Kacey Sycamore, 33, grew up in the Los Angeles area. She went to Chico State to study journalism before working in radio and marketing. She lived a life she describes as “pretty average,” which is why it may seem surprising that Sycamore now lives in upstate New York with the Bruderhof, a communal Christian movement with communities scattered across mostly the Northeast.
Sycamore emphasized that her and her husband’s attraction to the Bruderhof—founded in Germany in 1920 to practice ideals such as nonviolence, common ownership, and adult baptism—is rooted in their Christian faith. But she also described how her current life differs radically from her old one. Her marketing work for Community Playthings, the children’s furniture business through which the income-sharing community partially supports itself, is a five-minute walk from her living space, which is in turn a two-minute walk from the communal daycare where her baby spends the day. Her husband, formerly in tech marketing, also works for the business, and in the evenings, they gather with their older children for family time or a community activity. Every day, communal lunch is served.
To live in a Bruderhof community, you commit to several things, including a renunciation of personal property; anyone who “has decided to become a member freely gives all property, earnings, and inheritances to the church community,” per the movement’s website. Food, shelter, and healthcare are provided, and members are not paid monetarily for their work. Day-to-day affairs are co-managed by a team including pastors and “work distributors,” who assign tasks to members.
“Family life, and just sharing [that] life with other people, rather than being out on your own, is such a beautiful thing, and it just feels like this is the way people are meant to live,” Sycamore told me.
Sycamore and her husband are not alone; a spokesman for the Bruderhof told me that interest in their communal way of living has risen since the pandemic. Exact statistics about commune-dwellers aren’t available, but it’s easy to see the appeal, and to believe that communes are, once again, on the rise. Communes can offer the absolute opposite of the oft-bemoaned lifestyle of many Americans: rootless, atomized, and utterly separated from meaningful relationships or purpose.
Indeed, in a period where the surgeon general issues health advisories against loneliness and isolation, the Bruderhof seems to offer a unique bulwark against such scourges. Are such institutions radical? Especially compared to the life of the modern yuppie, sure. But even though not everyone will want to live like the Bruderhof, their community is part of a rich history of such living arrangements—religious and not, income-sharing and not—that can teach us something about how we might live well, together.
Communitarian ideals have long existed in the United States, waxing and waning but never disappearing. The Shakers set up their first religious independent community in 1787—and still exist today, if barely—and the Owenites started a socialist utopian community in 1825.
But the word “commune” is more likely to evoke the hippie movement of the 1960s and ’70s, with images of long-haired, perhaps unwashed, anti-war artistic types, practicing free love and experimenting with drugs. But hippies were not a monolith; according to a 1992 article by Tim Miller, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and an expert on intentional communities, such communities were devoted to a range of ideas, including “radical politics, anarchism, sexual freedom, the sharing of labor, creation of arts and crafts, land development, ethnicity, and a dazzling array of visions of assorted seers and cranks.”
From that description, you’d be tempted to think that such a form of living might be attractive only to those on the cultural left. But it seems that era is over, if only because drugs, sex without consequence, and freedom from responsibility are ubiquitous in today’s America. And commune culture is arguably defined not by any specific lifestyle but by a general dissatisfaction with mainstream culture and the economy itself, and a desire for a different kind of life. In her new book The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024), historian Kristin Ross writes that “people actually living differently, according to a different concept of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation … these are the outlines of the commune form.” Likewise, Miller told me that, in the 1960s, “People were interested, more broadly, in rejecting the dominant culture. You know, ‘This is what’s corrupt, this is what’s made things so bad in so many ways,’ … and one solution would be to change our way of living.”
So a more communitarian form of living might be an answer for the disenchanted across the political spectrum. For today’s left, living communally could be about sustainable living: shared cars, appliances, and vacuums all reduce a household’s carbon footprint, and climate control is more efficient when there are more people in a room. For today’s right, living communally, especially in a rural area, would be an ideal escape from governmental overreach and a chance to cultivate conservative or religious values that are scoffed at in the wider culture.
“Family life, and just sharing [that] life with other people, rather than being out on your own, is such a beautiful thing, and it just feels like this is the way people are meant to live,” Sycamore told me.
That isn’t to say that the commune is necessarily rural. The Ganas Community, which was started on Staten Island in 1979, was built around “an intention to care for each other while sharing work, having fun, and addressing whatever problems arise, together.” A spokesperson declined to talk to me about the community, but Ganas’s website describes a series of houses on a hill where about sixty-five people live, about 90 minutes from Grand Central Station, each for $950 a month, including a room, food, utilities, laundry, and toiletries. (That’s roughly half the average rent of $1,652 in the same borough—for only a room.) Unlike the Bruderhof, some members of the community have jobs outside Ganas.
There are newer urban efforts, too. Cohabs is a Belgium-based company founded in 2016 that offers housing in major cities, including Brussels, Paris, Madrid, London, Milan, and New York. Its offerings are similar to Ganas, especially in a relative financial sense: a fully furnished room in a Manhattan house starts at $1,700 a month, complete with a gym, cinema room, and basic utilities. (The average Manhattan rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,870.) Interestingly, Cohabs is careful to use the word “coliving” on its website; the word “commune” does not appear anywhere. There seems to be a post-counterculture rebranding effort underway.
