check out
How to buy land with your friends
Start a “research group”
Make agreements (and set expectations)
Start researching
Do things together: eat together, do activities, help each other, go camping, etc
Do the buy
Move to the land
What successful intentional communities and collective homesteads have in common
Case study 1 – TBD
Case study 2 – TBD
Case study 3 – TBD