Reihan: Bring Back Communes!

We all know that the kibbutzim failed as a social experiment: those that thrive today operate on markedly different principles than those of their utopian forebears. Having learned quite a lot about how and why so-called "intentional communities," I really think we need to take another crack at building an alternative to single-family living arrangements. No, I don't mean we need to build more multi-family apartment buildings or condos, though we should certainly do that. I mean I think we need to encourage families and couples to "double up," i.e., to live in closer quarters with strangers. If this sounds to you like Soviet-style communal apartments, you're on the right track.

It's quite common for recent graduates and single people to live in group houses or with roommates, first and foremmost to better spread costs and secondarily for comradely companionship. There is a sense that one ought to "grow out" of this phase of life, as though there is something slightly juvenile about living in such jumbled-up circumstances, and of course marital intimacy demands privacy. Or so we've come to believe.

But given the tremendous environmental costs of our housing stock, I think we need, as individuals, to start considering truly radical measures. Building new houses to Passivhaus standards (i.e., houses that maintain a consistent temperature without costly HVAC systems) is something we ought to aggressively pursue. A more immediate solution would be to use our existing housing stock more intelligently.

Between now and 2050, we will in all likelihood add well over 100 million people to the current US population of 100 million. And of course we've grown accustomed to steadily consuming more housing per person, even in the heart of our metropolitan areas. Some see this as a happy byproduct of rising affluence, and that's easy to understand. At the same time, it has encouraged a tremendous, absolutely perverse waste of space and energy. The mortgage interest deduction has something to do with this, and getting rid of it is almost certainly impracticable politically speaking.

The most effective way to "communalize" living arrangements in the privacy-conscious United States would be some kind of economic calamity. We don't want that.

Another way would be to sell it as an attractive alternative to anomie. And that's already happening. Shrewd developers are building vast "condotels" in cities across the country. These buildings, a longstanding obsession of mine, offering a wide array of hotel-like amenities to residents. Other buildings have full-time "activity coordinators" who are there to facilitate social interactions among residents, the kind of thing that you'd expect organically. Of course we can't expect that given the anonymity and heterogeneity of big cities, and the work schedules of the affluent.

"Co-housing" communities, a middle ground between communes and private homes, are becoming increasingly popular among boomer retirees. This strikes me as a model that can and should spread.

The four couples, two widows and two who are now living solo live in eight individual town houses, grouped around an inner courtyard. Still under construction is the "common house" with a living room and a large kitchen and dining room for communal dinners; upstairs is a studio apartment they will rent at below market value to a skilled nurse who will provide additional care. It is their own self-styled, potluck utopia.

"It's an acknowledgment that intimacy doesn't happen by chance," said John Jungerman, 84, a retired nuclear physicist and one of several Ph.D.'s in the group, who is perpetually clad in purple socks and sandals.

These people are really, really smart.

We can go further. Why not rent a ramshackle 5 bedroom house and fill it with a couple of couples and a couple of singles, all like-minded. Two members of the "mini-commune" could be the homemakers, preparing meals and creating a pleasant, nurturing environment. These could be people who work from home on a flexible basis or who take a particularly strong interest in the domestic arts. The others would be breadwinners. This could, of course, be a reciple for disaster. But consider the savings, in financial and environmental terms. And consider how full of life such a house would be relative to a sterile home that is empty most of the time.

Just a (crazy) thought.

Comments

I'm ENORMOUSLY sympathetic to this, but I think there are huge cultural barriers to it happening, other than to some extent in in the urban singles context.

Posted by LarryM | October 4, 2007 3:04 PM

Reihan, I'm sympathetic to this as well. Just let me know when me, my wife, and two kids can move in.

Posted by Joe Marier | October 4, 2007 3:23 PM

I'm a recent law grad and currently "co-housing", so let me tell you that it is more than a cultural barrier that keeps people from doing this long term. It is a privacy/autonomy/simplicity issue.

The privacy issue comes to the fore when at least one person in the house is in a relationship, and I'm not just talking about sex. Couples want to be alone with each other, and to be forced to retire to a bedroom or do without gets pretty old. When there are two or more couplings going on -- especially if the coupling tends to bring yet another party into the house -- the situation becomes even more tiresome.

The autonomy issue is pretty obvious, too, and runs into the simplicity issue. More people in a house equals greater complexity -- ranging from who gets to watch what on the big screen to who gets to eat what and when -- and more complexity equals less freedom. Tension is inevitable, because it derives from the fact that each co-housing principal has an equal claim on a single object. How those tensions get worked out can get complicated, and again, it gets tiresome.

And then you get different work schedules, different sleep schedules, one person wants to party late night and another has an important meeting in the morning -- all that crap.

