Supernuclear: A Guide to Coliving

The published guidebook to co-living by Phil Levin and Gillian Morris, drawing on their experience starting three co-living communities and living in seven. Functions as the meta-framework for the contemporary co-living movement.

Supernuclear is a guidebook to co-living, co-edited by Phil Levin (founder of Radish in Oakland) and Gillian Morris (with experience across multiple co-living communities). Between them, the two have started three co-living communities and lived in seven. The guidebook is published as an ongoing series on Substack at supernuclear.substack.com.

The guidebook is organized as practical knowledge for what Phil and Gillian call the instigators, organizers, and creators: the person in a friend group who has the vision and is trying to figure out how to make it happen.

Topics the guidebook covers:

• Group decision-making in co-living (consensus, do-ocracy, voting, hybrid models)
• The Pyramid of Coliving Needs (a Maslow-style hierarchy adapted to co-living: basic infrastructure, social rhythms, growth, contribution)
• Legal and financial structures for co-buying property (LLCs, Tenants in Common, HOAs, the FriendLLC model)
• The Radish FriendLLC Model in detail (separate entry in this Library)
• Case studies of specific co-living communities (Dreamship, Open Field, Radish itself)
• The Supernuclear Directory (a working list of co-living communities Sharon may want to cross-reference)
• How to find the right fit, recruit residents, structure rents, handle exits
• Practical tooling: Loomio for distributed decisions, Slack for communication, regular in-person check-ins

Why it sits under Frameworks rather than Constitutions:

The other entries in the Constitutions category catalog the governing document of a specific community. Supernuclear is the meta-framework that lets you read those documents comparatively in the co-living domain. It plays the same role for co-living that Ostrom's Eight Design Principles plays for commons governance: a synthesis across many cases that gives the field a working vocabulary.

For a researcher, Supernuclear is the entry point into the contemporary urban co-living movement and the index pointing at the specific community constitutions worth reading next.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is in the early stages of setting up a shared house and you want a resource that covers the operational side without requiring you to read governance theory first, Supernuclear is probably the most practical starting point available right now.

Supernuclear's own network of coliving houses, primarily in the US and UK, uses the handbook's templates as a common starting point. These are not identical communities: each house adapts the materials to its own context. But the shared vocabulary makes it easier for people moving between houses to orient quickly, and the network has developed a community of practice around what works and what doesn't.

The houses using Supernuclear templates tend to be urban, 8 to 20 people, and somewhere between a house share and a full intentional community. That is a real and underserved middle ground. A lot of people who want more than a flatshare but less than an eco-village have found that Supernuclear's framing matches where they actually are.

For adjacent approaches, the Embassy Network covers similar territory but with a more explicitly political and cultural orientation. Embassy houses are interested in questions of governance and commons in a way that not every coliving house is. Roam sits at the other end: more nomadic, more commercial, less interested in the community formation questions that Supernuclear centers. Where you land between these depends on what your group is actually trying to build.

Where the door is:

• The Supernuclear handbook is free online. You do not need to join anything or pay anything to use it.
• Their Discord community is active. If you have a specific question about house agreements or conflict resolution, there are people there who have worked through it.
• One practical suggestion: do not try to implement the whole handbook at once. Pick one section that matches the problem your house is currently sitting with. The house agreement template is a good starting point for a new house. The conflict resolution section is useful once you have been living together for a few months and things are starting to get complicated.
• Ask your group: what is the thing we keep not talking about because it feels too awkward to raise directly? That is probably where to start.

One caution worth being direct about: Supernuclear's materials were built for urban coliving houses in the 8 to 20 person range. If you are working with a larger community, 50 or more people, or a rural setting, or a community with significant shared assets or legal structures, the handbook will get you partway there and then stop being useful. The operational challenges at that scale are different enough that you will need to draw on other sources.