Green, who is in his late thirties, crammed a few last bags into the trunk of his Volvo convertible and dropped the top. Green co-founded Treehouse Hollywood, which opened in the weeks just preceding the pandemic.
I first encountered him several years earlier, when I interviewed him about an immigration lobby that he’d started with Mark Zuckerberg. Back then, Green had arranged to meet me in an airport food court while he waited for a flight to D.C., the better to streamline the logistics of his life. He’d sported a mop of curly brown hair and a dark blazer, and had looked tired. The Trump Administration nullified the work of liberalizing immigration.
Green started psychedelic therapy, and a nonprofit to promote it. The mop of hair had turned into a coif, and the clothes had become loud. In the car, Green wore pink floral trousers and a toast-colored Cowichan sweater. He said that vulnerability was now his lodestar, and talked about the content of his therapy and a nascent romance with a woman in New York. You know: you’re single, you’re in a relationship, you settle down, you move into a single-family home.” “It really crystallized recently for me that humans evolved with interdependence, but technology has made us independent,” he shouted while the Volvo mewlingly gained speed.Ĭhirangi Modi said that, before moving to Treehouse, she “was always following the trend. I wanted to learn what people found so absent from traditional home life that, during a pandemic, they were rushing into life in groups. Green exited onto the 101, and we slowed into residential Hollywood: dingbat houses, stucco buildings, the Netflix towers, and, across the freeway overpasses, tents. Prophet Walker woke that morning in his room at Treehouse Hollywood around four, as usual, and prepared his normal breakfast in the pre-dawn dark: orange juice, chicken sausage, sliced tomato, boiled eggs, and an avocado rained on by ground pepper. Walker grew up in Watts, in South L.A., with a mother who was addicted to heroin. At sixteen, he broke a guy’s jaw and stole his CD player, and was sentenced to six years in prison. Inside, Walker lived next to the Skid Row Slasher and earned his G.E.D. when he got out, he studied engineering at Loyola Marymount. At twenty-six, he ran unsuccessfully for the State Assembly. The next year, he was a special guest at President Obama’s State of the Union address.Īll along, he’d had an idea for a community centered in one building. “My belief was that the world should be connected, but that urban design, like many other things, failed to bring us together,” he said. He and Joe Green were put in touch by a mutual friend on the theory that they thought similarly. They did: Walker is Treehouse’s other founder. Green doesn’t live there-he has a pied-à-terre in Beverly Hills-but Walker does, with his fifteen-year-old daughter. That Saturday afternoon, he headed to the café in the entryway of Treehouse, to find out the latest from everybody else.Īlex Rafaelov had been in the café for much of the afternoon, working on an iPad, steaming lattes, and watching the foot traffic as it passed. Rafaelov was nineteen, with a jut of blond hair and a bright demeanor. They identify as queer, and are undergoing a gender transition, which had caused tension at home. They’d enrolled at a community college, getting meals from a food bank at one point, and loved the range of people they met at school. Seeking more of the same, they arrived at Treehouse last February, moving into one of its six below-market-rent rooms, for two hundred dollars a month. Other units average twenty-two hundred dollars, which roughly matches other new apartments on the block. Most people live in five-person suites, with separate bedrooms and bathrooms, built off a shared kitchen studios are available for more than three thousand a month.
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