Some Ideas About How We Can Live
A Case for Informal, Political Intentional Community
I. introduction
When I graduated high school, I set off with grit and determination to become a hermit in the California mountains. I was convinced that salvation from my existential suffering, as well as answers to my nascent political frustrations with my upper-middle class background, lay in a complete separation of myself from society.
For a long time, I had been aware of the intensity of my own introversion, finding much social interaction a bane, a burden, exhausting, something I did more as an obligation to others than a pleasure to myself. Now, I can look back and realize I had a great deal of social anxiety, but I did not have such language at the time, and thus experienced my feelings only as social revulsion. On top of all of this, in highschool I began developing a self-righteous superiority complex. Increasingly, I regarded the lives and pleasures of many of my peers and elders as infantile, opulent, hollow, or otherwise worthy of my secret scorn. The cocktail of introversion, anxiety, and self-righteous disgust with my surroundings made me crave escape deeply.
My idea to run to the mountains was by no means original. I took inspiration from a lineage of other white American men. One of them, as captured in the book and movie Into the Wild, was Chris McCandless. Graduating incredibly disillusioned from my now alma mater, Emory University, in 1990, McCandless set off to experiment with increasingly solitary lifestyles, culminating in a winter spent alone in the Alaskan wilderness (an effort which he did not survive). There was also Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, whose essay Rain and the Rhinoceroses struck a chord within me. In it, Merton writes from a cabin in the woods, as rain patters down around him. From this quiet isolation, he writes himself into higher and higher spiritual planes, nearing what, to young Gabe, seemed enlightenment. And then of course there was Henry David Thoreau, who in Walden, opines the virtues of living on the strength of one’s own will and body alone, alongside a small pond in New England.
These influences (among others) left me convinced that all the things that I needed to shake my feelings of ennui and begin to make sense of the world were locked up within myself, and that all I needed to access them was precious distance and space from the clamoring, needy masses of society. Rather conveniently, in my parents’ privileged network of friends, I found an Oakland lawyer that owned (but did not reside on) a great deal of acreage in the Sierra Nevada foothills and was willing to host a young stranger in exchange for help with the olive harvest.
Well, if it was to the California mountains I fled to be alone with my own supreme company, it was also in the California mountains that I learned how entirely and completely wrong I was about myself. The first month was pleasant enough—reading, walking, cooking, writing, attempting to reflect on my young life. The second month became more of a challenge. I was running out of things to think and write about. I started “cheating,” seeking out semi-social interactions, if only shopping in Walmart or visiting family friends in the Bay. By the third month, I felt my sanity slipping, and started counting down the days to my departure with wild eyes.
For in the absence of society—where I thought I would find enlightenment and answers— I found blankness, a void. There was no secret self to discover. There was no capital “T” Truth to be excavated from my own ingenious mind. Rather, as the isolation stretched on, the less anything meant anything, and the more I craved my old life, even those parts that had previously irked me.
I was forced, in California, to confront the fact that meaning is socially produced; to admit that everything that was me—good and bad—existed only in relation to the people and institutions that had raised and shaped me. Even my most angsty and rebellious parts—those that had driven me to the mountains—were socially derived. If it was a different and more meaningful life I wanted (which, I can now say, is what I was really after), it was different and better people and institutions I sought, not their elimination.
The three months of rural solitude in California launched me into the future I have now lived: to study sociology, to become a lover of communitarian anarchism, and ultimately to seek out and live in intentional community. The time did not make me any less introverted, socially anxious, or, unfortunately, cure me of my superiority complex. It did, however, make forever clear the sacredness of the social.
Five years after those months in the mountains, I joined two close friends and one new acquaintance in a park in Atlanta. We met to discuss the possibility of becoming roommates. Or, more accurately, the four of us came together on that particular day and in that particular configuration because we wanted to do something significantly more ambitious than just be roommates.
It was the peak of the 2020 summer uprisings for Black life and, simultaneously, the collective recognition that the COVID-19 pandemic signaled a serious departure from the “business as usual” of late stage capitalism. All four of us, in our own ways, felt a need and desire to find ways of living that made sense for the devolving world around us—a world that was both terrifying and exciting. The term we used for what we wanted was “intentional community.”
In the park, we talked about possibilities for our cohabitation: having weekly dinners, using our house for political organizing, creating a space in which to do art, developing conflict resolution processes, getting to know our neighbors, gardening together, and more. Sufficiently energized by and endeared to one another that day, we began seeking a place to rent, and in August, we signed the lease on a four bedroom house in Vine City and called it the Playground.
II. definitions and the argument
In this piece, I reflect on my year in the Playground and consider what the ways of domestic life the four of us explored in that house have to offer our floundering generation. For my purposes, I’m calling what we did together informal, political intentional community.
By intentional community, I mean people sharing residential life together primarily because they want to, not (or at least not exclusively) because they are family, partnered, or are looking to reduce their cost of living.
In my definition, intentional communities also collectively orient around some shared values or, you guessed it, intentions. While these may be centered around a certain faith, a certain activity, or a certain identity, ours was primarily built around a shared political analysis and corresponding political commitments (see next definition).
Lastly, intentional communities have at least some aspects of their residential life that are formally structured, often to aid them in living up to their shared intentions, but also to help with the more mundane functioning of daily life. In the Playground, for instance, we started with a structured weekly house dinner, a weekly commitment to participate in a local food redistribution program, and a system to divide the house chores equally amongst ourselves.
The word “political” is used in endless ways, but here I use it to describe individuals and intentional communities that are grounded in a liberatory framework (i.e. a framework that focuses on overthrowing conditions that do harm to people and earth). This may involve partiality towards various specific ideological traditions like Marxism, anarchism, Black liberation, abolition, queer theory, decolonization, and so on. But it may also include a politics informed more by personal experience than anything academia can slap a label on. What is essential for my definition of the political is a conviction that things are not right in a foundational, structural sense as well as a genuine belief that they may be done in another way. In the kind of community I am defining here, a shared political vision is the thing that draws everyone together.
