Great piece. I can only speak to my own experience -- the opening line to my book, Brave New Home, was about how I had no idea how isolating young parenting would be.Prior to being a parent, I was never really at home, so I didn't really think about needing community in my living arrangement then. Having kids really changes how much time you spend at home. Unfortunately I think a lot of people come to realize how much they want to raise kids in community after they've bought the house and birthed the kid.
The example in India is interesting -- kids there grow up always knowing how important community is for childrearing. That makes it a lot easier and more intuitive to plan to live with or near family as you approach starting a family.
Currently, most of my friends are the parents of my kids' friends, and we all live near each other because our kids attend a walkable, neighborhood school. We all share a playground in our neighborhood where our kids also mix with kids who are not part of their friend group. We also support a community of stores and public transit etc. My next book is about spending too much time at home -- I love the idea of building a community around a home, but think it's as important or even more so to build a community around public spaces and public life.
Reading your book was a profound influence on me (everyone else: read Brave New Home! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/diana-lind/brave-new-home/9781541742642/ ) and that introduction in particular stuck with me. I have a bunch more posts brewing about parenting in community that will probably end up quoting you in depth :)
This is a great piece and I have many thoughts on it. I think a huge part of the barrier is around housing design and how hard it is to find housing that can work for families and people who might want live with them, but not be sharing a wall with a crying baby. I definitely think there’s some openness to group living situations where the adults far outnumber the kids. I think there might be less interest in openness when the number of children is more than the number of adults. Those children go from adorable gurgly babies to tornadoing toddlers and elementary school children who take up space in a different way. (I speak from the perspective of having three rowdy boys myself.) however I do think it’s heartening that there’s more discussion and interest from people who do not plan to have children to be more involved in the day-to-day life of families.
I am Indian and want to warn that you should be careful of idealizing the multigenerational household. I, too, think it sounds beautiful and idea. But many of my extended relatives live in multigenerational households in India and they are all miserable. So many politics of gender, in laws and power. Furthermore, if you grow up with parents with mental illness, no amount of multigenerational household living will resolve the fact that your parent(s) have a mental illness and it directly impacts the kids.
Finally, as an adult, my husband and I moved into my dad’s house to help him as he grows into very old age (he is in his late 80s). That lasted about 9 months. He hated us being in his house and was not ready to share or make space for us.
I would not generalize what one Indian friend has told you. That may be their experience but in practice, I have seen that multi generational households live on in India mainly due to tradition but that most everyone I know in that situation is miserable.
Many American military base housing neighborhoods function as de facto community living. My husband and I lived in one when we had two very young children, and it was similar to your examples. Each family had a townhome with its own small front yard, while the back of the house opened into a courtyard complete with playground, basketball court, and large grassy areas with another line of townhomes on the other side. Any toy or bike left in the courtyard was shared. In our group of 18 townhomes, there were 50 children, all 10 and under! We had impromptu shared dinners, emergency and planned babysitting, and I paid $10 for a crowd of 6-9 yos to mow our tiny lawn - which they divided with cones so they all got a chance with the lawnmower - and watch my 1.5yo at the same time.
Not every military housing functions like this, especially suburban-style ones with single family homes and large yards, but many do. There are challenges like frequent turnover, and some families keep to themselves instead of participating. Having lived in other places that were similar with lots of shared parks and many children but didn’t function like this, the keys seem to be proximity, communal space, and a smaller scale. If you know your ten closest neighbors and every member of their family, see them daily in a shared area, and can be at their door in a 1 minute walk, you have community living.
Yes military and diplomatic families really seem to get this right! I've had a few friends who get out of the military talk about how isolating it is to leave the community they had in the service.
Your point on scale is a good one. I have lived in a few communities that had so many people that there were always new faces to get to know - and it can be hard to build intimacy in that setting. Phil has a great post on this topic that points out there's no objectively 'best' size for a community but there are pros and cons to every size. https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/dunbars-number-and-community-size
One of my Indian relatives lived in a large house designed for 3 separate extended families. Each had their own living spaces, set up as separate units, but the dining room was open plan. So you could eat with just your family or join together with another family, depending on your mood. I never connected the dots that this was communal living until just now. It just seemed like a lot of fun when I would visit.
