I The Cohousing Association welcomes blog posts from anyone in the cohousing movement

In Portland (OR), the cohousing cauldron is beginning to boil with one project about to go to construction and as many as three others in the formative stages. The SE Examiner neighborhood newspaper recently profiled PDX Commons, a 55+ cohousing new condo project which will rise near the center of Portland in one of the… Read More

[Bella DePaulo’s introduction: For How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, I visited so many cohousing communities and had so much to say about them that the book just couldn’t hold it all. Descriptions of some of the experiences I cherished were cut from the book. This is one of… Read More

[Editor’s Note: Chuck Durrett with McCamant & Durrett Architects is developing a training program for architects, detailed at the end of this blog, which is reposted from A Word from Chuck: Reporting from the National Cohousing Conference in Durham, NC from MDA’s newsletter.] When Katie & I traveled to Denmark in 1984 and studied the… Read More

True story: for three years my wife and I looked for a small town to call home. People thought we were crazy to leave Portland, Oregon where we had met, married, and gave birth to our precious son. The ever-growing popularity, the crowds, the traffic, the ever-escalating prices, the pace in Portland all motivated us…. Read More

Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing (CHUC) in Seattle, WA is finally edging up to its fourth floor in construction and just weeks away from setting the base for The Rooftop Farm project we have planned. We are talking about more than a few raised planters on the roof. We envision a working, year-round urban farm. We… Read More

Sitting on the back deck, summer evening, listening to the birds in the swale, kids in the pool, sunlight fading… It seems to me that living in cohousing is pretty much kid paradise. “Our” kids at Nevada City Cohousing, like most American kids, go off to a variety of schools (local public, charter, home school),… Read More

I’ve been a group process consultant for 28 years. For the first 26 years most of my work was focused on weathering storms, or training groups in foul weather drills, so that they could better handle heavy seas themselves. In the last 18 months, however, there’s been something of a sea change. In addition to… Read More

“Cohousing really helps crack the nut of intentional community. We have plenty of privacy and the benefit of abundant community. It’s a great blend.” “When you have people who’re watching out for you, you know you have them to rely on. That lowers your stress. Sharing activities increases your quality of life.” “In a typical… Read More

A friend of mine, Tree Bressen, recently pointed me in the direction of an article in Fast Company entitled: “How Krash And Other Startups Are Taking Coworking Home: It’s called co-living, and it’s all the rage.” Leaving aside my reaction to the name “co-living” (did the originators think they’d invented the concept of shared housing?),… Read More

In response to this query on coho-l: I am an owner at Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community in Nanaimo. One thing I am curious about, is the number of people who say they want to rent for awhile before deciding to buy a unit. They want to “try it out” and “see if it is a… Read More

Cohousing was one of my first introductions to collective living and the world of Intentional Communities. My father helped found Valley Oaks Village, in Chico, CA, in the mid-90’s. He and I moved into his unit in 1996, when I was 16, and I lived there for a year before I moved out on my… Read More