[foobarbecue]

Hey, seems like a cool idea! I've always lived in apartments and wished there was an easier way to meet people than relying on bumping into them in the hallways. Have you built anything yet? By the way, I noticed a typo -- "aprtment."

[readonthegoapp]

thanks!

and thanks for the typo note -- fixed.

nothing built, other than the carrd.co website there. i kind of wanted to put something down 'on paper' to try to develop the idea a bit more myself, maybe show it around online here and there - at least see if i'm just a monster or if other folks have the same problem, etc. and it's def helped to put the site together - it's just allowed me to take the next step - think about:

  - how to contact people, 
  - what types of friendships/relationships/apt-family people might be interested in making/creating, 
  - how would we actually set up an initial meeting between future-apt-family members
  - is 'family' too strong a word/idea? part of my goal is to increase solidarity generally.
  - could / should these communities be able to evolve into something much more thna 'just' a family -- tenant union, buy the building/property, land/building-type trust stuff?

i thought of 'competition' (co-opetition?) that already exists, things like:

  - apt communities doing 'pizza days' or whatever once a month
  - some communities have fakebook groups, etc.
  - some folks will actually meet around the building - parking garage, street, laundry room, dog park, walking around the hood, etc.
  - some folks will meet on Nextdoor

and i didn't want to fall into the 'trap' of trying to build something online -- or mostly or only online.

my natural inclination for a lot of things these days seems to be 'avoid doing this venture online because it will suck -- almost by definition'. that's a bit harsh, but just my take. some of my ideas, like a kb idea, it's online-only and that's fine/good. but when i think of 'online apt community', the closest thing i can think of right now is 'nextdoor' -- which... has always felt like a racist/classist cesspool to me, whenever i checked into it. just my take. so doing yet another online community like Nextdoor, or fakebook, just has an 'ick' factor for me.

one buddy said his communities' 'pizza days' are all he has ever needed to make NEWFOREVERFRIENDS in whatever city he has ever been in, and that this MyAptFam idea is completely stupid or worse.

and then i met a kid who said, during some discussion i wasn't even involved in, "i'm NEVER moving to another city where I don't know someone again."

[foobarbecue]

Oh man I wish there were pizza days in my neck of the woods.

I really like your thinking about keeping this from being entirely online. How about something involving flyers or bulletin board notices, but maybe the app somehow facilitates that?

Another thought that bubbled up in my head is that I wonder if there's a way to gamify the act of meeting neighbors ... ooooh now that feels like it has potential to me. Your building gets points for how many people have met each other, and there's a geographic leaderboard. Or maybe you could set up the incentives to encourage deeper interaction, like involving some of those icebreaker games (some of them are actually not lame IMO). Honestly if this app took off, I could see the apartment's "social score" affecting property value. Ok now I'm getting excited. Also worried about potential negative consequences.

[readonthegoapp]

yeah, flyers, bulletin boards, etc. -- lot of this stuff, in a sense, you're confined/constrained to doing online things because presumably we don't own / manage / control the building, but we could either operate without the blessing of building management, or work with them.

i'm guessing building management-type community-building software already exists -- i've used some of it to pay rent -- but nothing that actually tried to build community, that i remember.

to me, having building mgmt involved is problematic, but.... not necessarily a dealbreaker. maybe your pitch would be, "hey, use our software for $5/apt/month, and we'll increase your lease renewal rate by 5%, and therefore you'll end up saving/making a net of +$6,000 this year for your 150-apartment complex. (I don't actually have any idea of the economics.)

i did talk to a friend who is part of an investor group that owns apt buildings - he's not interested in this solution from an ownership perspective (maybe he should be?) - but presumably he would be able to get in touch with the companies he/they hire to manage the buildings. i think the mgmt companies get 10% or something to run/maintain a building, and presumably if they don't hit their revenue targets, then a new mgmt company is hired (??) - no idea tho really.

so, we would not have at least my ideal scenario of a perfect apiring-to-be-a-family community -- b/c it would ultimately be controlled by the apt mgmt -- but we could still achieve _some_ level of camaraderie/family/solidarity/friendship amongst the tenants -- and that might be where we have to start.

i kind of think of it like tv during the clinton years (i think?) when he/they/the gubment/tv/media were pushing the whatever communications act of 199x -- basically, giving away much of the tv/some?? spectrum for free to the megacorps (instead of licensing for real money from taxpayers, providing some of the spectrum for public broadcasting, etc.) -- and all the major news channels/shows/etc. just didn't cover it -- so the public/taxpayers never knew about this heist of the century.

so, something similar could happen with an apt community 'bulletin board' -- someone posts, "Hey, my rent is going up $300 this month, wtf??" -- and building mgmt is like "nope, deleted." -- so, that would suck, but....i would argue the tenants could/would at least know each other enough to take their organizing on that topic to another forum and/or offline.

i suspect a lot of this hippie-dippie community stuff is what adam neumann is trying to do with flow.

i like the gamification idea. i usually _hate_ those 'team building exercises' in various settings, so....i might be too biased in this particualr use case to see clearly, but it sounds cool/fun - if you're actually into meeting your neighbors. coming up with things/ideas/games/etc. that would actually work would be difficult, but prob also fun, interesting, etc.

what would the potential negative consequences be? maybe a building has a '0' social score? :-D

to me, right now, most apt complexes with 50+ units deserve a score of approximately 0 anyways.

[foobarbecue]

Yeah, status quo is almost all apartments get a score of 0! OTOH, I did have some friends that lived in a giant apartment complex in Santa Monica that was one big debuached party 24/7. People who moved there knew that that's what they were in for. Not sure what conditions set that up. It seemed like the reputation of the building was self-sustaining.

My concerns about the gamification are that it would be quite easy to accidentally make things really creepy. E.g. lets say you have a game intended to get you to share stories with your neighbors, and the win condition is that you prove to the app you know stuff about each other, and then you accidentally end up with neighbors aggresively researching each other, and it's 1984.

[readonthegoapp]

santa monica story is funny. and fun.

interesting tho if you think that certain buildings could have personalities -- oh, this is where the partiers live, hippies over there, capitalists over there, etc.

yeah - i can see the risk of creepiness from gamification, and just other stuff.

we could do something to try to set up guardrails, but lot of creepy folks out there, and others who just don't know how to act -- i.e. possibly unintentionally creepy, might be immature, just make a mistake, etc.

guardrails might be a 'School of (Apartment) Life' HOWTO Guide, with something like:

  - don't go into someone's apt, or let them into yours, unless/until you know them really well
  - don't be aggressive with asking about people's personal stuff -- take things slowly
  - don't shit where you eat (you are free, of course, to date / break-up with, marry / divorce the people you live with / near, but we STRONGLY recommend against it -- for various reasons -- read more...)
  - etc.