The Hot New Millennial Housing

Trend Is a Repeat of the Middle

Ages
Communal living is hardly a departure from traditionit's a return to how
humans have been making their homes for thousands of years.

A conte
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I L A NA E . ST R AU S S

SEP 26, 2016

BUSINESS
For most of human history, people were hunter-gatherers. They lived in
large camps, depending on one another for food, childcare, and
everything elseall without walls, doors, or picket fences. In
comparison, the number of people living in most households in todays
developed countries is quite small. According to the Census
Bureau, fewer than three people lived in the average American
household in 2010. The members of most American households can be
counted on one hand, or even, increasingly, one finger: Single-person
households only made up about 13 percent of all American households
in 1960. Now, that figure is about 28 percent.
Belonging to a relatively small household has become the norm even
though it can make daily life more difficult in many ways. Privacy may
be nice, but cooking and doing chores become much less timeconsuming when shared with an additional person, or even several
people. Water, electric, and internet bills also become more bearable
when divided among multiple residents. There are social downsides to
living alone, too. Many elderly people, young professionals, stay-athome parents, and single people routinely spend long stretches of time
at home alone, no matter how lonely they may feel; more distressingly,
many single parents face the catch-22 of working and paying for
childcare. Living in smaller numbers can be a drain on money, time, and
feelings of community, and the rise of the two-parent dual-earning
household only compounds the problems of being time-poor.
It wasnt always like this. Living arrangements have been changing for
thousands of years, and the concept of the nuclear family originated
relatively recently. Even as the economy has moved away from the sort
of agricultural labor that would encourage large households, people still

have just as much of a need for the support of friends, family, and
neighbors. Perhaps that is why so many people todayfrom young
coders to lonely septuagenarians to familiesare experimenting with
communal living, a way of life that, whether they know it or not, echoes
how things worked for most of human history. This sort of
experimentation is all too appropriate at a time when, for the typical
American child, having two married parents is on the decline, and there
is no longer a single dominant family structure as there was a halfcentury ago.
Tens of thousands of years ago, all living was communal. Being a
hunter-gatherer meant being free of many of the distinctions that
govern life today. Theres no division between your social life and your
private life, says Mark Dyble, a postdoctoral researcher at University
College London who studies modern-day hunter-gatherers in the
Philippines. Your whole life is open to other people. Theres no way to
be isolated. The hunter-gatherer camps Dyble studied, whose members
change week by week, consist of anywhere from five to 18 deeply
interdependent households, each usually made up of parents, their
children, and perhaps another relative or two. These households are
involved in virtually every aspect of each others lives.
Home was the place that sheltered you at the moment, not the one
special place associated with childhood or family of origin.
While relatives often stick together, these families are anything but selfsufficient. A chimp mother is capable of feeding herself and her
offspring. Thats not the case with humans, Dyble says, pointing out
that human children take a long time to mature and take care of
themselves. By our biology, we are obliged to have support from others.
You couldnt survive as a single-family household among huntergatherers.
The Middle Ages, when homes were essentially gathering places for
small groups of revolving residents, represent a conceptual midpoint
between hunter-gatherers living arrangements and those common
today. As the historian John Gillis described in his 1997 book A World
of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values,
people in medieval Europe lived with a mix of friends and extended
family. At that time, single-family households were uncommon in most
of the world, and Western Europe became, around the 12th century, one
of the first places where households were organized around

