Thanks for a very valuable, thoughtful, and insightful comment. I agree with almost all of it, and I appreciate your effort in turning a painful personal disappointment into some specific and useful advice for others.
I especially appreciated your points about the strong cultural forces (e.g. in US, UK, etc) that make the single-house nuclear family arrangement very hard to escape over the long term—no matter how expert one is at living in EA group houses, polycules, or other coliving arrangements.
Ideally, it would be possible for EAs (or people in any like-minded subculture) to set up their own neighborhoods or streets, with a dozen or so houses, restricted to people who share their values and life-goals. But that kind of ‘freedom of association’ is not actually legal in most countries (it would violate various anti-discrimination laws). And trying to do coliving on a smaller scale within a single property raises very thorny problems in terms of the home ownership, shared equity, and what happens if couples get divorced or inhabitants get into too much conflict.
Like it or not, the single-family nuclear house seems a pretty strong ‘focal point’ in the space of possible living arrangements, especially for parents with kids (and maybe elderly parents), and especially given the current economic, legal, and cultural context.
Thanks for a very valuable, thoughtful, and insightful comment. I agree with almost all of it, and I appreciate your effort in turning a painful personal disappointment into some specific and useful advice for others.
I especially appreciated your points about the strong cultural forces (e.g. in US, UK, etc) that make the single-house nuclear family arrangement very hard to escape over the long term—no matter how expert one is at living in EA group houses, polycules, or other coliving arrangements.
Ideally, it would be possible for EAs (or people in any like-minded subculture) to set up their own neighborhoods or streets, with a dozen or so houses, restricted to people who share their values and life-goals. But that kind of ‘freedom of association’ is not actually legal in most countries (it would violate various anti-discrimination laws). And trying to do coliving on a smaller scale within a single property raises very thorny problems in terms of the home ownership, shared equity, and what happens if couples get divorced or inhabitants get into too much conflict.
Like it or not, the single-family nuclear house seems a pretty strong ‘focal point’ in the space of possible living arrangements, especially for parents with kids (and maybe elderly parents), and especially given the current economic, legal, and cultural context.