Here's why people other than hippies and techies are choosing communal living

The Center in SF is a coliving space in the Bay Area that also hosts community events and has two yoga studios. The Center in SF is a coliving space in the Bay Area that also hosts community events and has two yoga studios. Photo: Google Maps Photo: Google Maps Image 1 of / 24 Caption Close Here's why people other than hippies and techies are choosing communal living 1 / 24 Back to Gallery

The idea of communal or cooperative living has been associated with hippies, the 1960s counterculture, and even cults in recent decades. But for people living in them today, like the author of this piece, the routine of waking up in a house full of former strangers feels more practical than subversive.

Communal culture in the Bay Area started long before the Summer of Love. For example, Cloyne Court, a 140-person student housing co-op in Berkeley, has been operational since 1946. In 2013, The Chronicle reported that people in the tech industry were reviving the concept of communal living. At one point, the article listed 16 communal houses popping up in the region, with one former Stanford University computer science student running another four.

In June 2017, Business Insider reported that one Bay Area cooperative housing startup, HubHaus, has expanded to over 40 co-living houses in the past year. There are other companies like WeLive and PureHouse that are scaling a similar rate to HubHaus.

In part the new growth of these shared living spaces is the search for alternatives to the costs of traditional Bay Area rentals. But the trend is also pulling in people want to live a less atomized lifestyle.

Visual artists, teachers, event planners, writers and architects and more have been turning to co-living as a means to create intentional community, share resources and, in some cases, save money.

"I really was living in a small apartment in San Francisco that was, in so many ways, not really fulfilling what I wanted out of my living space. It was just super cheap," said Brent Schulkin, who lives in Euclid Manor, an 11-bedroom co-living house in Oakland. "I was one of the few who moved from San Francisco to Oakland to triple their rent, but for me it was definitely a desire to have community built in, to have friends that I can hang out with especially as someone is doing a lot of entrepreneurial stuff and spends a lot of time at home.

"That's much more demoralizing when you're by yourself all the time. You want to take a five-minute break, but there's no one around because you're in your little apartment, whereas here it's so much nicer to be able to take a break and have these great friends around and have these different resources."

One of the resources that is shared in several of these co-living houses is food. Residents often pay into a food budget and then buy food and drink that are communal.

Schulkin said that the shared food program, combined with the enthusiasm for cooking among his fellow residents at Euclid Manor, is a real bonus.

"I end up eating much more, with greater health and greater convenience than I otherwise would as a result," he said.

Eating meals at a co-op provided Will Schuerman, a 32-year-old psycholinguist, with some of his greatest memories while living in the 140-person Cloyne Court.

"Having a hundred people eating dinner, all together at once, from a home-cooked meal was always chaos," Schuerman said. "That was the fun of it. It was chaotic, but always in a fun, positive way."

Schuerman, who has lived in co-living houses off and on since his early 20s, said that once he lived with over 140 people, "anything smaller than that is manageable." But one of the challenges to living with several different people is making decisions.

Every housing cooperative has its own decision-making process. "We initially had lots of discussions about complicated governance models, but we haven't actually needed them," Schulkin said with a chuckle.

He said his house meets every other week to make major house decisions and makes smaller ones using the Slack messaging app. Schuerman lived in a house in 2017 that had a similar decision-making process. He said that one of the challenges of co-living, as it relates to decision-making, is that "people have different ideas of how the house should be run."

The Berkeley Student Housing Cooperative (BSHC), of which Cloyne Court is a part, has a member-elected board of directors and managers to facilitate conversations and make major decisions. That organization, which was created in 1933, oversees 17 housing cooperatives and three apartment co-ops around Berkeley's campus.

Aside from the large houses - like Cloyne Court and the three apartment co-ops - the BSHC has the Afro House, an African American theme house, The Convent for students age 25 and older and Andres Castro Arms, which became a people of color theme house in the fall of 2016.

So communal living, in various forms, has been around for much longer than the '60s. It's continuing to evolve in the Bay Area and will likely spread to other major cities, with venture capitalists starting to invest in co-living startups like HubHaus. The concept represents the future, at least for some of the people who are living communally now.

"Now that I've experienced this sort of living, I find it hard to imagine going back," Schulkin said. "I think that I've had a taste of this and I think that some form of community living will be in my future, certainly."