Reflections on Homebrew

Three months in a New York commune, getting kicked out and a Christmas miracle.

On the 26th November, I was unexpectedly asked to leave the commune I had been living in New York City based on ‘vibes’ and a newfound aversion to ‘finance bros’. This is the story of how I ended up in a fourteen-person commune, unexpectedly made homeless a week before Thanksgiving in addition to discovering Christmas miracles can still happen.

Homebrew, based in Chinatown, Manhattan, was established by Madhu Sriram, Douglas Browne, Daniel Wu and Zuoming Shi. An offshoot of Fractal, a community in Brooklyn primarily based in and around McKibbin Lofts, Homebrew has been marketed as a coliving and coworking space that holds events like the learning sprint shown here.

Fractal is hard to describe but I think a ‘commune of TPOTers in Brooklyn’ as noted here is best. TPOT (This Part of Twitter) refers to an internet-native community interested in maximising individual agency and self-improvement. One aspect of Fractal the San Francisco Standard leaves out when describing its possible links to Luigi Mangione is that many of the founders have been involved in Effective Altruism (EA), a movement based on ‘doing good’.

Next month will mark my one-year anniversary of living in America. Moving to the United States is a dream for many Irish people, many give up on the dream due to the challenge of acquiring a visa. I gave up on the dream many years ago. But the dream came true unexpectedly when my employer moved me from Oslo to New York. For the first eight months of my time here, I lived in an apartment my employer organised in midtown Manhattan. Besides some colleagues, I didn’t know anyone in New York which I tried to remedy. Through someone I met in Emergent Ventures, a grant programme run by Tyler Cowen, I discovered Fractal.

I met Madhu, an ex-Effective Altruist, through Fractal in February and I signed up for a Progress Studies course she was running – I never attended the course but I kept in touch with her. Why didn’t I attend the course? For some time, I have been ambivalent about the potential of Progress Studies to achieve its goals. This feeling was still in its early stages in February. What attracted me to Fractal? The community is very welcoming at first and is largely full of well-intentioned people – the thought of escaping high housing costs through living with a large group was appealing to me. At the time, I thought if I got the opportunity to live in such a place, I would give it a go.

By July, I started looking for new accommodation given my new job contract which made me an employee permanently based in New York didn’t have housing as part of the package. Looking for somewhere to live was a four-week odyssey with many twists and turns involving visiting properties with bug infestations and attempted extortion by a real estate broker in Queens.

At the same time, Madhu had launched her commune on Monroe Street with seven people upstairs in Homebrew and seven people downstairs in the Residency, a kind of retreat for founders started by Nick Linck, with the distinction between both groups of seven created to avoid potential legal issues due to housing regulations in New York. In practice, there was no distinction between both apartments making a fourteen person commune. I had the opportunity to move into Homebrew as a sublettor with Madhu, Doug, Daniel and Zu being on the lease. After a one-month trial the agreement was I would eventually get on the lease if all was good.

Things seemed fine to me. Carol eventually backed out and was replaced by two Bangladeshi cousins sharing one room who later left and were replaced by Alexey Guzey. The other sublettor, Katherine, moved in at the same time as myself and besides being a Columbia student was also in her mid-twenties on Alzheimer’s medication. I learned this when I awoke to her screams at 2am one morning when a DMT trip that Doug had organised for her went wrong. During the post-trip post mortem, her voluntary use of Alzheimer’s medication was revealed.

All these things should have set off alarm bells but at the time life was coming at me fast. The first month went by and I didn’t end up on the lease. I also didn’t get a formal sublettor agreement which left me with effectively no rights as a tenant besides 30-days’ notice ahead of eviction. As everything seemed groovy, I decided to ignore these unexpected aspects of my living situation.

In the last week of August, Doug, Madhu, Katherine and I got the place set up which involved moving furniture from McKibbin Lofts and fighting a bug infestation in the new apartment. At the time, I was excited to visit McKibbin lofts for the first time and a little dismayed at seeing one of the apartments there get fumigated due to the presence of cockroaches but the whole thing felt like an opportunity to experience the practicalities of setting up a commune.

Being part of a project that could potentially beat high housing costs in Manhattan was also appealing. Looking back, I think I was pretty good free labour and I now realise defeating Manhattan housing costs is likely impossible. If someone chooses to live in Manhattan, unless they manage to find a reasonably priced place with the help of friends or relatives, high rent will just be part of the deal.

By September, Homebrew started holding events as described by Daniel here. During the day, the apartment was open for ‘coworking’ which meant often coming back at 10pm or later at night and finding random people sleeping on the floor or strangers in the living room like the scene below:

In September, Homebrew had a housewarming party. One of my best friends attended and his description of Homebrew as ‘chaos’ should have been another warning sign. October and November went by quickly. Homebrew events were humming away. At the time, though I thought the apartment was a little too open to people I felt I was getting a pretty good deal. I didn’t have any say in the running of the commune anyways, so I kept my mouth shut.

Sometime in November, Alexey appeared. The founder of New Science, an organization started to ‘fix’ science, in receipt of extensive patronage from Emergent Ventures and others, Alexey had built up considerable repute in TPOT by the time I met him. With New Science running low on funds, Alexey moved in after his failed marriage and time with him was a revelation on what life is like for extremely intelligent but low functioning Autists.

