Insights I learned from living in 8 community houses

The first community I lived in gave me the deepest feeling of connection and belonging I’d ever had up to that point. I made friends that felt like family. We danced in the kitchen, played music together and cooked for each other. Then I fell in love with a housemate. And after a painful breakup, I decided to move out.

Then I started a 4-year quest to find a new community that felt like home.

The living situations I tried were varied. At each place, I made friends and learned more about what felt healthy and what caused struggles in communities.

Today, I live in a community that I helped kick-off using some of the principles I learned during my exploration. We’ve been living together for about three years and think about things like buying a house together.

Here are 3 insights I learned:

1. Different communities have very different goals

Once, I moved into a 20-person artist community because I love self-expression, and I wanted the opportunity to connect with other artists deeply.

But my goal for being there was different than other people’s goals.

Many of the other people felt excited about creating something open and accessible to everyone. Which meant that we hosted large events weekly that were open to the public, and had multiple new people staying over each night.

It was the perfect environment for people who were interested in movement building. It was not healthy for me, it turns out.

I wanted to walk around in my bathrobe, and cry after a hard day with my housemates, and this didn’t jive with the extended community potlucks.

From that experience, I learned that I care a lot about intimacy. I want connections where we make time and space to see each other deeply. “Design for intimacy” became a principle in how I thought about community building from then on.

In my current house, our goal is to be like a family. People you would visit in the hospital if they got sick. Or lend money to if they ran out. Or even raise kids with. But this goal has trade-offs, like investing less energy in meeting cool new people.

2. Architecture shapes how we connect

Once, I moved into a condo with 5 close friends at around the same time that my boyfriend moved into a large house with 3 close friends. They were very different experiences.

At my boyfriend’s house, when I cooked food, I always made extra to share. We’d wear bathrobes and watch Adventure Time, or play games and sing songs. I felt so cozy.

But at the condo, we’d spent most our time in our rooms, and occasionally have passing conversations in the kitchen.

So what was different?

I think it was the architecture.

The condo had three different communal hang out spaces, all spread out: one at the front of the house, one at the back of the house, and one upstairs. So if anyone was home, it was hard to even notice sometimes. To hang out with someone felt like an intentional decision: “I’m going to come into this room where you are.”

My boyfriend’s house had one communal space. One! And the communal space had a cathedral ceiling, heated carpeted floors, with large windows that looked out on nature. It felt nourishing to spend time there.

When we looked for houses to start my current community house, we looked for a space where the communal spaces were contiguous. If our goal is to connect, let’s be in spaces that make that easier to do.

3. Sharing values reduces conflicts

Once, I lived in a 22 person house which had large communal trash cans that would fill up quickly and overflow. It was gross.

At our house meetings, there were two schools of thought on how to fix the gross trash problem.

A young woman who recently graduated from university represented one school of thought, saying something like “we need to all contribute and pick up after ourselves”.

A 30 year old man who looked tired represented the other school of thought, saying “We’ve tried this before. Let’s just pay someone to take out the trash a few times a week. It’ll cost like $2 a person.”

The people in the first camp had ethical concerns about paying someone else to do something that you could do yourself. It might encourage people to take less responsibility for themselves.

The people in the second camp had concerns about the value of their time, and were frustrated about long meetings.

These felt like deep value differences that were hard to resolve in house meetings.

In the house I’m living in now, we made some clear statements about our values on the most controversial topics we’d seen in communities. I think it’s made decision making faster and smoother.

I hope these insights are helpful. Let me know what you think!