Two Doors Down

With the support of The G House LLC, four families formed an LLC and closed on 304 Homestead Road. It sits a couple of doors from 406, the original G House. That distance is not an accident, and it is not a real estate strategy in the usual sense. It is the whole idea. A life is built out of proximity: the neighbor who notices your car is gone, the friend who walks over without calling first, the second kitchen table you are welcome at. We are not building a campus. We are expanding a street.

What Chapel Hill Looks Like Now

406 is home to four wonderful residents who have the lived experience of disability and the desire to lead independent lives. 406 works because of the people in it. Toney and Colby, the House Leaders, have shown us what the live-in model looks like when someone genuinely embraces it rather than merely staffs it. They are not employees passing through a shift. They are neighbors with a stake in how the house feels on a Tuesday night. 304 gives us the chance to do it again, two doors down, with everything we learned the first time.

Room for One More Family

The four founding families at 304 Homestead are looking for a fifth. If you have a son or daughter who would thrive in a home they help own, on a street where the support is already standing, we would like to talk with you. Not a sales conversation. A kitchen table conversation.

Room for Two Household Leaders

We are also looking for the household leader for 304: a person, or a couple, who wants to live in the home and build something rather than manage something. The roles pair housing responsibility with care support through G Living, EOR, or an agency of choice and they come with a path to ownership. If that sounds like a strange combination of things to offer someone, it is. That is rather the point.

Possibilities in Durham

The Akron home in Durham is moving: architectural drawings, construction plans, and a search for the residents and house leaders who will grow this into a community. We are also in conversations with Reality Ministries about the Isaac House on North Street, and those conversations have been some of the most encouraging of the year, because Reality already understands the thing that usually takes the longest to explain: that belonging is not a service line item. Nothing is signed. But the shape of a partnership is there, and it is the right kind of partner.

Amsterdam and Copenhagen

I spent time in June with the team at De Drie Notenboomen in Amsterdam, walking through the Thomashuis model with Roger Lof and Eric Kahle. We have studied DDN for years. Sitting in their office was different from reading about them. Barbara joined me in Copenhagen, a launch city for a cycling trip through Denmark. We experienced the people, the landscapes, the real estate.

The insight we brought home is simple and slightly uncomfortable: the scarce asset is not real estate. It is the household entrepreneur. Buildings can be financed. Zoning can be worked. Finding a couple who will build a life inside a home with five adults who need them is the hard part, and every part of our structure should be organized around making that role worth taking. What we are adding is American, and it does not exist in the Dutch system. In our model, the resident families own the property, and we’re exploring equity pathways for household leaders as well.

The Unglamorous Part

Behind each house is a year of design and legal work that will never make a good photograph. Co-op governance at the house level. A parent LLC owned by the resident families. A land structure that locks the mission in permanently so no future owner can sell the thing out from under the people living in it. Professional management from the G House team, which means Carmen, Robyn, Barbara, and me doing the parts that families should not have to do themselves. It is foundational and it is iterative. We build a house, we find what breaks, we fix the documents, and the next house starts better than the last one did. Every property is both a home and a prototype.

The Long Ride and Summer into Fall

Barbara and I participated in RAGBRAI this month with Team You Betcha, riding and shepherding support vehicles across Iowa, in July, which is its own commentary on judgment. Long rides teach the same lesson every time. You do not finish because you are strong. You finish because you are in a group, taking turns at the front, and somebody hands you what you need before you have to ask: an apt description of what we are building on Homestead Road.

The G Day at Carolina picks back up this fall, and the G Living board continues to make real progress on the nonprofit side. More on both soon.

Come Sit At The Table

If you are a family looking for a home for your son or daughter, if you are a person who reads the household leader description and feels something click, or if you just want to understand how any of this works, reach out. We’re here.