Why communities end

The ninety per cent

You will meet the claim that ninety per cent of intentional communities fail. It is repeated in newspaper articles, in books, by people who have lived in communities for decades, and — we should say plainly — in a great many pages competing with this one.

We went looking for its source. Here is what we found.

The nearest thing to a foundation is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Commitment and Community (Harvard University Press, 1972), a genuinely serious piece of sociology that surveyed 91 communal projects founded in America between 1780 and 1860. Kanter needed an operational definition of success, and chose one: a community counted as successful if it lasted at least 25 years. On that measure only a handful qualified — the Shakers, Amana, Oneida and a few others.

Look at what has to happen for that to become “ninety per cent of intentional communities fail”:

• A study of nineteenth-century American communes becomes a claim about communities today.
• A study of a specific historical window, 1780 to 1860, becomes a claim about a permanent rate.
• Lasting fewer than 25 years becomes failing, which would make most businesses, most marriages and nearly every voluntary organisation a failure.
• And a sample of 91 self-selected historical cases becomes a rate for a category that had not been invented yet.

Deborah Altus, who works in this field’s own scholarship, asks the question that the arithmetic invites: should longevity alone be the measure of success, and should short-lived communities be regarded as failures?

The other ninety per cent

There is a second source, and it is the one most people are actually half-remembering. It is also about something different.

Diana Leafe Christian’s Creating a Life Together (2003) — the standard practical reference on forming communities, written by the then editor of Communities magazine — opens with this: most aspiring ecovillages and community groups, “probably 90 percent”, never get off the ground. Their envisioned communities never get built. They cannot find the right land, or they run out of money, or they get mired in conflict before there is anything to be in conflict about.

Read that carefully, because it is not the claim it gets turned into.

Christian is describing groups trying to start a community, not communities that exist. A forming group that never buys land and never builds anything did not fail as a community; it never became one. Her figure says nothing about the odds facing a community you could go and visit next week — which is what “ninety per cent of intentional communities fail” is always taken to mean.

She is also careful about it in a way that the people quoting her are not. The number is hedged — probably — and it comes from her own experience: editing the magazine, visiting dozens of communities, and interviewing scores of founders. It is a practitioner’s estimate, offered as one, rather than a count of anything.

The genuinely useful part of Christian’s argument is not the number at all. It is what she does with it. Having looked at the groups that made it and the groups that did not, she concluded that the successful tenth had all done the same five or six things right, and the unsuccessful nine-tenths had made the same handful of mistakes.

That is a claim about pattern rather than rate, from somebody who looked at a great many cases. It is also, more or less, the rest of this lesson.

The six patterns

The rate is unknown. The pattern is not — it recurs across the case literature, the practitioner writing and the accounts of people who were there, and it is consistent enough to be worth checking a real community against.

1. A vision that was never written. Everyone agreed at the start, so nobody wrote it down. Four years later the group discovers it never agreed about whether this is a housing project with shared meals or a life’s work, and both parties can point at the same warm memories.

2. No agreed decision method. Covered in lesson 4 and worth repeating here, because it is where a founding group most often mistakes goodwill for a system. Without a stated method, the first genuinely contested decision has no legitimate way to close.

3. Money without agreements. Not a lack of money — a lack of terms. Who owes what, what happens when someone cannot pay, what a member’s stake is worth on the way out. Communities that skip this are usually being kind: writing it down felt like distrust among friends. It becomes distrust among friends later, with interest.

4. Founder authority that never converted. The founders carried the project and were right to. What kills communities is when that informal authority is never turned into something anyone can hold, limit or inherit — so the group cannot disagree with them, and cannot continue without them. See lesson 9 on why declaring that there is no hierarchy makes this worse rather than better.

5. Conflict with no process. Not conflict. Conflict without a route. The dispute has nowhere to go, so it goes everywhere: into the meetings, the meals, the rota, and eventually into who is still speaking to whom.

6. Drift. The slow one, and the most common. Nothing breaks. The agreements stop being read, then stop being taught to new members, then describe a place that no longer exists. Shared meals thin out from three a week to one to occasionally. Nobody decided any of this. One day the community is a pleasant street where people are polite to each other, and everyone is vaguely sad without being able to say what was lost.

Drift deserves its own note because it is the only one on this list that does not feel like anything while it is happening. The others announce themselves. Drift is what a community gets for being reasonable and busy.

Spot the early warning

Five things you might notice on a visit. Which ones would genuinely worry you? Some of these sound much worse than they are, and one sounds like nothing at all.

1. Twelve years in, the founders still make most of the significant decisions. Nothing about their role is written down — it is simply how things happen.

Serious — I would want this resolved before joining correct answer Right. This is founder authority that never converted into anything anyone can hold. It is not that the founders are doing wrong; it is that their power cannot be delegated, limited, questioned or inherited, so the community has no way to continue without them and no way to disagree with them. Worth watching, but not disqualifying Twelve years is long past the point where this is a phase. Early on, founders deciding things is simply how a project gets built; a decade later, an unwritten authority is the structure, and the community has quietly chosen not to have a governance system. Normal — someone has to lead Leadership is not the issue. Unaccountable leadership is: nobody voted for it, nobody can end it, and the founders themselves usually cannot put it down even when they want to.

