Communes and Co-ops for Seniors

Baby boomers are looking at moving into shared living and communal living according to the article Boomers go back to the commune in retirement on BankRate.com. Normally when a headline has the words ‘commune’ and ‘boomers’ in it they usually mean cohousing but this article is really about income-sharing communal groups.

FIC’s directory lists about 100,000 people around the nation living in some form of purposely organized community, of which, Laird Schaub says, about 1-in-7 to as many as 1-in-6 fulfill the income-sharing requirement that technically defines them as communes. Two-thirds of these communities, he says, are in rural settings.

The article goes on to discuss a forming community, Heliotrope, being started in Oregon by a couple that used to live at Church of the Golden Rule community in northern California.

A grandfather of six whose resume includes stints as an artist, cook, greenhouse constructor, organic farmer and teacher, Burns says he envisions fellow Heliotrope residents as “average middle-class working people whose lives won’t be a whole lot different than the way they live now, except that everything will be shared.”

The article also discusses non-income-sharing options and highlights the efforts of the National Shared Housing Resource Center and the efforts of a real eastate broker who helps seniors find compatible cooperative arrangments.

Jim Parker, broker-owner of Access Brokerage Real Estate Services, has been looking into types of communal living at the request of a number of people in their mid-50s who have come to him with questions about the possibility of trying this kind of living arrangement as they age.

“A lot of people end up single in retirement,” he says. “They may not be well off enough to just go out and buy a house, and they’re looking for other choices besides renting.”

For these folks, Parker says, some kind of communal arrangement is a practical alternative.

Read the Commune article at BankRate.com