Loam & Trellis: Vitality in San Francisco

Growth, experimentation, and a beautiful life

Loam (n) - highly fertile soil used in gardening

Trellis (n) - structure that supports plants' vertical growth

The word that best captures San Francisco's spirit is creation. Depending on your circles, this might feel specifically like innovation, or expression. Either way, the people of this city appear uniquely interested in this deeply human act: taking an idea from the mind, and bringing it into the world.

I attribute much of the city's greatness to this tendency. A long-standing culture of creative expression and scrappy entrepreneurship has produced incalculable value for the world. From social and artistic movements, to the iPhone — the Bay Area is a clear net exporter of culture, ideas, and technology.

How did this rocky peninsula in California become so intellectually fertile — so productive? Most importantly, what can we do to potentiate its rare cocktail of creative energy?

I believe San Francisco's most beautiful future will be found by fostering conditions that promote the growth of creative experiments. I liken this to gardening, where the likelihood of new growth is a function of soil quality, and the scale of that growth is a function of ambient support.

The Goal: Vitality

While San Francisco ought to progress along a variety of dimensions, I'm specifically interested in the city's cultural, intellectual, and economic vitality. This might be measured by the amount of original research taking place, technology being built, or art being published — more generally, it's about the quantity and scale of experiments starting in San Francisco.

What are experiments? I define the word fairly broadly, as concerted attempts to enrich the lives of others and self. An experiment is a fundamentally creative act; it’s the point of contact between one’s vision and the world. Often, this takes form as an appeal to artistic sensibilities, technical innovation, or commercial enterprise. Some examples: starting a company, painting a neighborhood mural, writing a compiler, running a Hegelian phenomenology discussion group, opening a restaurant, bringing a bunch of goats to Dolores Park and letting people play with them.

Just as important as what this future looks like is what a vital San Francisco increasingly feels like. To me, this is an amplified form of its best characteristics: a contagious sense of agency, liberation from social convention, and desire for a life of consequence. The city should be an inebriating, propelling force — a welcome home for sky-high aspiration and single-minded obsession.

How do we get there? If the best proxy for vitality is the volume of experiments being run, then we should consider the conditions necessary for experimental growth.

I'll enumerate below what I think these conditions are, but first, it’s worth quickly calling out what allows this growth to be self-perpetuating: enabling a rich and fulfilling life for those people who themselves produce the conditions under which experiments can flourish: those who value intellectual exploration, personal expression, and agency. This population has long been drawn to SF, and is disproportionately likely to create things that ultimately contribute to the city's vitality. Most importantly, in their pursuit of a beautiful life, they light the beacon that attracts others who will do the same.

You’ll notice a circular dependency here: creating a beautiful life to attract those who will create an even more beautiful life. San Francisco’s greatest advantage is that the cultural cold start has already been surmounted — the flywheel is spinning, and the garden has been seeded. Let’s help it grow.

Loam: Fertile Ground

Gardeners promote new growth by using fertile, nutrient-dense soil. Similarly, if we want to encourage the growth of experiments in SF, we need to create the conditions that make them likely to begin. This means increasing:

1. Density of aligned individuals

2. Meaningful social exposure

3. Space for exploration

Together, these produce conditions for encouraging new growth.

Density

Density’s magic lies in what it enables: casual collisions — serendipitous encounters between people in day-to-day life — at the grocery store, in line for coffee, or while out for a stroll. The logic is simple: friends who live nearby are more likely to bump into one another. These unplanned interactions form a powerful, easily overlooked social adhesive — one I consider indispensable in strengthening in-person community.

The more obvious benefit is reducing friction to planned social activity. Greater density puts more people within an accessible radius of one another, resulting in a deeper social pool with more frequent and spontaneous activity. In other words, density unlocks social opportunity that would be impractical otherwise.

While density alone provides a strong sense of urban vitality, it doesn't guarantee community (paradoxically, cities are often isolating). Community is more easily derived specifically from density of aligned individuals — those who share interests, values, or vision. When arranged intentionally, this is typically referred to as co-location.

A prominent local example of co-location is The Neighborhood — an area surrounding Alamo Square that has attracted researchers and engineers as readily as it has writers and academics. Network effects are powerful; countless ambitious individuals from all walks of life have chosen to move in, making it the city's de facto center for non-traditional intellectual and entrepreneurial pursuits.

While significant opportunity exists around self-organized housing, even more remains on its underlying layer: urban development and design. Housing supply is an undeniable constraint which, when eased, enables increasingly dense and lively neighborhoods while generating downward pressure on price.

