Why is it so hard to get families to live in community houses?

I tolerated living with roommates while in college because I needed to save money. The first chance I had to move out on my own, I was gone.

I can't imagine my family living with roommates for any reason other than necessity.

Let me be frank, millenials and boomers don't make good housemates.

That said, I would not mind a good size plot of land with multiple structures..a family compound. Inside the same house? Absolutely never.

You must have some stories to tell! Would love to hear more :-)

Many of the problems this article talks about are relatively new, historically, and I can't help but wonder if the problem isn't really other trends like high-intensity helicopter parenting, rather than "atomic" families.

I grew up in a fairly typical American suburb, in the 70s, and lived in a single-family, single-generation household. But, there were 35+ kids on my one-block street! The neighborhood consisted entirely of families with children and retirees, and among the families, the median number of kids was three. There were a couple of families with two, but multiple with four; there were also families with 5, 6, and 7. We were constantly in and out of each other's houses. I regularly would walk out my door, through my neighbor's front yard, and into my best friend's house without knocking. A lot of the time we were outside, and unsupervised by adults. Overall I think the burden on parents (per kid) was much lower than today.

I think the large number of kids made this kind of arrangement both necessary and possible. Nobody could have the energy to supervise so many kids the way kids are supervised today, but also we all looked out for each other. There were lots of siblings. Older sibs were responsible for younger, and by extension, their younger friends as well. If someone got hurt, some friends would help while others would run to get a parent, and not necessarily the parent of the kid who got hurt.

Even this situation, I can't imagine wanting to actually share a household with any of my friends' families. In fact, when I slept over, I was always struck with how weird other families' closed-door customs seemed. It's the same now: when we get an occasional glimpse into the behind-closed-doors dynamics of our friends' marriages and families, my wife and I are always like, hm... weird. I think it's like that for everyone.

Getting married and having a family is a very personal thing. I love my friends, but I wouldn't want to marry any of them.

Different cultures. Your culture determines who sets expectations and who enforces them in these situations, and Indians can work with their culture's existing system for organizing and managing community homes. Americans would have to figure out a system, agree on it, troubleshoot it, while trying to learn how to be parents. That's almost impossible.