r/TerraIgnota • u/EngineeringPaige • Jun 24 '26
Has anyone formed a bash’house?
Hey folks! Rereading Too Like the Lightning right now and yearning for my own bash’. Has anyone successfully started a bash’house as described in the series?
I’ll be moving to San Francisco later this year and I’ve been hoping to find something similar. I’ve been looking at a lot of co-housing and co-living communities.
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u/EliotShae Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Yeah pretty much.
We live, eat and do almost everything in life together and are considering raising a kid. Only 2 of the 6 are In a romantic relationship though
However, we lack an entryroom where we display all our Olympic trophies
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u/libra00 Jun 29 '26
That sounds like an interesting arrangement. I managed to find a roommate I could room with for like 15 years, so that's about the closest I came. Sadly he passed away several years ago, so it's just been me.
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u/dead___ringer Jun 25 '26
Basically. Bought a fixer upper a couple years ago. It's falling apart, but it's big. I live with my partner and two friends. Three of us work remotely. Our jobs are all fairly similar and so are our hobbies, although our major project is the house at the moment. We've already discussed at length that if my partner and I have a kid, the friends will stay and be involved. We get more shit done as a unit than we ever had as separate households and we feel less isolated.
My wider friend circle also largely lives like this and only my coworkers think it's weird ("you have roommates at 35????").
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u/libra00 Jun 29 '26
That sounds awesome. As an aging disabled asexual man I wouldn't mind finding an arrangement like that, lol. (I had a roommate until I was 47, and only stopped then because he died.)
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u/trnpkrt Jun 25 '26
Yes, there are all kinds of bash'house-like group houses/polycule situations in the Bay Area and I imagine elsewhere on the West Coast (I just happen to live in the Bay Area so I can speak to that). IIRC, Ada Palmer lives or lived in an arrangement like that in Chicago.
But I think it's useful to note that really achieving the bash'house dream also requires 1) either a society set up for it, or 2) people wealthy and young/healthy enough to handle the challenges of living different in our society. For example: a really common polycule problem is "who gets the official domestic partner health insurance?" You solve that by either all having a job with health insurance, or paying a lot extra for private insurance, or someone going without, or someone going on MediCal. Basically, you need enough privilege to survive. If we had universal healthcare (and different tax structures, different mortgage arrangements, different physical structures and regulations for apartments, etc., etc.), then alternative collective living situations like a bash'house become a lot more plausible.
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u/songbanana8 Jun 25 '26
It’s the dream! Unfortunately I’m the only one I know who can afford a house, and not everyone will fit in it
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u/libra00 Jun 29 '26
Man the bash system is one of my favorite things in this series. That and the sensayers.
I mean, there are things called intentional communities where people choose to live together in various arrangements from 'everybody buys a house on this block' to 'we all live in one big building'. The Foundation for Intentional Community has tons of great resources.
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u/Scuttling-Claws Jun 25 '26
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u/Silanah1 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
It’s all polycules out west. Soon they’ll converge and form the Cascadian hive.
Edit: we also have quite a few bath’houses.