In the Playground, the four of us entered the house with a hodgepodge of anarchist, abolitionist, feminist, Black liberationist, and radical ecological perspectives. Though diverse, our politics had enough overlap to form a coherent collective starting place.
Lastly, by using informal, I mean to emphasize a contrast to formal intentional
communities—those typically rather ambitious projects that define the genre, such as land projects, ecovillages, Catholic worker houses, cohousing, squats, kibbutzim, communes, and housing cooperatives. Formal intentional communities generally require huge investments of time, energy, and resources. In contrast, informal ones have relatively low stakes of investment on both the material and emotional planes. There is not a lot of infrastructure involved, no 501(c)(3), no collectively owned property, probably not a website. There may be substantial group expectations, but people aren’t asked to quit their jobs, leave their relationships, or otherwise turn their lives upside down because the community demands it of them.
At the Playground, we signed a one-year lease together and made no plans nor created any expectations beyond this commitment. And though we moved in with sizable collective ambitions, we all had separate jobs, different friend groups, and generally large amounts of personal autonomy that we did not intend to compromise for the house.
So as I’m defining it, informal, political intentional communities (IPICs) will generally take the form of a) several people sharing rent on a house, with b) relatively low stakes and short term commitments of participation, c) a shared liberatory framework (or frameworks) among residents, and d) some level of structured activity related to these shared beliefs.
My advocacy for IPICs can be broken into two main points. First, I see in this way of living a unique capacity to meet the rather desperate economic, social, political, and existential needs of individuals at this moment in time (especially for us young people, and extra especially for us radically-minded young people). Finding living accommodations that do not seriously compromise one or more of the above categories of need is frankly incredibly difficult to do. It often feels we have no choice but to settle, working ridiculous hours to be able to afford rent, living with people that we don’t like or don’t allow us feel safe, becoming codependent with a partner, being involuntarily isolated, or sidelining our passions and political aspirations just to be able to maintain some kind of domestic homeostasis. I’m not claiming that IPICs are an infallible panacea to all of these contemporary maladies, but I think they can come closer to meeting our personal needs and avoiding undesirable compromises than any other model of living I have encountered so far.
Secondly, I think IPICs can be a pragmatic tool for macro-level radical or revolutionary base-building in our time and context. On the surface, this way of life seems low key, non-threatening, and ultimately quite compatible with the status quo. However, I argue that in its very unassuming features lies potential political power. In its accessibility, low stakes of investment, and ability to accommodate turnover, informal communities can host large numbers of people in relatively stable and healthy politicized environments. Furthermore, the nature of IPICs encourages their residents to practice their grand political vision on the small scale of the house, thus potentially contributing not only larger numbers of political actors to movement work, but also helping to ensure these actors are of higher quality (i.e. have lots of micro-level experience). Lastly, I see the greatest possibility for these seemingly simple community houses to contribute to macro-level change in the development of loosely organized networks between them, scaling their individual political power across geographical space.
III. today’s housing context
The housing reality for us late Millennials and early Zoomers is quite different from that of our parents’ generation. In 1975, 57% of people in the “young adult” age range (18-34) lived with a married partner. Today, that figure has dropped to 27%.1 Rather than with a spouse, the majority of us live with either a) our parents or b) roommates. (Vespa 2017, 6).
These figures shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the cultural and economic shifts of the last 50 years. To give an oversimplified summary: a post-industrial economy has come to demand more education from its workforce. Consequently, more people spend more years getting degrees before doing any kind of settling down, years in which they are generally living transient and financially precarious lives (i.e., not getting married and not in a position to secure private housing).
For those not pursuing work in professional fields, the economy has similarly changed. For these people, the loss of unioned blue-collar jobs and the massive expansion of the service, and now “gig,” economy has meant less stable employment well into adulthood, and possibly for the rest of life.
Add to these changes in the nature of employment and careers a rapidly rising cost of living. After decades of suburbanization, cities are again the place to be, both in terms of cultural desirability and access to employment. With an influx of people and huge new financial interests at play, most urban areas are seeing skyrocketing costs of living. Making rent on one’s own, or even with a partner, has become increasingly inaccessible, and for many, purchasing housing is entirely out of the question.
High costs of living are of course not aided by the huge amount of debt most Americans now carry, much of it saddled on in the process of seeking those very post-secondary degrees the economy demands of us. Debt payments ensure that even if we are able to earn a reasonable income and find relatively affordable housing, our budgets will continue to be strained.
On top of these economic shifts, the last 50 years have seen a cultural turn away from valuing marriage and child rearing.2 More than half of respondents to the 2012 General Social Survey noted that getting married and having children were plainly unimportant parts of adulthood (Vespa 2017, 4). Obviously these popular preferences push us only further away from the dominant housing patterns of previous generations.
In sum, the new cultural-economic context has prolonged the period before young people settle down (if we ever do at all), and seriously constrained the housing options affordable to us in the meantime. Therefore, we live where we can afford to live and in ways that make sense for the transience of our lives—often with our parents or by splitting rent with others. Even the minority that does have the means and security for independent living is less interested in quickly and enthusiastically jumping into the old nuclear family, in the way of our parents; other things are simply more important.
For my purposes here, I am most interested in how this shifting context has pushed people into living with roommates at a rapidly rising pace. Depending on how you look at the census data, anywhere from 21%-25% of young adults in the US are currently rooming with others (Vespa 2017, 6 & 12).
Social scientists have been studying the uptick in roommate living since the late 1990s. They call it the study of “shared housing” (or, in British English, “flatting”). A major finding of these scholars is that though shared housing at first seems to be just “a short term transition between leaving the parental home and setting up of an independent home (Clark et al 2017, 1192),” in reality a great number of people discover that they enjoy this way of life as an end in itself. Even when they arrive at the situation strictly out of economic necessity, with no thought of building a social life within their shared house, many find a great deal of joy in the community setting. In some cases, these fairly random collective living situations develop into such attached social units that the seminal scholar of this field, Sue Heath, has called them “non-utopian communes (2004, 172),” spaces of rather involved community living that are “based on shared accommodation and friendship.”
