Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
supernuclear.substack.com
supernuclear.substack.com
I grew up in a fairly typical American suburb, in the 70s, and lived in a single-family, single-generation household. But, there were 35+ kids on my one-block street! The neighborhood consisted entirely of families with children and retirees, and among the families, the median number of kids was three. There were a couple of families with two, but multiple with four; there were also families with 5, 6, and 7. We were constantly in and out of each other's houses. I regularly would walk out my door, through my neighbor's front yard, and into my best friend's house without knocking. A lot of the time we were outside, and unsupervised by adults. Overall I think the burden on parents (per kid) was much lower than today.
I think the large number of kids made this kind of arrangement both necessary and possible. Nobody could have the energy to supervise so many kids the way kids are supervised today, but also we all looked out for each other. There were lots of siblings. Older sibs were responsible for younger, and by extension, their younger friends as well. If someone got hurt, some friends would help while others would run to get a parent, and not necessarily the parent of the kid who got hurt.
Even this situation, I can't imagine wanting to actually share a household with any of my friends' families. In fact, when I slept over, I was always struck with how weird other families' closed-door customs seemed. It's the same now: when we get an occasional glimpse into the behind-closed-doors dynamics of our friends' marriages and families, my wife and I are always like, hm... weird. I think it's like that for everyone.
Getting married and having a family is a very personal thing. I love my friends, but I wouldn't want to marry any of them.
There is p much nothing in our life that wasn't an invention of the industrial revolution or later. Every aspect of our life was invented within the last 2-3 generations.
But yet people talk like these weird, mostly white Christian ideals, are how life has always been throughout history. People believe what they want to feel good about their extreme overconsumption in todays modern world.
It probably just seemed normal to you if you grew up in it.
It was almost certainly not how families worked when your parents or grandparents were kids.
I don't know enough about my grandparents to be able to answer, but I think it's likely that small three-generation households were common somewhat common, i.e. a grandparent and one of their children, that child's spouse and that set of grand children. But I think multi-family households and intentional household relationships not bound by marriage or parent/child bonds were rare in their day as well, at least in the US and western Europe.
Then there is the whole issue of cleanliness. What one person thinks is clean could be light years away from what you think is clean and tidy. This would cause untold levels of stress and discomfort on both ends. I'd rather have my own domain even if its only a travel trailer, than share living space with a bunch of people continuously giving their "advice" on what they think is best.
It's one thing when you all grow up together. There's a baseline level of compatibility and trust that can make it all work. But in today's world where you often have to move every five years for a job, or for a better school, etc., spontaneously joining groups of families and having it "just work" is a tall order.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/intensive...
Personally I'm ok with flexing my standards a bit for the sake of having a great community - I'm on the cleaner side but I don't mind doing a little extra tidying as long as it feels like a balance. I've lived with my friends and their kids and while we don't have the 100% the same parenting styles we all respect what the others bring to the table.
And co-living should work better with strangers of mixed mentality?
Yes, this must be for people with highly common way of current thinking (current, momentarily, as people do change when they go through significant life experiences, like raising children or joining a community).
And with more than 2 co-parents, a quorum might form that excludes you.
Cleanliness has been a huge source of frustration, as you say there's a huge chasm between what some people considers "clean enough".
And that's not sharing it at the same time, like in a community home...
I'm very particular about how my kitchen (and living space in general) looks. I coordinate the colors of appliances with the cabinetry, the styles of all the cutlery, the locations and labelling of everything. Fonts, typography, margins all matter in those labels. I sometimes design and make my own containers for things. I like bottles of ingredients being in aesthetically-pleasing arrangements by color shade.
But I'm also an introvert, an artist at heart, and it helps me save money. When my kitchen is an evolving work of art, I'm drawn to spend more time in that space, and that inspires me to make more food for myself, at 1/5 the cost of food outside. If my kitchen looks like an aesthetic mess because the person I share it with does not give a shit about design, I would be more likely to go spend $30 on food outside, and that adds up pretty quickly.
Something I found was that different kids are, well, different.
