We often joke about how the tenants we wish would leave, don't leave, and the tenants we hope will stay longer, leave sooner than we'd like. Similarly, the people we hope will apply for an apartment, do not apply, and the people we do not want to apply, do.
That comports with my observations of the value different people put on community. Those with useful hard skills don't need the community as much as the community needs them. The unskilled majority often see joining a community as the only way---or at least the fastest way---to indirectly access these skills. Naturally, this creates tension. The skilled leave (brain drain) and only people with the standard trope of "singing, dancing, and story-telling" abilities remain and then they turn into a traveling theater group (failure-mode 1).
Personally, I find it a lot easier to deal with an annoying person who doesn't live with me (just ignore them/I don't feel compelled to give them a polite brush-off; just ask my local door to door sellers) than an annoying roommate/tenant/cohousing-member who would be a lot harder to get rid of once they're in. For the later, I would screen so hard that practically nobody (except DW) would ever make it through.
The decentralized approach would work more like a club. I think the biggest risk of not having a screening process is moving to ERE City and finding out that either 1) Wow, all these other ERE people really suck in person; or 2) Wow, all these other ERE people really think I suck in person. This is also why a required condition is that people like to live in the place anyway even if the ERE thing doesn't pan out. It's a lot easier to stop seeing someone than to kick them out (or be kicked out).
Putting a bunch of highly functioning ERE people together seems redundant. I mean just two Thoreaus are a crowd, no? And what's going to happen, you get your costs down to $6,943.55 a year? Not to mention putting someone like myself within a true ERE group would obviously be highly detrimental to the group. I could see the discussion turning to what's the most ERE way to kill a guy. So it seems to me the best way to go is for the real ERE people to seek those who want to apprentice and take some work off their hands. Kind of like a terrorist cell or the early Medieval pedagogical thing where a small group of acolytes sit under a tree with a renowned teacher.
I could attempt to model the filter(s)s for ERE city using Decomposition Tree visualization in Power BI with Consilience (or GDP, or Happiness) as value to be AI maximized under analysis. I think the results might be quite surprising.
In a previous life I was the HR Manager for the beta-test-store for a mega-book-retailer located in the Most Educated City in the U.S. Prior to being incorporated, this retailer had a high-hurdle filter for employees in the form of a very tough book knowledge test. When I became HR Manager, the book knowledge test had been outlawed by legal, music sales were being expanded, and "diversity" was the stated mission for the year. It was also a tight labor market when I was attempting to hire all the staff for the brand new store, so I had to put up recruitment posters in order to get enough applicants. Still, I wasn't going to hire anybody who hesitated when I asked them, "What do you like to read?" The rather surprising thing that happened due to this shifting of filters was that sales at the new store were fantastic, and I received all sorts of random kudos from Corporate for hiring such a "friendly" staff. It also became a running joke that even though I hired the most diverse staff possible in terms of a variety of parameters, the store became a sort of nerdy/bohemian lid-for-any-pot hook-up/romance central (I was married with small kids at the time, so was not hiring for my own "benefit" in this regard.) with almost everybody on staff dating somebody else on staff. The weird thing is that given the tight job market, I was only filtering hard for "reasonably literate" and "not completely sullen during interview" and "not acting like coke addicted" after actively recruiting for diversity with my posters, but the results were unexpectedly good. The store had a very up vibe.
