... it can be hard enough to find ONE person with which to share years of life together, within a long-standing social construct (marriage). Making it work with other "like-minded people", while you're all making it up as you go along, seems unlikely to work out well, especially as the members approach end-of-life. I'm not surprised that it's been tried and found wanting.

As a college student, I was part of a casual discussion about forming a communal living arrangement, on the rural property of a humanities professor. I offered that I might be interested in providing technical support, being an electrical engineering student with a solid 4-H run-your-own-farm background, and I'd leave the social experimentation to the others. It never got off the ground, but it was a useful thought-experiment.

It would help if there were just more places for boarders and lodgers to be in a walkable area and to have at least one or two meals a day family style so that food expenses could be cut back and not everyone needs their very own washing machine. Sharing refrigeration facilities could be done by two apartment houses that also share a cafeteria style food service. There are many ways to share that do not involve LifeLong Committment to function. Just breaking a Mega Mansion into separate quarters with a shared laundry room for instance. It can be done if the will is there and the expenses are high enough to motivate the cities to stop legislating against shared housing.

But two or three single parents could share a setup like that and have a common room for the kids with a laundry room to share. It could help with babysitting and when kids get sick to have another parent you know and trust. They could pool resources to hire a part-time cook/housekeeper to prepare ready-to eat casseroles and clean the bathrooms and wash the bedclothes. And a boarding house would be owned by the person who is making a small profit and a living from the space, so would be the one to mediate and prevent messes from becoming a problem for the other tenants. It is possible to have a caravanserai set up for the transients and even the drunks with a safe place to sleep and water to drink and a shower and an open air toilet -- a place that is subsidized by the town and staffed by monk or other charities. There could be Tenancy-In-Common (TiC) arrangements where the whole building is owned in common by the residents and also partly funded by relatives and friends who invest in the building instead of stocks and bonds. Bulk buys and shared costs of things like Insurance, roofing, plumbing replacement fittings, toilet paper, or whatever, beans and canned goods, maybe -- all these different kinds of shared housing could be part of a normal cityscape.

I'm currently reading Paul Groth's book, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States.

EVERY form of housing listed above is included. Here's a very rough list.

Flop houses: they take anyone and don't care what you do.
Rooming houses: they rent a room, toilet facilities down the hall, no meals.
Boarding houses: they rent a room, the landlady provides breakfast and dinner, expects to know your business, and enforces a curfew.
Organized residential clubs, generally operated by a charity: YMCAs and YWCAs are here. Tenants have some freedom; meals may or may not be available.
Low-end residential hotels: from a Single Room Occupancy to something more middle-class. Price varies. No meals but hot plates abound as do local, cheap basement restaurants.
Middle-class residential hotels of various types: exactly what they sound like; they cost more and expect a higher standard of behavior BUT they come with meal plans that often make them cheaper than a house
Upper-class residential hotels: more costly and more services.
Palace Hotels: high-end service, plenty of servants, fine dining, etc. for people with money.

There are other options too! Every town that had a factory had some sort of residential hotels. I haven't gotten to it yet, but I suspect that in addition to well-meaning reformers who couldn't stand residents living in ways they disapproved, another change to the market was changes in mortgages. Once you could get a 30-year mortgage with only 20% down, a family didn't have to come up with a 50% down payment AND pay off the balloon mortgage at the end of seven years. That must have changed things substantially.

This is a stunning, very readable book; especially noteworthy since it's a product of an academic press (University of California Press).

The book is VERY expensive on abebooks.com so get your copy via the interlibrary loan.
You'll have a FAR greater understanding of various housing options that were common.

One thing they all have in common: no one is spouting off silliness about 'we're all going to be happy together'. It was expected that the landlady or manager or desk clerk paid attention to the residents' behavior and they threw you out if you didn't meet standards.

Having lived for several years in college in a small, shared house, I can tell you that getting other people to clean up after themselves and not get drunk and pass out in the living room floor is damned hard. They don't want to pay their share of the rent, they run the furnace to 80 degrees so they can prance around in shorts and a t-shirt and empty out the oil tank (true story), they want you do to do everything and if they don't get their way, they pout and skip out on their share of the bills, they won't cook for everyone or if they do, they won't clean up afterwards, and they sure won't get on their knees to scrub the toilets.

I wouldn't do it again. Unless you've got similar cultural values enforced by community standards (i.e., marriage), it doesn't necessarily work well, especially with strangers.

was $75.
Not gonna happen.
The info you showed was very interesting tho,
never seen it layed out that way. Thanks.

I like interlibrary loan, too. I've gotten access to some pretty useful stuff that way.