For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person would volunteer to spend time with (...or at least would not volunteer for the second time...).
So being able to "have dinner with our friends every night" I think comes down a lot to the individual kid and not the environment. You may have just got lucky and got a laid-back kid who just goes along with things and is happy hanging out with random adults. They're not all like that.
Before kids I was very much on the “nuture” side of nature vs. nuture, but now I think a lot of it is random, just a genetic lottery.
I can't imagine my family living with roommates for any reason other than necessity.
Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them.
LGBT communities aren’t perfect either.
Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options and you were strongly incentivized to make compromises.
Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.
Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.
Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.
Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.
It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.
Also I haven't had to deal with "awful rainbow clubs". In fact my experience has been the exact opposite. Twelve years ago, I went to a furry convention and ended up joining one of the most accepting communities I've ever seen. And let me tell you, once a community gets to a certain size, it will have Problems™. :)
If one can be selective about who is "in" and who is "out", then one is a leader of the social club. There can be plenty of animosity between members.
Putting all these folks into a "shared community" that actually codifies the obligation for everyone to work together....Well you'd need to get a very special group of people to pull that off and even then, im sure the falling outs are pretty awful nonetheless.
Right this is why I don't live in a community house, a lot of my kids' friend's parents suck ass. Who gets to live in the community house with the alcoholic soccer mom or the cop who got fired for threatening to kill someone at a baseball game.
I know one community house of > 10 people in California, exactly the type the author says they want, which kept getting fines from PG&E because they were using too much electricity, even though this was solely due to the house size and on a per-person basis they used much less than people living in single-family houses thanks to resource sharing. A policy intended to encourage energy efficiency ended up punishing it instead. Landmines like this are all over the place.
The anthropological term for the kind of arrangement you're talking about is "patrilocality." Matrilocality is where it's the daughters instead of the sons, and it's much more the norm in the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and somewhat more sporadically in Africa). The really fun part is that matrilocality does not imply matrilineality (let alone matriarchy), so you can have a society that is both patrilineal and matrilocal.
Monks live together in harsh conditions just fine. This is a specific community, of course. Yet this is also the answer: you need something bigger than yourself to submit your wishes to.
This is the fundamental misconception of the article. Living with your own family does not equate to being raised outside a community. Church, school, little league, etc. are all community networks that huge swaths of society participate in regularly.
Same with the argument that a miracle of coliving is having grandparents to help with the kids. You get that by living near your parents, which has the added advantage that your parents aren't constantly observing you and your relationship and choosing everything from your interior decor to your entertainment... and when you want your grandparents to look after the kids so you can have some peace, the kids actually go to a different building! And it turns out the fun, community-oriented bit of your friends' kids is meeting them at events or when you invite the family round and being impressed by how much more confident they've got since last time you saw them, not being woken up in the middle of the night by them.
Communal areas like a shared kitchen immediately fall to the tragedy of the commons, unless there's a HOA or similar that directly pays someone to maintain it.
I don't see any reason it has to be that way, though. It's more an accident of history.
I probably would have chosen to have children if I grew up in a culture where "a bunch of people living close together and helping each other out" was the norm. I didn't, though. I grew up in 1980s "Superman and McDonalds and the American Way" suburbs. Having kids in that environment always looked like a nightmare to me, so I didn't.
I also suspect this has an extrovert / introvert component. The super social people around me constructed these little "ephemeral villages" out of nought but thin air, smiles, backyard barbecues, and PTA meetings. Or so it seemed to me. I was always too introverted to do this, though.
My own mother and of course my mother in law are absolute liabilities with my 5 and 3 year olds. They continually and repeatedly break our rules.
It's not unsafe per se, but it's just high-risk things for no reason apart from what we believe is just willful defiance from the grandparents. E.g. letting them out into the garden with no direct supervision, when there is no physical barrier from them getting into the road etc. "Oh lighten up! It's just a busy street with loads of distracted drivers in 2+ ton vehicles going over the speed limit! What's the problem!"
As a result, they're not usually left alone with the kids unless we can avoid it.
