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Fixes

Modern Housing With Village Virtues

Working families in the United States have many struggles today: expensive child care, not enough time to cook healthy meals, disconnection from nature, a sense of social isolation — what the sociologist Robert Putnam famously called “bowling alone” — and more. Older Americans, a booming population, often end up segregated generationally and in dire need of care and companionship.

What if there was a potential salve to all of these struggles? One that was introduced to Americans 25 years ago, but hasn’t yet gone to scale?

That potential solution is cohousing, a form of shared living in which groups of families with their own private homes (usually about 15 to 40 households) also share common spaces — a kitchen and eating area, often a garden, tool shed, or laundry facilities, or all of them, and a set of principles and practices about living interdependently.

Since 2013, I have experienced the benefit and challenges of living in cohousing as a resident of Temescal Commons, an interfaith community in Oakland, Calif. The principles of these communities vary, depending on their size and type (urban vs. rural, religious vs. secular, intergenerational vs. over 65); still, most groups hold in common a belief that a high quality of life is achieved not through self-sufficiency, but through a village mentality. Families will often share meals, yard work and repair labor, sometimes even cars; they also help one another spontaneously in many other ways.

Louise Dunlap, 78, has rented a studio apartment in a nine-unit cohousing community for the last six years. “Interdependence,” she says, “goes beyond turning the compost and fixing the washing machine. I get a chance to share meals and deep conversations. There’s a kind of love that grows out of these connections — not romantic love, not family love, but something about our common humanity. I wish everyone could experience this.”

The first distinctive cohousing community in America, Muir Commons, was built in Davis, Calif., in 1991 by the architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, who became familiar with cohousing while studying architecture in Copenhagen in the 1980s. They have written an authoritative book on cohousing in America and today run their architectural firm, the Cohousing Company, from Nevada City, Calif.

Europeans have been the pioneers in this particular form of shared living; there are more than 700 cohousing communities in Denmark alone. In comparison, according to the latest count done by the Cohousing Association of the United States, there are only 160 established in just 25 states across the country.

So why have we been so slow to catch on?

First, there’s a lack of awareness. People often picture hippie communes when they hear “cohousing.” Alice Alexander, the executive director of the Cohousing Association, draws this distinction: “There’s nothing wrong with communes, but cohousers actually value privacy and structure highly.”

Another big hurdle is financing. When they set out in 2009 to create a 24-unit cohousing community in downtown Durham, N.C., Alexander and her co-founders were turned down by 10 institutions before getting a loan. The project didn’t officially open until 2014.

The problem, Alexander says, is that “banks have no mechanism set up to get a loan for a cohousing community to buy land or fund marketing so you can find your ‘tribe.’ ”

Traditionally, many people who want to build a home finance the purchase of the land themselves and then use the property as collateral for a building loan. But if you’re buying the larger piece of land necessary to build a comprehensive cohousing community, the cost can be prohibitive. Alexander says that National Cooperative Bank is on the cutting edge of trying to figure out new mechanisms, but it’s slow going. Cohousing communities are typically structured and incorporated as homeowner associations, condo associations or housing cooperatives.

But there are alternatives to building from the ground up. More recently, people have been gravitating toward what is called “retrofit cohousing,” in which neighbors transform an existing neighborhood over time. There are 11 retrofit cohousing communities operating in the United States today, and more in development, according to the Cohousing Association.

Americans’ interest in cohousing is growing. The Cohousing Association knows of 120 communities currently in formation. The 2015 National Cohousing Conference was the largest yet, and dozens of architectural firms and real estate developers have specialized in working on these types of communities. At Alexander’s community alone, 300 people are on a waiting list.

According to Alexander, aging baby boomers are driving the expansion; many want to downsize and find supportive communities. Additionally, millennials, many of whom experienced co-op living in college, are just starting their families. They are accustomed to a sharing economy that subscribes to many of cohousing’s principles and practices.

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Residents of a cohousing community in Sacramento, Calif., sharing a dinner.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

For some, the many benefits of cohousing make the challenges of creating or finding such a community feel worth it. In expensive cities, it can be cost-effective and stimulating, intellectually and emotionally, to share regular meals in a group. Rather than depending on the nuclear family unit to meet all emotional needs, cohousing participants have a wide range of people to talk to.

