Before the citation, there was a home.

HOME is a small place on about eleven acres of south-facing foothill land, three miles up from Nevada City, where bear clover grows between the ponderosa pine and the black oak. I started it in 2019, and the community that grew here has shared it since — the barns, the water and the woodpile, the plain daily work of keeping a place going and keeping faith with each other. It was never meant to be remarkable. It was meant to be a home more than one household could afford, on land we would try to leave better than we found it.

The name came before the land

Before there was any ground under it, there was a name. HOME began in 2018 as a small idea I couldn't stop turning over — a dinner-series notion, a way of gathering people — and the pitch I kept making, first of all to myself, was that one project might answer three things at once: a place people could actually afford, work that was worth doing, and the plain company of other people. The name grew up alongside the idea, and it changed as the idea got more honest. By the spring of 2019 it had arrived where it still sits — months before I had found a single acre to put it on.

The land

People homesteaded this parcel long before I ever saw it. Barns stood on it that the county's own records reach back to count. There are oaks, a seasonal creek, and an irrigation ditch cut across the slope that still runs water year-round. That ditch began in 1882 as the Leonard Ditch, dug by the South Yuba Water and Mining Company to serve the gold mines, and was later taken over by the irrigation district. I think about that a lot: a channel first cut to serve mining, now carrying water to grow things. It is most of what I mean by the name of this place.

This is Nisenan country, and has been for more than ten thousand years. The village of Ustomah stood where Nevada City stands now. One of us wrote a voluntary one-percent Nisenan land tax into our community agreement, a small, permanent way of remembering whose home this was first.

Coming to the foothills

I found the land in 2019, out past Nevada City where the pavement gives way to red dirt and the pines lean in close. I had been looking for a while, and when I finally walked this parcel — the barns already standing, the ditch already running, the oaks holding the slope together — it felt less like taking on a property than being handed the beginning of something. We moved on that summer, a small group of us, and started the ordinary work of turning a piece of ground into a home: clearing, mending, learning where the water went and where the cold settled.

Building a home together

The idea was cooperative in the plainest sense: share the cost, share the labor, share the table. We wrote it down in 2020 — three community dinners a week built right into the agreement, weekly meetings, and a rule that we decided things together, by consensus. The pitch I made to myself and to everyone who came was the same one the project started with: that one place could answer several things at once, a home people could afford, work worth doing, and the company of other people around a shared table.

There was a bigger dream underneath it. I imagined that if you lived here and worked to make the land better, you would earn a real stake, and that after enough years the people who did the work would own the place together. I will be honest: we never built that. It stayed a dream, and the ordinary business of a shared life kept me busy enough. But it is still the idea under the barns.

The life of a shared place

For a long stretch of years, that is simply what this was: a place where people lived and worked and ate together. Households came and went, the way they do anywhere. The woodpile got split and the garden got put in; someone cooked for whoever was around; the barns held tools and projects and the general clutter of a working homestead. Not every day was easy — any shared life has its ordinary arguments, and ours had its share. But the center of it held: meals, work, the land, and the steady effort of keeping faith with the people you have thrown your lot in with.

All the while, I tried to do right by the county's rules — to ask the questions, chase the right permits, and keep good records of a place that had been standing, in one form or another, long before I arrived. That habit of keeping the record turned out to matter more than I could have guessed.

Why I built it this way

People sometimes ask why I would take all of this on. The truest answer is the third thing in that first pitch: the company of other people. I wanted a home with others in it, and I wanted it built to last.

Somewhere in these years I also came to understand myself better — that I am autistic and ADHD together, what a lot of us call AudHD. Naming it explained a good deal about how I am put together. It is part of why I reach for systems and written-down agreements and a carefully kept record; part of why a home shared with others, structured and legible, made sense to me when a great many other things did not. I mention it here because it belongs to the honest story of this place, and because the record I keep — the very thing the chapter we are in right now turns on — is, for me, how I keep faith.

Being neighbors

HOME is not apart from Nevada County. It is a small part of it. We shop the same stores, drive the same roads, and expect the same thing of our local government that anyone does — that it deal with us fairly and keep honest track of its own paperwork. Which is where the chapter we are in right now begins.