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

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

#61

Post by altairprime »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #34

There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of. Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them. LGBT communities aren’t perfect either. Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options an…

If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.

Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.

Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.

Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.

Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.

It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.

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

#63

Post by tomashubelbauer »

yongjik wrote: post #60
os2warpman wrote: post #27

People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…

> I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb) No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments. ...which casts doubt on…

Isn't the principle still the same? Koreans moving into bigger, fancies apartments to make sure they put more distance and barriers between them and people they don't want to meet. Fancier apartments guarantee a building with reception that can take your packages so you don't have to talk to delivery people. Bigger apartments means people in the building are more spread out so the noise they make is more spread out and as a result dampened. They might not be moving to literal houses, but they are isolating themselves to the same end.

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

#64

Post by maxglute »

os2warpman wrote: post #27

People generally only live in community houses if they're poor and have no other options. "But people in Indi.." No. Wealthy Indians have fucking single-family Get Me The Fuck Away From Everyone Else compounds surrounded by high walls, gate houses, and surveillance equipment. Unless you're a lifelong career civil servant in the foreign service nearing retirement who went abroad working in consulates and embassies imm…

The wealthiest family India lives in multigenerational skyscraper. Others in multigeneration compounds / culdesacs.

East Asians overwhelming move to nicer / larger apartments or urban villas before fucking off to suburbs with shit schools and bad travel time to nice large, cities.

Rich in poorer/develping countries with shit urban centres may pick private suburbs for privacy/security, because they simply don't have choice / access to world class urban living.

Nu-urbanists are kind of delulu, but they (probably) know more than "normal humans" when it comes to spectrum of livable build enviroment, the vast majority haven't lived in a nice 200-300 sqm apartment in a tier1 city. Most see medicore suburb living > medicore city living.

Ultimately it's not even that expensive to make that kind of housing (i.e. extra sqm construction $$$ to odor and sound proof units is not much). It's much harder to build nice cities people (or rich) want to live in, vs easy to spam livable single family unit suburbs.

That said, housing (and access to services) preference is almost seperate discussion from single family vs communal / multi generation living arrangments. Plenty of people would not want to live with extended family even if culture compels them too. And plenty of people probably wish family was closer.

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

#65

Post by maxglute »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #63
yongjik wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb) No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments. ...which casts doubt on…

Isn't the principle still the same? Koreans moving into bigger, fancies apartments to make sure they put more distance and barriers between them and people they don't want to meet. Fancier apartments guarantee a building with reception that can take your packages so you don't have to talk to delivery people. Bigger apartments means people in the building are more spread out so the noise they make is more spread out a…

Distinction is suburban vs urban isolation. Making family residencial space more comfy =/= retreating to single family unit outside urban areas op described. Many east asians still try to knit together multigenerational arrangements if they can afford it, i.e. having extended families live in units of same apartment complexes. I mean granted you can do that in suburbs too, but objection with ops claim is people with money don't default to big private spaces in burbs... especially in dense countries with urban areas where it's PIA to get into city. In which case it's better to stay in city but get nicer spaces. Those with resources will coordinate so family is close. It's not communal housing arrangement but it facilitates communal child rearing. Of course if you have absolute fuck off amount of money you buy a penthouse or mansion depending on lifestyle preference and pay someone else to raise the kids.

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

#66

Post by D13Fd »

mattlondon wrote: post #57

Some people quoted sound like they only have one baby. Something I found was that different kids are, well, different . For my own kids there is a huge difference in temperament. One is chilled and happy with basically anyone, another is extremely highly-strung. We raised them the same as far as we can tell, but one is very easy to look after and spend time with, the other is a fucking nightmare that no sane person w…

Five kids here, and I’ve found the same thing. Even though we’ve raised them all the same way, they are each unique individuals with very different behavior.

Before kids I was very much on the “nuture” side of nature vs. nuture, but now I think a lot of it is random, just a genetic lottery.

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

#67

Post by geverett »

crazygringo wrote: post #5
afaxwebgirl wrote: post #3

My parents had to share a house with a couple when I was a small child. It was not ideal. Shared kitchen. Other shared spaces. Unless you are all on the same page about things, you are basically taking on extra parents. Other people telling you how to do such and such in raising your child which may be ideas that you're not on par with. When you have your own home, you can amicably disagree and go to the privacy of y…

Yup. Disagreements over tidiness, food, kitchen usage, what is appropriate for children, the list goes on and on. Different families come from different cultures, have different values, etc. It's incredibly difficult to find a bunch of other families you're "on the same page with" where you actually want to be co-parenting with and hanging out with all the time. It's one thing when you all grow up together. There's a…

I'm reminded of this Atlantic article that says 'You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/intensive...

Personally I'm ok with flexing my standards a bit for the sake of having a great community - I'm on the cleaner side but I don't mind doing a little extra tidying as long as it feels like a balance. I've lived with my friends and their kids and while we don't have the 100% the same parenting styles we all respect what the others bring to the table.

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

#68

Post by phil-lnf »

zdragnar wrote: post #31

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.

The people here aren’t necessarily roommates. They live in their own private units next to their friends (rather than next to strangers)

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

#69

Post by yongjik »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #63
yongjik wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know what Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans who live in miniscule tower apartments do once they get money. (they buy an SUV or wagon and move to an American-style suburb) No they don't. I may not know a lot about families, but I know a thing or two about Korea, and the one thing I know is that they overwhelmingly stay in apartments. When they get money, the move to bigger, fancier apartments. ...which casts doubt on…

Isn't the principle still the same? Koreans moving into bigger, fancies apartments to make sure they put more distance and barriers between them and people they don't want to meet. Fancier apartments guarantee a building with reception that can take your packages so you don't have to talk to delivery people. Bigger apartments means people in the building are more spread out so the noise they make is more spread out a…

Of course wealthy people, whether they're Korean or American, buy and live in bigger houses. No surprises there. But that's a pretty weak argument to support my parent comment, which reads less like "people love big houses" and more like an anti-urban-density pro-SUV rant.
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