Max Mandax

My friend Sam puts out a monthly zine, Free Rogers Park, about free events and liberation in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. I helped him put together a March issue about intentional community and did a little presentation on the topic at the “release salon” for the issue a few weeks ago. Here’s the article I contributed:

Intentional Community in Rogers Park

Intentional communities are groups of people who live together, sharing resources (like food, space, energy, ideas, books) and responsibilities (like cooking, cleaning, bills, childcare, and supporting each other). Intentional communities include coops, communes, and cohousing, and even within these categories the particulars of how communities work vary a lot from one to another. In almost all communities, though, members try to build closer relationships with each other and at least occasionally eat together.

In coops, residents generally have their own rooms but share common spaces like living rooms and kitchens and generally split some house expenses. Communes generally involved less personal space and more sharing of finances and possessions. In a cohousing community, each family or individual has their own finances and a private residence with their own kitchen while the community also shares common spaces.

Chicago is home to dozens of intentional communities. Though they are spread throughout the city, a number are in Rogers Park, and in the Edgewater neighborhood to the south and the city of Evanston to the north too. Most communities in Chicago are coops, since this arrangement works well in an urban setting, but there is also a forming cohousing community, and some communities that don’t choose any more specific language to describe themselves. Some communities own their houses or apartments while others rent from a landlord.

Though they don’t need to be, communities can be united by many different things, including common social values, a common political goal, or a common spiritual path. Chicago is home to a number of communities with various religious affiliations and at least a couple with anarchist sympathies.

I live on a small coop in the northeast corner of Roger’s Park. Since we moved to Chicago and started our community after graduating from a tiny college in Massachusetts called Simon’s Rock, we call the house Rockers Pack. We generally share similar socials values, and by chance all four of us our Jewish. Since three of us keep a pescetarian diet, that’s what we eat for house meals. I love having people around to talk to, I love sharing cooking and meals, and I love that splitting our rent lets us have a great apartment.

When we moved to Chicago, one of us was starting graduate school in the northern suburbs and another was planning to pursue a career in acting. While two of us have cars, two of us don’t. Because living together mean accommodating all of our needs, Rogers Park was a natural place to live, since we have street parking and public transit, access to the opportunities in the suburbs and in the city.

Two local groups meet regularly to discuss intentional community, both open to those who currently live in communities and those who don’t. The Chicago Intentional Communities group on meetup.com meets monthly (last Sundays) at Awake Cafe in Uptown. The Chicago Network of Intentional Communities (groups.google.com/group/chicagonic) meets every couple of months at various communities, sometimes at one in Roger’s Park.

Communities in Chicago are often seeking new members. Chicagocoop.net and the Chicago Network of Intentional Communities mailing list both include announcements of openings in community. Chicagocoop.net and directory.ic.org both also have listings of communities around Chicago, often with contact information. The listings at directory.ic.org and the websites linked to from the directories often have information about joining the communities.