Living in Cohousing

After the November 2007 Japanese Ecovillage Conference in Tokyo, I visited three “collective housing” projects in Tokyo with conference host Akemi Miyauchi. At that conference I first heard of what the Japanese call “collective housing” – high-density housing projects with various kinds of common space – but it sure sounded much like cohousing to me.

As cohousing increasingly becomes a global phenomenon, I've become curious to learn how different countries mold the concept to reflect their cultural, financial and regulatory realities. I learned that firsthand after I had a chance to see three cohousing projects in Japan recently.

After attending the Japanese Ecovillage Conference in Tokyo in late November 2007, I visited the 28-unit Kankanmori no Kaze Cohousing project in Tokyo with two friends, Giovanni Ciarlo from Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage in Mexico and Akemi Miyauchi, one of our wonderful conference hosts. Giovanni and I had given presentations about intentional communities at the conference, and we were eager to see similar projects in Japan. There appear to be relatively few intentional communities there, and so far perhaps only a total of four cohousing communities – depending on how one defines the term.

I used to have contingency plans for where I wanted to live in another five years. For a while, it was New Zealand, then upstate New York, then a small town in western Colorado that doesn’t feel the pace of a fresh-air-challenged metro area like Denver. Where would I try to be comfortable next? Where would I try to meet as many needs as possible with a minimum amount of stress?

While community living is not a new phenomenon, one must acknowledge that with the success of cohousing, the idea is being spread for the first time on a global scale. If globalization tends to destroy cultural variation, the flexibility of cohousing has allowed it to resist that trend and to adapt to people’s needs in different cultural contexts. A look at how cohousing is being implemented in Europe demonstrates that idea.

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.

In every cohousing neighborhood I've lived in or visited, sustainability has been an explicit core value, particularly expressed in how the community was designed and built. Many of us have the luxury to choose to live lightly on the earth, "changing the world, one neighborhood at a time," as a Coho/US bumper sticker puts it.

How do people in cohousing create traditions? How do we mark the major life events of our members, such as births, coming-of-age, marriages and deaths? How do we celebrate community events, such as groundbreaking or community anniversaries? How about birthdays, new jobs or people moving in or moving out?

The cohousing movement in the U.S. has come a long way since the first community was built in the mid-1980s. There are currently an estimated 200 cohousing projects in 37 states – 93 of them completed! These numbers are expected to increase significantly in the next few years, as more people discover the joys of living in cohousing neighborhoods. Elder cohousing projects and retrofit cohousing will undoubtedly show the fastest growth, although the number of typical, multigenerational communities will also increase significantly over the next five years.

Chuck Durrett, along with his wife Katie McCamant, popularized the Danish concept of cohousing in this country with the publication of their 1988 book. Here Chuck offers an open letter about his personal experiences in avoiding a corrosive aspect of living in community.

Imagine that your cohousing group just found a site and you have the chance to hear three of the most experienced cohousing developers in the United States offer you pointers on how to finance your project. Or imagine meeting someone who is willing to tell you about the agreements that will keep your group from self-destructing – because he’s lived in community 32 years and has given it a lot of thought. Or maybe you’d like to hear from two experts about how to make your project more affordable. Or perhaps...

Scan the vision statements of cohousing communities and you'll notice touchstone words such as neighborly, safe, close-knit, diverse, tolerant, nurturing and supportive. Independence and interdependence are highlighted as the mortar that cements these elements together. "What can I give to the community?" not "What can the group do for me?" provides the bedrock for vibrant and resilient cohousing.

Wow, the single-family house – what a workout it can be. After 12 years of living in Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, I'd forgotten how hard it is to live in a "regular" house. How do so many people do it and stay sane?

oe picks up the top brick from the pile on his left and adjusts it into position on the sliding tray of the tile saw. He braces the brick with one hand while flipping a switch with the other. ZZZZZZZZZ! The brick eases forward into the diamond-edge saw blade and soon becomes a custom-fit brick paver. He wears safety glasses, earplugs and rubber gloves to protect him from the intense noise, tiny chips of brick and cold water spraying from the whirling blade. The saw stands near the center of a grove of young aspen trees that commemorate the arrival of four babies in the first year of our village. The leaves of the aspens and the pea gravel under the trees are covered with a fine red film - water mixed with pulverized brick dust.

Year One: We waved goodbye – and good riddance – to the last of the construction trucks. For more than a year the vehicles had used for their staging area what the architects had neatly labeled the "community garden" on our blueprints. Dump trucks, pick-up trucks, 18-wheel delivery trucks, piles of lumber, stacks of pipes and industrial-size garbage dumpsters had squatted on our scraped dirt field during the building of our community. Now they were gone and we could begin to reclaim the land.

Last summer my friend Claire and I were sitting on the grass at the park, talking while our 3-year-old daughters played. When the two girls began throwing cedar mulch at each other, I asked my daughter Lila to stop. “Why can't they throw mulch?” my friend Claire asked. “It's not going to hurt anyone, is it?”

Giving neighborly support often has been easier for me than receiving it. A near-death car accident in September 2002 followed by extensive shoulder surgery changed my perspective in a heartbeat.

This list first appeared in our Fall 2001 issue. Cohousers across the U.S. offered the diverse list of suggestions below.