2. There was a serious conflict here last year. It went on for months and in the end two households left.

Not a warning sign in itself correct answer Right, and this is the one people misread most. A community that has had a real conflict and survived it has information about itself that a placid one does not. The follow-up question is the whole thing: what changed afterwards? An answer names a rule, a process or a role. No answer means it was endured rather than resolved. Serious — two households is a lot Departures are the visible part and the least informative. Communities that never lose anybody are usually either very young or very good at making people quietly stop speaking up. Worth watching Reasonable caution, but it points at the wrong thing. Watch what the community did after, not the fact that it happened.

3. You ask to read the agreements. Everyone is friendly about it, and after twenty minutes nobody can find a current copy.

Serious — this is the most dangerous item here correct answer Right, and it is the quiet one. Agreements nobody can find are agreements nobody has consulted, which means the community is running on memory and habit. Every dispute now becomes an argument about what was decided, settled by whoever has been there longest — which is founder authority arriving by the back door. Untidy, but a filing problem That is exactly how it presents, which is why it survives for years. The test is not whether the document is tidy but whether anyone has read it recently; a text nobody consults has stopped governing anything. Fine — the culture is what matters Culture is what happens when everyone agrees. Agreements are what you need when they do not, and the moment you need them is exactly the moment nobody can find them.

4. Meetings routinely run to three hours. Several people mention, without much rancour, that they are exhausting.

Worth watching — a fixable problem correct answer Right. This is usually a method problem rather than a power problem: too much brought to the whole group, no delegated domains, weak facilitation. It is genuinely fixable, and communities fix it all the time. It becomes serious only if you find they have known for years and nothing has changed. Serious — this will burn people out It does burn people out, and it is still the most tractable item on this page. Long meetings have known remedies — circles with real authority, a consent threshold, a rotating facilitator — and a community open enough to admit its meetings are exhausting is usually open enough to try them. Normal — self-governance takes time Partly true, and it is also how a community ends up with a governing class of whoever can still concentrate at eleven at night. Length is not a virtue.

5. One member covers a large share of the running costs. Asked what would happen if they left, people laugh and say they never would.

Serious — the community has a single point of failure correct answer Right, and there are two problems, not one. The financial exposure is obvious. The subtler one is that a member the community cannot afford to lose has power nobody granted them and nobody can name — which distorts every decision they have an opinion about, whether or not they ever use it. Worth watching The laughter is the finding. A community that has thought about this has an answer — a reserve, a plan, a cap on any one member’s share — and one that has not is relying on a person rather than a structure. Fine — generosity is a good thing It usually is generous, and generously meant. It is still a dependency, and dependencies that nobody will discuss are the ones that end projects.

Endings that are not failures

Treating every ending as a failure is both unkind and analytically useless, and it is the habit that makes the ninety per cent figure feel plausible.

Completion. Some communities are formed to do something — house a group through a stage of life, hold land until a trust could take it, support a project. Finishing is not failing.

Deliberate dissolution. A group decides, while it still can, that this is not working, sells up, pays everyone out under the terms it agreed, and goes. Executed well, that is a governance success, and it is far better than the alternative of a slow attritional decline in which the last three members are left holding a building and each other’s resentment.

Transformation. A commune becomes a housing co-operative; an ecovillage becomes an ordinary village that happens to have a common house. The original thing ended. Something continued.

People leaving. A household leaving is an event, not a verdict. Twelve years is a long time to live anywhere.

The endings genuinely worth avoiding are the ones where nobody chose — where the money ran out, or the founders left and nothing had been transferred, or one conflict was allowed to run until the place emptied. What those have in common is not bad luck. It is that a decision was available earlier and nobody made it.

What to ask on a visit

Sources & further reading

1. 1 Kanter, R. M. — Commitment and Community (Harvard University Press, 1972) — 91 communal projects founded 1780–1860, and the 25-year success threshold everything traces back to
2. 2 Christian, D. L. — Creating a Life Together (New Society Publishers, 2003) — the "probably 90 percent" of forming groups that never build, and the five or six things the rest got right
3. 3 Altus, D. — The Value of Community: What Defines Success? — a Communal Studies scholar questioning longevity as the measure; the 90% figure appears in the comments. Archived — the Foundation for Intentional Community has since removed the original.
4. 4 Ostrom, E. — Governing the Commons (1990) — the eight design principles, and what they imply about durability
5. 5 RCOS Core — Layer 6: Evolution & Adaptation — versioning and the learning log — the layer aimed squarely at drift
6. 6 Communal Studies Association — the academic literature on communal societies, historical and contemporary
7. 7 How this is written — why we mark what we could not verify rather than dropping it

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written