Sandwiched between two highways and a river in north Denver, there’s a historically diverse neighborhood called Globeville.
Now, zoom in to a street lined with small bungalows and there’s a big corner house its residents have named “Nowhere.”
“I think it looks like a big red barn,” said co-owner El Rice of the now burgundy building, faded by decades in the sun.
Rice, 37, is a cellist with short, spiky, red hair. They are the first to admit this place is funky, starting with the wooden deck.
“There's literally like a bathroom-sized giant hole under this,” Rice said, which could have been used for a bunker or a root cellar, an insulated space previously used to preserve food.
There’s also a carriage house that only fits a carriage, not a car, and a secret trapdoor to a cellar.
But this quirky nature and the mixed-use zoning are part of what made the place shine to Rice and the two other owners — their partner and a bandmate.
The three are part of a growing movement contending with the housing affordability crisis in the U.S. and proving the American dream of owning a home can look a bit different today.
Last year, they pooled their resources to qualify for the almost $700,000 triplex. They’re turning it into an all-ages, DIY venue for emerging musicians or poets. They named it Nowhere since they feel the area is often overlooked, and they’re living in it together, in separate units, though.
“We are punks, but we're also adults, and we need to have some personal space,” Rice said.
Rice and their partner, Max O’Hern, will live in one unit. Bandmate Schwa, short for Joshua, Sanders will live in another, and they’re renting out the last unit to help pay the mortgage. They’re demoing walls to create a shared indoor space, which could act as a living room for everyone.
“We can have our roommates, have our community without having to share a kitchen, which is where all the problems come in, I feel like, with roommates,” said Sanders, who described his stage character as a “pirate Santa” with a white, scraggly beard.
Sanders said he turned 50 this year and has been dreaming of this kind of setup for three decades. Seeing the housing market explode after the COVID-19 pandemic only put him further over the top.
“I went from being able to afford a two-bedroom house to being able to afford a studio condo, literally overnight,” Sanders said.
Across the West, home prices ballooned more than 40% from 2020 to 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, and ownership became unattainable for millions of Americans.
“Initially all of the conversations I was having were about affordability,” said Sarah Wells, the group’s real estate agent.
She owns her house, part of the Queen City Cooperative, with six other people and specializes in these kinds of purchases. It’s called “co-buying,” and she said it’s gotten a lot more popular.
“Going through COVID and everyone feeling that isolation,” Wells said, “I've seen way more people come to us because of an interest in intentional community, not just from a place of affordability, but from a place of community connection.”
Some are friends. Others are siblings or multigenerational families, parents wanting to live under the same roof as their kids as they age.
If you include unmarried couples, co-buying purchases could account for 31.5% of home sales this year nationwide, according to the company CoBuy, which offers platforms that help co-buyers get on the same page before and after buying. That’s up from 25% in 2021, when the company first started tracking these numbers. It estimates that 64 million Americans co-own a home today.
And co-buying isn’t just popular in Colorado.
“We had two friends going in together to buy a house,” said Rebecca Hess, a realtor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “They bought a four-bedroom because then they turned around and rented out their bedrooms to their friends.”
She said co-buying is more likely to work in urban areas than rural ones, where prices can be higher.
There could be other downsides. Buyers are weighed down by the group’s lowest credit score when getting a loan. Plus, friend breakups can happen.
Hess is still a little skeptical.
“I think you have to be very wise on how you do it,” she said. “Have proper documentation sketched out and signed prior to, just in case something happens.”
The Nowhere house already has a contract of this kind.
The agreement pencils out a clear exit plan if somebody wants to sell. The other co-owners get first dibs on their share. It also talks about how they share money and live together, along with some other specifics.
“None of us care about the Super Bowl,” Rice explained. “So, we decided that Super Bowl Sunday would be a good day to set aside every year to have our yearly homeowner meeting where we go through any projects that we completed that year.”
That includes a stage they built in the backyard for shows. Rice and Sanders’ apocalypse-themed punk, folk band, “Fables of the Fall,” performed there last summer. They were beneath a tree’s canopy and string lights in front of an intimate group of friends and neighbors.
Now, they’re getting the indoor venue up and running in the Nowhere house. They hope to open it to the broader community early next year.
“I think that by working on something this big together, it makes it feel possible,” Rice said, taking a pause, “ in a way that it wouldn't if I was just trying to do it myself.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
