A Neighborhood With Friends

When I first moved to Vegas, it was mostly an accident. I bought a condo because I couldn’t pass up the deal, and during the process of renovating it I fell in love with the city and eventually came to the point where I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I shared my enthusiasm with friends and within a few years we had bought 11 of the condos in our 50 condo complex.

Most people traveled for most of the time, but often at least one or two other people were there, and occasionally a large group of us would all be there at once. In many ways it felt like the best of all worlds, with the convenience and social aspect of a college dorm, but with the independence of having your own space that you could customize to your needs.

At the time, I thought the biggest selling point of the condos was their price. Many of us bought them for $50-60k, which is basically nothing for a comfortable two bedroom apartment in a convenient (though not particularly luxurious) location.

My wife bought the apartment next to mine, so we had two units that we used as one bigger apartment. We knew it wouldn’t be forever, though, as having two kitchens and paying two HOA fees didn’t make much sense. During the pandemic we felt a bit confined without access to any outdoor space (and the city astoundingly shut down the parks), we decided to move.

We moved to a new neighborhood with much nicer houses. We had twice as much space as our combined condos, a pool, and a big backyard. I felt a little bit bad abandoning the neighborhood to which I spend so much work convincing people to move, but we were happy to have a nicer house with some outdoor space.

I didn’t bother trying to convince anyone else to move, because in my mind everyone else had bought a condo mostly because it was so cheap. But then, one by one, people started asking about the new neighborhood. And new people who were never interested in the old neighborhood were interested in the new one.

Now five of us have bought houses in the new neighborhood (though one is currently renting his house out). It turns out that “buy an amazing house for cheaper than you can in any other good city” is a lot more compelling than “buy the cheapest condo in any good city”. Besides the five houses (9 people total), I also have another couple that I believe will move eventually as well as a couple potential future move-ins.

This past month was a perfect storm where everyone was in the neighborhood along with a few guests coming in over the course of the month, and it was magical enough that I felt compelled to write about it.

The closer you live to your friends, the less planning is necessary to spend time together. We know that this is true on the scale of large distances (it’s easier to see someone in your same city than it is in another state), but it’s amazing how that ease continues to scale as the distances become shorter. When everyone can walk or ride a scooter to one person’s house in a matter of minutes, spontaneous meetups to swim, play pinball, watch the hockey game, or go out to dinner happen much more frequently.

It’s also easier to help each other. I borrowed my friend’s Tesla for a road trip to Utah and it was easy to drive one minute to pick up the keys and drop my car off for him. A friend wanted me to watch her plants so she carried them over. Another friend was renovating her place so she stayed at our house and brought my tools back and forth. When one of us is out of town, the others are available to stop by and pick up packages or make sure the door is locked. It’s not a big ask.

I write so much about friction and how I try to eliminate mandatory friction in my life, and only now am I realizing how much friction is eliminated by living in the same neighborhood with my friends. Spending quality time with my friends is one of my top priorities in life, and it’s great to also make that one of the easiest things in my life.

Sharing a neighborhood also deepens friendships more than I expected. One person who I’ve been friends with for years became a much better friend when she moved down the street, and I’m now good friends with her fianceé, who I didn’t really know very well before they moved.

Right now we don’t quite have critical mass, but I also have some ideas for the future involving hiring people to provide “neighborhood services”. We could buy 1-2 days per week of a cleaner’s time, for example, and they could do all of the houses at once. If we got enough people we could probably hire someone to work a couple hours a day and do errands for everyone.

Of course, all of this is to say that I think that you should consider moving into a neighborhood with your friends. I’m not sure if anyone else will really do it (since no one has bought properties with their friends and told me about it), but it’s worth thinking about.

I think the key points are to move into a neighborhood that is nice enough that everyone would love living there, but inexpensive enough that everyone can afford it. That’s obviously tough to manage in some cities, but in cities like Vegas it is very easy. I’m sure there are hundreds of cities around the US that would have doable neighborhoods. It’s a tough pill to swallow to move to a city that isn’t your first choice, but I think it would be well worth it to live with your friends. As much as I love Vegas I would consider living just about anywhere if enough of my friends moved into the neighborhood with me.

It would be best to have a couple friends committed to the idea with you so that you don’t have to first move alone like I did, but you may need to be a pioneer so that you can sell the city. I wouldn’t have discovered how amazing Vegas is if I didn’t move here accidentally, and I don’t think any of my friends would know if I hadn’t pushed them to spend more time here and move (though honestly I don’t think most of them really loved Vegas until they actually moved).

Because I convinced everyone to move here, I feel a (welcome) burden to make it as good of an experience as possible. I help everyone find houses and meet the realtors for them when they’re not in town. I lend my van when they move in, my car if theirs isn’t here yet, and I help them fix things in their houses. As our community has gotten bigger, others have also helped pitch in with this sort of stuff, which gives a real sense of community. If you try to get your friends to move nearby, do everything you can to make it easy.

