How Alternative Housing Can Bring Us Happiness and Community

The United States has 3.8 million fewer homes than the American people need, according to the Center for American Progress. Headlines are filled with stories about the lack of affordable housing stock all over the country, but rarely do we hear a robust public conversation about not just the cost of housing, but the kind of housing that would actually provide an abundant foundation for us to live lives of connection and meaning.

As Lily Lamboy, the cofounder of Modern Family Institute, put it: “Only 18% of families in America qualify as ‘nuclear’—meaning two married parents and at least one kid—so why does the majority of our housing stock reflect such a minority family structure?”

And, truth be told, for those 18% of families, traditional notions of homeownership are often a bad fit anyway—financially, emotionally, and otherwise. The housing bubble burst in 2008, and yet nearly two decades later, we have failed to create a built environment that reflects what we learned in that critical moment in the United States: that the white picket fence was a delusion to begin with and, where it does exist, often makes people feel isolated, stressed, and stuck.

The alternatives are real, including cohousing and other forms of housing designed with multiple families in mind—what one entrepreneur, Phil Levin, calls “multiplayer housing”—as well as smaller spaces, like accessory dwelling units, on existing lots that can house elders or singletons who would like to live together with others but also have their own private space. These options tend to be designed around the core idea that meeting someone’s needs—for care, food, play, emotional support, etc.—is far easier when there is a larger pool of people to depend on. 

For now, these models are still under the radar of the average American and hamstrung by regulatory and economic policy. In his 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills posited that our ability to live lives of fulfillment and creativity are directly related to our social imaginations, and our social imaginations are determined by the political and economic structures around us. This lack of sociological imagination endures when it comes to one of our country’s most urgent collective needs because we haven’t shone a light bright enough on the alternatives. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.

Living intentionally

Lamboy, Levin, and I are sitting at a sleek modern picnic table in the yard of Radish, an intentional community in the Longfellow neighborhood of Oakland. We happen to be chatting during “baby happy hour,” and so Levin’s three-year-old daughter explodes unhappily into the backyard in a Beauty and the Beast–themed sundress with her extremely pregnant mom, fresh off of preschool pickup.

“She has a problem only her dad can solve,” explains Kristin Berman, Levin’s wife. The three year old collapses into Levin’s arms, and he offers her a piece of cheese from the cutting board in front of us, which she readily takes while snuggling in for some baby happy hour co-regulation.

In some ways, it’s a counter counter-cultural moment. The whole point of Radish, the intentional community where we are gathered, is that people are happier when they don’t depend on their partners and parents as their only form of stimulation and safety. Levin admits he really learned this from the very pregnant Berman, who is a behavioral scientist. She made clear—from the moment they met—that she dreamed of living a life that integrated what her research told her: that the conditions of nuclear family life were anathema to thriving.

Radish began as an idea in 2018 (in an essay for the substack Supernuclear, the couple outlines how they went about structuring and building their community). What started as seven friends has grown into 20 with nine kids under the age of four, who are spread across six neighboring buildings. There’s a hot tub for grownups, a ball pit for the little ones, and public transportation within walking distance.

Cohousing, a concept first imported to the United States via Denmark in the 1980s, exists when many families live in small units on a dense plot of land, while sharing some common amenities like a garden, a common area for eating weekly meals together, or tools and bikes. The benefits of this structure are multitudinous—living communally is cheaper and more environmentally friendly, parents tend to be less stressed because of the fluid and constant cooperation with others, and elders have a village to keep them young and take care of them, when needed.

Sounds utopian, right? In many ways, it is. But there are downsides, too. When you live with lots of people, you live with lots of people. In other words: Long meetings, interpersonal conflict, and chronic frustration with people’s lack of contribution or accountability abound.

But the severity of these downsides depend on the norms and expectations within a particular community. Radish, for example, is probably best understood as cohousing 2.0—it has a lot of the structural principles of other communities, but isn’t wedded to consensus and tries to avoid meetings whenever possible.

Growth and challenges

Of course, the strains that are surfaced by more traditional cohousing communities can be seen as growth opportunities, too.

