Living the communal dream

Jonah Richman had just finished eating lunch when he was handed 5-month-old Sequora Chik-McNeal. He didn’t seem to mind, though no one asked and he wasn’t family. Instead, he continued to sit and chat, holding baby Sequora while she scanned the faces of the eight adults and four other children—including her parents and sister—who came and went during the meal.

This was a normal day at the GRUB Cooperative, where many parents—including Richman, who has 8-year-old twin daughters—have chosen to raise their children communally.

“It’s stressful, being alone in a house with kids,” said Eartha Shanti, another cooperative housemate. She was the one who handed Richman the baby during lunch, though she’s not related either. “We’re all on better behavior in a community,” she added. Parents and nonparents alike chimed in with myriad benefits to raising children in a communal-living situation: parental support among the adults, exposure to different personalities and parenting styles for the kids, easily available playmates and babysitters. They also pointed to having a connection to a community and the ability to share skills and resources.

“Kid-wise, we don’t need as much stuff,” said Stephanie Elliott, GRUB Cooperative member and mother of two. “There are other children to play with, there are other adults to play with,” she said. In addition, they’re able to share things like toys, clothing and other resources. “So instead of stuff, and ‘me, me, me,’ it’s about relationship-building. They have the opportunity to do that here, because they have this built-in network of ‘siblings’ and other grown-ups.”

Although child care and shared toys are clearly great built-in advantages, many parents who choose to live communally point to the sense of community as the most important benefit to cohabitating with other families.

“I tried to do the whole homesteading thing,” said Cedar Rose Selenite, mother of three. She, then-husband Eric Anderson, and their children bought 5 acres, built a straw-bale house, made biodiesel, and grew their own vegetables—carrying out the sustainable-living dream. But she found the lifestyle unsustainable as a single family. “I couldn’t do all that by myself. He was gone 50 hours a week to pay for the thing. And I was alone and I was like, ‘I can’t do all this,’” she admitted.

“It’s not meant for you to do all of it,” chimed in Amber French, another communal-living advocate and mother. “When you feel that you have to do it all, you’re never quite good at any one thing. But when you know you have these other people you can count on … you know you’re taken care of, and you have this web of connection, and it relieves all that stress and pressure.”

Selenite now lives in a communal townhouse of four adults and four children off Lindo Channel, and hopes to join with likeminded parents like French in a new cohousing project based on nonviolent communication (NVC), which focuses on recognizing and strategizing to meet the basic needs of ourselves and others. Respect for basic needs predicates respect for the larger world, said Selenite, whose business, Universal Human Needs, provides NVC-focused life coaching, relationship mediation and classes.

“It’s about interdependence,” Selenite explained. “NVC is sort of like social permaculture. It’s social sustainability.” Resource-sharing in particular, Selenite said, is touted by NVC leaders as one of the most subversive things you can do—it’s a rejection of the consumerist all-for-myself culture. Resource-sharing includes housing, and by extension, all the other stuff that comes with a house.

“For the eight people [in our household], we have one car,” Selenite explained, gesturing to a beat-up ’91 Toyota station wagon parked across the street.

“In contrast to the current system of capitalism that we’re living in, which does not value human needs, [NVC] is a way of [meeting] peoples’ needs as much as possible without resorting to the mechanisms in the marketplace,” explained Lauren Brown, Selenite’s housemate and a mother of a 10-year-old boy. In living together, the adults found they could meet their need to travel around town with just one car. So, instead of each family having their own, they share.

The group is enjoying the social experiment so much that it is looking to expand and form a cohousing unit of other likeminded families, including French, who has turned her garage into a yoga studio and transformed the communal yard into permaculture gardens. She is hoping to create a cohousing project, centered around her yellow house on Humboldt Avenue in Chapmantown, focusing on sustainability, permaculture and NVC. Cohousing, slightly different from communal living, entails families living in separate houses but coming together for community activities and sharing communal spaces.

“We are going through a planetary shift, a cultural shift,” French said. “You don’t even have neighborhoods anymore, really, and kids can’t go play. And all of this is not good for what’s coming.” She added that she believes climate change and an unsustainable economic system will lead to less stability than we have come accustomed to. “We have to build our tribe. We’ve really got to bring it local and bring the power back to the people.”