There’s not a single neighborhood in the world that’s perfect, but the place my neighbors and I built 26 years ago (with a member architect and a contracted developer) dampens my desire to move away. As a group of six households-to-be, we bought a ten-acre parcel at the edge of Golden, Colorado, and began imagining the kind of place we’d want to live in. In those early days, my old Volvo had a bumper sticker that read “Cohousing: creating a better society one neighborhood at a time.” That’s an ambitious goal, but the world urgently needs social change and neighborhoods of all descriptions are the perfect place to cook it up.
Within the last several decades, Cohousing has become a mini-movement in North America. After being imported from Denmark in the 1990s by architects Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant, growth has been steady: there are already more than 170 cohousing neighborhoods built, with many more in process. People gravitate toward do-it-ourselves communities because they sense they can be better heard and understood in a place that strives for cooperation and support. They can be neighbors with others who want to help put the pieces of a splintering culture back together. I’m convinced that the reinvention of community bring individual empowerment as well as cooperative action. Why not deliberately create neighborhoods that are safer, friendlier, and healthier? Why shouldn’t the places we live in become the places we love?
Many of Cohousing’s experiments are extremely valuable to a society so shell-shocked by the frantic American lifestyle. In general, residents of cohousing are living actively rather than passively. An underlying intent of cohousing might be seen as the deliberate substitution of real experiences for canned ones. Cohousing at its best provides a structure for meeting needs directly, with strategies like consensus decision-making, participatory design, alternative sources of energy and information; shared resources and designs that reduce each person’s ecological footprint, neighborhood activism in surrounding towns and communities, and collaborative management of neighborhood resources.
Wonderland Development Company in Boulder, Colorado was very active in building Cohousing neighborhoods, which they defined as “Small-scale neighborhoods created with resident participation which provide a balance between personal privacy and life in a close-knit community of neighbors. Individual homes enjoy convenient access to shared space, including a “common house” with facilities such as a kitchen, dining room, play room for children, workshops, guest rooms, office space, a sitting area and laundry. Each home is self- sufficient with a complete kitchen, but typically, optional resident-cooked meals in the common house are offered several times a week.”
That concept sounded pretty good to us. Like many Americans we were feeling a loss of trust, a precipitous decline of nature, and a troubling national story. We each wanted to create something more grounded, supportive, and sensible. We didn’t realize in the early months how challenging the project would be. But looking back, I can easily refer to the work and play as my life’s greatest adventure.
“Are we Crazy?” A Dream Sloowly Becomes Reality
The neighborhood began as a dream of architect Matt Worswick and his wife Linda, in the early 1990s. By the time I joined the group, lots of ideas as well as prospective members had come and gone, but seven core households continued to meet every month, even though we hadn’t yet found the perfect piece of land. The community existed only in our imaginations. What enabled our eventual success was a diversity of aptitudes: some were big-picture dreamers and others focused expertly on the construction, financial and legal details. Many of the early meetings in members’ living rooms were visioning sessions. We got to know each other with exercises like describing what we each liked to do and imagining how the new neighborhood could accommodate our passions, skills, and physical needs. One member wanted an open field big enough to throw an ultimate Frisbee and another wanted the common house kitchen to be equipped with built-in recycling bins. I couldn’t stop thinking and talking about a garden where we could work together growing healthy food.
At one brainstorming retreat, we imagined how the pieces would fit together: pedestrian walkways, community garden, playgrounds, and various rooms in the future common house. Since we had already agreed the architecture would be southwestern, we imagined the tolling of a mission bell in a Santa Fe-style bell tower. One member excitedly reported that her parents had such a bell on the floor of their barn, and several years later, that imaginary bell had a very real clang. Kids love to pull the long rope to ring it to call neighbors together for meals, meetings, and celebrations.
Cohousing creates a sense of community because residents have many things in common. My neighbor Linda Worswick comments, “You can have all the architects, planners, and engineers to the world try to design the buildings and landscape but how do you engineer the social fabric? It’s the underlying intent and shared experience that does it.”
Creating a social network meets human needs as a precious, intentional by-product. Elder neighbors may look out the door after a snowstorm and discover that a bundled-up neighbor has shoveled and sanded their walks. An emailed request for a ride to the airport reduces stress and saves money. Cooked meals arrive at front doors in support of an ailing neighbor, and kids have an appreciative audience for a puppet show or spontaneous flute recital. Not long ago a friend called to tell me he’d seen a short video about our neighborhood on the evening news. (The news crew had lingered after the filming, we knew that). Maybe the best indicator of cohousing’s hard-won legitimacy was when my mother began telling her bridge and church buddies what was going on at Harmony Village – a hard-won departure from my early years in the community, when she was afraid to ask how many wives I had.