So, largely through economic constraint, many people are kind of accidentally stumbling into community living. What would it look like, I cannot help but ask, to take these organically developing “non-utopian communes” and make them utopian? To add to them, using Heath’s language, “a shared ideological commitment (Heath 2004, 172)?” Or, in my language, add to them the intentional and the political?
What’s clear is that the material conditions for the proliferation of community houses are already here; people, by choice or necessity, are living with roommates in huge numbers, and many of them are already finding much good in it. Therefore, if you buy the arguments that follow—that informal, political intentional community has a great deal to offer us individually as well as as a radical collectivity—we actually have a very ripe situation on our hands.
IV. the argument, part 1: the meeting of individual needs
Without zooming out to any kind of broad political argument, but sticking narrowly and selfishly to the benefits to the individual, IPICs have a lot to offer us.
psychosocial health
For this piece, I interviewed a number of friends who have lived in, or are currently living in, situations that meet my definition of informal, political intentional community. From here on, I use their experience, as well as those of myself and former roommates from the Playground, to flesh things out.
Sanae, who lived in the Playground, wrote a short essay reflecting on their time there. In it they write:
I do remember there was a time, a certain period where I sought to be on my own more. I understand why some of us would want that. Especially those of us for whom community has been synonymous with patriarchy-centered, man-pleasing, abuser-ignoring spaces and families. Those of us who had to hide who we were in the community, hide our queerness. Those of us who experienced community as being about people-pleasing and being about silencing conflict when it bothered other people most comfortable in community (usually our fathers!) . . . The solution to being forced into patriarchal communities is often to go off on your own, get that coin, get that one bedroom apartment with no roommates.
In this excerpt, Sanae highlights how the living situations of our generation often present a tension between alienation and isolation—between community settings that feel bad and an alternative of utter independence. Experiences of alienation can run the gamut from the fairly banal frustrations that sent me to California (discussed in the introduction) to the much more actively violent dynamics Sanae touches on here.
Regardless of intensity, living with family tends to be ground zero for our generation’s feelings of alienation. Sanae and I have discussed what appears to be a uniquely large rift between us and our parents and older family members. Of course, clashing with elders is no new historical phenomenon, but, anecdotally at least, people our age seem to have it worse than our predecessors—close, healthy relationships with elders seem the exception, not the rule. In our speculative conversations, Sanae and I attributed this in part to the interpersonally manifesting violences that older generations seem to have terrible trouble parting with (patriarchy, homophobia, etc.); in part to the way that escalating crises fundamentally shape how our younger generations must approach the world; but most significantly and generally to the ridiculous pace of change of the last 50 years. The internet was invented in 1983, and the iPhone just in 2007. The context we are in now is so radically different from the one our parents came up in that the ability to relate across this difference, more often than not, creates strain.
Alienation is not, of course, limited to familial living situations. People find themselves with roommates and partners that make them feel bad, unseen, or unsafe. But whatever the particularities, a great deal of us suffer from poor mental health stemming from those we live with.
The flip side of living in a social yet alienating environment is living in unhealthy isolation. As Sanae suggests above, some of us voluntarily seek out isolation in response to previously alienating and/or violent living situations. But for others, isolation is involuntary. In an economy that requires cross-country (or even international) moves for opportunities, people frequently wind up in places they have no family or established social networks. The census shows that a non-negligible amount of young adults (8%) live alone (Vespa 2017, 6), but of course, one doesn’t have to be physically alone to feel forms of isolation. In the house I live in right now for instance, my roommates and I hardly interact.
Voluntary or not, isolation generally sucks. As my time in the California mountains made abundantly clear, too much time alone can create a devil’s playground for our minds. Scholars of shared housing note that “digital forms of interaction and sharing have ensured that living alone does not necessarily result in a ‘society of loners’ (Druta et al., 2021).” Online platforms from Tinder to Facebook allow people to connect in ways never before possible, whether such connections remain virtual or bleed into the in-person world. Similarly, instant messaging and video calling of various kinds allow people to stay more connected even when they are far-flung. However, while such mediums of interactions may make isolation more tolerable, most would agree that they are weak substitutes for robust, real-life social networks.
Ultimately, the twin forces of alienation and isolation are no healthy cocktail for well-being. We should not have to choose between living situations and communities that are unpleasant (or worse) and being and/or feeling alone, but in a period of unaffordable housing, precarious employment, intergenerational strain, and opportunities that scatter us far and wide, such experiences are unfortunately quite common.
Sue Heath (who, should you need a reminder, is the seminal scholar in the sociological field of shared housing) observes how our generation has adapted to this strange moment by creating “new and diverse forms of social dependency, based on ‘families of choice’ (Heath 2004, 162).” We are figuring out ways to build social worlds that feel good to us by “transforming the boundaries of interpersonal relationships, looking to [our] friends rather than sexual partners or family to meet immediate needs for intimacy (Clark et. al 2017, 1192).”
Indeed, friendship rises to the surface as the foundational social building block that makes sense for our peculiar historical moment. Friends, Heath argues, can function as “a protective strategy in the current period, providing support and solidarity against a backdrop of increasing levels of risk (2004, 167).” Essentially, a lot of us are saying, “I cannot get what I need from the traditional sources of family and partnership, so I will seek support with peers who are in a similar boat.”
And if friendship is the new support structure of choice, there is no better way to build friends into our lives than to live with them. For, after all, living with people provides a “rapid acceleration of the usual pace for developing intimacy (Heath 2004, 173).” Community living can thus encourage the kinds of social home environment most equipped for facilitating our psychosocial well-being.
Recall here that Heath makes all of these observations while studying largely happenstance shared housing situations (i.e. random roommate living). The potentials for cultivating socially healthy, residential space around friendship increase tremendously when people are putting intentional effort into the planning and curation of their houses.