I've been to that eco village in New York and it's amazing! Some friends of mine used to live there, but when they tried to buy their house, preference was given to a couple who said they were planning to have children — and then didn't. Anyway, for those who do have children, and for the children themselves, it looked like a wonderful place to live.
Very well articulated. I grew up in Indonesia but now live in the US. Such a stark cultural difference! In Indonesian communal society, I see my aunt, uncle, cousin, friends, you name it, every day & supporting each other. Here, even in my husband’s fam, most only see their family once or twice a year. I honestly think communal living could help bring back that “it takes a village” vibe that so many of us are missing.
My husband and I built our house with a walk-out basement with an entirely self-contained apartment of about 1100 square feet for my grandparents. My grandmother ended up living there for eighteen years. After she passed on, one of our sons and his wife and two grands lived there for three years, and when they moved out, another son and his wife moved in. They have all shared in expenses and such, but it's mostly just been pleasant to have them nearby. As an extreme introvert, however, I cannot imagine having other people living so close — just thinking about it feels stressful. It does seem like a much healthier option for families, though.
I consider myself an introvert as well (perhaps not an extreme one), and find that sharing my domestic life with a few specific people doesn't drain my social battery. It's having constant guests or new people cycling through that can be exhausting. But long term roommates to me feel as familiar as my family, and thus not stressful to be around. (Some of my extended family on the other hand can be a real handful!)
I could write my own essay in response to this. Sufice it to say I believe almost everything in North American life is designed to make sure this type of community is impossible for anyone but the ultra wealthy, and impractical and undesirable for them.... A sad state of affairs
And yes I think there are a lot of things that make this structurally difficult, but far from impossible. Hopefully we can surface more stories that make it seem approachable.
Wealth doesn't just mean financial wealth it also means 1 person in the couple having the time to organize a community or the time to donate , it also means traveling in social circles were people have these things which is a 3rd kind of wealth
I'm not sure that's true. In fact, I think it's likely easier to conceal child molestation in a single family home, where there are fewer adults looking out for the children.
One of the reasons it's hard to get people in the US to live in communal or multigenerational housing is that nuclear family has extremely deep roots in the English culture from which we descend. Already by the high Middle Ages, people were apt to move further away from their parents to get married in England than anywhere else in Europe, and married couples — not extended families — were the basic unit. So it's been almost a thousand years of nuclear family. That's not how most of the world functions, and clearly America has taken English individualism too far. But as great as these cohousing stories sound, solving the problem of family isolation in Anglosphere countries is going to require solutions that are adapted for the very durable and longstanding focus on the nuclear family in these societies. You can't just shake a stick at American culture and tell it to be more Indian. We actually have a determinate set of cultural predispositions that make multigenerational or multifamily cohousing a harder sell here than almost anywhere else. A Tocquevillian solution of dense networks of voluntary associations based in neighborhoods and towns, like parents' groups but more committed — including church-based groups — might be a more doable way to alleviate the isolation many families face.
Hm, interesting point, but I’m not sure I agree that the nuclear family has such a long history in the US. In the 19th century, as the population of the US skyrocketed thanks to immigration, the default home included boarders who were unrelated by blood. Early colonial households were at least multi generational and also usually included servants/slaves. The idea of the single family home and the ‘nuclear family’ unit are largely 20th century constructs (I mean, just look at the term nuclear family - it was coined in the 1920s). The ‘Own your own home’ campaign was a PR campaign funded by the US Realtor’s association and later the Department of labor in the wake of WWI to encourage single family home ownership. The stated purpose of the campaign was to encourage consumer demand - and to get women out of the workforce so there were enough jobs for the boys returning home from the war.
