That's just... what your average county/municipality/local government already does, except with higher income tax/wealth redistribution.

Well, except that in reality you can't ignore externalities and that quickly makes the "leftist commune" look a lot less like an idyllic hobbit village. Everybody must pitch in for national rail and highways, even if they aren't the ones benefiting. Cities generate a LOT more wealth/capita and almost incalculably more wealth/km² than rural areas, are way more resource efficient and don't contribute as much to the erosion of natural habitats, yet they are utterly dependent on rural areas. How does a hypothetical "small government communist" society deal with this fairly so that urban and rural communes don't literally go at war with each other?

Here in Belgium the municipalities are, in principle, legally obligated to provide a certain amount of subsidized low-income housing. That's exactly what you're advocating for, and it's great! ... Well, except for the part where many rich municipalities simply refuse to build any such housing out of NIMBYism and would rather pay the fines. Making government "local" does not, unfortunately, lead to the left-wing utopia that some people think it would. This is not "big guberment" or "capitalism" or corporate lobbying, it's the mundane evil of your average citizen voting against the interests and wellbeing of their less fortunate (would be) neighbors.

communism works if you take out the human element. otherwise you're always going to have someone that inherently does "more" work than someone else and complains that they don't get back what they put in.

Sadly once a society atomizes and a very strong sense of individuality of property rights emerges it is difficult to reassume a communal lifestyle where someone doesn't try and exploit it for singular gain. It's also really difficult to try and make it work without the social interconnectivity required because this individualist stance long ago fractured the family from community and a certain it requires work to maintain those social connections... Work that people generally don't want to do anymore. It also tends to lock people in place as your support doesn't extend as far to strangers so unless your community is nomadic moving basically breaks the bonds.

People have a really hard time even picturing a society without money and a lot of people believe that it just looks like a barter system ecconomy...which is kind of a capitalist lie. Barter isn't really true to what we know of communal life from modern study of the few places that capitalism has spared. It's more like social credit. It's more like how we behave with our friends. You give because I do and when someone asks you give you do it because when you ask they give. You don't keep mechanical score but if you feel like they aren't reciprocating generally you stop being generous. A lot of societies that work/worked on this principle didn't make it super complicated. Wealth and resource redistribution was more ritualized. Your success and standing as a community was measured by how generous you could be to your society not by how much you individually hoarded.

It's not so much a utopia as it requires entirely different things from you. We have a hard time working backwards from that because capitalism demands a hierarchy based on numbers and once you've been trained to keep exact score people become very bitter about everyone putting in the exact same amount and kind of resource to play properly which makes for weaker social bonds.