On the urban design front, promising efforts include: expansion of mixed-use zoning, re-imagining streets for human-scale activity, and additional public spaces. Space outside of home should increasingly become space for us to enjoy together, rather than merely distance to travel before a destination. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of these topics — together, they drive much of urban lifestyle quality, and frankly deserve an essay of their own.

Density, especially when paired with thoughtful urban design, is a powerful socioeconomic force. Its promotion of face-to-face interaction not only increases subjective quality of life, but also has material impact on productivity and innovation.

Density is the foundation of a rich urban life, and a flourishing San Francisco.

Meaningful exposure

The volume of interactions produced by density are indispensable, but insufficient. We also require opportunities for meaningful exposure catering to specific segments of the population. It’s these opportunities that allow people to discover that which they share, and build the lasting relationships that form a basis for community.

These opportunities are most readily available around community-oriented spaces I call “planets” — in SF, this is largely group housing, but can also include third spaces, etc. It’s worth briefly examining the unusual role they play in San Francisco’s social landscape.

Group houses function as “planets” — each has a cultural gravity that selects for a unique orbital community. These “orbits” intersect heavily with those of similar houses¹, forming a cultural cluster. Group houses of a cluster provide their community with reliable space to convene², but perhaps most importantly, space for ambient interaction — unplanned, ongoing social activity that occurs as a natural consequence of a shared environment. This might look like late-night discussions in the kitchen, or chatty afternoon co-working in the living room. Ambient interaction is impractical outside of dense, socially connected neighborhoods. However, group houses are effectively hyper-dense, tiny neighborhoods of their own — where casual collisions are maximized, and where friction associated with social activity is minimized.³

People naturally cohere around that which they share. However, to persist as a community requires space to be a community. San Francisco’s planets fulfill this need, creating opportunity for meaningful exposure by naturally filtering to sets of aligned individuals⁴, providing reason to convene, and reliable space in which to do so.

Meaningful exposure is indispensable in the formation of relationships and community. It both increases quality of life, and promotes experimentation⁵ — you’re more likely to run experiments with friends, or because of friends, than alone.

Space for exploration

When given time, energy, and exposure to new ideas, seeds of inspiration eventually sprout leaves and flowers. This is exploration — the inherently open-ended process of discovering what is, and what could be. There’s no obvious destination, and one is armed only with a gut sense that there’s something out there — to be understood, to be felt, or to be built. So, one does the inexplicable thing: raise the sails, and head for the horizon.

In practice, exploration often comes down to simply doing a lot of things — reading, writing, meeting new people, and tinkering continuously. While it’s impossible to know exactly what it looks like, there are reliably helpful ingredients: a community of others on the same journey, exposure to orthogonal ideas, opportunities for serendipitous interaction, and access to tailored events and discussions — all of which should be readily available at spaces designed for exploratory work.

I see unique value in spaces that make themselves home to general exploration, like The Commons. Here, you’ll just as easily find linear algebra study groups as you will painting classes, meditation groups, or Greek philosophy discussion circles. It’s in many ways modeled after university life, offering curriculums across a variety of topics. Unlike university life, members are motivated not by GPAs, but by genuine curiosity. Alive with playful energy, optimism, and creative agency, The Commons lives at the heart of the unique, long-standing culture of San Francisco.

These spaces provide something that most only have for 4 years, if at all — opportunity for discussion and debate, for exposure to truly new ideas, for collaborative creativity, and for curiosity-driven inquiry alongside a community. Together, these form a torch in the hand of an explorer — its blaze illuminates pathways that would otherwise go unseen.

Trellis: Supporting Growth

A significant portion of experiments that come into existence never progress beyond the seedling stage, or otherwise fail to create nearly as much value as their initiators would have liked. This isn’t a surprise — scaling is hard, and often requires a non-negligible amount of time, energy, and money. If we want to improve experimental outcomes, support is crucial.

Three categories with considerable impact potential:

1. Domain-specific communities

2. Access to capital

3. Lifestyle infrastructure

In an ideal garden, plants grow as well as their genes allow. Similarly, if an experiment fails or stops growing, it shouldn't be because of insufficient support, but because of limitations inherent to the experiment itself.

Domain-specific communities

There's a remarkable buzz when everyone in a room is excited about the same thing. Much like constructive interference between waves, passion shared between people has an unmistakable amplifying effect. This effect can be harnessed for collective benefit by domain-specific communities.

