Live with your favorite people in a social, active, evolving home.
Run Haus Living is a cooperative housing platform that puts people with shared habits and values in one home. We believe life runs better with supportive, healthy friends close at hand.
Background
Since 1948, The Framingham Heart Study has been tracking the habits of its eponymous Massachusetts town residents in search of the causes of cardiovascular diseases and disorders. The study tracked many other health indicators, including the prevalence of self-reported happiness, i.e. people who consider themselves happy. The study found people who live close to their friends are happier than those that do not. If one lives close to friends with whom they have mutual friends (a community), their chances for being happy go up even further. From a synopsis:
A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in co resident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbors (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.
For most of human history, living near friends and community members was easy. Pre-automotive societies kept people close to one another, their workplaces, and other activities that constitute a life. But almost a century of cars has upended this. Consider these statistics about modern life in America:
40 minutes: average daily time US adult spent socializing 2020.
8.00 hours: average weekday workday for Americans over 20 year old.
5.42 hours: average weekend hours worked US over 20 years old.
3.1 hours average time Americans spend watching TV daily.
3.25 hours: average time Americans spend on their phone each day, with 20 percent spending more than 4.5 hours.
47 minutes: average daily time spent in a car in 2020.
1.9 hours: time Americans ages 15 to 19 spent play video games daily.
17 minutes: average time spent shopping daily for an American adult.
1:04 hours: average time American adults spent eating and drinking in 2020.
1.64 and 2.36 hours: time spent on household chores of US adult male and female in 2020, respectively.
7 hours: amount of time Americans age 15 and over spent alone daily in 2020.
8 hours: amount of time Americans age 55 and over spent alone daily in 2020.
36 and 61 percent: portion of adults and teens who feel serious loneliness in their lives, respectively.
22.2 minutes: average daily time US adult spent participating in sports, exercise, and recreation 2020.
73.6 percent: portion of American adults currently considered overweight.
42 percent: portion of American adults currently considered obese.
These bleak facts are largely the result of America's fixation single-family, car-centric, suburban housing. Americans have become trapped in and by their homes, inconveniently distant from friends, family, communities, nature, and, per Framingham, happiness. For too many, this isolation is only made bearable through a cocktail of digital media and intoxicants ranging from booze to Fentanyl. Despite the realities, media keeps telling people how awesome it is to devote all one's time and money to paying, maintaining, and driving to one's own home.
BETTER LIVING TOGETHER
Run Haus Living is a housing alternative designed around how people naturally organize themselves, and works within America's problematic housing regulation and economics. Run Haus Living most closely resembles "co-housing," which usually involves a shared single-family home or combination of homes that share resources, time, and each other's company.
Building off the Framingham and other research, Run Haus Living puts people with shared values, habits, and lifestyles in one location, presenting psychological, logistic, and economic benefits. Those shared values center on what I call "peak personal and planetary health," a shared ambition to make oneself and the world as good as it can be, not merely as good as a broken status quo permits. More specifically, the Run Haus community is bound by commitments to:
Carrying one's own weight, literally and figuratively.
Continual improvement of one's body and mind through daily, strenuous physical activity, with a deep focus on running, specifically.
Direct, in-person communication and interpersonal interaction. Run Haus is not the place for the hardcore gamer or Insta-fame seekers; it's for those who prefer the Universe to the Metaverse.
A deep respect and reverence for the natural world expressed in frequently connecting and spending time in nature away from modern stressors like social media, work, traffic, etc.
Protecting the environment and live materially minimalist lifestyle.
Continual intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth.
Promoting economic, cultural, and generational diversity, equity, and interaction.
Creative, not conventional, living. "That's not normal" is not a meaningful criticism for one's behavior, and should be considered a compliment.
Run Haus Living is still in its early stages, but a couple pieces of real estate that may work for the purpose have been identified in Boulder, Colorado. My ambition is to build a global network of housing and community spaces, but before that happens, I am building a prototype--something I have experience building (examples: here, here, here, here, and here). Everyone is welcome: women, men, singles, families, old folk, and youngsters, as long as they're willing to do the work that comes with the above commitments.
Contact me, David Friedlander, if you are interested in being a part of this adventure in living and I can tell you more and see if it's a fit.