“Cohousing is the ultimate adult development project,” says Kate Madden Yee, who created Temescal Commons with others from her church community in 2000 in Oakland, CA, and has lived there ever since. “Sharing space with my neighbors in a daily way offers many, many chances to check my own perspective—am I really right in this situation?—soften toward others’ positions, and remember that, at base, we all want the same thing: to live together with ease.”

The other downside is just how challenging it is to create cohousing in the first place. Today there are 206 existing communities and approximately 150 in some stage of development throughout the country, but the demand is much higher. “Many existing communities have waitlists in the hundreds, with units becoming available very infrequently,” explains Trish Becker, the executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States.

Historically, cohousing communities have been challenging to create for a number of reasons. Single-family zoning and restrictions on density, shared spaces, and occupancy can pose significant obstacles. Plus, traditional financing models often don’t accommodate the unique ownership and governance structures of cohousing; lenders can be resistant to finance projects that deviate from conventional housing models, especially if they don’t understand what cohousing is.

One workaround is informal cohousing—where folks knock down fences and incorporate some of the practices, like a weekly common meal and shared lawnmowers. People interested in pursuing this kind of cooperative living can benefit from resources on creating your own cohousing community at the Cohousing Institute or find an existing community through the Foundation for Intentional Community.

Levin has also created a real estate company called Live Near Friends that specializes in the financial, legal, and zoning considerations for purchasing multi-unit homes. How does that work? Let’s say you’ve always dreamed of living next door to your college bestie or getting your siblings proximate for easy Sunday dinners—you would engage Levin to represent you as broker who knows how to look for the best-fit, still-too-rare kind of housing, usually a duplex, apartment cluster, or single-family unit with an additional unit in the backyard.

Another model that shares some of cohousing’s structure and values, but offers a much-needed innovation on the financing, can be found with Seattle-based B-corp Frolic. Frolic is interesting for a number of reasons.

Incubated at the Center for Real Estate at MIT and officially founded in 2019, Frolic tackles one of the core problems of gentrification in so many major cities in the United States: Longtime neighborhood stewards—you know, the porch sitters, school volunteers, and block party hosts—end up with a difficult choice: Sell their homes and leave the community that they love, or remain “house poor” and feel alienated from the increasing lack of affordability and changing culture in their beloved community.

Frolic offers a third way: Homeowners become developers, leveraging the value of their land to build new homes. These homes are structured as a co-operative (most famously common in New York City apartment buildings), so that each one can be bought with a down payment as low as $10,000 and utilities, taxes, and insurance are kept affordable, too.

Innovative financing, policy, and building

Frolic’s first project, fully built and occupied, is called Corvidae Co-op. In that case, they took vacant land on a single-family–zoned parcel in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and then put 10 homes on two parcels (the trick here was that some of the homes have kitchenettes rather than full kitchens, which helped avoid variances).

Corvidae has a shared central courtyard, common kitchens, and a guest suite that allows for communal meals and gatherings, plus proximity to a light rail station to promote the use of mass transit. Frolic used $1 million of investment and a $3 million construction loan to complete it. The median monthly rent is $3,200, which includes personal mortgage and a co-op fee (which pays for utilities, reserves, real estate taxes, insurance, etc.) 

Frolic has five projects in process in Washington and California and reports that the demand just keeps growing. Cofounder Tamara Knox explains:

We are contacted weekly by both homeowners wanting a path to redevelop their land so they can stay in their neighborhoods and developers craving a way to use our model as we de-risk the development process. It is astounding and heartwarming to see how much our model resonates with these two groups who, in very different ways, are impacted by the systems that affect what can be built in our neighborhoods and how we live.

Innovative financing is key to the large-scale transformation needed to create housing stock that actually reflects our biggest dreams for our interconnected lives. But urban policy and structural ingenuity also play a role.

One clear example of this is accessory dwelling units or ADUs: a secondary dwelling on a single-family residential lot, sometimes called a “granny flat.” This solution hits the sweet spot for so many people: proximity and privacy.

