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

That idealism isn't how families happened. Traditoinally you split the farm when the sons (it need not be sons, but sexism generally comes in somehow as someone needs to leave home for genetic diverstiy reasons and the entire culture needs to follow the pattern in general so lets just talk about sons with the understanding that sometimes it was daughters) until the farm was too small to support the family at which point the oldest son got the farm and the other kids were sent off on their own. If you were lucky enough to be the oldest son you got to stay home and raise your own family with your cousins nearby in the village - but for your brothers who knows where they went, if they had a family it wasn't in sight and they didn't have the family.

Tell me you're american without telling me you're american.

> I know what Hip Young Urban Professionals Sipping Coffee On A Sidewalk Next To A Cafe Along The Seine Or Rhine Because Their Apartment Is To Small To Do Anything do the second they get money.

They buy a nice apartment on the southern bank of the seine because they're the only one that can afford it, cycle everywhere and enjoy the thousands of places you can go in Paris with their friends while sharing a babysitter because they can walk by their friends places to pickup their kids afterwards.

I moved to SF for work 6 months ago and I can't understand how you guys can "enjoy" living alone and depressed in your empty suburb.

Want to know who actually lives in the "american-style suburbs" of Paris? Poor people who have no choice but to live there

The question isn't: Why doesn't everyone want to raise their children in communal living?

It's more like: why does almost no one want that?

There's a big difference.

It should be obvious why not everyone or even most people don't want that.

It's less obvious why basically no one does - especially since lots of people are actually interested in the idea, and there are - theoretically - advantages.

Because other people do it wrong :)

My own mother and of course my mother in law are absolute liabilities with my 5 and 3 year olds. They continually and repeatedly break our rules.

It's not unsafe per se, but it's just high-risk things for no reason apart from what we believe is just willful defiance from the grandparents. E.g. letting them out into the garden with no direct supervision, when there is no physical barrier from them getting into the road etc. "Oh lighten up! It's just a busy street with loads of distracted drivers in 2+ ton vehicles going over the speed limit! What's the problem!"

As a result, they're not usually left alone with the kids unless we can avoid it.

Ultimately if any harm were to come, I want to know that it was my own fault effectively, and not because I suspected that some other adult was not paying enough attention, or could have tried harder/made more effort to stop it, or was deliberately not doing things how I like it to be done. If it was under your own watch or your partner's watch that something bad happened then you can be pretty sure that the harm was unavoidable and not because someone else has other concepts of safety and risk for your offspring.

Urban doesn't have to mean slumming it. There is a very comfortable peak in the middle between capsule hotel and suburbia.