An alternate path: Community living experiments in the city

Cooperatives. Communes. Intentional communities. Utopian experiments.

Whenever the idea of “living in community” gets thrown out, at least one and (more likely) all of these terms will inevitably appear in the conversation. “Utopian” risks sounding naïve in the cynical, postmodern era, and “commune” is often flat-out wrong (properly, it’s only used to describe communities that pool all their finances, which most do not).

But many urban college graduates are feeling the call to a lifestyle beyond the single-bedroom apartment with neighbors who rarely exchange conversation. And some of the more idealistic-minded are answering it by living in communities dedicated to a larger cause.

It’s not unheard of. It’s hardly even rare. The Fellowship for Intentional Communities lists over 450 such households or neighborhoods in cities across the United States. And although it uses a fairly broad classification (some are still forming, and some have only a few members), examples of like-minded people forming communities with a higher goal in mind aren’t difficult to find.

Young graduates are starting to emerge at the forefront of the movement. In New York, a group of college grads formed Nickel City Housing Corporation when they maxed out their credit cards and drained their life savings to purchase their first dilapidated building in Buffalo. They spent the next several years inhabiting and renovating it to bring more positive attention to the area. On the other side of the country, a group of students seeking to continue living in community after college launched a similar project in Berkeley. They called the organization Cooperative Roots and proceeded to christen their first two houses Fort Awesome and Fort Radical.

None of them (unless otherwise mentioned) would call themselves communes. Members have their own incomes, their own jobs, and their own personal lives. What they trade is a fraction of their personal space for something they believe is better – a 24-hour support group and the chance to make a bigger difference than they could by themselves.

“By being a visible representative of community living in an area, it says that this is not something that is insane, this is not something that’s a cult-like thing to do,” said Michael Gallisdorfer, the 28-year-old president of Nickel City. “Anyone could do it. It’s not crazy to have kids who live together. It’s something you or anyone could do if they wanted to.”