The commune officially started in March of this year. Members pooled some of their existing money to pay for home renovations and other expenses, but mostly kept the assets they had before joining separate. Since March though, they have agreed to put 100 percent of their earnings into a joint bank account, which is used for everything from mortgage payments to clothing to happy-hour drinks to braces for one of Jenny’s kids. For purchases of more than $100, they consult with each other. For everything else, they use their own discretion.

They are saving for a bigger house but first want to refine their accounting system. They’re also hashing out what happens if a member leaves. If it comes to that, they said, they’ll try to provide that person with enough money to help them move and get started somewhere else. In the future, they want to be able to provide savings accounts and potentially retirement accounts for each member as well.

Compersia’s founding was the end of a series of conversations that started during meetings organized by Point A, an group founded by Blundell in hopes of forming more urban communes. Jenny and Blundell met at a conference at the Twin Oaks commune in Virginia, one of only seven communes in America to be recognized by the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. The duo got the word out that they were trying create a commune in D.C., figured out where they would live and how many members they could accommodate, and started building a community. The concept of income-pooling isn’t unique, but attempting to build a commune in one of the most expensive cities in the nation and opting to share 100 percent of money earned is a fairly radical proposition.

Most communes within the U.S. are in rural locales, where the living is cheaper, there’s plenty of room for expansion, and members have the opportunity to farm or raise animals, which can decrease costs significantly and help the commune bring in money as a group. But husbandry isn’t possible at Compersia on any significant scale. So in addition to dividing up household chores, including some light gardening, members share the money they make in their jobs. The requirement of turning over any money earned to the commune was extreme enough that it alienated some would-be members, Scalzi tells me. “That was sort of a dividing line where, some people, when we decided we were going to do full income sharing, there were some people who were like, ‘Ok, well, that community's not for me,’” he says.

Most research on income pooling focuses on its most common applications—between members of couples and families. And even when it comes to sharing money with family members, data shows that individuals’ satisfaction with sharing incomes can change based on who is earning, who is spending, and how decisions are being made. Researchers attempt to dissect these complexities by splitting the work into two areas of study: the sociological side, which investigates the personal impact of income pooling on household members, and the economic side, which investigates the economic choices a household that is sharing its income makes. Studies have found that in households that pool incomes completely, consumption is spread more evenly between partners: For example, a spouse who brings in only 40 percent of the income might be responsible for half of household spending. Among couples who share expenses, but don’t fully pool resources, consumption and spending are more heavily dependent upon how much each individual makes. More recent research suggests that as instances of cohabitation without marriage rise, income pooling may well be on the decline, with more and more couples opting to combine funds only for shared expenses while maintaining individual accounts for everything else.