Getting the work done in cohousing

Sunward Cohousing, Ann Arbor, MI (Photo by Michael McIntyre)

The first two years of living in Doyle Street Cohousing (Emeryville, CA), we scheduled workdays one Saturday a month for six hours. There were one or two coaches, and resident volunteers could come or go fixing whatever the coach(es) previously had decided needed to be fixed. It was completely voluntary – and a total disaster.

Five people would show up to paint the gate or patch the asphalt drive. In the course of six hours, other residents would leave their houses, walk toward the parking lot, pass those who were working, shyly state they were busy, apologize for not being able to help, and walk away feeling guilty. Those left behind who were doing the work felt righteous, used and angry. There were plenty of acrimony and accusations.

Most multi-family developments (even cohousing) feel like conventional condos, where there is always someone else to do the work, and residents are always too busy to help. It’s a perfect storm quite deleterious to the sense of community. Seeing the dysfunctional community not-at-work, two women at Doyle Street Cohousing proposed a much better system.

It started with a survey of one question to all the adult residents.

Q. How many hours per month did you spend outside your previous residence doing exterior maintenance, including yardwork such as trimming trees and raking the leaves?

A. Naturally each person had a different answer, but the mean was 12 hours/month.

Since our houses were new and designed to be low maintenance (and on only 0.29 acres), we determined that every adult would need to do 12 hours a year of exterior maintenance. We shifted our workdays from six hours one Saturday a month to four hours one Saturday a month from 9 am to 1 pm. The coach(es) have everything ready to go – assignments, tools, supplies and instructions – and those who arrive on time get bagels, lox, cream cheese and lots of good, hot coffee for breakfast.

Those who come to work a Saturday shift spend the first 15 minutes on project orientation. If you come on time, you get to choose the fun stuff. If you come late, you mostly clean up after others. The coaches log each resident’s hours on a matrix – person, date and hours worked. If you don’t log 12 hours for the year it costs you $20/hour for the hours not worked. The money collected is spent on supplies.

Building community

We soon discovered that the workdays brought us considerable collective satisfaction. They became an effective means of building community, not to mention getting necessary projects done. Once the new arrangement was in place, there was zero acrimony around the workdays – lots before, but none after. I was the head coach over both approaches. The new system was about recognizing the difference between what was fair and developing a means to keep it that way. It was not about personalities.

The analysis

Sometimes it seems like a panacea to hire outside professionals to do some of the maintenance work. It is not. Our analysis shows that it almost always takes more time to hire someone else to do the work. By the time you show them what needs to be done, negotiate a contract and (often) correct their work, it takes fewer people-hours to perform the tasks ourselves.

As one of the two coaches for more than 12 years, I worked with a couple of other community members to analyze the performance of our residents compared to what we would expect if we hired outside contractors. In almost every category, our residents outperformed hired workers. If we painted a fence, we prepared 10 times better, primed five times better and had twofold better coverage. Calculating the value of the labor of group members at $20/hour, it cost us much less to complete most jobs, do the work as well or significantly better than many professionals would, with much less aggravation.

Frog Song, Cotati, CA (Photo by Matt Kramer)

Try it with a simple task. Count the people hours it takes to bid the job out, versus the people hours required to do it yourselves. Compare the cost and the results. And did I mention that most contractors don’t want to work with homeowners' associations? By the time you orient five different bidders, you could have completed the task and gained the satisfaction of doing it with your own hands. In the process, you have helped build your community and made it stronger, both physically and spiritually.

The only exception is for dangerous projects that need special equipment or expertise. For these types of jobs, you should hire professionals.

You need to be fair

I don’t think that anyone who moves into cohousing plans to take advantage of his or her neighbors’ good intentions. But without a system of accountability in place for shared work responsibilities, this will likely happen and it will be detrimental to your sense of community. You wouldn’t take money out of your neighbors' pockets, and you can’t steal their time either. If you don’t do your share, that’s exactly what you are doing.

“Subtle” communitarianism

At Doyle Street Cohousing we had three residents who would make it clear to every new person moving in, “We expect you to cooperate with your neighbors to take care of mutual responsibilities. If you don’t want to participate, please don’t move in. There’s an entire world out there for folks unwilling to cooperate—go live there so others can live here.”

They were very clear and matter-of-fact about these important community issues. Save this one place for folks who do want to participate. While this might seem like it would be detrimental to selling houses, the opposite is true. When a community is working, it’s palpable. When it’s not, it’s also obvious. Doyle Street Cohousing always had a very strong interest list (except for the first two years) and units sold quickly. If people are going to move into a cohousing community, they want to move into one that works. The same was true in Denmark. (Read Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves.) And the people were the best communitarians you could ask for, once they were clear on the mutual responsibilities.

This level of pulling your own weight and being accountable in community reminds me of a small town where I used to live. Once we had to clean the sludge out of the municipal waterway, which was basically a ditch. One person (the coach) decided that if you spent most of your time leaning on your shovel, then you received none of the $10/hour allocated to those who helped, and if you used water from the ditch, you had to help. That got people’s attention in a hurry. I’m not sure cohousers could live with that much fairness. But accountability pays. If you want others to be accountable, “Oh, that means I have to be accountable as well.” Also, I found that once you get cohousers to show up, they are not slackers.

“Oh, but we’re different!”

“Doyle Street Cohousing must be made up of homeowners who were used to maintaining their own homes!” Nope, mostly first-time home buyers. Remember they didn’t have their act together at first. “Oh, they must have a lot of men there!” Nope, single moms, a single grandmom (with a live-in granddaughter) and plenty of single women. “Young people!” Not really. Our neighbor Margaret, 77, was right in there with the rest of us making lunches and running errands. You’ll come to the solution fastest if you assume that there are no excuses.

Getting the work done together can be effective, fair, fun and guilt-free. No one should feel guilty for not doing his or her share, and no one should feel used for doing too much. There are always a few folks who can’t perform physical tasks, but they can sit at the common house phone and call paint suppliers or do paperwork, while others might run errands, make lunch or watch the kids. Include everyone – that’s a community!