Similar to Morris, Rose previously lived in the Bay Area, where the co-living scene is abuzz. In 2021, after moving into a three-bedroom New York apartment with friends, a vacancy in the unit across the hall presented an opportunity. “We happened to have another friend who was trying to move from San Francisco to New York at the time, so we helped her sign that lease. It was a four-bedroom, so we helped her fill those rooms. At that point, it was like Friends. We would just leave our doors unlocked and go between them.” So, Rose dug deeper and deeper into organizing the community over the next few years. She’s gone semi-viral singing the praises of living near friends and has sold numerous pals on the lifestyle. Like Rush, Stokes, and Smith, she points out the natural ease of linking up to hang out when the need to “make plans” is replaced by casually bumping into each other.
“The sense of serendipity [is a major benefit],” Rose says. “Before I was in this situation, it was a lot of, ‘Let’s get coffee next Tuesday at 7:00.’ Now that’s just way less common. It feels a lot more like being in school. You just can spontaneously hang out with people… As an adult, there’s a lot of drudgery—you go to the grocery store, you do your laundry. But for the last multiple years, I always go to the grocery store with a friend.”
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According to Rose, the Fractal organization has no religious or ideological binding agent beyond simply a desire to maximize time spent around pals. Levin, too, laughs off comparisons to a commune tinged with the darkness of every negative commune stereotype—though by definition, he admits that Radish kind of fits. “They are [communes], so part of that’s true,” he says of such co-living arrangements. “But it’s an urban commune. Most of us have great jobs and we all have private space. We have our own homes, which are just homes near each other rather than homes near strangers.”
Levin isn’t promising a perfect world through Live Near Friends. “No one’s trying to create utopia here,” he insists. “What this is going to achieve is just making your life feel 30% easier and 30% more supported. It doesn’t solve the world’s problems, that’s not the claim. It’s a better way to live, alongside a bunch of people that [you] think really matter, especially in busy, hard, or lonely periods.”
