Affordable cooperative housing in Cambridgeport - includes food! (Shared Housing)

Looking for social, affordable housing near MIT? Consider living at pika, a continued experiment in cooperative living located just off campus in the Cambridgeport neighborhood! Campus is a quick 5-minute bike ride away, or a 20-minute walk down... beautiful tree-lined streets.

pika is an MIT-affiliated Independent Living Group (ILG) consisting of roughly 20-30 MIT undergraduate and graduate students who cook, clean, and maintain our historic 3-story house together. We are an intentional community, where we make all decisions by consensus, and every resident is expected to contribute to the house by helping to cook or clean once per week, and also by doing 1 hour of labor to improve the house. (Did I mention that your rent also includes FREE DINNER, EVERY SINGLE DAY? Yeah... it's pretty awesome!) We also have a 2 or 4 day "work weekend" once a semester, during which we tackle larger projects together. Recent work weekends have seen us tackling significant construction and maintenance projects. (Want to use power tools?!) Attendance at these work weekends or making up the equivalent labor is required of all residents.

In exchange for all this work, we get to enjoy some nice things! In addition to daily cooked dinners, the house is restocked once a week with fresh fruits and veggies, snacks, and even communal toiletries and laundry supplies - all of which are included in your rent. Most folks find they never need to go shopping, because everything they need is already stocked in the house!

Wondering about costs? Because we own our house outright and buy goods in bulk, we are able to keep costs very low. One very unique thing about pika is that we set our own rent! The rent for the fall 2026 semester will be decided by consensus during the semester work weekend, but initial projections show it should be around $4000-5000 for the semester (about $1000/mo). This includes all utilities, communal toiletries, breakfast and lunch foods, and of course, a prepared dinner every evening! (But this is not set in stone! All of us - including new residents - have equal say in setting the budget.)

If this sounds appealing to you, we're now taking rolling applications for fall 2026 move-ins! We currently have single, double, and triple rooms available (but a particular rooming arrangement is not guaranteed). Limited off-street parking is also available at no cost. Both MIT graduate and undergraduate students are welcome! We practice a "continuous rush" process, in which we will review new applications as they are received. Read More