At Seattle’s WOW House, the kitchen is political. Specifically, the refrigerator, long ago dubbed the “socialist refrigerator” by the women who lived there. This means any unlabeled food inside belongs to everyone in the household. While claiming ownership of a jar of peanut butter isn’t necessarily offensive, doing so all the time shows that you’re not interested in the communal premise of WOW House. A former roommate started writing her name on everything; she didn’t last long.
WOW Houses (which stands for “Wild Old Women”) are just one of many communal living arrangements across the United States in which people who are not related by blood or romantic relationships choose to live together. But they are not roommates, emphasizes Davida Wolf, a resident of WOW House. Their brand of collective living, or co-living, reflects a conscious decision to share a home with others, not just because it makes rent cheaper, but because they are willing to do so. Residents share space and meals and manage the household collectively. “When you live in a group,” Wolf said, “everyone has responsibility and authority.”
For many, choosing this lifestyle is a fundamental answer to larger social problems: food waste, skyrocketing rent and home prices, and what the U.S. Surgeon General calls a loneliness epidemic. It’s a way of redefining success in a society where traditional notions of “success” often mean living alone or in a small family – a society that, as Wolf puts it, has “a huge bias against individualism” ”.
1970 new york times An investigation into the “commune phenomenon” found nearly 2,000 groups living together “seeking economic gain, social revolution, love, pot, God or themselves”. More than 50 years later, the settings may look different, but the underlying motivations are the same. For Sony Rane, 35, who lives with 19 other people in a housing cooperative in Chicago, living alone just doesn’t make sense: “I come home from work every day and have a home-cooked meal. At the end of the night I wash the dishes and then I’m done.
Today, the Intentional Communities Foundation’s database documents more than 700 such groups nationwide, not counting more casual combinations such as multiple couples sharing a house. Gillian Morris, who runs a blog about living together called Supernuclear and is the co-founder of Casa Chironja in Puerto Rico, is seeing more and more people reaching out to ask how to start living together Advice for life, especially in the wake of COVID. During the pandemic, she said, “people are being forced to face how difficult it is to be alone.”
Food is one of the main motivators for living in these larger groups, members say. “Mealing together is at the heart of living together,” Morris said. She and her roommates in San Juan, along with all 20 members of Chicago’s Bowers House and the wild women of Seattle, invited Bon Appétit to join them in the kitchen. We get a behind-the-scenes look at these families as they plan meals, cook meals and cut bread together at the (sometimes very large) table.
wow house
Seattle, Washington
