14 Roommates?!

Sustainable living. Dig it:

What the [Co-op Genereux] members forsake in space and privacy they reclaim in financial reward. The average monthly cost of living at the Genereux Co-op is $320. This includes rent, bills, three telephone lines, high speed wireless Internet, and three square meals a day, five days a week. Monetary gain is not the only advantage to having fourteen roommates. Both Marc and Spencer spoke of the experience they have gained in group facilitation and agenda setting, not to mention such other worthwhile skills as cooking mass amounts of food, making homemade soy milk, building walls and doing renovations, drying herbs, and the plethora of skills and abilities inherent in a group of fifteen. “It is interesting in terms of resource use,” Marc explains, “In North America people don’t tend to share things. Here we share everything from books and music to space and food. It teaches one to be conscious of the space one occupies in terms of both things and behavior.” Beyond being an interesting experiment for the young and daring, the Co-op Genereux is a model of an alternate lifestyle possibility. “There is a narrow range of lifestyles that is perceived as fulfilling, happy, healthy, and feasible in North America. We want to explore possibilities and provide options by putting different ideas into the world,” explains Spencer, “This type of lifestyle acknowledges the impacts of choices we make in our lives about everything from food, to money, to decision making, to socializing. It is freeing to acknowledge and understand the destruction of communities and ecosystems and to then be empowered to make changes.”