Published May 7, 2020, in No. 11
The coronavirus crisis has impacted us all in unprecedented ways. We’ve all had to balance the conflicting advice of different experts, organizations and governments, and, where our institutions have failed, have had to take our health and protection into our own hands. In addition to these political and medical aspects of the current crisis, there is the social and spatial dimension of being confined to our homes in this time of lockdowns and social distancing. Under these conditions one’s home and household becomes even more central to day-to-day existence than it perhaps ever was before. Where one lives and who one lives with can drastically shape one’s safety, sanity and overall wellbeing in profound ways. There has already been some analysis of the way that social class affects the comfort of sheltering-in-place, as the super-rich have fled on private jets to luxury bunkers on faraway islands; the moderately wealthy enjoy “white-collar quarantine” in vacation homes; the professional class work from home, continue to enjoy income, and survive off of their Amazon accounts (I admit this is totally me right now); and much of the working class continues to work precarious jobs out in public, where they’re exposed to disproportionate amounts of risk.
I’d like to offer some insight into a different aspect of the way that home conditions and household composition are affecting pandemic life, by reporting on how the present situation is affecting those living communally—specifically in the network of communes in San Francisco that I used to live in and helped to organize. For context, there are more than 300 communal households in and around San Francisco, each with between eight and thirty residents, living in apartments, houses and converted commercial buildings, and these intentional communities have served as a new template for home and kinship for a growing minority of urban dwellers who have rejected and/or been financially excluded from more typical typologies of housing and their corresponding social organization of household-based kinship and support. Unlike traditional roommate arrangements, the communes operate as both households and institutions, with formal governance procedures, clear protocol for sharing resources and allocating domestic labor, and each has a unique culture that its members cultivate with varying degrees of self-consciousness. San Francisco has proven uniquely adapted for communal living because the city has a plethora of large houses that are too large for most traditional households—in an expensive city whose cost of living discourages the hoarding of space. Since 2012, many of these communities have become increasingly interconnected into a federated network held together by dense social ties and a series of shared projects and visions fort the future. At the local level, in the central neighborhoods of San Francisco, the communes have organized into a group called “Haight Street Commons,” composed of roughly 40 different communal households. Together, the members of Haight Street Commons pool resources and skills in a kind of “parallel economy;” leverage surplus time, money and space to support transformative structural changes; help get new communities get off the ground; and have increasingly organized themselves as a political bloc that advocates for progressive shifts in the city’s governance.
For our federated network of communes, the main strain of the coronavirus crisis came early on. As was the case for the rest of the world, the crisis came in waves, as did the reality of what was going on. The realization of what was happening—or about to happen—hit some sooner than others. Well before the government (local, state or, dead last, federal) took the pandemic seriously, a number of mathematically-inclined members of our wider community sounded the alarm. “In case you were wondering when it’s time to start paying attention to this coronavirus thing and how it could affect you, that time is now,” one prominent and well-respected member of our community announced on February 24. “Over the last few days evidence has mounted that containment of SARS-CoV-2 (the “Coronavirus”) has likely failed.” Over the next few days, members of our communes began planning how to cope with the impact of a global pandemic.
It would not be for another three weeks (Tuesday, March 17) that the city and country of San Francisco would impose a mandatory shelter-in-place order. During those three weeks, there was a lot of dissensus about the extent to which the impending public health crisis should be impacting our day-to-day lives. For those living in large communes with many housemates, the risk of collective infection was extremely high. Each housemate represented a potential vector for the virus to enter the community, and this was exacerbated by the fact that so many of those living in San Francisco—including members of many of the communes—are members of the highly mobile, cosmopolitan professional/managerial class. For those who had gone through the difficult process of breaking from the psychological status quo of ignoring the mounting warning signs (not just about the coronavirus, I might add)—moving from fear to learning to growth to action—the situation suddenly appeared to be far too urgent to wait for others to catch up. Unlike other kinds of crisis, our social dynamism, high density and large households have meant a higher risk of exposure. And, at least in this early phase of the crisis, inner cities have tended to be the first to be hit hard, which has increased the risk to our urban communities. Because our “do-ocratic” structures—informed as they are by a semi-libertarian version of collectivity—do not require perfect alignment or consensus, there were no mechanisms through which better-informed commune members could compel others to take the situation seriously enough to alter their day-to-day behaviors. What’s uniquely challenging about a pandemic situation, we’ve discovered, is that your whole community is only as safe from infection as your least careful/protected member. Without a shared perspective or prognosis of the situation, we had some members of one of our communes setting up entry criteria and sanitation protocol to protect our most vulnerable members, while others embarked on a trip to Sudan for a posh hippie wedding. Under these circumstances, the lockdown came as welcome support.
