At 75, May D'Marie has visited enough retirement homes to know that she never wants to live in one. "They're boring," she says. "Everyone is the same age practically. And even the elevators move slowly." But she also doesn't want to live alone, doesn't have family in her area and doesn't want a roommate. That seemed to leave the retired librarian with no options--until she heard about a new community being built near her in Sacramento.
At Southside Park Cohousing, D'Marie now shares three meals a week in a central dining hall with 65 other residents of all ages. Her apartment, like the others, looks out over a common lawn, gardens and playground. Here, there's always someone to talk to. When she needs help moving a couch or changing the battery in a smoke detector, neighbors are ready to assist. In return, she hems their clothes or makes applesauce for them from the community orchard. "I'm very comfortable here," she says.
Sound like one of those hippie communes that disappeared along with bellbottoms and VW Bugs? It is. Like so many icons of the '60s, they're back now and being marketed successfully to the mainstream. A few still feature free love and organic farming, but what's more common is a form of collective housing built by and for property-owning, car-driving, middle-class former suburbanites.
"The general public has the impression they all died out in the 1960s," says Michael Cummings, a University of Colorado, Denver, political scientist who has studied communes for 17 years. In fact, Cummings estimates, there are now tens of thousands of "intentional communities"--groups of people who reject conventional neighborhoods and live with others who share their values or interests.
Behind the resurgent interest in such communities is a significant demographic shift. The average household in America is half the size it was at the start of the century. About a quarter of Americans live alone--and many of these are widowed, retired or both. There are also more single parents. The new breed of communes is more likely to have members named Ozzie and Harriet than Mad Dog and Rainbow. They keep a low profile and strive for respectability. They're just folks who simply found life in the atomized suburbs lonely.
The founders of Southside Park Cohousing set out to prove they could create a village in the heart of a big city. Their block of pastel clapboard row houses blends smoothly into the surrounding neighborhood. Seven years ago, the block held only the burned-out ruins of 80-year-old Victorian houses trashed by prostitutes and crack dealers. When the band of would-be communards wanted to buy the site, the city was so delighted that it helped finance the project.
"I had lived in a commune back in western Massachusetts in the 1970s," says Susan Scott, 52, one of the community's founders. "I thought it was a great way to raise children." But in the 1980s, Scott, like so many other flower children, took a right-hand turn. She became a lawyer for the state of California, got married, bought a house, had a child, got divorced.