It's so strange that - at least in North America - the style of living in which you have your own room but only a partial kitchen, but the building has a large communal eating area in which a paid professional makes food at scale on a fixed schedule every day (with a few options, but nothing made to order) is only available to a) college students, b) prisoners, and c) people in long-term care homes.
Not everyone would want to live like that, of course, but I'll bet you that a lot of people would. It's a great living situation for single people, young people just starting out, and people who are in a city on a temporary basis. Cooking at scale is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than each individual cooking or getting takeout. Cleaning kitchen facilities scales similarly well. Employ a few people who know what they're doing and are paid well to do it, and they'll keep that kitchen running safely, efficiently, and cleanly in a way that a few hundred pressed-for-time 20-somethings never could. And a lot of people simply do not care enough about what they eat to want anything else.
Moreover, not putting a full kitchen in each unit means that the units can be smaller without cutting into living space, cheaper to build, and safer. Lots of people who live alone don't cook a lot, since cooking for one is not very time-efficient, which means that for all those people the kitchen is practically just dead space. You could replace its function with a microwave and a minifridge, and if you do, you've given that person a whole extra room.
And the thing is, this style of living does exist in North America. You just can't voluntarily get it unless you go to college. Why? Because we have - for some reason - decided that this globally-not-uncommon way of living is somehow beneath the dignity of an adult. We should change that.
We should have this more
