Printed in Spring 2026 in Communities Magazine #210. Reproduced here with permission.
By Daway Chou-Ren
The Enticing Model
When I sat down for dinner with my friend Nathan, his idea for how communities could rent and eventually buy homes, keeping money circulating within the group, lit me up. Communities generate relational, creative, and cultural value, yet—at least for renting communities—most of their finances flow to an outside landlord.
At the community where Nathan and I met and became good friends, former residents had transformed their very large, barren basement, using their own money, into a vibrant gathering and event space with dozens of events a month. It became a beloved third space. In swooped the landlord. Seeing the property’s increased value, he raised the community’s rent.
Nathan wanted to remove the landlord from his next community, and he had found an interesting opening. Where we live there are all these oversized homes. He came across an unwieldy 18-bedroom house. Who better to rent such a place than a community? Who better to eventually buy it? He negotiated a favorable two-year lease with first rights to purchase after that. I found the possible future compelling: what if we could live together, build real bonds, and let our commitment grow slowly? We could rent first, and co-own later. No cold feet from jumping too fast into a group purchase.
Nathan would be the master tenant. He was taking on real risk and leadership: signing a lease without knowing whether the house would fill, negotiating terms and renovations with the landlord, and carrying a compelling vision for a community that aimed to make meaningful cultural change in our town. His vision of crafting culture and sharing it is what drew all of us together. He planned to make the top floor a paid workshop space, a place where the relational work we practiced and refined at home could be shared more widely. For all of this risk, vision, and labor, he planned to charge the community rent above his own costs and take a share of the workshop revenue.
I had some concerns. Is community something to profit from? But I felt it was better for communities to exist, with founders compensated for the work of making them possible, than to not exist at all because no one can afford to take on that labor for free.
Can profit be part of communities in ways that strengthen and help spread them, rather than something that destroys them? I’m writing from inside this experiment, as we run into painful, unresolved tensions. And I write as someone who lived with Nathan in a previous community with a similar landlord–master tenant–subtenant structure, one that ended in lawsuits, deteriorated relationships, and a messy dissolution. We both knew things had to be different. This piece is about how hard that shift has proven to be.
Secrecy
If money is the root of all evil, secrecy is the shadow that feeds it.
At our former community, we also had a master tenant. He worked tirelessly to run the gathering space. He was the reason it continued to exist, and all of us residents benefited from it. In private, he charged the community surplus rent to create a buffer fund. When I eventually learned of this, I thought it was wise: someone has to cover the shortfall when a housemate leaves so there’s no time pressure to fill their space. He also took a free room. Given how much he did for the gathering and event space, I personally had no issues with this level of compensation after I found out.
But he didn’t tell anyone. When these secrets came out, residents were furious. Without transparency, there was no chance for subtenants to consent to their higher rent. With this sense that everyone was just taking for themselves, the relationships between the residents, the master tenant, and the landlord fell apart.
When trust breaks, people often justify their own retaliatory behavior. A legally minded resident stopped paying rent and eventually sued the landlord; she was paid tens of thousands to leave. The landlord finally decided he was done with the headache of dealing with a 20-person community. He bought everyone else out, ended the community’s lease, and closed the beloved public gathering space.
The Pain of Talking about Money
So when Nathan told me he intended to take a monthly profit from this new community, my alarm bells went off. He had internalized the lesson to be upfront that he was charging surplus rent, but as he talked, he still wasn’t telling me how much. My partner and I told him we wouldn’t move in until he agreed to share the actual numbers with the house because any vagueness would create the shadow for rumor to take root. I did not want to be a part of a house with easy places for resentment to build.
Nathan understood. He also froze. He named aloud that he didn’t feel safe revealing the details to everyone. Money is a ripe target for projection. Being at the center of profit invites other people to land their fears and stories on you.
Eventually he agreed. He called the community and held an open meeting to walk us through the books. The numbers were only partially there: the house wasn’t full yet and the event space wasn’t really running, but the projected surplus was thousands per month.
Months later, with all rooms filled, several housemates asked for a second transparency meeting. Nathan presented the same projections—still no updated numbers. People were upset there was no clarity. Nathan was not inclined to provide more details. People shouted. Eventually, everyone let the matter drop, but the consequences of that opaqueness still linger.
I long for the day when communitarian can be a proudly worn job title and not just a passion hobby. When people can profit from the hard work of leading a group and taking a risk in starting something, and have that be acceptable. When communities have healed enough of their wounds around money that we can talk about it freely.
For now, the opaqueness around the level of profit in our home creates a steep power imbalance. It signals “I don’t trust you” and crushes collaboration before it can form.
