Co-buying a house, the life-changing power of collaboration, and The Artist’s Way
4-person homeownership as a critique of The Artist's Way
In the last month of the horrible year 2020, we bought our house—“we” includes myself, my husband Victor, and my housemates, Alanna and Josie. All four of us bought it together by splitting the downpayment and putting all four names on the title and mortgage.
Buying a house with 3+ people is not new: people have owned homes with family members since time immemorial (or since the advent of private property).1 But buying a house with your friends is novel. When I tell people about this, there are three typical responses:
Ah, what a smart investment.
Wow, that sounds like my nightmare!
Wow, that sounds like the dream!
The first response universally comes from people 20 or more years older than me. They are aware that young people are now completely shut out of the housing market; they feel nebulously bad about this fact (depending on how many young people are dependent on them), and they admire this decision as a financial strategy. The second response is from people who genuinely enjoy living alone, or had bad roommates in the past—people for whom walking around naked is a high priority to living well. And finally, the third response is from people who loved having roommates, and who never want to keep a thought to themselves for more than one hour.
All three responses are followed up with the same question: what happens if one of you wants out?
My answer is somewhat defensive: most people buying a house with a partner do not have a plan for what to do if one party wants to sell it! Couples break up all the time, arguably more dramatically than most friendships. In our case, though, we have a legal contract that governs the co-ownership, including what is legally required if someone wants to leave. If this eventually comes to pass, I hope it does with great diplomacy and kindness.
Legalities aside, when you buy a house with your friends, they stop being your friends and become your family. In the last four years, we’ve enmeshed our lives together. It’s hard not to: the adage of ‘it takes a village’ is true for everything. Imagine how much easier your life could be when you don’t have to cook every day? When you have people around when you need help—for the silly and the hard stuff—and can share the effort of being a helping hand and a listening ear with multiple people?
It’s taking some effort to publish this. Talking about happiness in public in an unsolicited forum is a recipe for invoking the evil eye! 🧿 To stress: the house is work, an active project of communication and collaboration. 🧿 On the other hand, the project of freeing myself from the belief that the universe is ruled by cause and effect, leading to inevitable punishment for the audacity to express contentment or joy, remains incomplete.
A user’s guide to buying a house with friends
Some measure of luck has kept our house afloat for four years. I’ll be honest: we embarked on this project a little haphazardly. The short history of how we ended up here is that we were in a “pod” together, when such a term was part of everyday conversation, spending a lot of time with one another as the only people with whom we were governmentally permitted to share indoor air.
Josie pitched the idea when we were in the depths of lockdown and realized the potential of buying a house and we ran for it headlong. There were a spate of articles about people leaning on friendships and “unconventional” relationships during COVID-19 lockdowns, then a spate of articles shortly thereafter about what happened when these co-living, co-buying scenarios went poorly (for example). I’m here to lodge an example of one such scenario that came together during a period completely unlike any other in our lives and has continued successfully (!) during more normal life.
The reasons why it has continued to work are similar to any partnership. Shared goals, ideals as well as shared values (both aesthetic and moral), along with a mutually crafted understanding of compromise. Not without its own learning curve!
The burden of commitment shuts out possibilities. In the case of buying a house with more than just a romantic partner: the possibility of having sex with the door open, the promise of dropping everything and uprooting your life, the ability to buy a couch without belaboured discussions or the ability able to watch a television show without checking in on which correct constellation of people is around who wanted to watch that show.
But like any act of love, it’s a commitment that transforms the people who partake. What I’ve given up in privacy I’ve received tenfold in the bounty of laughter and help taking out the garbage.
In defense of collaborating, or “My Gripe With Julia Cameron”
I recently completed Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, the 12-week “creative recovery” program. The problems with that old chestnut are well documented: it hasn’t been updated for the digital age, it believes in a meritocratic world in which everyone has the same resources of time and potential, all while Cameron shares anecdotes about buying a horse or her friends’ escapes to Switzerland.
As someone who has entered the hallowed ground of Cameron Completers, the benefits of The Artist’s Way largely lie in ritual and practice. It asks you to do similar or related tasks over and over again, most of which boil down to answering similar questions many times over: what do you want, what do you dream of, what’s stopping you? At first, this is annoyingly repetitive. But the truth is, your first answer to big questions is the one you give without thinking, the one you’ve given one hundred times, but it’s not the only answer. The book as a whole is an exercise in taking yourself seriously, and in asking yourself those questions until you come up with enough answers to start to put together the pieces.
Most people I’ve talked to who haven’t completed the twelve-week process bought the book and tried to do it themselves. This despite the fact that in the book Cameron makes frequent mentions of the groups she led that created the ‘Way’ itself. The first time I tried this, I did it mostly by myself and I failed to get through it. I then completed it because I did it with a group, with weekly meetings to keep us accountable, and to discuss the reading and our responses. I absolutely would not have done it otherwise.
My actual gripe with the book—aside from those mentioned above—is how much it upholds the atomized artist. It provides many strategies for shedding people who do not believe in your creativity. This is almost assuredly good advice for lots of people. But what about finding people to share and create your vision? The only creativity celebrated is solo creative production. Missing from the book is collaboration: both collaboration of people working together in creative partnership, but also any recognition for editors and critics, the art of refining and producing better work. It puts on a pedestal, as so many things do, solitary creative production.
How much good art is made in isolation? For every Goya painting alone on the walls of his home,2 you have thousands more works of art made with help from a dozen or more people. Flip to the back of any book and read the acknowledgments section. Is the only art writing itself—is there no artistry in the editing and shaping, the people who took a draft and made a novel? Surely you can fill in your own blank of a contemporary novel that could’ve used a tighter edit.
There is so much in the world that upholds the idea of the isolated genius—the stories we tell and celebrate, even when those stories themselves were shaped by many hands (Thoreau’s mother doing his laundry etc). We want this even now, as evidenced in our mythos around influencers, the last entrepreneurs of the 2020s. I’m reflecting, in particular, on Alicia Kennedy’s recent essay on the damage of the individual in online media, in which she discusses how digital media has stratified from larger traditional institutions into influencers who are simultaneously benefiting from being their own brand and precariously at the whims of technology companies with no vested interest in those individuals. This media landscape creates a series of voices working alone on projects that would often benefit from collaboration!
On my end: I write these little blogs myself, fueled by discussions with my roommates, and Alanna edits them—she has inserted 1-2 jokes about herself into every newsletter, which I have edited out before publication. That’s collaboration, baby.
In summary
Four years into living in this house, my review of co-homeownership is that it is just as wonderful as I’d hoped. This isn’t the path for everyone; the stars of friendship, finances, and shared goals have to align. I’m also wary that this comes across as bragging. It’s relevant to add that we own our home in Toronto, in a country with one of the worst income-to-house-price ratios in the world.3 I have many complicated feelings about it all. I do genuinely believe that sharing a house, taking up less space, and sharing more of it than I would have expected at this age (based on recent historical precedent of single-family home construction) has fundamentally changed how I live in the world. On the other hand, I can hear the ridiculousness in presenting “private property: the truly radical act.” Life is full of myriad compromises, and it’s nice to make some of those compromises with people you love.
My roommate Josie, who has never read this newsletter before and hopefully never will again (this one was dictated to her as she is featured in it), wanted it to be clear that there is no “immemorial” to private property, because it is a colonial construct.
Even this, a prime example of ‘art made in isolation,’ the evocative names of the paintings were given by historians!
Not to brag or anything.
I really enjoyed reading this! More power to the friend house!
many happy returns to you and the housemates! the commune’s continued existence/thriving-ness is such a hopeful thing, to me.