Intentional Communities and Fair Housing Laws

I've come across a conflict of legal rights and responsibilities that I'm not entirely sure how to resolve. This doesn't have much of a direct effect on me at the moment, but it will in the foreseeable future. Therefore, I'm curious to hear your thoughts and feelings on the matter.

As you may know, I have a strong and ongoing interest in intentional communities. Intentional communities are groups of people who share some important aspect of their lives in common, such as their faith, their ethics, their politics, their diet, their ecological perspective, and so on. Because of this common bond, they choose to share their lives in some organized and ongoing manner -- a community center, cooperative housing, community agriculture, and so on.

On the one hand, intentional communities are a form of free association. If consenting adults choose to share important aspects of their private, social, and economic lives with people who they share some bond of belief or identity with, why should society interfere?

On the other hand, intentional communities may be seen by some as a form of discrimination, especially when they involve sharing of major economic resources such as housing and land. If you and your friends own property, and you're looking for someone to live in your housing or work on your land, is it fair of you to say that they must be of a certain identity or belief group in order to accept this opportunity?

This may sound to some like an abstract debate about ethics, politics, and economics. However, it's a real issue that has come up for the Fellowship for Intentional Communities.

As someone interested in intentional communities, I have an account with the FIC and receive occasional emails from them. Recently, I received an email which explained that someone (the government?) had pointed out the above tension to the FIC, and that they had decided to eliminate any "discriminatory" listings from their online and print Communities Directory.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this decision.

On the one hand, I'm very upset that the federal government may be interfering with our right to free association. Why should the government be allowed to say that groups of like-minded individuals can't choose to live together, and to seek out others who share their beliefs?

On the other hand, what if people have a hard time finding a place to live in their area because of their religion, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their gender, and so on? To my knowledge, most areas aren't so full of intentional communities that they would crowd out anyone looking for independent housing. But historically speaking, minorities of all types -- racial/ethnic, economic, gender, sexuality, etc -- have often had a hard time finding housing because people who own the property will either overtly or covertly discriminate against them.

So, I'm not sure just yet how to respond to this conflict of interest. Should we as a society accept it when consenting adults make agreements and arrangements to live and work together with people of their own faith, belief, orientation, identity, etc? Or should we declare such arrangements to be forms of discrimination and take actions to discourage and/or disband their existence?

We need to consider this issue very carefully before taking action. It seems to me that there is some unknown delicate balancing point in the middle, with a slippery slope into the darkness on either side.

If we go too far in the direction of restricting "discriminatory" arrangements, then group living situations such as monasteries, convents, and women-only housing may become illegal. If we go too far in the direction of allowing such arrangements, then there may be towns or cities where all of the housing has been bought up by intentional communities which only allow people of one color and/or creed, while everyone else has to scramble for low-quality housing or some scenic spot beneath a highway underpass.

Both of these are extremes, of course. But they illustrate the sorts of scenarios that people on either side of this debate have in their head when they argue for or against regulating intentional communities in the same manner that other housing is regulated.

One thing I'm very sure about is that I'm not comfortable with the federal government being the ones to resolve this conflict. I don't believe in letting a centralized authority run our society, and I certainly don't trust the United States federal government any farther than I can throw it. Yes, they are a mixed bag, and they have at times exerted their power toward good ends. But at a certain point, once your organization has willfully organized the deaths of millions of people at home and abroad, it's time to scrap the whole thing and start over.

So, what do you think? In order to ensure that all comments show up in the same place, I encourage people to comment on my website ( http://treesong.org/ ) rather than on Facebook, MySpace, etc. If you'd rather comment in one of those places, that's fine -- just know that other people may miss out on your comments, and vice versa.