living the dream

[the_siobhan]

I'm not having my most productive day ever at work today. Go figure.

For some reason thinking about colonies on other planets and satellites sent me down the rabbit hole of thinking about intentional communities. I've met a number of people who lived in communes just from hanging around with pagans. (One I can think of in particular had been going close to 50 years at the time I met one of the members, and didn't show any signs of stopping. And that was at least 10 years ago.)

All the ones I've stumbled over or read about always seemed to be "on a piece of property somewhere out of the city" and that started me wondering if all intentional communities are necessarily rural. So I stuck a couple of terms into a search engine and started looking around.

Turns out that no, there are lots in cities. Including several in Toronto, which is kind of neat.

Just judging from what I found online it looks like Pagans and people interested in eco-housing seem to run about neck-and-neck in terms of wanting to start new communities. And that there is lots of overlap between the two, as you might expect. But that the real front-runners are Christians, who can list more active co-housing groups than everybody else put together.

And it also turns out that The International Church of Satan is starting a commune in Halifax. So there's that.




[ETA] I also found one called Lothlorien but I can't actually open the website because my work security deems it "suspicious". I'm finding that highly amusing.

Comments

[tcpip]

Personal God, theistic Satanism in Halifax? That's a long way from northern Iraq.

[hobbitbabe]

Many years ago, P and I went to a meeting of people in Kingston interested in co-housing. About two-thirds of them liked the model of being out in the country, grid-optional, and the other third of us liked the idea of moving downtown by taking down the fences inside a city block.

But what I thought was fascinating was that nobody there except us was currently or recently in any kind of housing arrangement other than living with primary partner and/or children. Nobody had housemates, or had had any since they were students. I had one housemate in my weekdays apartment and was building chosen family in my weekends-location, and I felt like this immediately made them decide I was of a different not-quite-grown-up generation.

[the_siobhan]

Interesting. It does seem like we relegate co-housing to something people do when they are just starting out or when they retire.

One of the things that really struck me while watching the show Sherlock is how everybody assumes they are a couple because they live together. Meanwhile almost everybody I know in London lives with other people because it's the only way to afford it. It just struck me as really jarring.