As to closer living quarters for multiple families, that sucks too. I've lived in apartments and condos for the past seven years, at least, and now that I have a house I would never go back to that, not ever. If good fences make good neighbors, then so do appropriate buffer zones. I've had the cops called on me because I was on my apartment balcony talking on a cell phone -- at 12 freaking 30 in the morning. I've had noise complaints for being outside while talking, loud music, loud movies, loud sports, whatever.

No, after dealing with that sh*t, I couldn't wait to get away from Other People. That is why you'll never see a large movement toward co-housing communes. Other People Tend To Suck.

Posted by JA | October 4, 2007 3:29 PM

Let's start with shared courtyards and see how that goes.

Out of eight people there'll be one who wishes he had more land to garden with, and seven who can't be bothered. Everybody wins.

Posted by chris | October 4, 2007 5:38 PM

Tell you what;

You go live in Provincetown or DC with Andy and his spouse and ride your bicycle.

No, no. Tell you what. You get Andy and spouse to live with you in, say, Hamtramack MI, work at a failing Ford plant and ride your bike to work.

Yeah, thats it. Then let me know how well this works out for you, will ya?

Posted by liam colvin | October 4, 2007 5:44 PM

I'm surprised how skeptical people are of this idea. These kind of living arrangements are pretty typical in most of the world except the US, and while it does require maturity and communication skills, the rewards are tremendous. When my husband and I were dating, we lived on the top floor of a big group house in DC. The house was owned by a couple with a 1-year old daughter, who lived on the second floor. The couple also rented a room to a graduate student, Stephen, and a basement apartment to a third couple they were friends with. Bills were cheap split five ways, there was usually somebody else's dinner leftovers if you came home late, and we all got access to each others' book & media collections.

But the real rewards were social. It's so nice to come home to a lived-in house. Parties get organized without having to do any work. Your social network gets quadrupled. And I got to play with the 1-year old girl, who was super cute, and occasionally watch her for 15 minutes while her mother ran upstairs. Fun without responsibility ;) I had a few other friends at the time with small children, and the universal story was that staying home with your baby means that you go crazy because of the isolation and lack of social interaction. Well, Maggie (the mother) had plenty of social interaction & adult conversation right at home, and her daughter was very outgoing, comfortable with strangers, and got lots of attention from all of us, which she loved.

The downsides? Well, sometimes people used up your milk. My boyfriend & I couldn't have impromptu sex on the kitchen table - we had to go upstairs. Not exactly the end of the world.

After seeing how well the arrangement worked with Maggie, I'm planning to try to set up a similar arrangement when my husband and I have kids.

Posted by ZK | October 5, 2007 12:44 AM

Because while you are crazy about your children, people who aren't related to you can't stand them for more than 15 minutes. The older they get, the cuter they ain't.

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 5, 2007 4:47 AM

As someone who has been involved in the cohousing movement for the past decade, and who has lived in two different cohousing neighborhoods since 2000, I'm excited to see your attention on this topic, linked to some of the overarching societal forces driving the movement.

We use the term cohousing to refer to a specific arrangement of private homes (typically legally condos, privately owned) with a large shared area -- a Common House, plus the courtyard/garden Chris suggests. Everybody has their own kitchen, the units are self-sufficient, but the Common House has a bigger kitchen and dining area where people can choose to cook and eat together a few times a week.

The physical design tends to encourage interaction (parking at the periphery, for example), but everybody has their own independent living space where they can close the blinds and live their own lives.

With shared resources like guest rooms and kids' play areas, people can choose to live in smaller places, and live simpler, greener lives... and most importantly, know their neighbors better, like an old-fashioned village. As ZK says, the benefits are social.... greater quality of life per dollar.

You don't have to love all your neighbors, just like enough of them to get the work done. If you know your neighbors, JA, they won't call the police on you, they'll dial direct and save (and you'll know their sleep patterns enough to choose to go to the Common House to make that late night call).

The benefits are enormous: Just last night, I saw my neighbor having a medical problem, and I drove him to the hospital. While I was there with him, another neighbor called me and arranged to get his phone, book, and clothes to him, while another was helping with arrangements to pick up his wife, if necessary, and to get him home so she doesn't have to interrupt her travels unless it turns out to be more serious than initially thought. We have our private lives, but are close enough to know what's going on and help take care of each other.

Note the emphasis is on adding choices, not taking them away.

So far there are nearly 100 cohousing neighborhoods built in the U.S. with more than 100 under development... it's been a resident-driven movement, with a few professional developers involved. As developers face high cancellation rates and unsold inventory in their conventional condo projects, perhaps they will turn to this model as a way to deliver what future resident-investors need rather than what they think they will want to buy.

There is a broader Intentional Communities movement (I serve as a volunteer director for the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) that includes not just cohousing but the wider range of coops and communes, which is more like what the author envisions in the "(crazy)" closing thought.

