more advice on how to live near your friends

stop daydreaming and make it happen

This is a follow up to How to Live Near Your Friends, about how I coordinated 22 friends to live in my neighborhood.

Does your friend group muse about living near each other? Or moving to the same area to start a commune together?

The reason these plans never come to fruition is because they’re daydreams. Plans are concrete. They involve real locations, not abstract ones. They have timelines. Like everything else in life, they have trade-offs.

Source: Phil Levin of Supernuclear

You can coordinate your friends, but you have to stop daydreaming and start planning.

Find a co-conspirator

My first recommendation is to find one friend who shares your vision and is willing to work towards it. Coordinating friends requires hard work over many months, so don’t do this alone.

How do you find a conspirator? You just need a seed of an idea to start. Maybe the idea is that your life would be more awesome if you lived within a five minute walk of five friends. Whatever your idea, I’d text some friends about it and see whose excited. Then meet up and create a more fleshed out vision that you’re both excited about.

You may have to reach out to dozens of friends to find someone who will actually follow through. Your friends face constraints: jobs, partners, busy schedules, lease terms, and preferences. For many friends the idea of coordinating to live near other friends might even seem a bit weird. That’s okay. I encourage you to be open-minded about who you found a neighborhood with. Your closest friends can join later!

What if you don’t have close friends in your city who are interested in your scheme? In that case I’d literally post to social media or make flyers and put them in coffee shops. I know, I know, this is an article called How to Actually Live Near Your Friends but the truth is, many adults live in different cities from their closest friends, and many wish they had more local friends. Creating an intentional neighborhood is simultaneously a way to draw your loved ones near you, and a way to create new relationships that you’ll cherish.

Years ago, my husband and I were living in San Francisco and wanted to live a different lifestyle. We imagined dinners with friends every night, and falling into into spontaneous adventures. But his closest friends were back in his hometown of Phoenix. And though I grew up in the Bay Area, my closest friends were living in the suburbs. So to solicit a co-conspirator, we wrote a simple tweet:

A stranger reached out to me. He came over for tea and we hit it off. 10 days later, we signed a lease together. We proceeded to grow close and have many adventures. Two years later, he invited us to move to New York City with him, which changed our lives forever. We made a good friend through seeking others who wanted to be intentional about how they lived, and putting out a (very simple) bat signal of our values.

One of our first adventures, climbing a crane.

But Not Too Many Co-Conspirators

Don’t coordinate with more than one other person.¹ Even if you have an awesome friend group where everyone says they want to live near each other.

Your friends have different commutes, budgets, priorities, and aesthetic tastes. They may have significant others with constraints too. Do not aim for consensus among your friend group or you will never form a neighborhood.

Your friends have different commutes, budgets, priorities, and aesthetic tastes. They may have significant others with constraints too. Do not aim for consensus among your friend group or you will never form a neighborhood.

I know this empirically. I’ve talked to and helped many people who wanted to live near their friends. The vast majority of people who try to coordinate with a group fail. They tour houses or neighborhoods together but one or two people have issues with each place. It’s over their budget, or it’s not nice enough. It’s too far from work, it’s too far from their climbing gym, it’s too far from their sister. The group decides to keep looking but some people have an issue with the next place you tour. And the next, and the next. In the end, the group loses momentum and gives up.

Sometimes two or three people in the original group later coordinate and succeed. And then once they’re established, others start to join them.

The Perfect Neighborhood Does Not Exist

Imagine a walkable, tree-lined neighborhood near lots of cute cafes and restaurants. Do you want to live there? So does everyone else.

When it comes to real estate, perfection is priced in. Your friend group might seem like they have overlapping preferences in a neighborhood. But you can’t tell anyone’s actual preferences when you’re daydreaming together. Real world tradeoffs become apparent the closer you get to signing a lease.

Living in the cutest neighborhood in town might mean that the only housing you can afford is small or run down. Or it might mean that you can afford to live in a nice house, but your closest friend cannot.

After moving to New York City, my husband and I once again dreamed of living near friends. This time we had a big and growing social group in the city. So I interviewed a bunch of friends about what they cared about in a neighborhood.

The #1 thing people cared about was living near a park. As city-dwellers, our friends valued being able to escape the “concrete jungle” sometimes.

Except. . . I noticed that although my friends claimed to want to live near a park, almost nobody actually lived near a park. To test this theory, I sent a survey to a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends. I asked them for their cross streets, and mapped them out. It turns out that my friends prioritized being near subway lines, especially the L and A lines.