When executed well, domain-specific communities make members better off than they would be individually. This is partly due to the above, but also to the myriad opportunities for knowledge exchange, mentorship, and collaboration that inevitably appear.

These benefits can disappear just as easily. Filtering is crucial — not for experience, since a major benefit is sharing of expertise and mentorship, but for genuine interest. In my observation, the constructive interference effect requires the overwhelming majority of members to be truly enamored by the domain — failing to account for this can just as easily produce destructive interference.

Well-assembled, domain-specific communities behave like engines for progress within their respective domains — increasing collective intelligence and productivity. This exists in SF for a handful of domains (like AI), but significant headroom remains. For every domain filled with passionate thinkers, there should be a space serving to unlock the innumerable benefits unique to collective passion.

Access to capital

How much value are we being deprived of simply because the people best prepared to create it are deterred by financial risk?

Traditionally, this is discussed in the context of venture capital and tech companies, but I'm just as excited by the prospect of funding projects in other domains, like the arts, using alternate models. Patronage was responsible for the production of many of our species’ most brilliant works — Michelangelo's David, the Sistine Chapel, and many of Mozart’s symphonies. Why should this model be left to history? Where is San Francisco’s Medici?

Modern grant programs may be the closest modern analogue of patronage. These programs are excellent, but insufficient — not only are they few in number, they’re often limited to specific domains rarely including culture and the arts. Personally, I’m most excited by the prospect of funding works that seek to inspire, imagine the future, or create beauty for its own sake. It’s only too easy to underestimate the downstream benefits these efforts can have on civic pride and motivation.

Francisco San is a favorite of mine — it aims to make SF "more whimsical through eventures and installations," with cited examples of "parties, pop-ups, puzzle hunts, art, races, (un)conferences, distribution of interesting objects or anything in between." Beyond adding an air of light-heartedness and whimsy to San Francisco, it has a deeper function I think of as cultural deglazing — loosening calcified notions of what the city does, and producing reminders of agency: “we can just do things.” Culture is a function of group behavior, and Francisco San funds behavior that is incredibly valuable, but is rarely rewarded by the market.

Of course, the tech/entrepreneurial side is just as important. South Park Commons is a notable example, offering to pay people as they explore alongside a broader community. In doing this, they unlock talent that would otherwise be trapped in the golden handcuffs of a 9-5 job — easing the difficulty of transition, and functioning as an employment off-ramp.

Regardless of domain, access to capital significantly reduces personal financial risk in undertaking experiments, enabling both greater volume and diversity of efforts. Even in SF, funding dollars appear outpaced by worthy projects — projects whose value will remain unrealized so long as they are undercapitalized.

Lifestyle infrastructure

There’s a reason people love working on-campus at tech companies: they provide nearly anything you could want within arm’s reach — frequently offering healthy food, barbershops, athletic facilities, and medical care. While I’m not suggesting we turn San Francisco into a Google campus (though we could do with more slides and ball pits), it's worth considering the value these campuses offer: lifestyle infrastructure — bundles of services that reduce overhead associated with lifestyle needs.

There are independent services in SF that can be thought of as components of lifestyle infrastructure, including Jeff's Blueprint meal delivery service, and Stedman's health optimization program. Both are designed to offer quality products within their respective categories, while simultaneously saving countless customer hours.⁶

These types of services, when coupled with density, produce an “unbundled” campus-like experience. Moving one step toward centralization, we see partnerships between vendors, offering packages of multiple services under a single subscription. Another step in the same direction, and we have the campus — a space that offers lifestyle infrastructure to a population of aligned individuals⁷. As I see it, every “managed” campus sits somewhere on the spectrum between monastery (organizers pay) and university (members pay).

An example of the “monastery” model is HF0, a startup incubator in Alamo Sq. that aims to meet portfolio companies’ lifestyle needs under one roof (including housing) — allowing them to simply focus on work. This model is excellent for tech companies and their investors, but could also work wonderfully for artistic or spiritual pursuits — rather than equity sale, funded by other means, like grants or income share.⁸

A "university"-style campus may offer more autonomy to members, as they’re paying for themselves. Similar to actual universities, this could involve a subscription fee to access managed services like: housing, food (perhaps from local vendors), or spaces for education and productivity. While there isn’t an extant example, it’s possible that Solaris will shape up to be the first of this sort.