Interest in shared living is significant and seems to be growing. The Foundation for Intentional Community keeps a directory of over one thousand such communities in the country; overseas, communal lifestyles in the U.K. and Israel have been proliferating in recent years.
Of course, whether a community succeeds depends on the individuals within that community. According to Miller, interpersonal issues are “almost always a problem” in co-living, and it’s easy to see why: someone interested in cheaper rent but uninterested in pooling funds or cooking meals together might charitably be called a freeloader; indeed, Ganas’s second house rule reads: “No free rides.” Miller put it thus in 1992: “The reality is that a reliable commune is seemingly a cradle-to-grave welfare system, and as such is attractive to persons lacking motivation and ability to contribute. The Shakers perennially had ‘Winter Shakers’ who would show up in the fall and live the communal life during the cold months, only to leave in the spring when the workload increased and life became easier elsewhere. The hippies also had problems with freeloaders and misfits.”
Even if one does pull their weight, the sacrifices required can be significant. Marianne Wright, who lives in the Bruderhof community of Woodcrest in upstate New York, told me that, while she might like to go see a show or travel the world, her vow of poverty, required upon entry to the Bruderhof community, prevents her.
But she believes it’s worth it. “It’s a very full life,” said Wright, whose parents and in-laws also live in the same community. And while Sycamore does not live in the same Bruderhof community as Wright, she said something similar: “So many aspects of it, I would say, that may initially feel limiting, end up being real sources of freedom.”
One major benefit of living with the Bruderhof is that Wright, who is a mother of five children between the ages of five and sixteen, “really [has] very little stress about taking care of my children from day to day.” Major reasons for this include a community wash-and-fold service, run by older Bruderhof members, which ensures that Wright spends about thirty minutes a week doing laundry, a far cry from the 4.5 hours a week an average American might spend, per one industry report. Wright also noted that, since their community at Woodcrest is walkable, she doesn’t spend hours driving her kids around. It is, as she put it, a “very seamless life.”
Such benefits are not limited to Christian communities. There are reports of single mothers living together under one roof in so-called “mommunes,” with one adherent calling hers a “support system like no other.” Multigenerational households in America have also been steadily rising in number; between 1971 and 2021, the share of Americans living in such a household rose from 7 percent to 18 percent, and the media have started to take notice. (It should also be noted that such arrangements seem novel only in industrialized nations; in parts of Latin America and Asia, multigenerational households have long been the norm.)
The Shakers perennially had “Winter Shakers” who would show up in the fall and live the communal life during the cold months, only to leave in the spring when the workload increased and life became easier elsewhere. The hippies also had problems with freeloaders and misfits.
Even with the uptick in these forms of collective living, our built environment still revolves around the nuclear family. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote the 2023 book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster), told journalist Ezra Klein that “we do not have the architectural options available to us in order to live in these wider networks of care and support.” Indeed, 63.5 percent of the U.S. housing stock consists of single-family homes. Ghodsee also notes that ordinances and zoning can further complicate co-living: in April 2022, the city council in Shawnee, Kan., decreed that more than three unrelated adults could not live together in a house.
But some enterprising people still eke out community where they can. Ghodsee told me that, in September, she gave a talk in London after which a retired man told her about how he and some university buddies bought three London row houses, side-by-side, removed the garden fences, and unlocked their back doors. “And I think that is something that we have the capacity to do,” Ghodsee told me. “I mean, obviously, getting on the property ladder is hard. But it’s not impossible.”
Indeed, while deciding to live in community might require a significant shift in values, getting property in which to live in community might require an even bigger shift. In March 2023, The New York Times (where I work) published an article about a mini-exodus of people from the coasts to Peoria, Ill., which at the time boasted a median home price of about $128,100, less than half the nationwide median. The diaspora generally did not live in the same houses. But the idea that enough people could uproot, leave their old lives, and form community in a place better suited to their needs is the same idea at the core of the commune.
I don’t live in a commune, but I’m not without experience in a shared mode of living. Growing up, I spent most summer weekends at my family’s tiny cottage in Koontz Lake, Ind. When the cottage next door went up for sale, my mother got her friend Darlene (and Darlene’s two sisters) to buy it. For as long as I can remember, there were few barriers between the houses: kids from Dar’s household would appear in our living room, and I would often work from Dar’s porch, as our house didn’t have wifi. We come and go between the houses as we please, and when someone goes to Walmart, others’ needs are tacked onto a grocery list.
Is this a form of living in community? The spectrum between that loaded word, “commune,” and the isolations of American life might have as its middle node “living in community,” but a word missing here is a simple one: neighborliness. Because that’s what the arrangement between Darlene’s family and mine was: we are simply good neighbors who made a conscious choice to be near one another. And while living like the Bruderhof or Ganas might not be attractive to or attainable for many people, better neighborliness is something universally accessible. When I asked Ghodsee for advice for people who can’t immediately uproot their current lives, she said: “Think about the space you have … how can you increase your lateral connections?” Indeed, community, whether found in a commune, in co-living, or in being more intentional with your friends and neighbors, might be closer than we think.