Commoning for Affordable and Sustainable Housing: Ecological Intentional Communities as Resistance to Market-Based Housing

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Housing Processes

Abstract

The United States faces a multi-faceted housing crisis characterized by increasing unaffordability, widespread social isolation, and ecologically unsustainable residential development. These problems are often treated as distinct, yet they share a common structural root: a housing system organized around private property, speculative markets, and individualized consumption. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork and 73 in-depth interviews, we examine three ecological intentional communities (EICs) in the United States that represent varying degrees of decommodification: an income-sharing commune, a housing cooperative, and a cohousing community.
Using a comparative framework, we analyze how these communities attempt to produce affordability, social connection, and ecological sustainability through commoning, defined as the collective stewardship of land, labor, and resources. We show that while commoning practices can generate meaningful social and ecological benefits across institutional forms, the degree of decommodification strongly shapes who gains access to housing and how durable these benefits are. Even within communalized systems, class inequalities persist due to ongoing exposure to capitalist property regimes and wage labor. By foregrounding property relations, this article argues that housing affordability, social isolation, and ecological harm are interlinked outcomes of privatization, and that addressing the housing crisis requires rethinking housing as a collective good rather than a speculative asset.

Authors

• Monica Bhatia, Washington State University

• Safiya Hafiz, Washington State University