In the Playground, we fared the most locked-down, isolating part of the (still ongoing) pandemic together. While many people I knew were suffering various forms of alienation and isolation in their home environments, we had a chosen group of three others to live alongside. We had dinners together, shared long hours of conversation, offered emotional support and advice, and discussed and processed the world around us. This is not at all to say that we didn’t have an abundance of interpersonal conflict and strife, or that we each consistently maintained good mental health. However, we were ultimately surrounded by people we liked, people we chose to live with, people with whom we shared a political vision, and people who were committed, in an intentional way, to being mutually supportive to one another through a very difficult and scary time. For people of our generation, building a place that feels good, safe, and nourishing is no small deal.
economic needs
As I touched on in the section on today’s housing context above, there is a fairly straightforward economic benefit to sharing housing, one that has turned roommate living into the second most common living situation among young adults: more affordable rent. According to RentCafe, the current average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta is $1,790. To stay within HUD’s recommended metric for housing affordability (spending a third or less of one’s income on rent), a single person would have to be making nearly $65,000 a year to be able to afford such an apartment. Meanwhile, the median income in the city is $34,000. Clearly, the math does not add up.
In the Playground we were able to split rent and utilities on a four-bedroom house, significantly reducing our monthly living cost to approximately $550 a person. While this is still far from chump change, and for all of us it remained our largest monthly expense, it was comparatively affordable for city living.3
Reduced rent is where the economic benefits both began and ended for the shared housing situations in Heath’s studies. But in IPIC settings there is the opportunity to be creative and ultimately go much further. In the Playground, for instance, we shared our cars. Letting others drive your multi-thousand dollar transportation machine through Atlanta’s harrowing streets is an act of generosity that requires a great deal of trust. However, from the beginning, both Dylan and Aishat (the two car owners) made clear that they wished to share their vehicles as much as was practicable for their work schedules. Dylan even created a calendar on a whiteboard where his car could be reserved in advance. Rather than find individual solutions to our transportation needs, we coordinated rides with each other around the city, and as a result, our collective transportation costs were significantly reduced.
Food was another area in which we went above and beyond to reduce financial strain. Through a joint commitment to participate in a weekly food redistribution with Food Not Bombs, we were able to take home enough excess groceries to cover about a third of our food needs, a huge reduction to our expenses. Furthermore, following the urging of our friend Miliaku, we opted to communize all of purchased groceries. Unless specifically marked, any food one brought into the house was fair game for all to use. With meals often being shared, even when the food one person purchased was cooked by someone else, it often came back to you one way or another.
Other informal, political intentional community houses in our network went even further than we did. Perhaps most admirably, two houses adjusted the costs of everything, down to rent and utility payments, based on the individual income and social privileges of each resident.
More affordable living has obvious benefits in reducing stress and allowing individuals to do some saving. However, equally importantly, it can create the possibilities to work less. A forty hour work week entails spending most of one’s waking hours devoted to someone else’s profit-making activities. The relative affordability of sharing rent (and perhaps going creatively beyond) can literally free up some of our time to be able to participate in things we are passionate about, whether that be political struggle, art projects, or simply focusing on relationships. In the Playground, owing in large part to our collective practices, three of the four of us were able to work only part time and still meet or exceed our material needs.4
political needs
The starry eyed radical youth that, by 40, gives up or sells out is a trope beyond cliche. As individuals, it can be difficult to hold onto our political convictions as daily adult life works to freeze them out of us. When the weekend comes and we are exhausted from 40 hours of work, it is more appealing to seek well-deserved pleasures than dedicate any time or energy to political struggles. When we pour all our wages towards meeting our basic needs, it may become easier to sympathize with a police state that protects our hard-fought property. When the people around us are themselves disillusioned with possibilities for change, we move in that direction ourselves.
There are always more coercive forces pushing us to invest in the status quo, and ever fewer reasons to believe the radical visions we once held were anything but naive daydreams. Perhaps in our heart of hearts—or in the abstract realms of our readings, our YouTube consumption, our social media postings—we continue to engage radical ideas, but how are we living them? Ultimately, the accumulation of the mundane functionings of everyday life in this world set us drifting towards capitulation.
Of course, we can find like-minded people out and about, in political organizations, in certain bars and community centers, in some academic environments. We can commit to participating in activism and organizing in various capacities, some of us even figuring out ways to intersect this work with our income streams. But engagement in all of these ways necessitates a sustained outward effort in what are often already overwhelming lives of just-getting-by.
One of the great benefits of community living is the ability to more easily sustain, grow, and act on our politics, conviction, and beliefs. When we are immersed in a household that shares and reflects our political convictions back to us, what we believe is given life. As Asa, who lives in an IPIC with two others, told me,
I’ve found it quite helpful and nice to have people around who send events, mutual aid requests, or projects, and who are willing to go to things with me. It feels much less intimidating to show up to things if you have another person to do it with. Of course, you don’t have to be living with the people you’re showing up with, but it is nice.
All of these things Asa could be doing on their own, but living with others that are on the same page and similarly committed simply makes political engagement easier.
Joel, who lives in a warehouse with 10 other politically-minded people in Chicago, used the language of accountability. They noted that when they say they are going to do something in front of their housemates, there is a positive social pressure to do it. This is as true of washing the dishes as it is of showing up to a political action. Ultimately group accountability creates expectations and mores that assist continued political participation, even when internal motivation may be lacking.
Being successfully reproduced as a passive participant in this violent world is one of the darker possibilities I can imagine for myself. When my best friend (and fellow Playground resident) Dylan and I were about 13 years old, we made a pact on a street corner somewhere in Atlanta that we would not become sell-outs. Though—in our protected, white, upper-class bubbles—we did not yet understand what exactly we were afraid of selling out to become, nor who (or what) stood to suffer as a result, we nevertheless had an intuitive sense that the life of most adults around us is not one we wanted for ourselves.
In the Playground, with two others, we were able to hold ourselves to this pact. Attending actions, participating in organizing, educating ourselves, and extending our political networks were all facilitated simply by living there together.
If so many of us carry a deep, personal desire to move away from the world we were born into and towards a more liberatory one, does it not make sense to encase ourselves in a mold that can assist us to these ends—to surround ourselves, intentionally, with others who strive for the same thing? At the end of the day, intentional community living is one of the best tools we have to hedge against our steady drift towards an acceptance of the status quo.
