A Community for Formerly Incarcerated San Franciscans Looks to Homeownership

District Commons runs several communal homes in San Francisco. Template House was formed in 2019 with the specific goal of offering communal living for people exiting prison. The owners, local couple Jessy Kate and Robbie Schingler, supported the vision behind the abolitionist cooperative and agreed to give residents seven years to buy the four-bedroom house and its shady backyard.

But those seven years are now almost up. The five residents are furiously fundraising $1.4 million to purchase the $2 million house. They have secured roughly $63,000 so far through donations, largely from individuals, plus $100,000 in a low-interest loan, with the help of the consulting firm Land and Power, which has helped tenants purchase their buildings in California and New York.

Their deadline to close on the house is at the end of this year. While the owners support the vision and have kept the price stable to support the sale even as the housing market explodes, they plan to put it on the market if the current residents can’t meet their goal.

For most, if not all, residents, that would mean moving out of the communal house and likely out of the city to find equivalent rents. Resident Eldridge Cruse, 56, said he pays $1,450 per month for his bed.

Advocates of the model say the need is more pressing than ever. In addition to the AI boom pushing rents to nearly $4,000 for a one-bedroom, a shift toward tougher-on-crime policing and prosecution both locally and nationally is occurring, which can leave people who have been arrested or incarcerated facing more barriers to accessing stable housing.

In San Francisco, arrests have surged in recent years even as crime rates overall have decreased. Public safety dominated political discussions and campaigns coming out of the pandemic, and the city has moved to put programs like a pretrial diversion program on the chopping block. That has the potential to increase the jail population and create an even larger number of people with barriers to securing leases and closing housing deals.

Template House is currently a permanent home for five residents. But the house often keeps a bed or two open for people in an emergency who are looking for a place to sleep while figuring out their next steps.

“We had two young guys come in from ICE detention who just needed a place to be. If they didn’t have an address, they were going to remain incarcerated,” said Agnew, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It’s a way of being able to offer solidarity and pay it forward, so it’s nice to have a couple of empty beds.”

For Cruse, one of the original full-time tenants at Template House, the space has been an unexpectedly critical part of his journey reacclimating back into everyday society.

Cruse arrived at Template House after spending 29 years in prison for being involved in a murder. Released without parole after his case was overturned in 2019, he didn’t qualify for transitional housing or other step-down programs. He connected with Agnew after a series of phone calls with lawyers and friends, and she offered him a place to crash at one of the other communal homes part of District Commons.

When he arrived, he immediately recognized some of the men he knew in prison sitting around a common area, and said he felt waves of relief.

“What we’re trying to keep alive is that spirit of coming home to someplace that brings comfort instead of anxiety. And my success since I’ve been here has been attributed to me having such a soft landing,” said Cruse, who now is an assistant director at a homeless shelter in San Francisco.

Shortly after Cruse arrived in 2019, District Commons proceeded to add another house to their community of cooperatives at the Haight-Ashbury building that’s now Template House.

The group landed on a strategy to work with Agnew’s nonprofit to purchase the house. Part of the thinking was that some people exiting incarceration might not have ample savings to put into buying a house and fundraising with the nonprofit could allow them to personally save in the meantime.

It’s also more straightforward to fundraise for a nonprofit than for individuals. And, residents can learn about the process of homeownership and the financial steps to get there, while avoiding some of the financial pressure to manage the dynamics of San Francisco’s unforgiving housing market.

“I can deal with the social aspect of this, but the management aspect, I leave it to the professionals,” Cruse said. “Who knows? Maybe one day I will be able to do it. But as of this time, it is very important for those who do know how to do this correctly that they do take the lead in it. And one day, then we’re able to take on those responsibilities.”

Not everyone in the house has lived experience in prison, and integrating different life and financial backgrounds is part of the group’s theory of success, as well.

“There is always some difficulty that can come with living in co-ops. It’s never quite as rosy as some might try to portray,” said Jeremy Mack, who lived at the house for around two years during graduate school and does not have direct personal experience with the justice system.

“But ultimately, spaces like Template are filling such an important gap that exists in the city and in the Bay Area at large, and are really a beautiful oasis in a landscape right now that is increasingly carceral, that is increasingly difficult to navigate, and inexpensive for people who are coming out of incarceration,” Mack said.

Template housemates say their long-term vision is a model of “mutually stewarded autonomy,” where they learn to run and manage the house together and ultimately take it off the market long-term by transferring it to a land trust.

“The Community Land Trust is a sort of legal structure that can outlive your lifetime,” Agnew said. “We talked about whether people wanted to do a shared ownership model, but everybody said that that was too stressful and would be a lot of admin… People really wanted to focus on the family and home dynamic more than the operations and logistics.”

Cruse said he already knows there’s demand, based on conversations he has with other formerly incarcerated people he knows and meets, whether that’s at backyard barbecues he co-hosts or just through community networks.

Now, residents and their allies are hurrying to recruit potential donors and lenders in the next six months to make the model feasible.

“Template is our step forward to see if we can create this cooperative, self-managing ownership structure as an alternative to halfway houses at scale,” he said. “This is just the beginning of something that is needed.”