Harmony Design Criteria
Quality Construction/Low Maintenance
Energy Efficiency/Passive Solar Architecture
Affordability
Open, Spacious Feel to Houses
Southwestern Architecture
Public/Private Balance
Marketability, or resale value
Flexibility of functions for Different Spaces
Quality Daylighting
Expandability
Environmentally Responsible Materials
Simplicity
Production Construction
Warmth
Good Views
Landscapes
Looks great
Integrates/unifies physical and social aspects of the community
Provides interface with the natural environment
Affordability
Low maintenance
Environmentally conscious
We listed “production construction” as a criterion because we realized that our members could not afford customized suburban castles or even cottages. However, that term also ruled out houses built from adobe, because they would take too long to build and cost too much. We focused instead on designs and approaches that pushed the envelope of conventional construction. We used energy efficient “low-E” windows, efficient appliances, cellulose insulation made from recycled newspaper, compact fluorescent bulbs, water-conserving plumbing fixtures, non-toxic paints and carpets, tiles made from recycled materials, and other readily available products. We brought the plumbing for solar hot water heating to the roofs, so it would be easy to install panels later.
Before we moved in, we formed a “tiling cooperative” in the spirit of an old-fashioned barn raising to help each other lay floor tiles. Dressed in kneepads and mortar-covered clothing, we were often still up at midnight, washing out a grout bucket. But we laid thousands of heat-retaining, southwestern tiles before we hung up our trowels. Partly to honor our hard work, a community custom was born in those early days– removing one’s shoes when entering a neighbor’s house or the common house.
With chainsaws in our hands, a small band of future neighbors carried out another cooperative project, thinning the private forest of the project’s superintendent to harvest logs for the rustic front porch pillars. While we were out having fun, we were also saving the project at least $6,000.
We saved the project another $6,000 by doing the landscaping plan in-house, which provided a sense of co-ownership in the living landscape. We formed a landscaping team to design water-conservative turf and flower beds, and specify trees and shrubs that were hardy enough to survive Colorado’s unpredictable weather.
We deliberated for many hours about the design of the pedestrian walkway. We wanted it to look and feel quainter than poured concrete, but building codes required that the materials be able to accommodate fire equipment and other emergency vehicles. We formed subgroups to research road base and paving alternatives, and finally reached a workable decision: to lay concrete walkways at first but later lay ornamental bricks on top. Six years after that decision, we worked together for 10 or 12 very hot summer weekends to lay 50,000 bricks – literally sweat equity!)
Typically, developers approach a project with a “clean-slate” mentality that leaves few natural features on site, but we took extra care to preserve a row of large cottonwoods along a creek, which reduced air conditioning demand and provided habitat.
In the style of cohousing, we kept cars out of the village center, instead parking them in common parking lots, carports and garages. Although it’s a radical departure from the suburban norm, this has been one of the most pleasant features of all. There’s a sense of calmness in the center of the neighborhood, kind of like a courtyard in a college campus – except, of course, when a soccer game or a wedding reception is in progress. We quickly got used to carrying groceries to the houses, and purchased several durable carts to help that process. We often cross paths with each other walking from the car to the house; spontaneous conversations lead to baby-sitting arrangements or agreements to cook a common meal together the following week. In addition to a very noticeable reduction in car noise and in land required for individual parking, we’ve also improved the air quality in our houses, because we’re not living above or next to vehicle-related fumes.
When guests come from out of town, they can stay in the co-owned guest room in the Common House, which makes better use of the space in each of our homes. We also have a hot tub on the flat common house roof, a large-screen TV in the basement, and a few rooms for kids. If you want to have a business meeting or a party in the common house, you just schedule it on the calendar. An active email listserve keeps community members up to date with activities, convictions, and aspirations. I still remember the methodical findings of senior citizen and founding member Macon Cowles, who’d spent a lifetime advocating for positive changes. Macon carefully made note of the amount of electricity consumed when his interior lights were not dimmed, consulting the meter on his front porch. Then he went inside, dimmed the lights that had rheostats on them, and observed a significant difference in un-wasted watts. After presenting the potential savings in money, fuel and CO2 emissions, Macon urged his neighbors to “Dim it, damn it.”
We may be earnest, often nerdy, but we’re reaching for things the world needs, like trust, hope, and connection, which give us an embedded sense of purpose. It wasn’t the market or a government telling us what to do, we did it ourselves.
Adapted from the Book Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods, By David Wann and Dan Chiras
