If my friends and I stopped being generous with one another, we’d start counting and hoarding the meager things we had, because in this economy they were unlikely to replenish. The only thing that made us feel abundant was each other.

Giving and receiving care changes us, which in turn changes our culture.

Striking the balance between letting new people in and pulling your existing community close—between inclusiveness and intimacy—is a tension at the heart of most groups,

My meals were no longer my gifts.

limited-equity housing cooperatives. In New York City, there are over eleven hundred HDFCs (Housing Development Fund Corporation co-ops).

The form of the protest—the bizarre blood sculpture, the poems—was itself a protest against passivity, lack of imagination, and normalcy.

No one person was in charge. There were power dynamics, but they were in a constant state of flux. None of us were easily perturbed, and when our tempers did rear up they quickly flamed out, rarely agonistically.

Corey woke up not long after, between six and seven o’clock, energetic and alert, like a dog who’d just pooped.

To stigmatize group living is to dismiss the pressures of the housing crisis; the need to reimagine women’s unpaid domestic labor; the fact that loneliness and isolation menace all ages; and the racist, classist roots of the nuclear family and single-family home.