Una Mullally: Beat housing crisis with communal living

Why don't we all just live together? I can't be the only person who has entered mad criteria into Daft.ie's search terms, poured over the photos of seven-storey mansions overlooking Dublin Bay and wondered how much it would cost per month between 11 friends. Now that so many people in most western capitals can barely afford to live in them (hurrah for capitalism),perhaps it's time to reassess the merits of communal living.

I've never lived with anyone I wasn't friends with already. The idea of sharing a home with strangers freaks me out. I hate detached pleasantries and small talk; I need someone I can share my cheese and thoughts on House of Cards with without saying "excuse me".

Still, there is something attractive about living with a load of people, as opposed to one, two or three. In my mind, it sounds like a ready-made book club, political party or Melrose Place-ian idyll. In reality, it's probably a monotony of house meetings, fighting couples slamming doors, and trying to get rid of the roomie with the collection of snakes.

The New Yorker recently detailed some communal living trends on the American east coast. A company called Common promises "friendly, flexible shared homes" and has three buildings in New York. The website for WeLive opens with videos of people pouring each other delicious-looking glasses of wine and doing yoga en masse. WeLive, which has one building on Wall Street and another in Washington DC, is a spin-off of WeWork, a co-working company recently valued at $16 billion.

What the likes of Common and WeLive are trying to do is remove communal living from its aura of kibbutzes and hippies. They do it by charging people loads of money and having websites with nice interfaces, shrouded in the meaningless language of start-ups, for a subset of a generation for whom “authenticity” is correlated with “stories” of you walking your dog on Snapchat.

Occasionally you hear about friends of friends of friends who wrangle a seemingly impossible-sounding deal thanks to some vague property guardianship scheme: “Niamh is living in a lighthouse for €20 a week! And they have a pet dolphin and a local farmer leaves brown bread on the doorstep every Wednesday!”

I imagine visiting these fantasy people, as they swing the doors of their castle down like an enthusiastic rapper on Cribs. I would make the decision, there and then, to live within the perimeters of a moat for next to nothing with a friendly bunch of interesting peers.

I wonder if these stories are actually true or just another contemporary Irish urban myth, like the Polish person who replied “Penneys” as a synonym for “thank you”.

Crowded house

I once lived in Boston for a semester (back when people thought

John Kerry

might be the next president). The city passed an amendment to the zoning code banning five undergraduates or more from living in a single rental unit. This was a bad news for the red cup-toting frat and sorority houses. With more than 150,000 students in a city of 646,000, you could go days without seeing anyone under 18 or over 25.

Down the street from our mice-riddled, mattress-on-the-floor apartment lived two guys who were determined to maintain a post-college, frat-house lifestyle that used to exist in the city’s Alpha-Phi-Sloshed axis. I have no idea how we met them, but we ended up at several of Scott and Scott’s Superbad-esque parties.

“This is amazing!” I thought, feeling slightly woozy while playing beer pong with a mysterious liquid. “What is this?”

“Cough syrup and vodka.”

“Oh.”

After several visits to the communal toilet, and after witnessing a particularly mean argument between a goth and a jock over a bong, I began to reassess the frat house dream.

It used to be that living with friends into your late 30s and 40s or beyond was viewed as some kind of Grey Gardens eccentricity. Now it’s a reality – and often a necessity: The rent is too damn high; people get married later or not at all; kids aren’t appearing on the horizon until prospective parents are in their 30s; and many people born on the cusp of the 1980s are living their lives in a suspended adolescence.

So why not do it together in larger numbers?

Boarding and bonding

Boarding houses for young people transitioning from rural life to city living were common back in the day. My mum recalls with fondness the one she lived in on Parnell Square when she first moved to Dublin from Galway: helping each other out, knitting in the evenings, spending wages in the sweet shop around the corner.

Sometimes cities isolate us. They box us off away from each other, leading to dozens all living together in the same building yet not knowing anyone’s name. For a generation less likely to be able to buy a house, more likely to have children later in life (if at all), thus suspending the need for a “family home”, there is something increasingly tempting about thinking “the more the merrier”.