Short Answer: probably not! Mostly because money and credit scores.

Long Answer: it depends on a lot of variables. For one thing, many places actually close to amenities (groceries, schools, etc) have rules about how many people can live in a given defined property. In fact my city just passed a law upping this number to allow for denser urban housing construction. So either you’re limited in your group size—thus limiting the funds you can bring to the project—or you are forced to search much farther out for a property to purchase. This means either dealing with greatly reduced amenities, or not being able to go after those properties at all, because…

I am assuming for the sake of this argument that we are discussing the people who ‘cannot build nests’; the homeless and very poor. This will mean all of them will most likely have no or few working vehicles, and a distant property will absolutely require reliable working vehicles to access.

They will also most likely have poor credit scores, and so unless they bring in a cash offer for the whole shebang, the people who own the property they want to buy will refuse to deal with them, as they will most likely find it difficult if not impossible to secure a loan.

And that brings us to cost. Closer in town, prices are high; you’ll be dropping minimum $500,000 in my area and more likely closer to $1mil+ if you want to buy a decent-sized (i.e. everyone can have at least a little space to themselves) property. Out further, the prices drop per square foot, yes, but in addition to the ‘reduced or no amenities’ part of things, the lots are bigger, and so still pricy overall (I know of one 20-acre near my grandparents’ farm that went for $800,000, which was a steal, and then there was another 80-acre plot nearby for $1mil). That’s a lot of money for even 5-10 normal people to put down; for people with no income or barely any it’s close to an impossible amount. If we up it to 20 or 30 people and find a property in the middle of nowhere, maybe?

Communes are generally started by either a group of like-minded people with money to pool, or by a charismatic scam artist who has collected the entire life savings of, again, people with money.

I have a lot of experience with this as an aunt of mine’s hobby seems to be joining the second type, and one of my friend’s grandmothers helped finance one of the first type. She got together with a bunch of her friends and fellow church-members to create a place with more stable and affordable housing for their less-affluent members.

So the final answer is this does, in fact, happen; it just happens in the classes with more money and capital to leverage.