Ultimately if any harm were to come, I want to know that it was my own fault effectively, and not because I suspected that some other adult was not paying enough attention, or could have tried harder/made more effort to stop it, or was deliberately not doing things how I like it to be done. If it was under your own watch or your partner's watch that something bad happened then you can be pretty sure that the harm was unavoidable and not because someone else has other concepts of safety and risk for your offspring.
"But people in Indi.."
No.
Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment.
Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies immediately after graduating university who has spent their entire life bouncing between different assignments to the point that you don't even feel like a resident of their own country anymore, I know more about this than you.
I know what Africans who live in villages do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb)
It seems impossible for the nu-urbanists and the like to understand the brains of normal human beings who prefer not smelling the farts of others or their terrible cooking, hearing them snore or argue or fuck, seeing them scratch their ass and pick their nose.
People who are forced to cohabit with relatives (siblings' families, with parents/grandparents as well) conform, and you don't hear them complain because they don't have a choice. But oh boy there are so, so many problems/conflicts. Harmony is usually an illusion.
They of course get the benefits when it comes to helping raise kids. But you have to pick your poison. Life isn't better - it's just different.
Much of what's in the article is fairly different from multiple (related) families having to share a house. I'm guessing for each of them, leaving is always an option, and it results in a different dynamic than "I'm stuck with these people because I can't afford to leave." If you offend someone who is not your relative, you don't have to live with the consequences forever.
East Asians overwhelming move to nicer / larger apartments or urban villas before fucking off to suburbs with shit schools and bad travel time to nice large, cities.
Rich in poorer/develping countries with shit urban centres may pick private suburbs for privacy/security, because they simply don't have choice / access to world class urban living.
Nu-urbanists are kind of delulu, but they (probably) know more than "normal humans" when it comes to spectrum of livable build enviroment, the vast majority haven't lived in a nice 200-300 sqm apartment in a tier1 city. Most see medicore suburb living > medicore city living.
Ultimately it's not even that expensive to make that kind of housing (i.e. extra sqm construction $$$ to odor and sound proof units is not much). It's much harder to build nice cities people (or rich) want to live in, vs easy to spam livable single family unit suburbs.
That said, housing (and access to services) preference is almost seperate discussion from single family vs communal / multi generation living arrangments. Plenty of people would not want to live with extended family even if culture compels them too. And plenty of people probably wish family was closer.
> I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money.
They buy a nice apartment on the southern bank of the seine because they're the only one that can afford it, cycle everywhere and enjoy the thousands of places you can go in Paris with their friends while sharing a babysitter because they can walk by their friends places to pickup their kids afterwards.
I moved to SF for work 6 months ago and I can't understand how you guys can "enjoy" living alone and depressed in your empty suburb.
Want to know who actually lives in the "american-style suburbs" of Paris? Poor people who have no choice but to live there
No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments.
...which casts doubt on your other confident assertions.
Are there truly no exceptions that you know of?
Like when someone says "cats are furry and fuzzy and I like petting them" and someone chimes in "Well what about hairless cats??????"
Why do you think Tata bought the brands and formed Jaguar Land Rover?
Did Ratan Tata "just like the brand" or did he see every single person around him buying Land/Range Rovers as Indians (and people in China, and Kenya, and everywhere else) got wealthier and started moving out to single family homes in suburbs and he wanted to profit off that?
That said, I would not mind a good size plot of land with multiple structures..a family compound. Inside the same house? Absolutely never.
Except people who will never ever face the prospect of living in a community house - they’re puzzled.
It's more like: why does almost no one want that?
There's a big difference.
It should be obvious why not everyone or even most people don't want that.
It's less obvious why basically no one does - especially since lots of people are actually interested in the idea, and there are - theoretically - advantages.
1) The article's portrayal of community living is rather idyllic.
2) To the Global Capitalist Profit Maximizer, community living is seriously sub-optimal. Ditto to aspiring members of the 0.01%, who can afford (or imagine) a "feudal lord" lifestyle - just themself and Mr./Mrs. Right, with a "community" of servants and servant-like outsourced labor services at their beck and call.