I have lived in collective housing situations for the last few years. This has saved me a boat load of money because collective housing is generally much cheaper. But it is also a way of conserving: the amount of energy used to heat a home is good for as many people as can fit!
It is also is really nice to have a lot of cool people around all the time and makes things fun. I learn something from my housemates everyday. And it saves me time when we organize cooking calendars because I’ll only have to cook once a week.
This post was submitted by Ethan.
One thing, that is strange to me, on our street is that we sometimes have three generations living within a home. That’s an older way to live that has less impact. For the young kids - it also really helped them as in most cases the parents were split and I think that the kids, with grandparents, were better off.
Our experiment at trying to start a co-housing group failed. People have such different goals. We had a split between the dreamers and the doers. Generally the doers knew what they had to spend and were not willing to risk their hard earned money in a project where the dreamers were going to do this via the American Dream ™. Ie the dreamers would finance everything, have virtually nothing down. The dreamers seemed to think that a ‘green’ home was something brought to them - as they made their current home bigger, had not so much as a single CFL in the house, put black shingles on the roof and bought a 100 year old house and were shocked that it was cold and drafty and expensive to heat …
Everyone wanted green things - but other dreamers thought that we’d get 40+ families into the project (when for 2 years we barely managed to scrape 5 together for meetings).
A rough breakdown of living expenses for a “mostly Voluntary Simplicity” family is this;
$15k total living cost per year
$5k home ($3k taxes, $1k energy, $1k repairs and upkeep)
$5k car ($1k insurance, $1k gas, $3k purchase cost)
$5k food (mostly), kids stuff
Now going into a house with someone else will split the $1k energy costs on the home.
Sharing a car can greatly reduce the $3k/yr cost of purchase and upkeep - but insurance brokers run screaming if you talk about sharing a car!
Food - we’re already buying 20kg sacks of flour, oat flakes, grains … so there isn’t much saving there. But it would be wonderful to have others around when it’s canning time and to have others to share a pressure canner with!
In short - I can’t believe that there really are any signif. savings.
Yes the reduction in impact is great.
But our society (western society) is generally setup so that people have a strong incentive to have their own castle!
However, if one has a mortgage - then more wage earners can really help pay down the mortage faster (instead of feeding interest to the Banksters) and provide insurance against inability to keep up payments. That’s an old trick of immigrants - go together to buy the first place and then support each other until everyone has a home!
Comment by Eric — January 27, 2010 @ 7:10 am