In the modern commune, a case of beer is not welcome

By Hal Hodson

I didn’t plan to move into a commune. But when The Economist sent me to San Francisco for two months to cover a gap in our Silicon Valley coverage, my housing options seemed unpalatable. I didn’t want to live in a soulless serviced apartment, and hotels and Airbnbs were horrifically expensive for long stays. So I found myself trawling Facebook groups with names like “San Francisco flatshare”. A stranger suggested I look at a spare room in a communal house he knew. I wrote an earnest email introducing myself to its occupants and asking whether they had a room for a month. A few hours later I was in.

Communal living has long been part of San Francisco life. Its roots may go back as far as the Barbary Coast brothels of the 19th century, where living as a community lent a veneer of plausible deniability to sex work. The commune’s heyday was in the 1960s, when hippies in Haight-Ashbury came together in a counter-cultural social experiment that other groups across America soon sought to replicate. These days sharing a space with strangers appeals to many people in the city for financial reasons instead, as the tech sector has boomed and rents have risen. To some this is an uncomfortable proposition, a regression to the dormitory life of studenthood. Others have leaned into the situation, aiming to build households that, like their forebears, are bound with ties other than the traditional ones of family or romance. For me, it was a way to live with the people whose world I was writing about and immerse myself in a culture that has spread throughout the Western world.