While our communes have certainly been blindsided by the pandemic, we’ve managed to prepare ourselves to be useful to the wider community should the need arise—a process that, like awareness of the crisis, has been unevenly distributed, perhaps in unexpected ways. With the imposition of shelter-in-place orders, we saw the rapid vacancy of rooms occupied by the more financially privileged and mobile members of many communal houses. Able to work remotely, unwilling to be stuck inside, and perhaps fearing what kind of state cities could spiral into, many of those with the means to do so fled to “Covid Airbnbs,” friends’ and families’ vacation homes, and other out-of-town escapes to ride out the crisis. With the indefinite timeline of the crisis, it’s uncertain how this will impact the ability of communal houses to meet their financial obligations moving forward. Meanwhile, our more vulnerable community members—many lacking money, mobility, alternative places to escape to, parole conditions, and/or jobs that would allow them to leave the city indefinitely—stayed behind and did much of the work of building a new kind of communal resilience and forms of mutual aid. For those who rely, in non-trivial and everyday ways, upon social and material mutual aid networks—that is: for those of our community members for whom communal living is more than just a lifestyle choice—these networks became more valuable than ever. Even prior to the city government’s imposed lockdown, those who understood the seriousness of the impending crisis organized housemate swaps and sterilization protocols, dedicated spaces for at-risk and otherwise vulnerable community members, and set up spaces for those who were or would be self-isolating and/or recovering. Depending on how the crisis plays out in the Bay Area, we may yet see a consolidation of residents and the offering of rooms in specific communes to medical workers who cannot safely go to their permanent residences, or the furnishing of surplus spaces for provisional hospital beds.
This is because we have seen crises before. We’ve been planning for another inevitable recession, political dissensus and strife, earthquakes and electrical fires. In December 2016, when the Ghost Ship fire ravaged a communal warehouse in Oakland, killing 36 people, the communes of the Bay Area leapt into action, organizing emergency plans, extending shelter to the people displaced by the blaze, writing safety guides and conducting “below-board” safety inspections that assessed for hazards rather than code violations (an important service in a region where formal, legitimate housing is far beyond attainable for most people). In all of these cases, our communes offered a resilience that private life couldn’t: by pooling knowledge, skills, financial resources and care, we have been able to weather all kinds of storms. The same is likely to be true of the current crisis, but only time will tell.
While domestic violence spikes in the claustrophobic nuclear family households of America, the communes have fared quite well, socially. With lockdowns in place, many communes have become socially-resilient spaces, full of friends and loved ones, lots of rooms and nooks and common space. They are high-density, but they still offer more overall space for flexibility, fresh settings, and social dynamics. There have been reports of difficult choices made about who to form “pods” (groups that agree to only have social contact with each other—a new version of social “fluid bonding”) with, especially since so many of those living communally are in polyamorous relationships with people who live in other houses. But digital socializing and collaboration has allowed many of the rich dynamics of our federated houses to continue—even in enhanced and expanded ways. Most currently, a large subset of our community has been planning for how to prevent a slip back into the same stratified, neoliberal apathetic powerlessness of ignoring of warning signs and seeking unsustainable comforts from the fact. There have been bi-weekly “support circles” for those who are looking for emotional support and growth during this difficult time, and all manner of financial solidarity schemes to extend mutual aid funding to artists and service industry workers who have been forced out of work by this crisis. Finally, there is a high likelihood that another crisis looms on the back of the current one. The pandemic will probably leave unprecedented economic damage in its wake, in an economy that was already over-leveraged and precarious. I’ll end with this: unlike the pandemic, for which we were under-prepared, we’ve been building for the crisis of capitalism—even as class continues to stratify our communities.
Eric Rogers, currently a PhD student in American history at Cambridge, is a scholar, organizer, designer and artist. Eric is a member of the Embassy Network, and earlier wrote a dissertation that looked at the significance of communal living in the twenty-first century.