Thanks for your response. Your points about early colonial households and 20th-century housing policy are good and well-taken. But I think several of your arguments in fact only support what I'm claiming. For example, you're right that cohousing in boarding homes and multigenerational housing skyrocketed during the late 19-century immigration boom. That's because immigrants weren't English. They were Italian, Eastern European, German, etc. And my guess is that the Italian immigrant neighborhoods were more densely filled with multigenerational homes than the German neighborhoods were, because Germanic people — including the Anglo-Saxons — have had a noticeable preference for single-family housing for a *very* long time. Some evidence: Tacitus points this out in his history of the German peoples, written c. 100 AD. He says something like "It's kinda weird that the Germans don't like living in apartments like we do. They prefer building freestanding houses." You can literally still see the vestiges of this preference today by flying over or Google mapping southern Europe vs. northern Europe. Berlin or Oslo transition from dense urban apartment blocks to single-family suburban-style development *much* closer in to the city center than, say, Rome. There's just a lot more single-family housing in Germany, Scandinavia, and England (saying nothing of the US, Canada, etc.) than there is in Spain or Italy. This isn't because of midcentury American housing policy. Much of it goes back to Roman times. So, naturally, the introduction of more folks from southern Europe correlated with an increase in larger, more multigenerational households in the US. As those folks become more enculturated into the US, they tended eventually to move out from the ethnic neighborhoods into single-family suburban towns.
As for the housing policy, why didn't similar campaigns for single-family, nuclear-style housing gain traction in Spain or Brazil? There's a chicken-and-egg question here, and I think at least part of the answer was because the culture was just a lot more receptive to nuclear family development in Anglo-America than it was in those countries. The frontier culture that stamped its imprint on American culture is a good illustration. Frontierspeople tended to live in nuclear-family settings. Take the Little House books — Ma and Pa Ingalls moved themselves and their kids from town to town across what's now the Midwest. Their family was the unit that mattered. I don't remember how often extended relatives showed up in those narratives, but it wasn't very often.
You can also read about the long tradition of English (and then Anglophone more broadly) individualism in Alan MacFarlane's works. His book The Origins of English Individualism provided evidence that the English simply never had a peasant society, defined by communal land ownership, strong extended family ties, and deep roots in particular towns. Instead they were more mobile and individualistic even in the Middle Ages. (This is comparatively, of course — by our standards today they'd be extremely family-focused and communalistic.) Here's a good exposition of his ideas: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n02/alan-ryan/english-individualism-revisited
I'm not arguing in favor of Anglophone individualism and nuclear family. I just came back from 2 months' research in Ecuador, and to be honest I probably prefer the more densely networked family structures there. It's a lot less lonely and a lot more human. But I think anyone who wants to fix the problems of American/Western isolation and loneliness has to grapple with the reality of very deep-set cultural tendencies in these societies toward individualism. You've got to meet people where they are. And the individualism has its benefits — it discourages corruption, since most corruption is just favoring one's own clan when in a position of power. And it seems to be correlated with economic dynamism. As usual, things are complicated.
I think about this all the time, and when I talk to my friends almost no one is thinking beyond their own single-family home if they have one. I think a huge part of the problem right now is just cost, and the second-biggest is the first-mover/cold start issue.
I knew some people who moved, as a group, to upstate New York and bought houses on the same block. Even upstate is getting expensive in many places, though, and being able to buy houses together was a lucky find for them. It isn't a replicable path, and even if it were, it is extremely expensive almost anywhere.
Of course, where it isn't expensive, no one in these groups is already living, and no one wants to live there because they don't know anyone there. People aren't trickling in over time. I have this issue with my friends: one friend of mine moved to Philly, he knew people there, another who has a friend group there is considering it. But everyone else is extremely hesitant when I bring it up, even though it is pretty affordable, and we all could get nice apartments or buy buildings nearby.
With Radish, what Phil et all are doing is amazing, but it is *expensive*, and it is just too far out of reach for most people. Most people don't even have The Rich Friend/Family Member who would front the money. I have thought for some time that if I was ever able to do this, I would want some sort of economic engine in the community as well (easier if you are creating a whole village like Esmerelda, harder if you are Ithaca EcoVillage and not super internally commercial afaik). This economic engine can act as a fund, a bank, whatever, that can give loans and provide financial support for more of these projects.
Anyway, thanks for writing this, always great to hear more stories and perspectives from people actually able to do it!
Can you write about people who make less than 100k a year doing this in the United States? I find your newsletter both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because it jives with my own values and ideas around parenting and community, and depressing because... a french chateau? that someone owns? that's such an incredibly high threshhold for entry into a cooperative community that it's laughably unrelatable. How are poor to middle income people doing this? Are any of them doing joint childcare by choice or is it all just bc of economic necessity? It can feel at times like reverse-engineering a reality that many low-income people do anyway (esp in crazily expensive cities), you take care of each others' kids or live intergenerationally bc childcare and housing is too expensive-can you profile what that is actually like when you do not have means?