monogamous couples and their children. But these households still

didnt look much like todays nuclear families. In addition to parents
and their children, medieval households frequently included various
townspeople, poor married couples, other peoples children, widows,
orphans, unrelated elderly people, servants, boarders, long-term
visitors, friends, and assorted relatives.
On top of that, people moved constantly among houses. Home was the
place that sheltered you at the moment, not the one special place
associated with childhood or family of origin, Gillis writes. Single
people sometimes ran households, and marriage was not as narrowly
defined as it is today. Most kids spent time living away from their
families, especially as teenagers. Living with strangers was common,
and locals would often treat houses like public property. People entered
without knocking, even without acknowledgement, writes Gillis. It was
often difficult to tell which family belonged where In big as well as
little houses, the constant traffic of people precluded the cozy home life
we imagine to have existed in the past.
By the 1500s, the idea of a household as a father, a mother, and their
biological children caught on among Europes new urban middle class,
at least as something to strive for. This godly household owes a lot to
the Protestant Reformation, in which religious leaders started rejecting
the Catholic Church as the center of life and replaced it with a domestic
divine: the father as a stand-in for God, the mother for a priest, and the
children for congregants. Its around this time that nativity scenes
became popular, emphasizing Jesuss role as a member of a nuclear
family rather than as a lone preacher.
For all its popularity as a comforting idea, the godly household was
hardly common 500 years ago. It was completely unrealistic for most
people to find the time, money, and resources to run a household on
their own. Even those who did usually had big households full of
unrelated people; they relied on the larger community far too much to
survive as a single-family unit.
It wasnt until the 1800s that people began drawing a sharp distinction
between family and friends when it came to who they lived with. So,
during the latter half of the 19th century, the godly family started to take
shape in reality. Industrialization made extended communities less vital
for earning a living. When societies were mostly agricultural, production
was centered near the home, and families needed all the labor they

could get to run the farm during busy seasons. But as industrialization
took hold, people started leaving home to go to work, commuting to
factories and, later, offices. Something communal was lost, and by the
early 20th century, industrial efficiency permitted a lifestyle of domestic
privacy: Households shrank down to nuclear families, much more
closed-off from relatives and neighbors than ever before.
***
Homeownership is still viewed as a central component of living out the
American dream, but the ways that many present-day Americans are
pushing back on modern living arrangements closely resemble what
came centuries, even millennia, before in other parts of the world.
Family members, relatives, neighbors, and strangers are coming
together to live in groups that work for thema bit like medieval
Europe. Today, all across the nation, Americans are living the new
happily ever after, writes the social psychologist Bella DePaulo in her
2015 book How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st
Century. The new part is that people with whom they are sharing
homes and lives are not just spouses or romantic partners.
Instead of limiting their households to children, parents, and
grandparents, plenty of people are going a step further, making homes
with friends and even strangers. Cohousing, in which a large community
lives together and shares household duties, is gaining popularity. In
cohousing, individuals or families generally have their own houses,
bedrooms, or apartments but share things like kitchens and community
spaces. Theyll commonly trade off on responsibilities like cooking and
chores. Milagro Housing, for instance, is a cohousing community
located in Arizonas Sonoran Desert. There, families, couples, and single
people live in 28 homes in a tight-knit community that shares a kitchen,
laundry room, library, meeting room, playroom, and storage rooms.
And Milagro Housing isnt all that unusual; the Fellowship for
Intentional Community, an organization that champions communities
"where people live together on the basis of explicit common values,"
lists 1,539 cohousing communities around the country, some already
formed and others in the process of forming. Thats likely a low
estimate, since plenty of shared-living communities arent reported to
any national databases. While some residents hire developers to build
cohousing villages from scratch, most have turned already-existing
houses and apartments into shared communities.

