It’s often hard to think about the future of housing without thinking about the future of how people want to live. Oftentimes at Holon, and elsewhere, we get lost in the political and technical mechanisms made to describe housing. YIMBY. We should build more housing. Make zoning easier. Build more public transit. Make mortgages more accessible. Shift to prefab/3D printed homes.

To me, a home is a place of safety and security from which one can launch into the world to seize their destiny. A lot of that sense of safety and security has been totally destroyed for the American youth. There is no safety in having to worry about making next month’s rent. There is no security in building no equity. There is no liberation in 12-month leases. For those working in the future here, I’d like to invite us all to take a step back and connect with what housing is for.

When we talk about the different sets of solutions above, our language is almost entirely in the material world talking about physical things. That dangerously narrows our scope and has us miss the truth.

When we started Holon, it came from a belief that whatever the future of housing may be, it needs to return us to that sense of safety, security, and liberation. We took quite a windy path to get to where we are today, but those values provided direction. We found direction not by thinking about how we can fix the problems of housing, but by how we can totally change the housing experience.

With community-owned housing networks, members build equity, have flexibility on how long to stay in one place, and gain accessibility to homes everywhere. We disintermediate the landlords that view homes as investments and return them to the people that understand homes as spaces to live.

We’re not in the future yet. There are a number of radically different ways this could go. Do our housing networks gain access to fantastic credit and gobble up properties in major cities? Do we help finance new suburb developments? Or as Balaji suggests, do we try to create new cities altogether?

The future is open, but I have my perspective. I do not think the future of America should rest on the ability of major American urban centers to scale. Over the past 120 years, the population of NYC has barely doubled from 3.4M people to 8.8M. It’s a shockingly similar story in SF with the past 120 years seeing a population frown from 342k to 815k. Asian cities have seen tremendous success and scale with their megacities projects that are a reflection of their culture, but not a foreshadowing of the story in the Western world.

Along with the physical impossibility for these cities to scale, I don’t really think we want them to. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Silicon Valley happened in the sparsely populated suburbs of the Bay Area. As a trend, centers of groundbreaking innovation, not successful copy-cat duplications, happen outside of major urban centers. The best colleges have space.

It certainly isn’t a linear relationship. It would be totally ridiculous to extrapolate and say rural farmland will have more innovation because of more space. There is this golden balance between the density of the place, the curation of people, and the design of the space that lead to breakthrough centers of innovation that grip the world for a few decades.

You want a place that is dense enough to stimulate random encounters, but not so much that you are constantly being inundated with inputs that decrease your sensitivity. You want these random encounters to be with people you have the same energy with, not totally random people. And you want the design of the space to give you the opportunity to be alone and integrate with nature, but also reduce the friction of getting together with people.

The canonical example of such a place is a college town. It’s no coincidence that breakthrough innovations happen there. No coincidence that Silicon Valley happened to be next to Stanford and Berkeley. No coincidence that not only are these places intensely productive, but people look upon those years with deep fondness.

As we think about the future of housing, we need to think about the future of living. It isn’t uninspired new construction or insipid sprawling suburbs. It is a collection of dense, curated, college-town-type environments spread throughout the countryside. Using new technology to be totally sustainable and integrated with nature. Built around community centers of learning, inspiration, and innovation. With people eating fresh organic food, exploring nature, and having breakthrough ideas.

A few of our customers are exploring such a future. DAOWest is kicking off by creating a co-living, co-working center for people in Web3. A ranch serving as a community center surrounded by cabins where people can live and work. Available only to people in the DAO. We see a similar pipeline project happening in Costa Rica.

I don’t think all, or even most, of the housing networks we support will be of such a flavor. But some will. And when we reflect on our impact on the way people live and the culture, we will see those few as the shining beacons promising the future.

This post is a part of a sequence of smaller articles I will be writing around ideas I have every day. They will not be as polished. Please forgive any typos and errors!

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