Considering Cohousing

If you’d like to join an already-built cohousing community, each of your visits, whether sitting in on meetings or participating in common house dinners, is a rich and fertile cross-pollination point. The residents are most likely seeking people who will help build their community culture and physical infrastructure: you might have exactly the right energy, physical skills and social skills they’re looking for. And you’ll probably be asking yourself, “Will I feel at home here?” “Are these my kind of people?” These unspoken issues may hang potently in the air during your visits and can involve some ambivalence and anxiety. In some ways, visiting your prospective new home is like going on a blind date, applying for a job, or being a new kid in school.

One of the best introductions to cohousing is visiting existing communities. The easiest way is through one of the cohousing bus tours that take place with some regularity in Northern California, the Seattle Area, Massachusetts, Colorado and in and around Washington D.C. – the places that have six or more completed communities reasonably close to one another.

But many folks cannot practically participate for one reason or another. So here are guidelines for visiting a cohousing community on your own.

Cohousing isn’t for everyone, so how do you determine if it’s a good place for you? Here are a dozen questions to help you explore aspects of that decision. The questions are intended to make your determination easier and, just as important, the underlying issues they probe might prevent an ill-fated mismatch of your expectations with the realities of life in cohousing.

The first attempt to build a Danish cohousing community began in the winter of 1964 when Danish architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer gathered a group of friends to discuss current housing options. Over several months, this circle of friends discussed possibilities for a more supportive living environment. By the end of the year, they had bought a site on the outskirts of Copenhagen and developed plans for 12 terraced houses set around a common house and swimming pool. Although the city officials supported the plan, the neighbors did not and the group eventually sold the site without building anything. Gudmand-Hoyer went on to write an article titled “The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House,” in which he described his group’s ideas and their project. When published in a national newspaper in 1968, the article elicited responses from more than a hundred families interested in living in a similar community.