Hi there, many of the communal homes we've profiled here include many people making less than 100k a year. The chateau you mentioned cost 1.4m euro and houses ~40 people, so on a per person basis it's one of the most affordable places thanks to its scale.
A lot of people come to coliving / joint childcare out of economic necessity, but part of what we try and highlight here at Supernuclear is that the economic savings are not the only perk: that our lives are enriched in so many other ways when we share them.
Thanks but how do people without this kind of social capital access this kind of ownership? I really wish there was some kind of start up guide to even get to the starting line of beginning a project like this is you are not placed in a community of either wealthy or similarly convicted people.
I think co-living arrangements/friend communes are really interesting and will be a great fit for some people. But some version of this — hippie communes, transcendentalist utopias, religious exiles communities, etc. — have existed for a long time and they've never been able to scale up. If anything, they've become more rare as actual, literal villages have depopulated and fewer and fewer people have this kind of arrangement by default.
imo, for that reason family has to be a part of this. Nuclear family is definitely not enough, but it is a useful base for a broader family-village. The Indian friend quoted here isn't talking about a modern techno utopia like Radish, he's talking about a tried and true pattern — layers of primarily kin, not kith — that's common across cultures and times.
What's been interesting to me as I research is how many community-like things I'm finding that have no publicity or interest in 'scaling' - they have found the scale that works for them, or grown and contracted over time, but are working for their current group of people.
But I also believe strongly that being inter-generational is key to communities enduring for long periods of time. Jon Hillis of Cabin.city memorably put it that 'it takes a village to raise kids, and it takes kids to raise a village'.
Great piece. I can only speak to my own experience -- the opening line to my book, Brave New Home, was about how I had no idea how isolating young parenting would be.Prior to being a parent, I was never really at home, so I didn't really think about needing community in my living arrangement then. Having kids really changes how much time you spend at home. Unfortunately I think a lot of people come to realize how much they want to raise kids in community after they've bought the house and birthed the kid.
The example in India is interesting -- kids there grow up always knowing how important community is for childrearing. That makes it a lot easier and more intuitive to plan to live with or near family as you approach starting a family.
Currently, most of my friends are the parents of my kids' friends, and we all live near each other because our kids attend a walkable, neighborhood school. We all share a playground in our neighborhood where our kids also mix with kids who are not part of their friend group. We also support a community of stores and public transit etc. My next book is about spending too much time at home -- I love the idea of building a community around a home, but think it's as important or even more so to build a community around public spaces and public life.
Reading your book was a profound influence on me (everyone else: read Brave New Home! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/diana-lind/brave-new-home/9781541742642/ ) and that introduction in particular stuck with me. I have a bunch more posts brewing about parenting in community that will probably end up quoting you in depth :)
Thank you so much, Gillian! I can't wait to hear more of your thoughts on this topic.
This is a great piece and I have many thoughts on it. I think a huge part of the barrier is around housing design and how hard it is to find housing that can work for families and people who might want live with them, but not be sharing a wall with a crying baby. I definitely think there’s some openness to group living situations where the adults far outnumber the kids. I think there might be less interest in openness when the number of children is more than the number of adults. Those children go from adorable gurgly babies to tornadoing toddlers and elementary school children who take up space in a different way. (I speak from the perspective of having three rowdy boys myself.) however I do think it’s heartening that there’s more discussion and interest from people who do not plan to have children to be more involved in the day-to-day life of families.
I am Indian and want to warn that you should be careful of idealizing the multigenerational household. I, too, think it sounds beautiful and idea. But many of my extended relatives live in multigenerational households in India and they are all miserable. So many politics of gender, in laws and power. Furthermore, if you grow up with parents with mental illness, no amount of multigenerational household living will resolve the fact that your parent(s) have a mental illness and it directly impacts the kids.
Finally, as an adult, my husband and I moved into my dad’s house to help him as he grows into very old age (he is in his late 80s). That lasted about 9 months. He hated us being in his house and was not ready to share or make space for us.
I would not generalize what one Indian friend has told you. That may be their experience but in practice, I have seen that multi generational households live on in India mainly due to tradition but that most everyone I know in that situation is miserable.