V. the argument, part 2: macro-level social change
Having discussed at some length how IPICs can address the holes in the hearts (and wallets) of individuals, I shift my focus to exploring how this seemingly humble effort can contribute to broader movement work.
the power of the informal: low barriers to entry, low costs of failure, more sustainability
When trying to imagine radical alternatives to our present realities—whether it be anticapitalist economies, prisonless societies, or robust local food systems—we often bump up against the great distance between our dreams and what seems possible to us now. Speaking plainly, liberation generally feels very, very far away.
The overwhelming distance between here and there can lead, on the one hand, to a premature surrender. Often through the slow process of erosion described in the section above, we eventually come to ask “Why bother? Why not make do with reform, or even the status quo?”
On the other hand, we may be inspired to action, but given the vastness of change we see a need for, endeavor to take on extremely ambitious radical projects, projects for which we are not ready, that bite off more than we can chew.
Nowhere can over-ambition be better seen than in efforts to construct intentional communities. Over the last several years I have been privy to so many enthusiastic conversations about plans for starting organizations, buying land, building tiny homes, growing food—in short, communing it up in one way or another. These are wonderful and beautiful ideas, but I have seen so few of them—even those that have had serious work put behind them—come to fruition thus far. The resources, means, experience, funding, and luck needed to execute such visions are simply immense—the barriers to entry are high.
This is where my persistent advocacy for the “informal” part of informal, political intentional community begins to make sense. Unlike the ambitious communes and land projects of our daydreams, we can sign a lease with a handful of committed others right now, using only the tools and resources already at our disposal.
The reality is, nearly a quarter of us are already living with roommates in unstructured, unintentional ways. By simply infusing this existing phenomenon with some structure and intentionality, we create an incredibly low barrier to entry means to explore alternative living. Doing so does not ask us to make huge commitments or life shifts—such as moving cities, giving up jobs, ending relationships—as a prerequisite for participation. In fact, we are able to continue our lives largely uninterrupted, with community living being additive.
Why attach our hopes of living differently to projects that are such a reach, especially for us young people without much in the way of resources and experience? Informal community living situations can give us a great deal of what we seek in the commune with much more immediacy.
After ease of access, the second major benefit I see to keeping intentional communities informal is an increased capacity to endure the inevitable difficulties of community life: tension, conflict, fallout, and eventually splintering, division, and reformation. In college, my best friend and fellow Playground resident Dylan studied formal political intentional communities at length, culminating in a thesis on the topic. In his thesis, Dylan describes how “efforts to build communities [at a] level of depth and interdependence, at least the ones starting from scratch, end in failure more often than not. Sometimes, catastrophic failure (42).” In fact, he cites researchers that show 9 out of 10 formal intentional communities “fail” early in their tenure, most often due to conflict and infighting. Unfortunately, such failures often lead to member disillusionment, ultimately lessening, not strengthening, social movement broadly.
Dylan spends much of his thesis exploring the practices and processes formal communities can use to break from these patterns of implosion. But here, in this piece, I am more interested in how, by staying informal, communities can avoid confrontation with such implosions in the first place. Indeed, owing to the low stakes nature of IPICs, I believe that they can more easily grow, shrink, transform, morph, and dissolve without devastation to the individual or movement as a whole.
In the second half of its tenure, the Playground began to come unraveled. Tensions ran high, conflicts erupted, and it became very clear we would not continue doing this together beyond the end of our lease (if we even made it that far). At first, the conflict and resultant fallout made us feel like we had failed at what we set out to do. But as we accepted our incompatibilities and the fact that we would not achieve the precise vision we had dreamed up together months before, we were able to return to a place of relative ease and goodwill. Most impressively—thanks to the creative thinking of Sanae and Aishat—we even had a house graduation ceremony in our last days together, in which we all gathered in a park with close friends and shared aloud ways we had seen one another grow (see the picture at the top of this post). This beautiful ceremony gave us all a sense of closure, and sent us off into the world without fear of living in community again nor disillusionment with radical projects in general. Rather, we left with the knowledge that we had done a beautifully imperfect thing and learned a heck of a lot while doing it. In fact, all of us have expressed wanting to return to community living in some form again.
In reflecting on my year in the Playground, I can not help but wonder how things might have gone even better had we more explicitly anticipated and preemptively accepted that big conflicts would arise. If there’s one thing the history of movements shows, it’s that people are forever coming together only to then come apart, like tides rising and receding. What would it look like, when building intentional community, to accept this reality rather than fight it? To non-judgmentally incorporate into expectations and planning the inevitability not only of conflict, but also major fissures and even dissolution? To fundamentally accept that “destroy-build-destroy” is a consistently-recurring part of radical project efforts, particularly when we are young and new to them?
In sum, in one of the stranger arguments I’ve ever made, I’m saying by taking on less upfront in our attempts to live politically and communally, we actually create more possibilities in the long run. Informal intentional communities allow more people to access alternative living now, as we need only the things we already have to form them. And once they are built, such communities are significantly less likely to drive people to burnout and surrender as their low stakes nature allows them to come together and fall apart with relative ease, particularly if an awareness and acceptance of patterns of fissure are incorporated into their establishment. With a lower barrier to entry, and a high(er) rate of retention when compared to their formal counterparts, informal intentional communities simply create more space for more people to live political lives.
I want to be clear that higher stakes intentional community projects have a very important place in movement work. Having visited spots like PLACE and Canticle Farms in Oakland, and having lived in the Open Door here in Atlanta, I can’t argue with the power more long-term, rooted, high-commitment and high-stakes projects can offer. In fact, I myself have been an enthusiastic part of the planning process for a very ambitious land project here in Atlanta for quite some time now. However, given the historic fragility of such projects, it feels important to come to them experienced and ready. To such ends, informal community living can function as a practice grounds. There is not a doubt in my mind that all I learned during my year in the Playground will be invaluable if ever again I become a residential member of a larger stakes project.
the ability to hold politics
Earlier in this piece, I showed how informal, political intentional community can help people hold onto and grow their political convictions as a benefit to themselves and their own psychosocial wellbeing. But the preservation of people’s radical political positions also has obvious benefits to movement as a whole, for it is a baseline assumption of working for macro level social change that masses of politicized people are necessary.
