Why you shouldn't bring your full self to work

Jordan Marie Smith, a producer at NPR, spent the first four years of her life on a religious commune in a mostly Black Seventh-day Adventist community. Decades later, as an adult living alone in Washington, D.C., she started hearing friends fantasize about buying a farm together or starting a “gay commune.” That tension — between the American ideal of solitary adulthood and the growing appeal of living with people who are not family or romantic partners — became the thread of this episode. Smith reports that a significant percentage of home buyers are now purchasing with someone who is not a romantic partner, often a friend or sibling. The Zillow data she cites puts the figure at about 16%, more than she expected.

The economics and the dream

The episode makes clear that the rise of communal living is partly a response to a brutal housing market. The National Association of Realtors recently reported that the median home price in the U.S. is at an all-time high. Marriage rates have been declining for decades, and the classic nuclear family — a couple with children in a detached house — is both harder to afford and less desired. Smith’s colleague Rayna Cohen, who lives in a D.C. house with her husband, two other couples, and a friend, put it plainly: “Sometimes economics gives people an excuse to do something that they want to do, but might be hard to explain.”