Are we too selfish to live like hippies?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/08/hippies-communes-london

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How sad that London’s last communes are under threat. In what looks like yet another example of the prioritising of profit over affordable homes, the company (One Housing Group) that owns the buildings that house the last two 1970s-era communes said it wanted to “decant” the tenants into separate properties. It made them sound like goldfish being plopped into smaller bowls.

This marks the end of a way of life that for many years, in London and other European cities, constituted a real alternative to rising rents and property prices. You might think that the commune’s passing will be mourned only by a minority of crusty hippies, but my generation is not the first to have faced a lack of affordable housing. My parents went through all this before me, which is why I was born into a housing co-op.

The Islington house furnished from skips that was my first address is remembered by my mother as the backdrop to the happiest times of her life. The core membership was five adults (and then, in 1987, me) but people were always flitting through: art students from Berlin, Portuguese musicians, my mother’s sister, who was appalled at the conditions in a place described by my grandfather as “early Blitz”, my godmother Spike, miners during the strike. The house was owned by a housing association called Patchwork, who would peel off years’ worth of wallpaper (six layers, hanging off the walls) and patch up the damp plaster beneath. “Film directors pay thousands for a set like this,” my mum’s friend Gary said when she moved in. Though the conditions weren’t great, they paid £11 a week rent.

The house was eventually butchered and divided into flats, but such set-ups allowed many young people to pursue their dreams. Low rents (or if you were squatting, no rents) enabled people to work in the arts, to create music (I was sampled on a Madchester dance record, aged three) write literature and paint. Though communal living has its downsides – Linda Grant writes about the pretentious political dogma and macrobiotic obsessions of a hippy commune in her novel We Had It So Good, while what went on in RD Laing’s living experiments was altogether more disturbing – I’m convinced that witnessing how resources, material and intellectual, could be pooled at such a young age has shaped me as an adult. My memories are faded but what remains is a picture of a happy, lively household whose ethos was not so far removed from times when children were raised by communities, not individuals. It is perhaps for this reason that it was a defining moment in my childhood that features heavily in the fiction I am sluggishly working on.

Though deeply unfashionable now, communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members, who, crucially, were there by choice. Now, many people are crammed in reluctant flatshares, but their communal living seems far more atomised.

There are 11 million private renters in this country and tenants spend almost half their income on rent. So the criminalisation of squatting, the attitudes of buy-to-let landlords (typified by the Daily Mail’s offering last week of a buy-to-let property as a competition prize), the right to buy and the carving up of housing association stock constitute a national scandal.

Yet, while past generations no doubt have failed us in profound ways, people of my generation must also face up to our own millennial attitudes. Our political apathy, our materialistic obsession with property ownership, our disinclination to pursue alternative lifestyles all explain why communes and squats are in decline. Now, house sharing is viewed not as a positive choice but an indictment of our cramped cities.

Might there be a different way? I made a conscious decision some time ago not to let living in a shared rented flat affect crucial life choices. If I want to have a baby, for instance, I will go ahead and have one. Yet, walking through Park Crescent the other day, past impossibly grand houses with their dark interiors that, like so many London buildings, are unoccupied, I felt an incredible sadness. It is the disappointment at the abandonment of an experiment. What a waste. Imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar, a few sacks of lentils and a place like that.