The Lower Haight-Alamo-Hayes region (roughly “The Neighborhood”) already offers a decentralized, campus-like experience. At its current pace of growth, the area will soon have nearly 100 group houses, gyms, and third spaces, all in a reasonably dense urban zone — one that has already largely selected for the aligned population mentioned at the start of this essay. However, significant opportunity remains for:

1. New services and amenities catering to campus residents

2. Bundling these services together to form lifestyle infrastructure

3. Managing lifestyle infrastructure so it can be delivered simply and at scale

Lifestyle infrastructure reduces overhead associated with the fulfillment of lifestyle needs, enabling the redirection of time and attention to the things that matter most. The campus model is particularly exciting because it promises to deliver lifestyle infrastructure while further promoting our foundational ingredient for vitality in San Francisco: density of aligned individuals.

The future

I’m deeply excited by the prospect of an increasingly vital San Francisco. This essay describes my mental map of the most important factors in getting us there. Generally, this involves fostering conditions under which experiments can flourish. To use my gardening analogy, this requires fertile soil to promote new growth (loam), and support for existing growth (trellis).

Note that this essay mostly covers the social layer. In the future, I’ll discuss the policy layer⁹, which introduces a new variety of topics: incentivizing economic activity, promoting housing development, combating crime, homelessness, and governmental dysfunction. Like the social layer, this can be understood using the loam & trellis framework I’ve introduced here. Unlike the social layer, these topics are thankfully already receiving unprecedented attention.

We’re now at the call-to-action part of the essay. There’s much I could ask of you, but here’s just one: create (or fund) the things that genuinely excite you; the rest will fall into place. San Francisco’s spirit lies in this simple act¹⁰ — recognizing it is crucial, and cultivating it even more so.

San Francisco’s significance extends far beyond the city's limits. Our world moves forward through creation — of ideas, culture, art, technology — all of which occurs with abundance in San Francisco, and has made it a disproportionate contributor to our species’ progress. Making San Francisco a beautiful place to live, and to increase the vitality of the city, is to move San Francisco forward. To move San Francisco forward is to move the world forward.

Much will change in the coming years, but one thing is certain: San Francisco will continue to grow as the home of agency, of inquiry, and the deeply human act of creation.

1. Intersection occurs particularly between houses that occupy similar domains (e.g., musician houses will have significant community overlap with other musically-oriented houses). You can start in the community of a music house, and traverse the graph until you arrive at a VR house. It might take a few hops, but this makes the full network of group house communities trivially navigable.

2. Communities that exist without space, or without permanent space, are like hermit crabs. Strong communities require readily accessible, permanent spaces.

3. Starting group houses, and finding the right people to occupy them on an ongoing basis, incurs a prohibitively high coordination cost. DirectorySF, a project I built with Tom, seeks to improve the efficiency of the sorting process by maximizing visibility into both sides (who has space, and who’s looking) while keeping signal high via careful curation. Ideally, people end up living with those people with whom they are maximally compatible.

4. I want to emphasize the importance of filtering here. This doesn't mean that everyone should be the same, but rather that they should be complementary. There should be what I call a ground floor — something fundamental known to be shared by all, and allows for more meaningful connection — perhaps shared interest or alignment in values. Having a ground floor allows robust relationship structures to be built quickly.

5. I half-jokingly say that the faster one can speed-run the ascent of Maslow’s Hierarchy, the faster one can turn attention to the world around them and the things they can create for it.

6. We may continue to see the classic “pick two” across quality, convenience, and cost. Optimizing for quality and convenience at the expense of cost works quite well given the large pool of cost-insensitive consumers, but I imagine there’s also demand for offerings at different points in the trade-off triangle.

7. The distinguishing elements of a campus, beyond simple packages of services, are: the scale of services offered, the simplicity with which they are delivered, and the centralization of its management.

8. While it doesn’t offer housing, Google is another example of this model. Like HF0, it seeks to optimize the lives of the people who will maximize shareholder ROI. This is good! These are different ways of paying for received services — with equity (HF0) or time (Google).

9. One could argue that the social layer is even more fundamental than the policy layer, and that policy exists downstream of social dynamics and demographics. This is perhaps visible in the increase in a specific brand of civic engagement in SF recently, as post-pandemic remote lifestyles made leaving easy. Those who chose to remain largely did so because they genuinely care for the city and its culture.

10. I have no doubts that the create-consume ratio of the median San Franciscan is beyond that of any other city. Spending time elsewhere makes makes immediately clear that the city is truly an oasis of agency.