On a quick search, I found this Forbes article and this article from Autism Housing Network. The Autism Housing Network appears to be a treasure trove of resources about this very interesting idea in general.
However, I’m honestly still a bit skeptical to the movement for autistic intentional communities as it stands. I found out about this movement earlier today, when I correctly figured while writing an essay that somebody else had probably already come up with that exact idea. However, while the extant communities are improving people’s lives, they don’t really seem like the sort of radically by-of-and-for-us type of neurodiverse communes that I was imagining while writing my essay. Rather, these extant communities feel like a sort of more status-quo-y liberal housing development with a neurodiverse flavor.
In my essay I had even written about all sorts of pipe dreams of cybernetics and e-democracy to connect different intentional communities together, but I guess that’s all it is: pipe dreams.
My instinctive response is that it’s a terrible idea. While having no expectation to mask is great, it seems to me that gathering a group of people who generally struggle to take care of themselves and their environment and who have very low tolerance for certain environmental stimuli and a deep need for other environmental stimuli is a recipe for chaos.
I attend a local autistic adults zoom group every other week, and it’s great for support and understanding, but if I had to be in the same room as one of the other members their stims would give me a meltdown. I over-empathise emotionally, an autistic friend has almost no emotional empathy, as a result some of our interactions do not go as intended. Multiply these kinds of issues with having to effectively live with eachother and I just don’t see it going well.
It seems like it goes more or less fine in practice, and I reckon this is probably because these communities end up being self-selecting to some extent. That the type of autistic person who thinks this sounds like a great idea would also be the type who’d have an easier time in this type of community, while the type who thinks this sounds like a terrible idea wouldn’t move to that type of community to begin with. And that even of the former group, that different intentional communities would end up dominated by different types of autistic people who tend to get along better. You wouldn’t just move in without any idea of who your neighbors are.
Speaking for myself, I’ve attended a monthly local autistic adults group in person, I’ve lived with my autistic brother for most of my life, in my time in public school I had special classes with other ND students and had a few ND friends, and I even spent a year at a dorm school that teaches independent living for ND folks. So for me the idea of living with other autistic people of a diverse variety seems pretty doable. There would obviously still be a number of problems that I’d need to solve with regard to interpersonal interactions or hypersensitivities, but that would still be the case if I lived in a predominantly NT community anyways.
I haven’t looked into it yet but it does seem interesting to research.
This isn’t something I would be too excited about, personally. Online groups intended to be for autistic people quickly get overrun by people who do not respect autistic persons’ individuality, do not respect that some people are profoundly disabled by autism, and frankly get very cliquey if not culty. I would assume this sort of thing would be worse in a living environment. They can’t just kick you out of a group for disagreeing, they can kick you out of your home. You cannot log off to escape the bullying and harassment so prevalent in online “autistic” communities.
I love other autistic people on an individual level. And in fact I’m quite certain many of the people who are causing the problems in these online communities are not in fact autistic. Autistic people can cause problems too, of course (anyone can), but I don’t believe the online autistic communities would have these specific problems if they were really compromised of at least a majority of autistic people. Or if there was a way to include severely and moderately-severe autistic people in our communities more. It feels like we’re leaving them behind in the ‘nothing about us without us’ realm and in our communities.
It’s 2am and I’m sleepy, sorry for the lack of coherence.
The idea of intentional communities for nd folk popped into my head a few days ago on occasion of visiting my very nd brother and kid. We understand each other’ quirks, but I don’t think we’d manage living together.
The intentional community I did live in as a rebellious youngster had probably a majority of nd folk and was often having conflicty situations, but non of us were diagnosed or aware. Maybe if we had been aware we could have done better? Anyway even with all its imperfections the place was life-saving for me - I was permitted to exist as myself, didn’t have to act normal.
wat?
There are a surprisingly large number of housing developments in the United States created to house primarily autistic, neurodiverse, or intellectually or developmentally disabled persons. An example would be Sweetwater Spectrum.
interesting.
I would love to find a cohousing project in my area. Have not found any good ones. Most of them seem like money making schemes. We had a group (not specifically ND) try to create a cohousing project locally. They went bankrupt and the developer bought out the property and made a profit selling regular homes. Most of the housing situations I’ve investigated geared to autistic people were very expensive. If there was a decent option in my area or anyone wanted to help put together a group to do this, I’d definitely want to get involved.