Many American military base housing neighborhoods function as de facto community living. My husband and I lived in one when we had two very young children, and it was similar to your examples. Each family had a townhome with its own small front yard, while the back of the house opened into a courtyard complete with playground, basketball court, and large grassy areas with another line of townhomes on the other side. Any toy or bike left in the courtyard was shared. In our group of 18 townhomes, there were 50 children, all 10 and under! We had impromptu shared dinners, emergency and planned babysitting, and I paid $10 for a crowd of 6-9 yos to mow our tiny lawn - which they divided with cones so they all got a chance with the lawnmower - and watch my 1.5yo at the same time.
Not every military housing functions like this, especially suburban-style ones with single family homes and large yards, but many do. There are challenges like frequent turnover, and some families keep to themselves instead of participating. Having lived in other places that were similar with lots of shared parks and many children but didn’t function like this, the keys seem to be proximity, communal space, and a smaller scale. If you know your ten closest neighbors and every member of their family, see them daily in a shared area, and can be at their door in a 1 minute walk, you have community living.
Yes military and diplomatic families really seem to get this right! I've had a few friends who get out of the military talk about how isolating it is to leave the community they had in the service.
Your point on scale is a good one. I have lived in a few communities that had so many people that there were always new faces to get to know - and it can be hard to build intimacy in that setting. Phil has a great post on this topic that points out there's no objectively 'best' size for a community but there are pros and cons to every size. https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/dunbars-number-and-community-size
One of my Indian relatives lived in a large house designed for 3 separate extended families. Each had their own living spaces, set up as separate units, but the dining room was open plan. So you could eat with just your family or join together with another family, depending on your mood. I never connected the dots that this was communal living until just now. It just seemed like a lot of fun when I would visit.
Such a great piece! Thank you. I also think being raised by the village has a ton of benefits for the kids, not just the parents. https://archive.curbed.com/2019/2/13/18194960/cohousing-families-communities-united-states-muir-commons
I've been to that eco village in New York and it's amazing! Some friends of mine used to live there, but when they tried to buy their house, preference was given to a couple who said they were planning to have children — and then didn't. Anyway, for those who do have children, and for the children themselves, it looked like a wonderful place to live.
Sounds like we need more eco villages so there are enough houses for all!
Fractal is a great community in BUSHWICK!
Agreed! I live in a Fractal offshoot house :)
Very well articulated. I grew up in Indonesia but now live in the US. Such a stark cultural difference! In Indonesian communal society, I see my aunt, uncle, cousin, friends, you name it, every day & supporting each other. Here, even in my husband’s fam, most only see their family once or twice a year. I honestly think communal living could help bring back that “it takes a village” vibe that so many of us are missing.
My husband and I built our house with a walk-out basement with an entirely self-contained apartment of about 1100 square feet for my grandparents. My grandmother ended up living there for eighteen years. After she passed on, one of our sons and his wife and two grands lived there for three years, and when they moved out, another son and his wife moved in. They have all shared in expenses and such, but it's mostly just been pleasant to have them nearby. As an extreme introvert, however, I cannot imagine having other people living so close — just thinking about it feels stressful. It does seem like a much healthier option for families, though.
I consider myself an introvert as well (perhaps not an extreme one), and find that sharing my domestic life with a few specific people doesn't drain my social battery. It's having constant guests or new people cycling through that can be exhausting. But long term roommates to me feel as familiar as my family, and thus not stressful to be around. (Some of my extended family on the other hand can be a real handful!)
I could write my own essay in response to this. Sufice it to say I believe almost everything in North American life is designed to make sure this type of community is impossible for anyone but the ultra wealthy, and impractical and undesirable for them.... A sad state of affairs
Write the essay! Would love to read it.
And yes I think there are a lot of things that make this structurally difficult, but far from impossible. Hopefully we can surface more stories that make it seem approachable.
The meme that you need to be wealthy is the biggest misconception about community life.
Wealth doesn't just mean financial wealth it also means 1 person in the couple having the time to organize a community or the time to donate , it also means traveling in social circles were people have these things which is a 3rd kind of wealth
“Raised by the community” = 1000% increase in rate of child molestation.
I'm not sure that's true. In fact, I think it's likely easier to conceal child molestation in a single family home, where there are fewer adults looking out for the children.