If residential communities have this powerful ability to hold members in political environments, and, if as argued above, informal communities have a greater capacity to offer such an experience to a) more people and b) in a more sustainable way, it follows that such informal communities are an incredibly underexplored political tool. At the end of the day, each informal house may not look like much more than a collection of roommates with a slight political tinge, but when we zoom out we can see how large numbers of such communities, scattered across a locale or a region, can hold substantial numbers of people in healthy political environments. While they may not be clearly unified under one organization or political banner, they can come to represent a kind of underground force of power.
While living in the Playground, I was surprised by how friends, acquaintances, and strangers were attracted to our little house with downright magnetism. Several of these folks even became de facto members of the place, coming over for hang outs, dinners, and even sleepovers, and ultimately getting many of the the personal benefits of IPICs that I outlined earlier without actually having to live in the house. This suggests that this ability of IPICs to help people hold onto and cultivate their radical politics can extend beyond the residents of houses themselves to include those living with family, alone, or in unintentional roommate situations.
a place to practice: "how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale"
Movement thinker and activist adrienne maree brown describes a concept she calls the “fractal” model of change, which argues that “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale (32).”5 Like a fractal, brown sees our total social structure as the additive product of small patterns created between individuals and small social groupings. These patterns, repeating throughout society, scale up to create our social reality.
brown observes that as us radicals work to take on macro-level issues, we often replicate the very systems we are trying to dismantle in our own micro-level daily lives. For example, we may be working to end the prison system, but approach conflict with our friends in carceral ways. Us white folks may be working to end racialized violence, but dehumanize people of color in our own networks through microaggression and fetishization. We may be working for an anti-capitalist economy, but we do not share our resources with even our closest relationships. In each instance, from a fractal perspective, we are undermining ourselves; to invert an old idiom, we are missing the trees for the forest.
Our lackings are understandable given the massive distance between the worlds that have raised us and the worlds we aspire to live in. We have been socialized under conditions that are largely racist, patriarchal, homo- and transphobic, capitalist, colonial, and anthropocentric. To move differently requires us to overcome, to tread new paths for which we have limited models and guidance. A fractal approach to change, however, suggests that investing in figuring out how to bring radical approaches to our own little worlds will actually facilitate making these changes possible on larger scales.
IPICs give us nifty little spaces in which to practice being different. Their scale is sufficiently small so as to be highly accessible and actionable. Here we can ask (and answer!) questions like: what does it look like to challenge patriarchy in a group of three? How can I take an abolitionist approach to conflict with the four people in this house? What does it look like to become economically interdependent with my roommates?
A fractal approach was a foundational intention of our lives in the Playground. In fact, the very name of the house came from our friend Miliaku’s very brown-esque aphorism that “relationships are the playground for the revolution.” By this Miliaku means that “the answers to macro questions are in the micro opportunities we have to show up differently for each other.” In the Playground, we truly sought to take this to heart. To give just a few examples:
In an effort to increase our interdependence, we attempted to communize some of the historically more fraught financial and labor-sharing aspects of communal living. In particular, we made all groceries collective and established a practice in which each housemate took turns washing everyone’s dishes, rather than being responsible for our personal messes. These may seem like small things, but if you have ever lived with roommates, you know how sensitive both sharing food and cleaning dishes can become.
In an effort to decenter whiteness and manness, we had fairly regular and explicit conversations about how Dylan and I impacted the collective space. During these, the two of us would receive feedback that we were expected to internalize and adopt in our behavior. On occasion, Sanae and Aishat had Black and/or non-men only gatherings, during which Dylan and I would find things to do out of the house. Though the Playground was our home, we could recognize the importance of our house offering dedicated space for those of identities (unlike ours) that do not get to be universally seen, heard, and made to feel safe.
In an effort to overcome the standard approaches to conflict that can treat people with carceral disposability, we designed a way to have mediated conversations—with a mutually trusted third party—which focused on each person being heard.
These efforts and more sought to take what we all talked about theoretically and breathe life into it in our mundane, day-to-day co-existence.
When surrounded by the urgent crises of our age, it may seem a waste of time to pour gobs of energy into realizing our radical beliefs on a scale so small as a community house. However, if the macro is truly a reflection of the micro, practicing radically different ways of being within our small communities is actually a meaningful contribution to revolutionary change. In so doing, we both create a small piece of that future world in which we want to live, and we develop the skills to be able to replicate that world out into larger units of the fractal. As brown says, taking a fractal approach “doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet (33).”
So building on the above section, informal community houses not only offer potential contributions to macro-level social struggles by being able to hold more political actors, but also by ensuring that these actors are of high quality. As with most things, practice literally makes us better revolutionaries, and IPICs give us plenty of space to practice.
the potential for networks
One day my friend Willow and I were walking circles around the lake in Stone Mountain Park when we found ourselves speculating about connecting all of Atlanta’s political, collective houses. As I’ve noted already, the Playground was by no means the only intentional house of politically minded young people in Atlanta in 2020. During that year, we were acquainted with a handful of other such houses, and knew of even more peripherally. Willow and I observed that while there were many informal connections between different residents of these houses, there was nothing intentional going on.
