Neall@neallseth
San Franciscan behavior is often inscrutable from the outside. Is it poverty? Contrarianism? Inexplicable quirks of the techno-bohemian class?
It starts making sense when you walk out of SFO, and into the reality distortion field that’s inspired social deviance for decades
For those on the other side:
If the city is a universe, group houses (loosely defined) are its planets. Each has a unique cultural “gravity” that naturally selects for an orbital community. House “orbits” intersect, forming micro-cultural clusters which themselves overlap with peripheral clusters
Given sufficient social energy, one might ride these orbital tracks across the universe
Put another way: if SF is Twitter, these houses and their friends form the group chat archipelago
Like GCs, houses are mostly assembled for fun, and because they’re natural platforms for conversation, events, and serendipity — not due to financial necessity as you’d see elsewhere. Starting a house is an implicit registration as a node in a sprawling social graph
It’s hard to overstate these houses’ roles as SF’s serendipity machines. In some cases, they become de facto semi-public cafes or third places. Friends might flit in and out through the day, often hanging to cowork or take a quick nap on the couch
It’s no surprise people choose this. It invites a social richness into life that’s hard to achieve otherwise, with no downside other than occasional raised eyebrows from people on the internet