One of the reasons it's hard to get people in the US to live in communal or multigenerational housing is that nuclear family has extremely deep roots in the English culture from which we descend. Already by the high Middle Ages, people were apt to move further away from their parents to get married in England than anywhere else in Europe, and married couples — not extended families — were the basic unit. So it's been almost a thousand years of nuclear family. That's not how most of the world functions, and clearly America has taken English individualism too far. But as great as these cohousing stories sound, solving the problem of family isolation in Anglosphere countries is going to require solutions that are adapted for the very durable and longstanding focus on the nuclear family in these societies. You can't just shake a stick at American culture and tell it to be more Indian. We actually have a determinate set of cultural predispositions that make multigenerational or multifamily cohousing a harder sell here than almost anywhere else. A Tocquevillian solution of dense networks of voluntary associations based in neighborhoods and towns, like parents' groups but more committed — including church-based groups — might be a more doable way to alleviate the isolation many families face.
Hm, interesting point, but I’m not sure I agree that the nuclear family has such a long history in the US. In the 19th century, as the population of the US skyrocketed thanks to immigration, the default home included boarders who were unrelated by blood. Early colonial households were at least multi generational and also usually included servants/slaves. The idea of the single family home and the ‘nuclear family’ unit are largely 20th century constructs (I mean, just look at the term nuclear family - it was coined in the 1920s). The ‘Own your own home’ campaign was a PR campaign funded by the US Realtor’s association and later the Department of labor in the wake of WWI to encourage single family home ownership. The stated purpose of the campaign was to encourage consumer demand - and to get women out of the workforce so there were enough jobs for the boys returning home from the war.
Thanks for your response. Your points about early colonial households and 20th-century housing policy are good and well-taken. But I think several of your arguments in fact only support what I'm claiming. For example, you're right that cohousing in boarding homes and multigenerational housing skyrocketed during the late 19-century immigration boom. That's because immigrants weren't English. They were Italian, Eastern European, German, etc. And my guess is that the Italian immigrant neighborhoods were more densely filled with multigenerational homes than the German neighborhoods were, because Germanic people — including the Anglo-Saxons — have had a noticeable preference for single-family housing for a *very* long time. Some evidence: Tacitus points this out in his history of the German peoples, written c. 100 AD. He says something like "It's kinda weird that the Germans don't like living in apartments like we do. They prefer building freestanding houses." You can literally still see the vestiges of this preference today by flying over or Google mapping southern Europe vs. northern Europe. Berlin or Oslo transition from dense urban apartment blocks to single-family suburban-style development *much* closer in to the city center than, say, Rome. There's just a lot more single-family housing in Germany, Scandinavia, and England (saying nothing of the US, Canada, etc.) than there is in Spain or Italy. This isn't because of midcentury American housing policy. Much of it goes back to Roman times. So, naturally, the introduction of more folks from southern Europe correlated with an increase in larger, more multigenerational households in the US. As those folks become more enculturated into the US, they tended eventually to move out from the ethnic neighborhoods into single-family suburban towns.
As for the housing policy, why didn't similar campaigns for single-family, nuclear-style housing gain traction in Spain or Brazil? There's a chicken-and-egg question here, and I think at least part of the answer was because the culture was just a lot more receptive to nuclear family development in Anglo-America than it was in those countries. The frontier culture that stamped its imprint on American culture is a good illustration. Frontierspeople tended to live in nuclear-family settings. Take the Little House books — Ma and Pa Ingalls moved themselves and their kids from town to town across what's now the Midwest. Their family was the unit that mattered. I don't remember how often extended relatives showed up in those narratives, but it wasn't very often.
You can also read about the long tradition of English (and then Anglophone more broadly) individualism in Alan MacFarlane's works. His book The Origins of English Individualism provided evidence that the English simply never had a peasant society, defined by communal land ownership, strong extended family ties, and deep roots in particular towns. Instead they were more mobile and individualistic even in the Middle Ages. (This is comparatively, of course — by our standards today they'd be extremely family-focused and communalistic.) Here's a good exposition of his ideas: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n02/alan-ryan/english-individualism-revisited
I'm not arguing in favor of Anglophone individualism and nuclear family. I just came back from 2 months' research in Ecuador, and to be honest I probably prefer the more densely networked family structures there. It's a lot less lonely and a lot more human. But I think anyone who wants to fix the problems of American/Western isolation and loneliness has to grapple with the reality of very deep-set cultural tendencies in these societies toward individualism. You've got to meet people where they are. And the individualism has its benefits — it discourages corruption, since most corruption is just favoring one's own clan when in a position of power. And it seems to be correlated with economic dynamism. As usual, things are complicated.
