Sunday, November 23, 2025

The Purple House

When I wrote for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, I was living in a large Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. It was painted purple and we were a collective of six adults and one child, my niece Elizabeth.

Behind us on the next street over was a far more famous house occupied by British songwriter Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

The Purple House, as we called it, was the nicest place any of us had ever lived in or would live in for many years to come.

But none of us could have afforded the rent on our own, let alone even think about buying it. We were all freelancers of one stripe or another, trying to make it in the city of the Summer of Love.

What got us by month-to-month was pooling our scarce resources to collectively come up with the rent, utilities and groceries.

The Purple House came up in my memory as I pondered what that idealistic young socialist, Zohran Mamdani, can possibly do about the affordability crisis as mayor of New York City.

I know he has proposed building thousands of affordable, rent-controlled units but that will only get him so far. Incentivizing collective living arrangements might be one of those socialist ideas that could be worth a try.

The thing is that groups of people living together encounter all sorts of problems as they try to navigate the practical details of daily life. People fight over those details, and couples break up.

To persist in such arrangements, people have to learn to compromise and adapt. Back at the Purple House, we did that for a while until we no longer were able to. We all moved out and moved on.

So if that kind of experimental living arrangement is to have any chance at a revival, we as Americans are going to have to become much better at the very thing — politically at least — we seem to be worst at.

Compromising and getting along.

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