Proximity and regularity matter. A recent study found that most people report having only two close confidants with whom they have important discussions on a regular basis. It’s a lot easier to sit down next to someone at a weekly common meal and spontaneously troubleshoot how to handle a rude boss or health problem than it is to call an equally stressed friend in hopes that it is a moment when he or she can talk. Matthew Brashears, an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University, who conducted the research, told NBC News: “Discussion partners provide both emotional support and ideas for how to solve problems, so a shrinking discussion network may lead to more stress and poorer outcomes.”

Cohousing also can provide a safety net at times of natural disasters like heat waves or hurricanes. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist, has found that the tight-knit bonds that are formed set these neighborhoods apart — more so, even, than money or preparedness — in effectively surviving such calamities.

Evidence of these benefits and others has mostly been anecdotal, at least in the United States, but it is drawing new attention from social scientists, some of whom have created a national Cohousing Research Network. A study they conducted in 2011 found that 96 percent of people interviewed who lived in cohousing reported an improved quality of life; 75 percent felt their physical health was better than others their age; and 96 percent had voted in the 2008 presidential election.

Angela Sanguinetti, the director of the network and a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Davis, recently published a paper in The Journal of Environmental Psychology on a survey she did of 559 cohousers. They reported a greater connection to nature based on two different widely used scales. (Many cohousers build sustainably, often using solar panels and other techniques that meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.)

Heidi Berggren, an associate professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, found that interdependent living often coincides with greater involvement in civic or political action, or both, including voting at twice the rate of the average American. Her research was recently published in Social Science Quarterly.

While the research of both Sanguinetti and Berggren suggests that cohousing could benefit society as a whole, there is little public support for it. One reason may be that the majority of those who benefit from cohousing, so far, have been white and relatively affluent. Susan Friedland, the executive director oft Satellite Affordable Housing Associates, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization, was part of a team that built a cohousing community designated affordable housing in Sebastopol, Calif., in a project funded by the federal government as well as private dollars. She said the federal support latter hamstrung them in many ways.

“Federal fair housing policies are in place for good reason — to prevent discrimination,” she said. “But they also prevent us from giving preference to people who want to live in cohousing or involve low-income residents early in the design process.”

As a result, Petaluma Avenue Homes, as it’s called, has had a mix of people, some of whom love the cohousing aspect, and some of whom are understandably lukewarm to the experience, quite possibly because they’ve been subjected to the obligatory bureaucratic requirements and vetting often required of the poor by government agencies.

Nevertheless, Friedland retains faith in the concept. “Developers, architects, builders, we could all learn from the design principles of cohousing — the common house, moving the parking out of the central space, having the front porches, the centrality of the gardening. All of these are based on human experience and a balance of privacy and connectivity.”

Of course another formidable hurdle is how difficult it is to predict the dynamics of a complex group. Many cohousing communities fall apart early on because they fail to agree on principles, practices and finances.

“Life together hasn’t been a Cinderella story,” Kate Madden Yee, a founding member of Temescal Commons Cohousing, has written. “It’s not easy, hanging in there with one’s fellow cohousers, despite disagreements, disappointments and disillusionment. Yet therein lies the reward: In our time together, my neighbors and I have learned a thing or two about how to not only create, but negotiate our common life with more ease and compassion.”

Twenty-five years in, although the experiment is still small scale, it has yielded a generation of Americans who grew up in cohousing. Many are evangelical about the ways in which the experience has shaped who they are.

Ravenna Koenig, now 26, grew up in Vashon Island Cohousing in Washington. “It taught me communication,” she says, “not just as a tool, but as a value. When you share your home with 17 other families, all those conversations that you’d normally just have with your spouse or your kids — about what to do when two kids from different families get in a fight, or whether to prioritize filling potholes or weeding the garden first — those conversations become much bigger. You have to learn how to articulate what you want, and empathize harder than you ever thought you could.”

Update: This article has been revised to include the information that the author lives in the Temescal Commons cohousing community.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of “The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream” and a columnist for On Being. She is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

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