Yeah the "friend compound" thing seems nebulous, and one of the stated benefits is specifically that it can be financed independently and resold to third parties. So basically it's just higher density housing and pretty soon it's just very close houses of random people with some sort of weird condo fees for the commons (surely there is shared walkways, etc), etc.
It may seem odd to people who grew up in the single-family detached housing world of the postwar US,
but there are cultures and societies around the world even today where multi-family housing is common.
See for example Casas de Vecindad,
a typical form of housing in the US/Mexico borderlands for hundreds of years.
