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Simple Living Provides An Economic Shelter

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The Associated Press

Published: August 5, 2008

CHICAGO - Keri Rainsberger isn't rich. She works in the nonprofit world for a relatively low-profit salary. Yet, as many Americans are scrimping for every penny, she hardly feels the pinch.

She still tithes 10 percent of her income to her church, even as other members have cut back. She rarely worries about rising gas and food prices. And she never bothers to balance her checkbook because she doesn't come close to spending what she has.

"I live so far below my means that it doesn't really register," says Rainsberger, 31, a Chicagoan with an unusually sunny outlook. "I don't have to think about money."

How is this possible?

For starters, she has no car and commutes by bicycle each workday. She has no mortgage payment and chooses to live in an "intentional community," a partly shared space where $775 a month covers everything from utilities to meals.

"In one fell swoop, I pay for the roof over my head, the food in my stomach and the lights to read by. That's a big advantage," says Rainsberger, whose high-rise living space is part of the residential program at the Keystone Ecological Urban Center in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.

Her private quarters - larger and a bit more expensive than some - are about 400 square feet, divided into a sitting room, a craft room and a small bedroom. She shares bathrooms, showers, a kitchen and a large dining room with 28 other residents whose ranks include young professionals, professors and retirees.

"It's like a college dormitory, but with better conversation," she jokes.

More People Pool Resources
The concept of sharing resources has been around since the beginning of time and is used today from the Amish farm to the Israeli kibbutz. For low-income families, it's often simply a matter of survival.

But those who track consumer habits say a growing need to cut costs, along with a wish to be more environmentally and spiritually conscious, is causing more people to pool their resources, whether defined as an intentional community or not.

"The economy starts to tank. People get tired of it," says Daniel Howard, a consumer research and behavior expert at Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. "It's people saying, 'Let's get together and help one another.' And it works."

Few may have the desire or the ability to live the Spartan lifestyle that Rainsberger learned from her Depression-era grandmother. For instance, not everyone is willing to bicycle in the stifling mugginess of a Chicago summer or the cold, blustery winds sweeping off Lake Michigan in winter.

But those who advocate a simpler, less consumer-driven life say there are lessons in the strategies she and other intentional communities use.

By buying their food in bulk, Rainsberger and her neighbors spend $100 to $150 per person each month for meals. (Consider the U.S. Department of Agriculture "thrifty plan" for a single person is $200 a month.)

Some residents who own cars share them, drastically cutting vehicle expenses.

Although this intentional community has no children, similar communities trade child care or keep costs low enough so more parents can stay home or work part time.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community, a Missouri-based nonprofit that began a steadily growing directory of such communities in 1990, estimates that at least 100,000 Americans live in one. They define them as groups of people living together who share common values that are religious, economic, environmental, social or any combination of those. Sometimes they own property; others rent. About a third live in urban areas, while the remainder are rural.

Communities Weather Hard Times

Fellowship executive secretary Laird Schaub says he has no proof the growth in numbers they have seen is tied to the economy. But he has little doubt intentional communities are better equipped to weather hard times.

"We're pretty isolated from the ups and downs of the regular economy," says Schaub, who has lived at the Sandhill Farm intentional community in Rutledge, Mo., for 34 years. The farm's 10 residents grow most of their food and sell organic produce. Some have other jobs and all share incomes with the group, as do about 13 percent of the intentional communities in the Fellowship's directory.

"You don't have to chase as many dollars to have a quality of life," Schaub says.

That is freeing in other ways, says Duane Elgin, an environmental activist in California.

"It isn't just cutting back on things. It's about people not needing so many things and putting more attention into their personal interests and their family and friends, being creative, being of service," says Elgin, author of "Voluntary Simplicity." "As a result, they are richer individuals."

Lela Philbrook, 23, a singer living in Rainsberger's community, found that to be true. She saves so much money living there that she's able to pay for voice lessons, which cost more each month than her room and board.

"That's huge," says Philbrook, who lives down the hall from her grandmother, a longtime community member whose room is a gathering place because she has an air conditioner and wireless Internet access. Residents congregate to play games or do puzzles.

Rainsberger, whose closest family is in Ohio, savors the camaraderie.

"For me, to be able to walk out my door and have everybody in the hall know me, that's a really great experience," she says. "And if anything happens to me, I know there's somebody next door who'll take care of me."

There are times she has had her fill of the difficulties that arise with any group. "Then," she says, laughing, "you go to your room, shut the door and don't come out."

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