Thinking about cooperative living spaces

The traditional setup of an American home has a lot of wasted space and materials, especially for someone single or a couple with no kids. You only use the kitchen a few times a day, the living room spends most of its time as a glorified storage shed, and you end up with a large number of tools that only get used a few times per year. On top of this, its lonely! While having a home of your own sounds nice and romantic, coming home to an empty or almost empty house day after day is not. To socialize, you end up having to call someone else and get back in the car and travel.

Contrast this with a cooperative living arrangement. Instead of a single person or couple living in a house, you have anywhere from four on up people living in a shared space. Bedrooms are generally private, and bathrooms vary by setup. In this situation, you still have your own private space where you can go and shut the door when needed, but the formerly underutilized areas such as kitchen and living room are shared.

Lifestyle benefits

Not only is this cooperative living arrangement a more efficient use of space and resources, but it has a number of lifestyle benefits as well. One of the most obvious is the ability to pool resources cooking. It's far more fun to prepare a special meal for a group of people than for only one or two, meaning that in most cooperative living situations you end up with more and more varied home cooked food. It is also much easier to clean up afterwards; many hands make light work, and the growth in dirty dishes happens at a slower rate than the growth in people participating.

Another advantageous element is the social one. While of course, you will still want to get together with friends outside of your coop, it becomes far easier to socialize without going out. Instead of having to call around, plan ahead, and get people to agree on a destination, impromptu social gatherings happen in the kitchen during dinner, in the living room after dinner, and at various other locations all throughout the day. This does, of course, mean that you should only live with people you get along with, but that is a good idea regardless of your living situation.

Actuality: Outside looking in

In truth, I have only limited experience with cooperative living arrangements. In undergrad, I lived with a number of other guys, but we had little space and did very little cooking. While T was in large coops through her last two years of undergrad, I only lived in them part time through her. Next, we got an apartment together, and while we were in several talks with friends to live together, nothing ever ended up coming of it. We had a close friend living in a coop nearby, and spent many days visiting with her and staying over there, but again this was somewhat outside looking in.

Nonetheless, T looks back fondly on her experiences with cooperative living, and every time I am exposed I want to try it at a more in-depth level. In Guatemala, we have experienced some interesting variations on this theme, first living with another family, and now living in a house where we have our own bedroom and bathroom, but share the kitchen and courtyard (complete with couch, hammock, etc). While the family was a bit much, the shared space we're in now is close to ideal, with casual hanging out happening at various times, and no problems so far with conflicts over any space.

The next few years

Back in the bay area, our friend is starting a new coop, and if we were not moving I think we would be joining it. Instead, we're off to find a new community and a new place to live in San Diego. I think we are likely to start off renting an apartment somewhere, but I hope that as we begin to grow our community there we can find some like minded people who are interested in sharing a house.

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• Guatemalan Families and Community

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Guatemalan Families and Community

One thing that is very obvious is you stay with a Guatemalan family is that their idea of a family unit is very different from ours. In the upper middle class family we stayed with, the grandmother, her daughter, and her daughter's three kids all lived in the same household. The grandmother's son lives elsewhere with his wife, but eats at the house for almost all meals, and his 5 year old lives about half the time with him and half with the grandmother. In poorer and more rural households, it is apparently not uncommon to have up to 4 generations under one roof, sometimes with only a single room.

Some of this is definitely due to different levels of wealth. When you are very poor, combining living expenses with as many people as possible is a good idea. However, another contributing factor is a very different view on family and community than exists in the United States. In the United States, it is encouraged to strike out as independently as possible. Living with your parents past the age of 18 is generally looked down upon, and certainly once you have a steady income you are expected to be living on your own, likely in a different city.

Similarly, it is entirely common to travel from city to city as school and different jobs require, without strong regard for living near family or friends. This independence certainly has some value; there is a sense of freedom in being able to pack up your things and leap into the unknown, following a great opportunity. However, I think there is something we have lost as well. Here, there is a sense of roots, of belonging, and of continuity that I have never sensed anywhere I have lived.

The Value of Community

We are social beings, even those who like me are introverts at heart, and seek to connect with others who are like us. Witness the rapid growth of online social networks like Facebook; These tools offer nothing new; social networks have always existed. Instead, they bring the power of the internet to bear in allowing people to connect with less regard to distance, and have grown like wildfire. There is a strong desire to forge a sense of community, despite our tendency to spread ourselves so far apart.

It was our community that made our wedding such a memorable one; with friends and family providing the food, the cake, the wine, the Huppah (wedding canopy), the artwork on our Ketubah (wedding vows), and of course the ambiance, turning our special day into one we will remember forever.

And it was our community that made living where we did, in a single bedroom apartment in an expensive and not very interesting city near Stanford an amazing and wonderful experience. Our memories are filled with meals together and trips for milkshakes, crazy parties and mellow games of cards while sipping warm drinks, mornings spent sitting on the grass playing guitar, and making pancakes. All with members of our wonderful community.

Yet we too, leave it behind

Fully aware of how amazing our community is, we still left to travel to Guatemala, and we still are leaving it behind when we get back to move for T's graduate school. Not as far as we might have gone, and to the place where I went to school, so we have some remnants of community, but still leaving our bedrock behind.

It makes sense to do it. Graduate school is a necessary step upon the path T wants to walk, and we are by no means alone. This is the time in life when many people in the States scatter to pursue dreams, and we had already felt the fragmenting of our community as many friends left to pursue theirs. But it makes me wonder...

Will there ever be a time when we're all ready to settle together?

Will we ever be willing to say no to the opportunities that require traveling from each other, no to the things that 'make sense', and agree with each other to settle in one place, where we can live and grow and build a community together? It seems almost antithetical to the American way, to deliberately give up some possibilities, and be less independent, in order to continue living with the same people in the same place.

But it is a way that also calls to me. Another dream, this time one of interdependence instead of independence. Of deepening and lengthening relationships over years of time. Of teaching each other, and learning together. Of knowing that I can count on my friends to be there, and that they can count on me to be there, not just day after day but year after year. Of setting down roots, the kind of which seem natural in places like Guatemala, that you read about in stories where families have lived in the same homes for years, generation after generation of children playing with each other and growing up together.

We have gained some measure of independence in the United States, and I value that. But it seems in many ways we have given up community as it used to be known. And I wonder... was it worth it? And if not, can we get it back?

Leave me your thoughts in the comments!