case study: KSCO

This post was written by Evy from notes taken during an interview they did in January 2024 with KSCO residents Chris Dembia and Alejandro Vientós.

Website: kscomission.com

Date founded: A first version in 2017, and the current iteration in October 2020

Location: Mission, San Francisco

Rented or owned: Rented

Governance: “Fist of five and vibes”, which means that the results of fist-of-five votes (where 5 is the most enthusiastic vote and 0 is a veto) are turned into decisions differently depending on the specific situation.

Amount of space: 2240 square feet. Seven bedrooms, a guest loft, two full bathrooms, an extra half-bath shower, and a large open common space with the kitchen and living room. Nine people and a dog currently live there.

Origins

In 2020, James and Chris were living in a house of ten people in Atherton named Mosaic. Their landlord was renovating and ended their lease, so they needed to find a new place to live. Five of them came together to explore moving to another house.

Meanwhile, the members of the Kaleidoscope cooperative house in the Mission were all looking to move onto other living arrangements. But they wanted to preserve their space as a community house, and so they searched for a new group to take it over.

It was a perfect fit. The five folks from Mosaic moved in, and the new housemates started to also use the name KSCO (pronounced KAY-SCOH) to mark this new phase of the space. They inherited many systems from Mosaic, including how they did meetings, voting, and regular house dinners.

Finances

KSCO has one master tenant who pays rent, and everyone else pays their rent to them. The prices of rooms were previously calculated using a version of this spreadsheet, and in the fall of 2023 they switched to using this NYTimes rent calculator with some adjustments and more than a few reservations. Any time new people move in, they can request that room rents be reevaluated.

Food and utilities are spent by individuals and settled through Venmo Groups. There’s no formal spending limit, but there are norms around how much is spent. Usually people end up contributing $200/month to this fund. Most basic groceries are bought collectively (veggies, eggs, flour, salt, oils, rice, milk, ice cream, etc.), but residents are on their own for more processed food and meat.

There’s a maintenance fund to which each room contributes $50/month, and it’s been used for things like a new washing machine and speakers. Anyone can spend $20/month from this fund without asking permission, and people can pool their budgets together -- for example 5 people can come together to spend $100 (5 times 20) on something without asking for permission from the remaining housemates.

Chores

KSCO recently went through a process to update their chore system, spurred by a combination of chores not getting done and a desire to revisit systems to better suit several new housemates that had moved in over the past year. The process started with a spreadsheet called “chore feelings” where people shared opinions about various chores including how important it felt that the chore be done, how willing they were to do it, and how long they expected it to take. From this, a chore chart was created where everyone is expected to do certain things every week and everyone is given a similar number of hours of work. There’s no rotation of chores.

They provided each other feedback and iterated over time through regularly scheduled check-ins. These check-ins became less and less frequent until people felt satisfied enough that they stopped being regularly scheduled. People don’t always complete their assigned tasks, but there are no fine-tuned systems for accountability except for check-ins which anyone can call at any time. Through check-ins they were able to find a fairly simple system that could work well enough for them.

Every four weeks the house also comes together to clean on Sunday from 10:30-1:30. Two people make breakfast that’s served at 10am, and as the house eats together they create a list of tasks they want to get done (starting with a default list) and sign up for the tasks they’ll do.

Important time-sensitive things can also get done outside of house cleans and chore charts to keep the house running, for example purging the fridge to make space for new groceries or fixing a broken door.

Decisions

KSCO uses fist of five for all decisions at their house, but the way they use the result of the votes is different depending on the specific situation. Alejandro described this as “fist of five and vibes”. Usually there will be conversations with people who have the lowest votes, and sometimes their input leads to changes in the proposal being voted on. For bigger decisions like recruiting there are more conversations and formality about what a vote needs to look like to accept someone, and for smaller decisions it’s less of a big deal if some people have low votes.

They are very explicit about all their existing systems being flexible and having bias towards engaging with desires for change. Agreements from the past are always open for discussion to become new agreements that are a better fit for the needs of the current set of residents, which might include new people and might include the same people whose opinions or needs have changed. They do this partially as a way of supporting new members. They also do this from a belief that when people bring up concerns, it’s usually because a proposal from the past either doesn’t work or wasn’t implemented well, and therefore some change is necessary.

falsely captioned polaroids (a KSCO tradition)

Guest-centered

KSCO values bringing in guests and connecting with their extended community. Some residents have a desire for the house to be an almost-third-space for community members (“a 2.5 space”). On average five people come through the space every week, and every month or two KSCO hosts an event such as a clothing swap or dance party. The guest loft can be booked up for up to a week without asking, as long as the house is notified and the dates are marked on the house calendar. They have a guest door code that over 30 people know to be able to let themselves in (they keep track of who has the code in a Discord channel and rotate it regularly). Someone even uses this code to keep their spare key at KSCO in case they get locked out. The kitchen is very clearly labeled, so that any guest can use it without needing to ask where things are. Guests can eat however much they want, and KSCO has even considered creating a food-boarding system where people pay in to join for food more regularly, as a way of encouraging people to eat at the house more often.

One of many clothing swaps hosted in KSCO’s common space. At each clothing swap, they encourage people to make butt art that gets hung in their bathroom.

There has been some internal controversy about guests within the house, as some residents are more interested in making it easier to share the space with extended community and some are more interested in prioritizing residents feeling comfortable with who’s around and feeling at home. For example, at one point guests from a dance community would regularly come over and talk a lot about dance at the dinner table to the point that residents felt unable to participate in conversation. After bringing this up, the house decided that the kitchen table would be a designated space for more inclusive conversations, and small-group or closed-off conversations would happen on the couches.

Lessons learned

thanks for reading <3 this was a post from thought clippings on community housing