attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour.

Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951)

478 intentional communities since the 1820s have now shrunk to 112 worldwide in the last 30 years)