> I can't wait to hit the phase of life with a partner and/or family living with me.
You're in a phase of life where you could live with others, although there's no guarantee of there actually being a good opportunity near by.
I spent a chunk of my 20s living in a student housing cooperative in Ann Arbor, MI, and for the most part it was a great experience. It was big enough, and enough of the population was grad students, that it was easy to be left alone when that's what you wanted. But it was also plenty easy to find someone up for a game of chess or whatnot at pretty much any time of day.
It was also inexpensive, I still had some space of my own, and while some work was owed to keep the house running it was in practice substantially less than I spend on my own apartment with typically better results.
As someone in the same area, I'm curious if you did this post-grad-school? I can't imagine the co-ops in e.g. Kerrytown are very welcoming of non-students, but I don't know.
Being a non-student, I needed approval from the house. Being student age and working on campus, it was easy to get - but it's sometimes granted to people for whom neither of those is the case.
I lived next door to the co-op at State and Catherine, and there were a few people who lived there who were in their late thirties and definitely not students. I don't know about _all_ of them, but some definitely don't care if you are a student or not.
Unless things have changed in ways that seem very unlikely, every ICC house "cares" in that non-students need house approval and students (generally?) don't. But houses will certainly vary in terms of how easy it is to get that approval. They will also vary along many, many other axes.
You're in a phase of life where you could live with others, although there's no guarantee of there actually being a good opportunity near by.
I spent a chunk of my 20s living in a student housing cooperative in Ann Arbor, MI, and for the most part it was a great experience. It was big enough, and enough of the population was grad students, that it was easy to be left alone when that's what you wanted. But it was also plenty easy to find someone up for a game of chess or whatnot at pretty much any time of day.
It was also inexpensive, I still had some space of my own, and while some work was owed to keep the house running it was in practice substantially less than I spend on my own apartment with typically better results.