Carmel Boss, a mommune veteran who said she coined the term “mommune” years before it entered the social media lexicon, started CoAbode, a house-sharing platform for single mothers, as a nonprofit after her divorce 20 years ago. At the time, she had just become a single mother to a 7-year-old son, and decided to invite another single mother in Los Angeles to live with her. She realized, however, that there was no easy resource for single mothers in seeking communal housing to find each other, and an idea was born.
At first, CoAbode was like a Craigslist for mothers, she said. But in 2016 she converted it into a for-profit business, and now estimates that 300,000 single mothers have created profiles for home-share matches on her site.
“We’re like an online village, except the women are meeting in person,” said Ms. Boss, 69.
Later this year, Commune, a residential housing developer based in France, will open a development for single-parent households in the Paris suburbs with space for 14 families. A second project will open at the end of the year in the north of France, with space for 28 families. Two-bedroom units with a kitchenette will start at 1,190 euros a month, said Tara Heuzé-Sarmini, Commune’s Paris-born co-founder. The company, said Ms. Heuzé-Sarmini, is filling a gap.
“I was not interested in creating co-living spaces for yuppies living in Berlin,” she said. “The elephant in the room was the demographics of single parents, whose needs are completely unaddressed by the market.”
The need is worldwide. Anna Dillon, a 42-year-old Irish mother living in Abu Dhabi, decided to create a mommune in 2021 with Emily Winchip, 40, an American. Both are education professors.
Ms. Dillon has been in the United Arab Emirates since 2013, but divorced her husband in 2019. In the first year of the pandemic, she said, the isolation was crushing, and caring for her two children — a daughter, 12, and a son, 13 — was challenging while juggling a social life and a full-time job.
Ms. Winchip, her colleague, was facing a similar struggle. She had lived in the Middle East for 13 years, but when the pandemic hit, she was newly separated and alone with her son, now 12.
“I told her I wished we all lived in a place where the kids could play together,” Ms. Winchip said.
In September 2021, they began renting a three-bedroom apartment in a gated community, splitting the rent evenly and taking turns cooking and watching each other’s kids. The arrangement isn’t forever — Ms. Winchip and Ms. Dillon both have new partners, and plan to eventually move out and start new lives with them — but after living through a pandemic in a foreign country together, they say their partnership has been essential.
“I wish we had done it about two years earlier,” Ms. Dillon said.
Back in Florida, Ms. Gilder and Ms. Batykefer also don’t plan on staying in that four-bedroom house in Jacksonville area forever. The duo hopes to buy and remodel a fixer-upper of their own in the coming year, and to allay costs, they’ve signed a deal with a television producer who believes the process of renovating their new mommune could make for entertaining reality television.
But whether or not those small-screen dreams come to fruition, Ms. Batykefer said the little community she’s built in her current house has helped her not just recover from heartbreak, but give her peace of mind. She said she is more present and focused as a mother.
“When I had to leave my husband, all I could think about was how I now had to figure out how to do everything on my own — buy a house on my own, pay my bills on my own, and raise my child on my own,” said Ms. Batykefer, whose divorce was finalized in February and now splits custody with her ex-husband. “I never thought about finding another single mother to live with and do it together. We just fell into it. But now, it’s like, why isn’t it more common for us to join forces?”
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