About

Who made Townsteading and what it serves.

Who made Townsteading

My name is Tristen Nichols. I decided to build Townsteading due to some simple observations: the people who most want to rebuild local community are usually the most geographically scattered, and those with zeal for building human-centric places to live are wasting their efforts dealing with bureaucratic nonsense from governments that manage an infrastructure that isolates individuals.

The project is both a practical public resource and part of a larger argument about rebuilding America’s communal and spiritual society.

My personal site is here: TristenNichols.com.

The local experiment

Townsteading is a lived experiment. Me and three families moved into the same town together with the intention of establishing a walkable, organic community with necessities both physical and spiritual. The larger project is to concentrate households in real towns, and the public directory exists partly so this experiment, and others like it, can be conducted in the open, with shared facts instead of merely ideology or rhetoric.

I am an Orthodox Christian, and our spiritual lives revolve around the Church Calendar. The American way of life makes it difficult to really experience the life of the Church together as a parish. Our personal goal is to have a local parish with parishoners and clergy a short walk away so that we can not only live that life, but produce people with an Orthodox phronema.

That being said, any group of friends can start a Townstead. I included the location of canonical parishes to make it easier for Orthodox Christians to find a place with a ‘mother parish’ to start out.

The role of the directory

This directory functions as the atlas for Townsteading: one verified list, built from one published screen, free to browse. Every town shown passed the same rules; the methodology page documents them, and every profile discloses its own data limitations. The directory will be regenerated as underlying datasets are updated.

Future plans

I plan to eventually introduce a forum and matchmaker. The focus of both will be to start a Townstead with your friends and to find potential fellow Townsteaders.