Many people today are choosing co-living. It’s a trend among millennials. There are many designs of co-living. One familiar one is the college dorm. Your personal space is limited to a room (or sometimes half a room), but in return you have access to a recreation lounge, a dining hall where all the cooking is done for you, and bathrooms that you don’t have to clean yourself. Many students disliked sharing a room, however (especially when it was with a stranger), and moved into student condos. Student condos often have four single bedrooms and a shared living room, kitchen, and bathroom. There is often a gym, a grill area, and a pool shared by the whole condo complex. This model has proved to be more appealing than the dorms.
Co-living actually has a long history – from Victorian boarding houses to the communes of the 1960s, In Israel, for instance, there has long been a long tradition of co-living on kibbutzim and co-working them as well, typically on a farm. There are some differences with the current trend of millennial co-living. They tend to live in urban areas, unlike the kibbutzim and communes that tend to be in rural agricultural areas.
Some co-living communities are more intentional than others. A cult would be the highest level of intentional living where everyone shares ideals, rules, perhaps even uniforms. Dorms are intentional to the degree that the residents are all students at the same college. A step up in intention from there is a student co-op with daily or weekly shared meals and a chore wheel. There are more of these than you might think. The North American Student Cooperative Organization (NASCO) is particularly big in the West (Austin, Lawrence) and in the Midwest (Madison, Urbana, Chicago).
Millennials may opt for co-living which is not intentional, but let us look at the intentional communities as they may be less familiar than condos and dorms. Most intentional communities affiliate with the Federation of Intentional Communities (FIC) which divides them into six types: student housing, religious community, communes, ecovillages, shared housing, and cohousing. We have already considered student housing. We will consider communes and religious communities together.
Communes
There are some old-style communes still surviving, typically due to a cottage industry. Ganas in Staten Island, runs vintage clothing, furniture restoration, and bookstore cafe businesses. Twin Oaks provides hammocks to Pier One, farms and produces tofu and heirloom seeds, and indexes books. Very few communes continue to share all possessions; often there is a hybrid model with a core group. Some rule by consensus. Some have a guru. Some have a guiding philosophy such as feedback learning at Ganas. The commune is a religious community if the philosophy is spiritual. They may have stricter rules or not. Some non-religious communities have strict rules, as well, such as vegetarianism.
Ecovillages
If you thought communes would be the most radical intentional communities, you thought wrong. Some, like Camp Hill, which cares for persons with disabilities, are quite “straight.” I have heard rumors of dorms, but in all the communes I have visited, everyone had their own rooms. (There was one with a communal clothing closet.) Ecovillages can be more demanding. They may be off the grid. They may be in a developing country. Members may eat mainly beans and rice. Then again, they may have to eat meat that they raised and slaughtered themselves. Housing may be in huts. There is typically little privacy. Generally, the ecovillage is remote.
Shared Housing
This is the intentional community type most likely to appear to those millennials interested in co-housing. It is also the category that can take on the most diverse forms. What makes it intentional is not the number of bathrooms or whether everyone ships in on a weekly community-supported agriculture (CSA) delivery. It is what the residents share. Perhaps this is a house for people from a certain home culture foreign to the host country. It could be a house full of Laker fans. Any unifying attribute (it doesn’t have to be a guiding philosophy) will do. The FIC divides them according to governance, economics, energy sources, food sources, education, and some lifestyle preferences.
Cohousing
This is probably the most mainstream type of intentional community. In many cases, the members are affiliated mainly for the economic benefit of pooling resources to purchase real estate. They may share little more than a riding lawnmower. On the other hand, it may be something more interesting. There is a community near Taos, New Mexico where the residents have all built their own earthships – houses made from old tires, glass bottles, and other recycled materials.
People are surprised to learn that all these models of intentional community are thriving with people of all ages. Some stay for years on waiting lists for the more established communes. Intentional living is not the only co-living model. With this trend in popularity among the millennials, we can expect many creative new designs to emerge. Contact us to learn more.