The Exploding Popularity of Cooperative Aging

The Boston Globe recently published an article in its magazine titled, “Introducing the retirement commune,” describing the various ways in which the Baby Boomer generation is reinventing senior housing by embracing more cooperative forms of living. Now some of you might be thinking: Great, an article about aging hippies. Not so fast! While this trend might be influenced to some degree by that generation’s experience with flower power in the 60’s, it is likely influenced even more by society’s current trend towards what is called “the sharing economy”. As proven by the popularity of such services as Craigslist, Zipcar, AirBnb, BitTorrent, and many others, the sharing economy is no longer the province of hippies. It is fully mainstream now (as it once was before hyperconsumerism), propelled by both economic necessity and quantum advances in mass communication, and it is beginning to make a difference in senior housing as well.

The article itself explores many forms of this new trend, including co-housing, informal house sharing, family arrangements, and village movements. What all these alternatives share in common is a rejection of the retirement status quo, in which people grow lonely in their isolated, outsized, single-family homes in the suburbs. As a group, the Baby Boomer generation is learning from the experience of their older parents, relatives, and friends, and inventing new ways (or reinventing the old, old ways) of aging together with a network of supportive peers. As the first senior cooperative lifestyle community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix Commons is proud to offer Bay Area seniors an opportunity to be pioneers in this rapidly growing movement.