Why I Never Want to Have My Own Place

Ms. Morris co-writes the newsletter Supernuclear. She has lived with friends since 2015.

When my friend and business partner, Phil Levin, and his wife, Kristen Berman, were planning for their first child, they didn’t go looking for a single-family home in the suburbs.

Instead, in 2019, the couple and five of their friends moved into two adjacent buildings in Oakland, Calif. Now there are 20 adults, eight kids and six buildings at the Radish, as the complex is known, where a communal meal is cooked almost every night, everyone helps with child care and the hot tub is always warm.

Once Phil and Kristen’s kids are asleep at 7 p.m., they can text one of their 18 friends next door, pass the baby monitor to whomever is home and head out. No babysitter, no preplanning — just an impromptu date night, like in the pre-baby days. Their friends have known their kids since birth and are comfortable intervening if needed.

“People talk about the first year of having a kid as extraordinarily challenging. I feel like a bit of a jerk for saying this,” Phil wrote in a newsletter, “but it’s been much easier than advertised for us. And we think our living situation plays a huge role in this.”

Very few Americans live in communities like Phil’s today. But they did once — and not that long ago.

At the turn of the 20th century, roughly 2 percent of Americans lived alone. We were, in large part, a nation of boardinghouses, multigenerational homes, tenements and apartment hotels, where urbanites ate in communal dining rooms.

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