We brought this conversation to a larger collective, with whom we were organizing at the time, and together we all brainstormed a variety of relatively low-effort programs that could be implemented amongst the Atlanta houses. Included were:
a semi-regular gathering of people within the network to meet, discuss, and learn from each other
a mutual aid fund that houses could contributed to based on their ability, and that individuals in the network could call on in moments of need
a physical, permanent “free store” located at one of the houses within the network where all residents could put material belongings they no longer wanted or needed to be freely available to others
a shared “library,” created by listing all the books of each house in a simple, online database
the infrastructure to do what the Amish call “barn raisings” and small farmers call “crop mobs,” essentially calling on the collective labor of the network to help with large and laborious projects. For instance, if a house needed to move, was building a garden, or helping put on an event, they could call on residents of other houses for support
As you read through these, perhaps you think of other simple ways that the kind of community houses I’ve described throughout this piece could cooperate synergistically. I know for a fact that in the nascent conversations I’ve been a part of, we were only beginning to get into what is a veritable iceberg.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned collective dropped our effort to build out this housing network soon after we picked it up amid unrelated conflicts and big transitions. But I think that the seed of what we were developing together represents the ultimate potential for informal community houses to contribute to macro-level political struggles and change.
By developing even the loosest of organization between these already individually politically powerful social units, I imagine that pretty cool things could happen. Borrowing from anarchist thinkers (who themselves are always borrowing from pre-colonial societies), I can even see networks of houses federating up in scale, from the level of the house, to the city, to the region. For instance, delegates6 from an Atlanta housing network could meet with those from Columbus, Augusta, and Macon. Delegates from Georgia could meet with those from other states in the Southeast. The loose, horizontal model of federations would allow, at least in theory, the preservation of the autonomy of individual houses with the possible benefit of large scale coordination and action.
But even if a network never took on anything so ambitious—no collective work or projects, no federating to larger scale— I can imagine that simply being connected to others attempting similar alternative ways of living could help to legitimize our efforts, as well as provide guidance and support in times of difficulty. Indeed, as I talked to and interviewed friends for this piece, I recognized that we had a great deal of wisdom to offer each other from our respective experiences, wisdom that could have been incredibly helpful if more easily accessible in earlier moments.
Lastly, the natural coming together and dissolution of informal community houses (that I described in the beginning of this section) could be made significantly smoother by even a very bare-bones level of a housing network. When one knows lots of people not only interested in, but actively living this way of life, conflict and splintering of one housing arrangement is even less likely to lead to disillusionment and abandonment of the lifestyle. Rather, people can take what they’ve learned from one group of folks and reconfigure with other people from the network in ways that better meet their individual needs.
In many ways, a housing network is a perfect example of what brown means by fractal change: when we have successfully practiced and developed skills and new ways of being on the small level of a house, we can move up to the level of houses. Through thoroughly working things out on the most minute level, and then scaling up in measured fashion, deep change can take root.
VI. major issues and a question
Though I have made a grand show of how wonderful, fulfilling, and powerful living in informal, political intentional community can be, this way of life is not easy. The reality is that where we live—our home—is the foundation for the rest of life. It is therefore a sensitive place, and what happens there tends to impact everything else.
While I think IPICs offer people a better foundation for well-being than most other living arrangements readily available to us today, they are—even in their relatively low stakes form—a great deal of work. Indeed, I often joked during the Playground year that I felt that I was “dating my entire house” because the time and emotional commitments were simply that demanding.
In fact, during the year of the Playground, all four of us took necessary leaves of absence from the house at one point another. Interpersonal conflict, insufficient access to privacy, feelings that the house was taking over our lives, as well as feelings of burnout and resignation (among other issues) were a non-negligible part of our year together. And we were not alone in this difficulty; nearly everyone I interviewed highlighted similar struggles.
Even if we take seriously my suggestion to anticipate and preemptively accept (rather than fancy ourselves immune to) major conflict and/or house dissolution, it does not make the experiences of these things that much easier. Ultimately, I make the same argument about exploring intentional community living as I did about polyamory in a previous essay: this alternative way of life asks a lot of us, and we have to have both the capacity and desire to see it through.
Notably, despite all manner of feelings of heartbreak and overwhelm, every single person I interviewed, in addition to the four of us Playground alums, have expressed an unambiguous desire to continue or return to this way of life at some point in the future. Suffice it to say, the benefits are sufficiently attractive to pull us back, even when we have experienced really hard times.
Now, I wish to briefly offer a bit more detail on what I see as some of the central challenges to informal, political intentional community living.
interpersonal conflict
By far the biggest barrier to sustainability in even the most well-planned intentional communities is interpersonal conflict. Issues arise from everything from mundane material concerns, such as feelings of unfairness around dishwashing, to large emotional needs, such as feeling a housemate is not emotionally supportive or is giving others in the house preferential treatment. If annoyances, hurt feelings, and conflict are not handled quickly and well, they tend to balloon into much larger issues.
As Ananda explained in our interview, owing to the intimacy of collective living, little things between you and housemates can really stick around and fester, permeating your entire life and leaving a feeling of no escape. “If your roommate and you are going through something,” they said, “it takes a lot of mental and emotional drain on you. You’re housemates, you see each other every day.”
When talking to Juanes, he added that because intentional community tends to entangle your residential and social lives, when conflict arises with a housemate, it can feel like your entire social world is unraveling.
One of the academic articles I read preparing for this piece (which unfortunately I can no longer find) observed that traditional family environments, healthy or unhealthy, have a presumed permanence. Family members know they will (most likely) continue to be connected to one another no matter what happens between them. In such an environment, people tend to engage more openly in conflict and more readily say what they mean. In contrast, when living with friends and strangers, such permanence cannot be taken for granted. People are less likely to be direct, more likely to bottle things up, and when conflict eventually does erupt, ultimately more willing to look to ending relationships and commitments as a solution to the tension.
Tensions and conflicts are an inevitable part of social life. This becomes doubly true when people are intimately sharing their residential space. Having ways to frequently and openly address small conflicts before they develop, as well as ways to address big conflict when it does arrive (because it will) are essential tools for its sustainability.
personal space
As an introverted person who absolutely relies on moments of solitude to reground and feel mentally well, I often felt completely overtaxed by community life in the Playground. It did not help that my bedroom, the only one downstairs, opened right into the kitchen and common space, so the buzz of others’ noise and energy crept through my doors most hours of the day. The proximity of my room to the common area also provoked regular (well-meaning) intrusions and interruptions to my attempts to be alone. Often, I would feel my social battery drain completely, only to then be drained further with no possibility of rejuvenation in sight.
