[analyst74]

While making life-long friends growing up is great, there are many problems and inconveniences caused by sharing your living space with other people.

Hence nowadays when people have a choice, most choose to live in their own apartment as opposed to share with others.

[tdaltonc]

Certainly that is part of it, but I think a bigger part of it is that finding a group of people you'd like to live with a space that enables communal living is really hard. Therefore developers build for the plug-and-play self contained dwelling.

Stated another way, the prevalence of independent living is more a consequence of high "coincidence of wants" costs and not of preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_of_wants

[mikeash]

Typically the choice is to either have your own space entirely, or share everything but the bedrooms. There's approximately nothing available like what's described above, with a shared courtyard and separate adjoining houses. How can we meaningfully be said to have a choice when they don't exist?