Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir

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

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.

Intentional communities don’t inherently create the conditions for what I love about group living—camaraderie, intimacy, synchrony. I’m drawn to something less structured than an intentional community but less atomized than the nuclear family, some squishier in-between place. I’m unwilling to participate in the amount of process these communities d

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

reminded me that living with someone without mutual care is worse than living alone.

there are more expansive ways to imagine home.

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,

Barthes criticized couples, nuclear family units, and especially larger communes “because their structure is based on an architecture of power.” His interest was in small groups cultivating “a zone that falls between two excessive forms”: solitude and assimilation.

The Danish version of cohousing is different from what people call co-living, sharing a single residence. It bridges the American dream of single-family home ownership with communalism, creating a neighborhood of private residences that share things like laundry facilities, community gardens, green spaces, and a common house where people gather and