At WOW House in Seattle, the kitchen is political. Specifically, the fridge, which was long ago dubbed a “socialist refrigerator” by the women who live there. That means any unlabeled food in it belongs to everyone in the house. While claiming ownership over, say, a specific jar of peanut butter isn’t necessarily distasteful, doing it all the time signals you’re not interested in the communal premise of WOW House. One former housemate started putting her name on everything; she didn’t last long.

WOW House—which stands for Wild Older Women—is just one of many communal living arrangements across the US, households where people who aren’t related or romantically involved choose to reside together. But they’re not roommates, emphasizes Davida Wolf, one of the WOW House residents. Their brand of communal living, or coliving, reflects an intentional decision to share a home with others not just because it makes the rent cheaper, but because they want to. Residents share spaces and meals and manage the household collectively. “When you’re living communally,” Wolf says, “everybody has responsibility and power.”

For many, choosing this way of life is a radical answer to larger social issues: food waste, skyrocketing rents and home prices, and what the US surgeon general has dubbed a loneliness epidemic. It’s a way to redefine success in a society in which the conventional idea of “making it” often means living alone or in a small family unit—society’s “big bias on individualism,” as Wolf puts it.

In 1970 a New York Times investigation into the “commune phenomenon” found nearly 2,000 groups living together, “seeking economic advantages, social revolution, love, pot, God, or themselves.” More than 50 years later these setups may look different, but the underlying motivation is the same. For Sony Rane, a 35-year-old who lives with 19 other people in a Chicago housing cooperative, it just doesn’t make sense to live alone: “I get to come home from work to a home-cooked meal everyday. I wash my plate at the end of the night and I’m done.”

Today the Foundation for Intentional Community’s database clocks just over 700 such groupings across the country, which doesn’t include more casual combinations, like multiple couples sharing a house. Gillian Morris, who runs a blog about coliving called Supernuclear and is a cofounder of Casa Chironja in Puerto Rico, has seen a “huge explosion” of people reaching out and asking for advice on how to begin living communally, especially after COVID. During the pandemic, she says, “People were forced to confront how difficult it was to be alone.”

One of the primary motivators for living in these larger groups, members say, is the food. “Communal eating is the beating heart of coliving,” Morris says. She and her housemates in San Juan, along with all 20 members of Bowers House in Chicago, and the wild women of Seattle, invited Bon Appétit to join them in the kitchen. We got a behind-the-scenes look at these households as they planned meals, cooked, and broke bread together at their (sometimes very large) tables.

WOW House

Seattle, Washington