Nagle and her partner, Chris Martell, and their two children, ages seven and four, live in one small bedroom in the main house, which also holds a piano. Appeya Galindo and her fiancée Adam Murray live in another bedroom; Galindo’s teenage daughter sometimes stays there too. Erin Corzine and her partner Mike Lyman live with their two kids, ages five and two, in a tiny, one-room cabin in back of the house. Andrea Martin and her boyfriend Luke Precourt live in a small cabin, jokingly called the “tiny mansion” out back (it doesn’t have a kitchen or bathroom); they each have teenaged daughters from a previous relationship who sometimes stay over.

The communal living strategy helps overcome some of the problems faced by parents in nuclear families who live isolated in their own homes. Parenting on your own or with a partner is a full-time job; having other people to help out can go a long way. Daycare is expensive. Friends are not. “There’s huge economies of scale when you have more parents around,” said Nagle, a petite woman with glasses and short hair parted in the middle. “Someone can take over for five minutes if you need to do something.”

There are concrete financial advantages, too. Each adult pays $400 a month for rent and general upkeep; people buy food when they remember; the group owns a car but no one is quite sure who has the title. The plot of land where they live was only $275,000 because it was littered with junk when they bought it in 2013. It’s another advantage of living an hour outside Portland—large plots of land are not as expensive as they might be in a big city. The group is eventually hoping to build individual tiny homes on the property around a main house, and perhaps invite other friends to join.

Decisions that will impact the group are made by voting, and any issues are discussed at informal house meetings. Each of the adult members, who are in their thirties and forties, say they envision growing old here.

The low expenses allow the adults to take a different approach to working and child-rearing than they might if they just shared a home with their partner and children. “I’ll retire earlier. My lifestyle is different. It’s not that high-stress kind of thing,” Andrea Martin, who has a 17-year-old daughter, told me.

None of the adults feel pressured to have jobs that would pay a whole mortgage. Nagle, a Yale graduate who used to work as a paralegal, recently quit her part-time job and started managing and booking bands with her partner Martell. One of the other adults is in school, another has a small business that makes baby rattles, another is a teacher at a charter school, and another works around town doing odd jobs. Everyone knows that if they have a financial emergency, they can borrow from other community members. They look forward to the day when they pay off the mortgage (it’s in Nagle’s name), and just have to pay for taxes and upkeep. Then, they might not have to work at all. “People going the nuclear family route definitely don’t have the same quality of life,” Martell told me.