Levin wrote in a Substack post detailing the sale<\/a>. \u201cNo Zestimate. No existing market for a \u2018custom-built friend compound.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\nWithout an established market to look to, the group settled on a target range of $4 million to $6 million, which breaks down to about $600,000 to $850,000 per unit. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe landed on a price range … which is uncomfortably wide but honestly, we don\u2019t know if it\u2019ll close closer to $4m or $6m,\u201d Levin wrote. <\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish-SplashPad3-(1).jpeg\")
The sauna at Radish. The North Oakland property was purchased for $1.8 million in 2018, starting out with two buildings (Courtesy of Steph Dewey)![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/DSC09770(1).jpeg\")
A Radish family. The property started with seven friends and now houses 20 adults and eight children (Courtesy of Hannah Franco Creative)<\/p>\n
The sale has attracted a huge wave of interest, pulling in close to 500 people for property tours, so far \u2014 though Levin quickly realized most were curious tourists rather than actual potential buyers. To weed them out, the group had to implement a stricter financial intake form. <\/p>\n
\u201cSerious buyers ask about the HVAC system,\u201d Levin wrote. \u201cTourists ask how we handle conflict and run our food system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because the property doesn’t fit the mold of a standard real estate listing, Levin has had to hypothesize about who the eventual buyer will be. <\/p>\n
He thinks there are a few possibilities: an existing friend group of five to seven households looking to skip years of construction; a multi-generational family looking to pool resources on one footprint; or even a mission-driven nonprofit looking for a turnkey community. <\/p>\n
But his strongest bet rests on what he calls a \u201ccompound for my people\u201d buyer. <\/p>\n
![\"Radish](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish.jpeg\")
Radish residents gather at the compound. The custom-built compound started with a behavioral scientist’s firm declaration that buying a traditional single-family home would lead to isolation (bree.sees.u)![\"As](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/DSC09618.jpeg\")
As the compound\u2019s kids grow older, the community plans to scale up their next properties to coordinate shared after-school programs and group commutes to school (Hannah Franco Creative)<\/p>\n
Most shared spaces don\u2019t start with a fully formed group of 20 people, Levin reasons. Instead, they require one or two wealthy households \u2014 perhaps tech jackpot winners \u2014 brave enough to plant a financial flag first, purchase the property and then invite their inner circle to rent out the remaining units over time.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how Radish began in the first place. Levin credits the concept entirely to his wife, Kristen Berman, who is a professional behavioral scientist. <\/p>\n
When the couple was first discussing moving in together, Berman made a firm declaration: they would not be buying a single-family home or renting an apartment alone. Because her work focuses on how environments dictate human behavior, she knew that traditional housing models often breed isolation.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe sort of proclaimed that … that was not going to be the formula for our happiness,\u201d Levin said. Instead, they wanted to design an environment that would actively combat what groups face in their 30s: the inevitable fracturing of a friend group. \u201cWe wanted to basically have a place that could capture them before they decided to sort of move off alone into the suburbs, and we never see them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
There appears a significant desire to live near friends across communities and generations, yet properties built to accommodate this remain exceedingly rare. Levin calls the sale of Radish a “once-in-a-decade thing,” largely because the real estate market hasn’t historically put these layouts on the menu. However, a recent loosening of zoning regulations across the U.S. is changing that, allowing people to legally convert single-family lots into multi-home pockets. <\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish-FirePit2.jpeg\")
The stone fire pit in the shared courtyard at Radish. Because there are no real estate comps or Zestimates for a custom friend compound, the owners are bypassing the traditional market with a broad $4 million to $6 million target (Steph Dewey)<\/p>\n
Levin and Berman bought the North Oakland property for $1.8 million in 2018, starting out with two buildings and moving in with seven friends. They spent an additional $1.6 million to construct two new buildings, renovate existing units and build out the outdoor areas. The compound\u2019s name started as a temporary codename that the group ended up keeping simply because people liked it. <\/p>\n
As more people joined the circle, they constructed two additional buildings, bought neighboring properties as they hit the market, and invested into major upgrades. Navigating California\u2019s notoriously difficult building process proved challenging even for a professional developer like Levin, but it means the buyer of Radish can avoid that entire ordeal. <\/p>\n
Over the years, the group has morphed and grown into a unified community full of rituals and traditions. Radish quickly became the center of their social world, with outside friends renting or buying homes nearby just to be close to the action.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have them over for dinner, you have them in the hot tub, they see the lifestyle and they immediately get it,\u201d Levin said. For the parents, that lifestyle meant a lighter load in daily burdens. \u201cWhen we go out at night, we don’t have to hire a babysitter, we just put our kids to sleep and hand our friends next door the baby monitor.\u201d <\/p>\n
The community\u2019s rare closeness was on full display this spring when three Radish babies were born in a 15-day window. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a day where they put the three kids next to each other on a blanket, and we decided to do a paparazzi shot where everyone got their cameras out and all surrounded the kids,\u201d Levin recalled. \u201cThere were like 20 cameras taking pictures of them on the ground, like little celebrities, and that was just pretty joyous to see.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"When](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish.png\")
When three infants were born within a 15-day window, the entire 20-person community surrounded them on a blanket for a celebratory \u2018paparazzi\u2019 shot (Phil Levin)<\/p>\n
Today, Levin and his wife are entrepreneurs raising two of the compound\u2019s kids themselves, a four-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.<\/p>\n
In their next phase, Levin and his neighbors plan to coordinate on a larger scale \u2014 organizing shared after-school programs and neighborhood \u201cbike buses\u201d to pedal groups of kids to school together. <\/p>\n
In the meantime, he is focused on the compound\u2019s July sale deadline, hoping a successful transfer will prove to investors that friend compounds are a viable, mainstream housing option.<\/p>\n
Looking back at their seven years on the property, Levin doesn\u2019t see Radish as a one-off experiment. To him, the massive interest proves that living next to your friends is a common goal that has simply been blocked by a rigid housing market.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt turns out that our friends were not weird,\u201d Levin said. \u201cThis is sort of the universal desire, and it wasn’t being expressed because it wasn\u2019t on the menu for people.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-359252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish-Courtyard1.jpeg\")
The shared courtyard at Radish in Oakland, California. Close to 500 people have toured the compound so far, pushing the sellers to use strict financial intake forms to separate potential buyers from curious onlookers (Steph Dewey)![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Radish-map.png\")
The layout of the Radish compound. The site expanded from its original two buildings into a multi-unit compound (Courtesy of Radish Oakland)<\/p>\n