The fun part is that as the community grows, everyone ends up helping each other and it becomes bigger than the sum of its parts. My friends have found all sorts of cool things in Vegas that I wouldn’t have found and have organized trips to go do them.

You can’t control who moves into your neighborhood and who doesn’t, but I wouldn’t try to convince anyone to move in who I wouldn’t randomly invite to have tea with me on any given morning. That’s my bar. In our previous neighborhood we had friends-of-friends move in, some of whom were great, and others I found myself bumping into more than I’d want to. As with any community you’re trying to build, quality over quantity.

I have a lot of friends and family in Austin, and it could be argued that by my own standards I should have moved there. But what I find interesting is that many of the people who are closest there don’t see each other that often, because they live in different parts of the city. I think if they lived in the same neighborhood they’d see each other all the time. My point is that you should think of living in the same neighborhood totally different than you think of living in the same city. The benefits are multiplied.

Anyway, it’s a big step and a lot of work to convince people, but it’s hard to understate how much it pays off. For me at least, it’s been worth the effort, and it’s fun to see how our neighborhood community grows and evolves.

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Photo is my neighborhood…. zoomed way out.

My good friends in Kazakhstan are now running tours that are basically more deluxe versions of the second one they took me on (which I thought I wrote about, but I guess not. It was even more fun than the first). Anyway… you should seriously go on a tour with them. They’re amazing people and the two trips they organized for me and my friends stand out more than any others I’ve been on in the past 5 years or so. Check out their site at JVExperiences.com

BTW, I looked back at my first post about Vegas in the first paragraph… pretty wild how even 9 years ago I thought we’d take over a neighborhood and that I thought the values would go way up (sold my first condo for ~3x what I paid for it).


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11 responses to “A Neighborhood With Friends”

  1. Jacob Avatar
    Jacob

    Yea when I lived a few houses down the street from some close friends of mine in middle and high school it was pretty awesome. After I finish my degree I would like to do something like that. Probably wont be Vegas since it’s going to be way too hot and dry in a few decades and probably not suburbs since I don’t trust suburbs to last until I’m an old man. Unless something in my life radically changes it will be pacific northwest or where I currently am in the Bay Area.

  2. Reader Avatar
    Reader

    Where you at then? Summerlin? I found many neighborhoods in Vegas to be quite trashy. And the nice ones weren’t actually that affordable, though it’s certainly not the Bay Area.

    1. Tynan Avatar

      There are good and bad neighborhoods all over Vegas. I’m on the east side but there are also a lot of good areas near downtown. I’m also not sure what you’re saying is trashy (and I’d agree some are), but IMO the best houses and opportunities are in areas others overlook because they don’t fit a cookie cutter mold of what a “good” neighborhood or house is.

  3. Justin Avatar

    20 years ago, my friend and I would talk about how it makes sense for friends to live in the same neighborhood. It felt like a pipe dream. Nice to see someone making it a reality.

  4. Rye Avatar
    Rye

    Thanks for all the vegas info and recommendations. I recently went and had one of the best breakfasts at Publicus I have ever had in my life, amazing ! Can’t wait to go back again !

    1. Tynan Avatar

      Awesome that you got off the strip. Publicus is amazing. I love their steak + eggs, and their tea is from Song Tea, which is like the Ferrari of tea companies. I’ve only ever seen one other cafe that serves Song.

  5. Dana Avatar
    Dana

    This is literally my biggest goal / dream. I would move anywhere to live near the right people. I’m just trying to meet the highest quality friends first…the place I currently live is not for me. Looking to move to a new place that would allow me to make friends

  6. 205guy Avatar
    205guy

    I like that you’re adapting the ideas of an intentional community to the existing landscape (condos and suburbia). Some other bloggers that have similar ideas: granolashotgun.com (less explicitly) and mrmoneymustache.com (more explicitly, he also started a co-working space for his tribe).

  7. Priya Avatar

    I did something similar with friends but via renting: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friends

    Lots of similarities:
    – We have a shared cleaner
    – We take care of each other’s plants and pets
    – We spontaneously hang out often (in our case for food, skating, co-working, music-making etc.)
    – We effortlessly learn new skills from each other. E.g. when one apartment refurbished their unit, many ppl in the community got to learn construction and use power tools for the first time. This spurred other friends to do construction too — they built lofted beds.
    – Many of us do daily standup together, where we meet in the mornings at 9:30, journal for 2 minutes, then share for 1 minute. We often end up unblocking each other.

    Re: “That’s my bar. In our previous neighborhood we had friends-of-friends move in, some of whom were great, and others I found myself bumping into more than I’d want to.”
    One thing I like about starting this experiment via renting is that it’s inherently impermanent. I intend to co-buy at some point, and by then we’ll have learned exactly where the bar is.

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