In an attempt at self preservation, I even made a ridiculous sign (pictured below) indicating my social availability, and posted it on my door. Unfortunately, this boundary-setting measure did not have the intended effect, and I continued to feel unable to access the kind of privacy, solitude, and peace I needed, except in rare moments of collective quiet, or more realistically, when no one else was home.
The emotional intensity of living in close relationship with three other people, coupled with the inability to get the alone time that I needed, led me into a deepening state of unsustainable frazzlery, contributing greatly to my month-long leave of absence from the house.
Obviously, finding ways to set boundaries and have personal space in an intentional community setting is also essential for its sustainability.
the house becoming an end in itself
Another argument I made in my essay on polyamory is that alternative practices and lifestyles can sometimes become so consuming within their little nuclei that they leave us with no energy for outward facing activity, their radical potential therefore becoming constrained. A distinction must be drawn between healthfully investing in the small to facilitate fractal change, and becoming so insular as to be myopic.
As Asa told me, “between the bigger emotional processing and the day to day tasks of dishes, cleaning, and cooking, I’ve found myself less energized to show up for things outside of my little bubble.” Reflecting on her time in community, Livvy felt similarly, saying that “trying to do things in a way that’s different . . . is a messy process,” and simply required too much of her time to feel sustainable.
When houses become too inward-facing, they exhaust their residents, and steal from the house’s capacity to have impact outside of itself. In such instances, they must reevaluate their priorities and pivot.
The issues that can arise in IPIC living really deserve an essay of their own. Fortunately, or so rumor has it, Sanae is putting together a practical guide zine, based on our year in the Playground, on how to start living with others intentionally. The zine will take the reader through how to address many of these concerns up front, so they don’t become unmanageable down the line. Stay tuned!
the big question: beyond the single young adult?
These many words deep, I still have many unexplored questions about informal, political intentional community. The biggest of all is: how inclusive can this way of life be? While it may be suitable for mostly single people in the 18-34 year old range, can it support children, elders, couples, families?
The micro and macro level needs that I argue this way of life helps address do not become less relevant just because people are not in this specific young adult demographic. In fact, in many ways, community has even more obvious import to other populations. Families with children, for instance, stand to benefit immensely from shared child care. Elders, as they begin needing increased support and as more of their peers pass away, also stand to gain quite a bit from community living. I also imagine that the perspectives of elders, children, and others outside of the narrow identity range I’ve mostly had in mind throughout this piece would enrich a community’s political perspectives and perhaps even its ability to resolve conflict.
While getting into this question is beyond the scope of this piece, I think it must be explored seriously if informal community living is to become more than a youth phenomenon, and instead a way of life that can offer personal and political health and power to a large diversity of humans. I hope to explore it further in my own life ahead.
VI. conclusion
For the last several months, since the Playground disbanded, I have lived in a little ramshackle yellow house in East Atlanta. In many ways, it is a paradise for me here. I have a great deal of garden space, a large attic bedroom where I spend great, long hours of blissful solitude, and I’m a stone’s throw away from the conveniences of modern industry: restaurants, grocery stores, bars. I have two housemates, but our connection begins and ends with our benevolent sharing of living space and rent. We run into each other on the way to and from the bathroom, or in or out the front door, but only on rare occasions do we pause to converse. We are, of course, in contact when it's necessary, such as come bill-paying time or in cases of emergency. But for the most part, we stay in our own lanes, living entirely separate lives in these 1,500 square feet.
At first, I treasured this solitude. I truly wanted to be away from people after the intensity that was last year. But now I can confess that, in my desire for reprieve, I swung my pendulum too far away from community. I miss living with people that I have deep relationships with. I miss my politics being encased in the physical space in which I reside. I am hungry once more for intentionality.
My life thus far has been a dance between solitude and community, the hermit and the commune. But always, always, always, I come back to my need for community. People are difficult, but precious. All the messes we collectively find ourselves in are the product of coordinated social activity, and there’s no doubt that it’s going to take some impressive coordinated social activity to get us out of them.
“Informal, political intentional community” is a label I’ve slapped on something I did last year with three friends—something relatively simple, and yet something that marked a distinct departure from the ways of residential life of almost everyone I know. While the year was a rollercoaster of humps and difficulties, I was consistently aware of how lucky I felt; how I was riding through the pandemic with people I loved; how I could discuss the dissolving world with like minds; how the burden of surviving capitalism, with its commodified food, housing, and transportation, could be lessened not through personal financial security, but through interdependence; how I stopped journaling because I had so many safe people with whom to process my emotions out loud; how I could come home to find hugs, steaming food, and loud, loud conversation.
In our interview, Juanes told me that intentional community living “makes sense for the world in my head.” I agree, and there’s nowhere I’d rather put my energy than making ways for the worlds in our heads.
References
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017.
Bremner, Dylan, “The Revolution Will Not Be Atomized: Building Resilient Movement Communities in the Age of Climate Collapse,” unpublished thesis, 2020.
Clark, Vicky, et al. "Shared housing among young adults: Avoiding complications in domestic relationships." Journal of Youth Studies 20.9 (2017): 1191-1207.
Druta, Oana, Richard Ronald, and Sue Heath. "Urban singles and shared housing." Social & Cultural Geography 22.9 (2021): 1195-1203.
Heath, Sue. "Peer-shared households, quasi-communes and neo-tribes." Current Sociology 52.2 (2004): 161-179.
Vespa, Jonathan. The changing economics and demographics of young adulthood: 1975-2016. Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, US Census Bureau, 2017.
Extra acknowledgments and special shout outs to:
Sanae, Dylan, and Aishat for living together with me.
Sanae for both their zine and several conversations about this piece.
Dylan for his thesis.
Miliaku for dozens of formative conversations.
Joel for one particularly helpful conversation.
Willow for speculating the network idea with me.
The friends who graciously participated in short but helpful interviews: Livvy, Juanes, Ananda, Asa, and Joel.
Juanes for being my editor.
