Five formerly incarcerated residents of a communal Victorian home in San Francisco's Lower Haight are racing a year-end deadline to purchase the building for $2 million and place it in a newly incorporated community land trust — with $1.4 million still to raise.

The five residents of Template House, a communal Victorian rental in San Francisco's Lower Haight, have a deal on the table: buy the building for $2 million by December, move it into a community land trust, and lock in affordable housing for formerly incarcerated San Franciscans in perpetuity. They've raised roughly $63,000 in donations and secured a $100,000 low-interest loan from the consulting firm Land and Power. They still need $1.4 million.

Template House opened in 2019 as a cooperative communal home for people exiting prison, after the local couple who own it, Jessy Kate and Robbie Schingler, agreed to give residents seven years to purchase the four-bedroom house and its backyard at a price they'd hold stable. The Schinglers have kept to that agreement even as the surrounding market has exploded; if the residents can't close by December, KQED reported this week, the owners plan to list the property openly.

The target legal structure is a newly incorporated land trust called the Collective Futures Project, which the Second Life Project — a program of the nonprofit District Commons Inc., registered at 438 Haight Street — intends to establish as a separate 501(c)(3). No public corporate filing for the Collective Futures Project has surfaced in available records. District Commons' most recent IRS return, a Form 990-EZ for fiscal year 2024 filed in November 2025, shows $44,218 in revenue and $48,001 in net assets. Jessy Kate Schingler, one of the two current owners, also serves as Treasurer of District Commons — placing her on both sides of the transaction.

"The thing that I really want to do is to take this building off the speculative market," Zarinah Agnew, who runs the Second Life Project and serves as District Commons' president, told KQED. "A land trust locks it in, in a way that's really powerful."

Resident Eldridge Cruse, 56, pays $1,450 a month for his bed. He arrived at Template House after 29 years in prison, released in 2019 after his conviction was overturned; without transitional housing eligibility, he found his way through a chain of phone calls with lawyers and friends. "What we're trying to keep alive is that spirit of coming home to someplace that brings comfort instead of anxiety," he told KQED. "My success since I've been here has been attributed to me having such a soft landing."

The fundraising push comes as San Francisco's rental market grows increasingly difficult for people with criminal records. One-bedrooms are averaging close to $4,000 a month, per KQED — a figure driven in part by the AI industry's concentration south of Market. The city has also moved to roll back pretrial diversion programs, which advocates say would expand the pool of people emerging from the criminal justice system only to find landlords won't rent to them and deals can't close.

If the deal falls through, KQED reported, most or all residents would likely have to leave the city to find comparable rents. The Victorian will still be there come January. The question is who will be inside it.