I recently facilitated an all-house meeting where we all gave Nathan our feedback on this. Everyone there voiced a concern about the financial and power structures of our community. One housemate said to Nathan bluntly: “You’re a landlord.” We, it seems, have gone just about full circle. For most of us, the profit Nathan is taking is not a problem, but the opaqueness and magnitude of it is.
The Consequences
It’s become clear that the economics we’re operating under are those of a business, not a co-op or community. That might even be workable except Nathan’s not the only one creating value, not by a long shot, so the equation is out of balance. Something fundamental is off. We’re a house full of cultural creatives—artists, facilitators, technologists, and healers—and yet, we’re not creating together. People are launching individual events and projects aligned with our community’s mission, but not communal ones.
Systems balance themselves out. Our house could come back into balance if he split the profit with the others doing the heavy lifting of bringing his vision into the world. But he won’t. So the system balances itself in another way: the communal initiative and value others create begins to recede.
The shape of our community—collapsing to a single point with Nathan at the top—isn’t working, not just for us, but also for him. “It’s lonely at the top,” the saying goes. It’s also exhausting. Nathan can’t step back or falter. The structure doesn’t let him. If he isn’t holding the whole community all the time, how does he justify his income?
There’s another consequence to failing to distribute ownership. It’s not just that those unwoven into the community stop contributing. Worse, when conflict comes, they might not hesitate to tear it apart.
Recently, two housemates who had been in a long conflict with Nathan moved out. Their complaints ranged from critiques about the wisdom of his decisions, to his opaqueness about the financials, to feeling like he was shutting their voices down and not letting them contribute. Their integrated gifts hardened into resentment and then into open hostility. They were so outwardly resentful and on edge in their final days that our housemates on their floor temporarily moved out until they left.
The intensity of this fracture, and I think the fracture itself, existed partly because our financial model never created a shared sense of “we’re building this together.” Just as disenfranchised citizens won’t hesitate to disrupt social contracts; disenfranchised community members will often try to burn down the house.
A Way Forward
I still haven’t ruled out the wisdom of experimenting with a for-profit community. I’d like founders to be compensated for their risk-taking, for bringing something into the world that wouldn’t otherwise exist. But I’ve realized that any for-profit community needs much more than financial transparency. Maybe the founder’s profit taken needs to taper off as others step up and the founder holds less and less. But if profit remains, any healthy community needs a clear path for distributing its sense of ownership, and in this case, that means a path for distributing profit over time.
Not necessarily in equal proportions. Even the egalitarian income-sharing communities that I’ve visited still elect certain members to hold greater responsibility. In our community, some contribute more, some contribute less, and some are here just to soak it in and receive. I think distributed ownership can reflect that
What I do know is that those who build community—who set the vision, who fine-tune the systems, who mediate conflicts so people can continue to live together, who bring the je ne sais quoi that others find enlivening—are creating something valuable. My first exposure to this was when I moved to the Bay Area for a summer internship. I saw an “intentional community” ad on Craigslist with no clue what I was walking into and found a house bursting with connection, love, and aliveness. I remember thinking “Adult life can be like this?” My dread about graduating the next year evaporated. That internship has faded from memory; that summer in community hasn’t. It changed me and taught me more about myself than any job I’ve had since.
The summer before, I paid $5000 to join a Mandarin immersion program in Beijing. Looking back, would I have paid that or more for the relational immersion I received in that house? Absolutely.
There is a vision here: of a community that brings in money for the cultural and relational experiences it offers to guests and non-core residents who sense a different way of living is possible. Our community, through the workshops we lead, has already helped many people grow into more love, aliveness, and well-being. And there are many other ways a place like this can generate value. There is a path for both founders and core stewards to be compensated, for them all to collaborate in growing the value that the community creates.
I don’t know if our community can shift to a model where the monetary value flows back in some proportion to those who do the most to steward our culture, where releasing financial control actually opens the door to more inventive creation. Systems are hard to change. Money is even harder. It’s difficult to talk about, harder still to loosen one’s grip on. And maybe introducing profit just inevitably corrupts what makes a community wonderful, no matter how good your system is for distributing it.
But the new vision still compels me enough to explore it: a home that creates value and isn’t afraid to receive it in return. A home where the value we generate is held by the community and for the community. One where there’s no landlord, whether on the lease or in practice.
Daway is a community builder and facilitator who specializes in helping groups and individuals navigate the psychological, emotional, and structural blocks that limit them. His work centers on creating spaces where people can dive into or discover their avoided issues that are blocking their creative and relational potential. See www.dawaychouren.com.