Raines Cohen
Cohousing Coach, Planning for Sustainable Communities
Berkeley, CA

Posted by Raines Cohen | October 5, 2007 7:17 AM

Reihan -

You're obviously right about the advantages of such an arrangement; I wonder, though, where you'd find space for such a cluster of homes, and how difficult it would be for friends (rather than like-minded strangers) to coordinate move-in and construction and such. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, right? Unless cohousing options are attractive and available, young people (and this is about young people, really) won't know to give them a try; without a big spike in interest, such residences won't be built in the first place. And you can't lay out a housing complex like this on the cheap in a city. And you can't convince urban professionals interested in saving space and conserving resources to head for open spaces, certainly not five families at a time, with a pretty big carrot...

It seems to me that there's no compelling financial reason for cohousing to spread beyond its current (affluent and old) demographics; it's too hard for young adults to get themselves together, especially with the kind of buying power necessary to get into such a community or get one started. And the appeal of putting your family in close proximity with ideologically-aligned strangers is...actually there's no appeal (I'm in Cambridge MA already, thanks). Maybe I'm belaboring a minor point (knowing the residents well before you move in), but I suspect it's gonna be a big deal for plenty of 'average Americans' who might otherwise consider such an arrangement for a host of reasons.

Plus, years down the line, doesn't resale become an issue? How do you get out of a five-family mortgage? If two people bail on a contractor, what responsibilities remain for everyone else? That's the kind of complicated relationship other (e.g. corporate) groups already deal with, but which presents a big barrier to entry for potential young co-homeowners...

Posted by Wax Banks | October 5, 2007 10:13 AM

Well, shit, if it worked for Maggie...

Posted by JA | October 5, 2007 11:33 AM

I live in New Orleans, and my friends already do this. They all rent (half) a house, and it's one married couple and three other single-people. I live around the corner and end up hanging out at "the house" all the time! No television, great food, and always great music... it's perfect, and I wish I could get out of my own lease and move in with them!

Posted by alli | October 5, 2007 11:40 AM

Perhaps after the Wars on Poverty, Drugs, and Terror will come the War on Loneliness declared by our first emo president sometime around 2028.

Posted by A | October 5, 2007 1:33 PM

The reason this sort of thing gets my goat as it's not a far cry (like our friend from Berkeley) to argue (and convince) that their ideas are better for the earth/people/TGLB companion animals and need to be given cost breaks/incentives/more money out of my pocket to their causes.

I grew up in Ann Arbor and both witnessed and participated in a number of "co-housing" arrangments (we called it "renting out rooms"). They tended to be really great until someone entered the mix who didn't toe the line, beleive in the dream or did the dishes. Then everyone either became lawyers or neo-fasicists, depending on the over all level of animosity towards the troublemaker.

Simple fact is, the older you get, the less you like sharing your space with others. Try to convince you aged parents that giving up their house is logical and sensible. I suspect they'll cut you right out of the will...

Posted by Liam Colvin | October 5, 2007 1:45 PM

The simple fact is, that this is relatively easy to do if people want to do it.

By now we know that public housing is a social failure unless it is mixed with privately owned housing of differing price levels. Intelligent design of public housing now includes provision for private housing, community services, mixed single and multi-family, access to transit, and varying density levels.

New transit lines in the US are proving so successful that a big problem now is to keep the planning out n front of the private investors who buy up land around planned stations. Investors are realizing that working with the community can be more profitable than whining, moaning, and trying to evade or defeat planning.

During the middle of the last century absolutely huge numbers of single room-occupancy (SRO) housing were destroyed in our cities. The "free enterprise alternative" of living in a car (if you're lucky) or a cardboard box has been no solution at all.

cf., Jane Jacobs, et. al.

Posted by serial catowner | October 5, 2007 2:48 PM

This was a common living situation for many years; only then it was called a "rooming house". You had a bedroom, access to a common area, and maybe a seat at the table for meals.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | October 5, 2007 3:00 PM

By trying to bring back communes, Reihan is simply acting out of self-interest. It's a straightforward way for him to ensure that he will always have someone around to drive him somewhere, since by his own admission he neither drives nor knows how to ride a bike. He's a clever guy, that Reihan.

But seriously, group living arrangements, like rationing, are a smart way to deal with scarcity. In a well-to-do society, most people prefer the luxury of privacy and personal space.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | October 5, 2007 3:17 PM

While studying at uni in Madrid, I lived in a boarding house for the year. It wasn't always great, the landlady was a big pennypincher and that caused some tension, but it also drove us roommer together. Having 25 roommates was great when everybody's young, single and from out-of-town(or country).

I've always had a roommate and while there is tension, if you try to work it out instead of letting things fester, you can get along. I think the people who claim they could never stand living with others need to try it out. And if there are problems, act like a grown-up.

Posted by Jeremy | October 8, 2007 11:00 AM