Cohousing has shown itself to be a useful living arrangement for groups

of people with all sorts of priorities. In Silicon Valleys hacker houses,
dozens of computer programmers, most of them very young, bunk
together while they work at start-ups or on their own projects. The
website CoAbode links single mothers who want to live and raise
children together. In Los Angeles, about a dozen young adults live
together in one large house called Synchronicity LA. There, they make
art together, hold salons, divide up chores, and trade off cooking
communal meals four days a week. It really feels like living in a big
family, Grant Hoffner, a longtime Synchronicity resident, told me.
Cohousing models can get pretty creative. In Hope Meadows, a
neighborhood near Chicago that DePaulo describes in her book, retired
people live together with at-risk foster kids. There, retired folks, many of
whom used to describe their lives as boring and lonely, raise the kids
together. And in Deventer, a town in the eastern region of the
Netherlands, that model is flipped: Some college students there live in
nursing homes alongside elderly people, who they socialize with and
assist with various chores.
The modern cohousing movement began in Denmark in the 1970s, and
there are now more than 700 living communities in Denmark alone,
according to DePaulo. In each, dozens or even hundreds of Danish
families live in homes built around shared spaces and common houses.
The residents wanted to see each other over the course of their
everyday lives, and be there for each other in ways large and small,
writes DePaulo. The idea spread to several other countries, and Sweden
even has a number of state-owned cohousing buildings, each populated
by hundreds of residents. And thats just this particular brand of shared
living;120,000 Israelis live in communal villages called kibbutzim,
which originated about 100 years ago.
Developers are starting to see how appealing cohousing is to some
people.Commonspace, for instance, is a company that designs and runs
apartments consisting of about 20 small units around a common area
occupied mostly by young and single people, sort of like a dorm for
adults. The first distinctive cohousing setup in the U.S. was built by
developers 25 years ago, but the concept hasnt gained much traction, as
there are now only 160 American cohousing communities built from
scratch. Perhaps that will change as developers court young people who
envision a lifestyle different than the one theyve inherited from the
20th century.

Among other things, many residents are drawn to the company that
cohousing offers, which DePaulo says is the main reason people choose
to live like this. Cohousing can feel a bit like summer camp, with people
always around to talk to and spend time with. But it also provides deep
support systems. If someone is hospitalized, cohousing friends are
there to visit, writes DePaulo. When a cohouser is ailing at home,
neighbors show up with chicken soup and the latest news from the
community.
It takes a village to raise a child, as the saying goes, and most modernday parents could use the help.
One anthropologist DePaulo interviewed decided to live with more
people after being unhappy on her own, even though her boyfriend lived
nearby and she had some friends in her building. I would come home
and cry, Leanna Wolfe, the anthropologist, told DePaulo. I was just so
lonely. She wasnt the only one: Americans have fewer close friends
than they used to. Since 1985, the number of Americans who have no
friends to confide in has tripled, reported a 2006American Sociological
Review study.
In addition to the sense of community it builds, theres an obvious
upside to shared living: saving time and money. In a typical American
house or apartment, individuals or small families are in charge of each
meal themselves. But cohousing communities can divide up cooking
schedules. Many residents only cook once a week and come home to
cooked meals everyday.
One of cohousings biggest draws is that it eases the burdens of childrearing. It takes a village to raise a child, as the saying goes, and most
modern-day parents could use the help. Among the Efe, a group of
hunter-gatherers in the Congo, some infants more than three weeks old
spend 80 percent of their time with someone other than their mothers.
By comparison, the majority of American communities are designed to
keep people apart. I like to think of dwellings as people: If a group of
people wanted to get to know each other, they would not line up facing
each other in two straight, rigid rows, too far apart to really see anyone
else clearly, writes DePaulo. Thats how houses are arranged on many
conventional streets. Under other housing models, a village really could
raise a child.

DePaulo argues that it would be particularly helpful to integrate

cohousing into public-housing policy. People who work on housing for
the poor have to deal with peoples whole lives, she argues in her book.
They cant just give them a place to live and forget about them.
Keeping rent affordable is the foremost concern for people in charge of
managing public housing, but cohousing can fill in other difficulties of
living without much money: Splitting cooking, childcare, and household
expenses can save lots of time and money. For these reasons and others,
Danish and Swedish governments have long supported cohousing.
American governments (especially local ones) could do the same,
perhaps by converting abandoned hotels into mixed-income cohousing,
building affordable shared-living buildings, or even just by connecting
interested locals and helping them refashion their neighborhoods into
something that better fosters community.
Humans have never lived the same way for long, and many people are
finding todays urban and suburban neighborhoods, which are based on
an idealized version of home that is by now hundreds of years old, to be
lacking. Humans may never return to the days of having strangers and
distant relatives dropping in to live for extended periods of time, but its
clear that a group of people are tapping into the past that John Gillis
wrote about: Until well into the nineteenth century, heaven was
represented not as a community of families but as one large community
of friends.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ILANA E. STRAUSS is an assistant editor at From the Grapevine. Her

work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's
Digest,and The Toast.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/millennial-housing-communalliving-middle-ages/501467/.