When they daydreamed about where to live, they imagined themselves near green space. But when they were making decisions in a competitive real estate market, they chose based on train lines. Proximity to a good train line affected their daily commute and how easy it is to move around the city. Besides, most NYC parks are accessible via transit. There are nine subway stops adjacent to Central Park alone. And living near a good park is expensive. So when it came to decision time, my friends were okay with being further from a park.

Listen to your friends’ revealed preferences rather than their stated ones.

How to Choose a Good (But Not Perfect) Neighborhood

The neighborhood you currently live in might be the right neighborhood. You already know it well, maybe you’ve learned its secret haunts and what makes it lovable. And you already chose to live there, when you were faced with real market conditions.

But if you want to coordinate in a different neighborhood, make a list of neighborhoods you like. Then check Zillow to find what housing is available in that neighborhood. Then, even if your ideal move is still a few months away, start touring units. Do not trust online listings to give you a realistic sense of tradeoffs.

Your goal is to viscerally understand the housing market. What housing is available at what price. How often viable housing opens in your desired neighborhood. (You need enough supply that your friends will be able to move too, on a reasonable timeline).

Months after I wrote about how I got 22 of my friends to live within walking distance of me, I got pregnant. We had expected to stay in that walkable neighborhood long-term. We imagined raising our first child there. But pregnant me had an immense, overpowering desire to move to another neighborhood—Fort Greene. It’s home to a beautiful park, iconic Brooklyn brownstones, and a high density of families. It’s expensive and in high demand.

Somehow, we found a too-good-to-be-true deal on a brownstone. We created a new group house with three of those 22 friends. Our hope was that the original neighborhood would continue apace. And we would seed another walkable neighborhood with other friends. (Friends whose commutes or preferences had prevented them from moving to neighborhood #1).

Four groups of our friends tried to move within walking distance; three groups failed. Few units came on the market, and those that did were expensive and rented right away. Landlords preferred to rent to couples or families, rather than roommates.

Our too-good-to-be-true deal was indeed too good to be true. When our original lease was up our landlord increased our rent by $3000. We had to look for a new home, and faced the same issues our friends had. By then our daughter was one, and my intense pregnancy hormones had faded. We moved closer to our previous neighborhood.

Your Best Friends Will Get FOMO…Eventually…

Fair warning: once you’ve chosen a neighborhood, expect to hear a lot of “no”s.

Your closest friends might not be eager or able to move. They are in leases. They have work commutes that constrain which neighborhoods make sense for them. Their significant other might have their own set of location constraints. And they might not see how much their quality of life could improve by living near their friends.

Your best friend, the one you dream of living next door to, might be harder to persuade than you expected.

Persuasion comes from showing, not telling. Thus you should gather the few people who are interested, and seed a scene in your neighborhood. Then when your best friends visit, they’ll see how much fun y’all are having and they’ll start to get FOMO.

I know because this happened with many of my closest friends. My best friend in New York City used to live in Manhattan, a 45 minute commute from me. He didn’t live within walking distance of any of our friends. He had a studio apartment, and he liked living by himself, thank you very much. He loved Midtown East and he would never give up “the principal island” to move to second-rate Brooklyn.

But his rent got bumped when his lease was up for renewal. He found himself temporarily without housing, and he came to stay with us. Within two weeks of arriving he told us he was never moving out.

We’re so used to commuting to meet up with our friends; it’s just normal! Many people won’t understand how much more fun it is to live near their friends until you give them a chance to try it.

Another story: my friend John came to our weekly dinner parties religiously for a year. He liked visiting, but he didn’t like that our neighborhood was sleepier than his. He told me he’d never move nearby…until one day he did (and he still lives there!). I don’t actually know what finally changed his mind. I just know long after I had given up hope that John would move near us, he decided to, and signed a lease.

So don’t feel discouraged if your closest friends aren’t initially enthusiastic. Instead, remain open minded and patient.

You can either start coordinating with casual friends until close friends FOMO in. Or you can exercise patience, and nudge your friends over a long time. My student Cormac took 2 years before he found and convinced the right friends to move in with him. None of them had ever tried living with friends before, and they all had doubts going in. But within a few months they all loved it. After a year they moved to a better house, and they plan to continue living together for years to come.

Or you can be less picky, like me and my husband. We pitched everyone from besties to friends-of-friends who we had only met once. Over time our neighborhood became a gravity well. Eventually our closest friends all got sucked into its orbit.

1. To be more precise, do not coordinate with more than two “entities.” I think it’s okay to coordinate with three people if one is a couple, like we did in San Francisco. Or with four people, if the group is made up of two couples (I have friends who started an awesome co-living house that way).