Hell is other people, sure, but we’re all we’ve got. In the New York Times, Elaine Louie revisits a 1994 story about Californians who decided to experiment with co-housing. An excerpt:

“In 1994, The New York Times reported on how those members, or ‘partners,’ as they called themselves, had settled into their first year of life as a community (“Retirement? For 11 Friends, It’s Off to Camp”). It was one of a number of such experiments, known as cohousing communities, that were springing up around the country at the time, based on a Danish model developed in the 1960s.

The original group of 11 included four married couples and three women, all in their 50s and 60s, each of whom agreed to pay a monthly fee for the mortgage, taxes and insurance on the 6,000-square-foot complex, as well as a small daily usage charge for utilities whenever they were in residence (food and phone bills were handled individually). Bedrooms and some bathrooms were private, but nearly everything else was shared, an arrangement that seemed feasible given the longstanding friendships of most of the members, who had started a cooperative nursery school for their children when they lived in Southern California in the 1960s. Still, there were three buildings in the complex (two that contained common areas and private apartments and one where residents could pursue their hobbies), because, as Ms. Hartman said in the 1994 article, ‘Everyone under one roof made people nervous.’

How did the experiment turn out? On the 20th anniversary, the consensus was generally positive.”