During November and the preceding months, I only slept in the apartment and didn’t really attend events. Unlike the other residents, I didn’t host any events either. On the 26th November, I turned on my personal phone to book bus tickets for a trip I planned for the following week to find these messages:

On reading these messages, my heart felt as if it was going to jump out of my chest! i remember thinking to myself a week before getting these messages that it’s a good thing I’m not looking for accommodation. On getting back to the apartment, they all refused to speak to me. For that reason, I posted the below tweets:

When both tweets started to get liked and shared only then would Doug and Madhu speak to me. It transpired the primary reason for my eviction was that Edward Saperia told them in a conversation in London that culture at the onset of a group house is very important and people in finance weren’t compatible with such living situations. The Spectator recently did a great piece on Saperia and his links to Extinction Rebellion.

Even though my life had felt like it was being turned upside down ahead of Christmas, the heartening thing was how many people reached out to me to help – I am grateful to all of them. I really appreciate the support I received from colleagues, people I met through Entrepreneur First, On Deck Founders and others. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to help many people with various projects and though our lives had gone in very different directions, many of these people reappeared and provided invaluable support.

Though I have spent some time working on housing policy, I never thought I would end up in a precarious housing situation. I posted the chat messages above on Reddit in a thread seeking advice. The thread was later deleted for ‘doxxing’. Now that I am out of Homebrew, I can say I don’t believe in protecting people’s privacy when they act against social norms and so I am sharing some of the comments that point out useful takeaways.

Many of the leaseholders had been to Burning Man, a festival in the Californian desert. At one point, Madhu likened what they had decided to do to me at Christmas to finding out that you had lost your ride at Burning Man: your ride is a vehicle that takes you out of the desert, if you don’t have one you’re stuck. The difference is I didn’t choose to go to the desert they put me in.

It transpired Doug’s initial message was written by the four leaseholders during a secret committee meeting, apparently none of them realised it was almost Christmas and probably a bad time to evict someone. Not knowing this on the night of the 26th, I emailed the following to Daniel and Zu respectively:

If I had known that they were so disingenuous I would never have moved in with them. Being an adult means being able to take responsibility for your actions including those that make another person homeless. I am prepared to get flak from people saying sharing such messages don’t make me look great or those that send messages like the below from someone in Fractal:

The reference to enemy territory is an allusion to this.

If this post helps one person avoid the situation I found myself in, it will be worth it. Over the past few weeks, I have gotten many messages from people who have found themselves in similar situations and my hope is that being honest about my experiences can save at least one person from a commune.

Consensus matters and most regular people would see living in a commune as weird or unusual, I should have taken note of the consensus. Like Solaris, a similar attempt at community in California, I think Homebrew, and even the Residency, will fail. My father, being of the Irish generation where the most important thing in life is getting up early for work and getting home late from it, would describe the people I was living with as ‘space cadets’. Some of them were definitely in space due to various DMT ceremonies. All of them fell subject to groupthink. Now I am making a commitment to stay away from such people.

I think overly empathetic types that are often found in communities like Fractal are best avoided. If you come across them, turn around and run away! Logical consistency is fundamental to the success of any project - I think the disconnect between what many communities aspire to be and how they act is why the vast majority fail. In saying this, I have not given up on the power of community – just cults and communes!

Many people have questioned the legality of my eviction. It turns out that it is legal to discriminate against sublettors based on gender in New York. All that is required for such an act to be legal is for thirty days written notice to be given. Given the way in which my time in a commune has ended, I strongly advise people to avoid such living situations. A primary motivation for moving into such a place was to save money. Upon running the calculations, the adventure of living in Homebrew and moving into a normal housing environment will cost me more money in the end though I have learned numerous valuable lessons.

In a since deleted tweet, Alexey described me as a ‘bad roommate’ and said he had evidence suggesting so. When I asked him to publish the proof, he wouldn’t do so. Why? It doesn’t exist. For some reason he is paranoid about people knowing his living situation and he feels that the way in which he spells his name and is referenced in the above messages makes him easier to track down and so he felt lying about me was acceptable. This was my first experience of being slandered online and so the positive messages I have received over the past three weeks have been immensely helpful.

For some reason, it has led to me asking much broader and more pointed questions about the kinds of people certain grant programmes patronize that I think are worth asking. Perhaps a better title for this post would be ‘An Account of Life in Internet Culture Communes’. Communities like Fractal and Homebrew are inherently internet native - many of the members met online first and/or have been heavily influenced by information they have found on the internet.

I was lucky enough to live with Alexey whose blogs have been very influential and who demonstrates the vast gulf that can come to exist between an internet and an in-person personality. Many TPOTers would call such a reality ‘very Straussian’ when it is in fact pure cowardice. In a world where meaning is increasingly difficult to find, the most contrarian and high-value strategy is to be as authentic as possible. The lines are blurring between physical and online interactions due to technological advancement and so authenticity is equally important online and off it. If I had to guess at the onset of this adventure who would have been most helpful, I would have said people in the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) pro-housing movement, that I would also describe as internet-native, that I had previously done work with.

The opposite turned out to be true. Perhaps all YIMBYism will be is another lobby group that falls victim to incentives i.e. they don’t want to truly solve housing shortages because that would mean they wouldn’t have jobs in the long-run. Many senior YIMBYs are ignorant of the realities people face when they find themselves in precarious situations as I have experienced. And so the experience of living in Homebrew has led me to the broader realisation that internet native groups are unlikely to succeed - most are populated by unserious and immature people that blur the lines between the carelessness enabled by the internet and the responsibility required by the physical world.

Christmas miracles still happen if you ask for help at this time of year. Through a colleague, I managed to get a studio in a very short period of time. I am immensely thankful to him as well as all of the people that I have met so far in life that helped me get out of this tricky situation. Now that communes are behind me, I can safely say I won’t be trying that kind of thing again!