I think about this all the time, and when I talk to my friends almost no one is thinking beyond their own single-family home if they have one. I think a huge part of the problem right now is just cost, and the second-biggest is the first-mover/cold start issue.
I knew some people who moved, as a group, to upstate New York and bought houses on the same block. Even upstate is getting expensive in many places, though, and being able to buy houses together was a lucky find for them. It isn't a replicable path, and even if it were, it is extremely expensive almost anywhere.
Of course, where it isn't expensive, no one in these groups is already living, and no one wants to live there because they don't know anyone there. People aren't trickling in over time. I have this issue with my friends: one friend of mine moved to Philly, he knew people there, another who has a friend group there is considering it. But everyone else is extremely hesitant when I bring it up, even though it is pretty affordable, and we all could get nice apartments or buy buildings nearby.
With Radish, what Phil et all are doing is amazing, but it is *expensive*, and it is just too far out of reach for most people. Most people don't even have The Rich Friend/Family Member who would front the money. I have thought for some time that if I was ever able to do this, I would want some sort of economic engine in the community as well (easier if you are creating a whole village like Esmerelda, harder if you are Ithaca EcoVillage and not super internally commercial afaik). This economic engine can act as a fund, a bank, whatever, that can give loans and provide financial support for more of these projects.
Anyway, thanks for writing this, always great to hear more stories and perspectives from people actually able to do it!
Can you write about people who make less than 100k a year doing this in the United States? I find your newsletter both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring because it jives with my own values and ideas around parenting and community, and depressing because... a french chateau? that someone owns? that's such an incredibly high threshhold for entry into a cooperative community that it's laughably unrelatable. How are poor to middle income people doing this? Are any of them doing joint childcare by choice or is it all just bc of economic necessity? It can feel at times like reverse-engineering a reality that many low-income people do anyway (esp in crazily expensive cities), you take care of each others' kids or live intergenerationally bc childcare and housing is too expensive-can you profile what that is actually like when you do not have means?
Hi there, many of the communal homes we've profiled here include many people making less than 100k a year. The chateau you mentioned cost 1.4m euro and houses ~40 people, so on a per person basis it's one of the most affordable places thanks to its scale.
A lot of people come to coliving / joint childcare out of economic necessity, but part of what we try and highlight here at Supernuclear is that the economic savings are not the only perk: that our lives are enriched in so many other ways when we share them.
Thanks but how do people without this kind of social capital access this kind of ownership? I really wish there was some kind of start up guide to even get to the starting line of beginning a project like this is you are not placed in a community of either wealthy or similarly convicted people.
So glad you asked! Priya wrote a great guide on how to build a cluster of friends near you: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friends
And we've written a bit about how to start to find your tribe: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/the-obvious-truth
Or to join existing coliving networks: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/how-to-find-your-first-coliving-experience?utm_source=publication-search
I think co-living arrangements/friend communes are really interesting and will be a great fit for some people. But some version of this — hippie communes, transcendentalist utopias, religious exiles communities, etc. — have existed for a long time and they've never been able to scale up. If anything, they've become more rare as actual, literal villages have depopulated and fewer and fewer people have this kind of arrangement by default.
imo, for that reason family has to be a part of this. Nuclear family is definitely not enough, but it is a useful base for a broader family-village. The Indian friend quoted here isn't talking about a modern techno utopia like Radish, he's talking about a tried and true pattern — layers of primarily kin, not kith — that's common across cultures and times.
What's been interesting to me as I research is how many community-like things I'm finding that have no publicity or interest in 'scaling' - they have found the scale that works for them, or grown and contracted over time, but are working for their current group of people.
But I also believe strongly that being inter-generational is key to communities enduring for long periods of time. Jon Hillis of Cabin.city memorably put it that 'it takes a village to raise kids, and it takes kids to raise a village'.