Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?
82 comments
·May 28, 2025jp57
chneu
Basically every aspect of modern life is new. It's weird how people yearn for "the old ways" yet they don't even know what they're yearning for.
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.
drewcoo
The nuclear family is also relatively new.
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.
jp57
My dad was born in 1925. He lived with his parents and sisters and didn't share a household with grandparents aunts or uncles. My mom was born in a small town in Italy on the eve of WWII and orphaned when she was ten. Again, there were no grandparents aunts or uncles, or friends or neighbors living in the same household, and none were in the picture to care for her. She was went to boarding schools until she could emigrate to America, where her uncles lived. During school breaks she lived with neighbors in her home town.
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.
afaxwebgirl
My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of your own house. When you live with these folks, the disagreement may not be as amicable especially if they see that you're not implementing their ideas of what they think is best for your child.
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.
crazygringo
Yup. Disagreements over tidiness, food, kitchen usage, what is appropriate for children, the list goes on and on. Different families come from different cultures, have different values, etc. It's incredibly difficult to find a bunch of other families you're "on the same page with" where you actually want to be co-parenting with and hanging out with all the time.
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.
ryandrake
I can't even agree with one spouse about a lot of these things, let alone a bunch of co-parents from different walks of life, in some sort of community house. No way that's going to work. I would not be able to even deal with having my own parents live with us and "help" with our kid. While I love them, the things they consider important about child-raising are not all compatible with the things I consider important and I am certain we would clash all the time.
geverett
I'm reminded of this Atlantic article that says 'You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.'
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.
spacemadness
It seems everyone’s trying to fix one part of the system without seeing the system as a whole. Build more housing is all you need to do, live in communes is all you need, etc. That’s great for easy blog fodder. I definitely think community is vital, but the system you live in can easily poison it or make it unworkable. Also the article seems to mention actual intergenerational families in India then asks why aren’t families living with other families which is a weird conclusion to make from that.
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mihaaly
And there are enstranged families. A sort of common occurrence nowdays, but not unknown in the past either (concealed, suppressed, being a shame, common occurrence of the present is perhaps due to less stigma nowadays). They do not want to live or even be in contact with those who gave you (you gave to) their values, efforts, view of life. Lived together for years and years in dependency. People with very strong ties, like it or not.
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).
drewcoo
Community and selfishness don't mix well.
And with more than 2 co-parents, a quorum might form that excludes you.
magicalhippo
My company has a cabin us employees can use. Only thing we have to do is reserve it and clean up before we leave.
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...
SoftTalker
Easily solved by hiring a cleaning service to come in between bookings. Anyone renting apartments or even doing AirBnB knows you cannot rely on tenants to leave the place anything better than "broom clean" and often they don't even do that.
dheera
I can't imagine sharing a kitchen with anyone but my own partner. Cleanliness is the bare minimum, but design and aesthetics is a big part of it.
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.
mattlondon
Some people quoted sound like they only have one baby.
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.
D13Fd
Five kids here, and I’ve found the same thing. Even though we’ve raised them all the same way, they are each unique individuals with very different behavior.
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.
zdragnar
I tolerated living with roommates while in college because I needed to save money. The first chance I had to move out on my own, I was gone.
I can't imagine my family living with roommates for any reason other than necessity.
phil-lnf
The people here aren’t necessarily roommates. They live in their own private units next to their friends (rather than next to strangers)
jebarker
I love my own children but very much don't enjoy other people's children. I'm sure it's my deficiency but I'd probably murder someone in a community house.
ryandrake
Funny... All of my kid's friends are pretty wholesome, respectful, nice people. Always happy to have them visit to play. But many of their parents (30-40 years old) are pretty bad. Not nasty, but just... anti-social and aloof, totally absorbed in themselves and their phones. I couldn't imagine raising our kids together in some sort of shared commune.
jebarker
I think/hope my feelings will change as my kids are a bit older. Right now they're both under 5 and other kids just seem like terrorists. I actually worry though that I'm teaching my kids to be too timid and should encourage them to stand up to the terrorists more.
SoftTalker
You should. It doesn't get better.
J37T3R
Humans may be social creatures, but we're not hive insects. Good fences make good neighbors.
kayodelycaon
There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of.
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.
altairprime
If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.
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.
kayodelycaon
I really don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think you're trying to make community too specific. And support meetings are very much clubs by your definition.
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™. :)
altairprime
Ah, I clearly misunderstood. Glad to hear you’ve done well!
drewcoo
> If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club
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.
petercooper
I imagine many people find it tricky enough to live with their own kin, but we have lots of mechanisms to generally make it work that don't really work with broader groups of people (e.g. marriage, societal expectations, judgment by broader family/in-laws, intimate relationships). It doesn't sound like the people in the article live in the very same living space, but there's a fine line between "close-knit community" and "living together."
skydhash
This very much. Harmonious groups only works when there's a clear hierarchy and group pressure to do well (basically a miniature society). And even then you have bad apples. Even in a single family, you can have conflicts. Imagine scaling it to several.
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bluGill
That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which point the oldest son got the farm and the other kids were sent off on their own. If you were lucky enough to be the oldest son you got to stay home and raise your own family with your cousins nearby in the village - but for your brothers who knows where they went, if they had a family it wasn't in sight and they didn't have the family.
jcranmer
> Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters)
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.
Mikhail_Edoshin
B. F. Skinner dreamed that people can be scientifically (behaviourally) trained to live together and described his vision in "Walden Two". It is interesting that the book spawned quite a few attempts to do that and some have survived longer than usual. I think one such community still functions someplace in Mexica, but do not know how close it remains to Skinner's ideas.
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.
Many of the problems this article talks about are relatively new, historically, and I can't help but wonder if the problem isn't really other trends like high-intensity helicopter parenting, rather than "atomic" families.
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.