ADUs are an especially powerful option when one considers the growing population of what researchers call “elder orphans”—older adults with no close family ties. Researchers estimate that one in five older adults is an “elder orphan” or at risk of becoming one, a figure that is likely to grow in coming years given birth and marriage rates. Being able to age-in-place near chosen family is key for these “elder orphans,” who want to stay out of more institutional settings.

Louise Dunlap, who fits the demographic definition (though she says the term makes her “shudder”) and lives in a cohousing community, has found chosen family all along the way through her activist and literary circles. Now that she’s in her 80s, she is trying to figure out the best way to ask for and receive support when she needs it. She explains, “I guess if I had to name the kind of structure I’m trying to put together, I’d call it ‘layers of family.’ And, of course, cohousing is kind of like the matrix that makes it all possible.”
 
The Corvidae Co-op in Seattle. @Rafael Soldi

Though ADUs may be physically small, they are not necessarily cheap. ADUs cost between $200,000 and $400,000 to build from scratch, depending on how many bells and whistles you include.

Some entrepreneurs are trying to make the process easier; Backyard, for example, is the name of an ADU unit created by private company Samara and can be installed in your yard in as few as seven months. The company handles every part of installation, from securing building permits to project management, and Backyard comes with solar panels that allow the ADU to run “net zero,” and can even cut down the utility bill of the main home on the property. For now, Backyard is only available in California, and starts at $152,000, with installation; there are five types at different price points.

California, where more than 100,000 ADUs have been permitted so far, is widely seen as the country’s frontrunner state in expanding the availability and ease of ADUs. That’s thanks in large part to the Casita Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to what they call the “middle housing landscape.”

“Missing middle housing” is a term coined by architect Daniel Parolek to refer to duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts, all of which increase affordability in walkable, desirable neighborhoods but also allow people to live among chosen families.

Transitioning gracefully

Back at baby happy hour, Levin explains, “We have a lot of social scripts. You can ask a stranger out at a bar. And so everyone knows: If you go to a bar, a stranger might ask you out. We don’t really have a social script for, ‘Will you be my neighbor?’”

“Despite Mr. Rogers’s best effort!” Lamboy says.

“Exactly!” says Levin.

Another neighbor chimes in, drawing a parallel between the romanticization of “the spark” in dating, which has been found to have no long-term impact on relationship durability, and the way we think of the perfect co-living crew. The person doesn’t have to be your most charismatic friend to be a solid roommate or community member. “Yes!” builds Levin, “What you really want is the person that rolls up their sleeves and does the dishes after a group meal.”

Lamboy, who lives in a mansion in the Berkeley Hills with nine other people, exclaims, “That’s literally in our ad for the house!” Everyone laughs knowingly.

Lamboy is one of many advocates working to expand the range of our social scripts and conceptualization of family. Modern Family Institute has used radio, conferences, and other creative ways to complicate our assumptions about who and how many people one can “partner” with, care for, have sex with, raise children alongside, and so on. This is about polyamory, in part, but also about something much broader—that our current schemas for who we live with and care for over the course of the ever-longer human lifespan is out of sync with reality. Lamboy even has a reality TV pitch: “I have a fantasy of doing MTV Cribs for co-ops. People are so curious!” 

While Lamboy awaits the greenlight on that, journalists are starting to paint a picture of this new reality for the public. Rhaina Cohen’s 2024 book, The Other Significant Others, seemed to really strike a chord with so many Americans who have been straining to describe the core influence of their friends in their most critical life decisions. In the book, Cohen writes: “I began to see how these unusual relationships can also be a provocation—unsettling the set of societal tenets that circumscribe our intimate lives.”

From the personal to the political—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have recently argued in their bestselling book Abundance that the left won’t win elections until it actually creates housing stock that is affordable and accessible for modern working families. What they fail to mention is that the vast majority of those “modern families” are not two heterosexual parents and a couple of kids; those families are multi-generational, blended, polyamorous, singles, and so much more.

This change is coming whether we plan for it or not. As Lamboy puts it: “Given the trends in population, climate change, and housing stock—people are going to have to live collectively 30 years from now. Let’s highlight what is already happening so people, rather than waiting until it becomes miserable, can make that transition gracefully.”