The Year Shared Housing Got a Rebrand

It’s estimated that by 2030, about nine percent of the world’s total population will live in just 41 megacities, and that by 2050, two out of every three people will live in cities or urban areas. Housing costs continue to skyrocket, with U.S. single-family rents rising an estimated 30 percent since February 2020. That’s before the costs of services like internet, heating, air-conditioning, and electricity. And those are just a portion of overall costs of living.

Perhaps that’s why 2023 was the year shared housing seemed to explode into the collective conversation. Though communal living—technically defined as a group of three or more unrelated people living together in one space—is certainly not a new concept, this year, it became more than just hippie communes or student housing, manifesting in the form of "mommunes," Golden Girls–style senior housing, and a general rethinking of home ownership outside of the traditional nuclear framework.

Some of this year’s most talked about communal living came from the silver economy, where home-sharing is a growing movement among senior citizens. Recent years have seen an increasing number of online agencies that match aging adults with non-relative roommates—in some cases, other senior citizens (or "boommates"); in others, millennials looking for a nice place at a good price—both as a way to decrease loneliness and cut housing costs for elderly people with fixed incomes. (The average cost of assisted living in the U.S. can range anywhere from $4,500 to $7,000 a month.) And as the senior home-sharing movement continued to grow, so did the concept of the elderly living community.

In 2023, a number of new developments pushed the boundaries of what we’ve come to expect from assisted living facilities. Take Priya Living, described in a New York Times profile as "an elder-living community that centers Indian culture through its activities, design, food, and residents"—with four California locations, one in New Delhi, and plans for developments in Michigan and Texas—where activities for senior residents include laughter yoga, classic Bollywood movie screenings, and weekly "chai and gupshup" (gossip) sessions. Then, there’s London’s new "over-65" Appleby Blue housing block designed by Stirling Prize–winning U.K. firm Witherford Watson Mann with timber-lined walkways overlooking a central courtyard, a rooftop garden, and a multipurpose room for film nights and dance classes. "People are so often pushed to the margins in later life," Martyn Craddock, the CEO of the charity funding the building, told the Guardian. "We are here to provide an option for people who want to live independently in the center of the city—and have fun in their later years."

That same mentality seemed to be applied to another group often shuffled to the fringes of society—single mothers—with the rise of "mommunes" (or, the resurgence, as this type of shared living arrangement among single parents pooling the load of household costs and child care is longstanding). The New York Times reported on a Florida "mommune" where a recently divorced TikToker and her young daughter live in a four bedroom with two family friends and another single mother, plus her two children:

When she came down with a headache, sore throat and body aches that knocked her flat, the other women in her house cooked her homemade soup and cookies and shepherded the children to a nearby park so she could rest. "Support system like no other," Ms. Batykefer wrote on a TikTok post that has been viewed more than 1 million times. "Shoulda moved into a mommune a long time ago."

While the "mommune" moniker more recently entered the cultural lexicon, the helpful hippie vibes these living arrangements call to mind are on the continuum of 1960s communes and intentional communities. Self-sufficient ecovillages, where neighbors share responsibilities like farming and child care, also seemed to continue gaining popularity, and even illicit communal housing movements served as grounds for studying: In Zurich, for example, a new mixed-use development opened with a sprawling hall where residents live in moveable structures inspired by those traditionally found in squat houses. More architecture firms also stepped into the world of shared housing design, whether through reimagining student dorms or creating new co-living complexes from Massachusetts to Los Angeles. In New Haven, Connecticut, students at the Yale School of Architecture designed and built free, employer-provided housing for child educators.

At least some of that development has come at the bequest of co-living corporations, which—though in recent memory declared all but dead—are once again on the rise. According to some estimates, there are about 1,700 co-living brands operating in 2023, up from just 800 in 2022 and a mere handful a few years prior, and companies like Habyt are actually growing rapidly and attracting even more investors. It’s that type of big money that has birthed concepts like California’s PodShare, which rents 50-square-foot sleeping spaces in an open-plan apartment that the company’s creator says lends itself to "maximum collisions," or social interactions amongst its inhabitants. For around $1,000 a month, members get access to a sleeping cubby, a shared kitchen and living space, and toiletries, shared food, a gym membership, and streaming service subscriptions. An informational page on the website reads: "The future is ‘access not ownership.’"

Of course, some skeptics call these types of arrangements "college dorms for people in their thirties." One X (formerly Twitter) user tweeted "Have these capitalists deadass reinvented having roommates" in response to a story about a Canadian co-living development. (As an aside, it doesn’t help that Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX cronies were communal-living defenders, residing in a 10-person apartment in the Bahamas together before the company flamed out in criminally spectacular fashion.)

"When done really badly, [co-living] becomes a way for companies to shove people into smaller and smaller rooms, have a communal lounge and give them free pizza on a Friday—then slap the word ‘community’ on the website," said Penny Clark, founder of consultancy group Conscious Co-Living, in a Guardian article titled "From Socialism to Private Gyms: Co-living Has Gone Mainstream, and It Feels Like a Mixed Blessing."

It seems like the type of co-living that resonated most for renters and homeowners alike this year took shape on a more ad hoc basis. The New York Times reported on a trio of friends who pooled their money to buy a Brooklyn brownstone, splitting up the apartments inside. The week prior, the outlet published a story titled, "Is Buying Real Estate With a Friend Really a Good Idea?" about two art enthusiast friends who seem to absolutely love their shared upstate New York house. Even Dwell’s own executive editor Kate Dries spoke in a Q&A with her partner and sister about "co-buying" their first house as part of a themed week exploring of the highs and lows of cohabitation, saying: "I’ve never considered the traditional Americanized vision of an insular family a particularly sustainable model. Having gone through this process of spreading resources across more than just two people, I feel even less wedded to it now." 

So, given the state of the housing market, perhaps 2024 is the year we really embrace quasi-communes, "mommunes", and the many iterations of c0-living and finally start learning how to share a fridge.

Top illustration by Vicki Ling

Related Reading:

Why I Returned to Renting After a Few Years of Home Ownership

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