Jane Lester along with community members and our building team

How did a retired pediatrician become a real estate developer? Crow Woods, our new Seattle cohousing community, is a dream come true for me. It is a winding path that got me here. 

“Martha’s here, let’s eat!” My sister had arrived for dinner, a casserole of vegetables from our garden, yogurt (homemade in the cupboard with a contraption involving a light bulb) and some chewy whole grain I didn’t recognize. It was 1979 and my four housemates and I shared a tall wooden house in Seattle. We were all professionals in our twenties. I paid $80/month rent and put $12/week in the food kitty, a cigar box kept in a kitchen drawer. Whoever shopped took the money from the cigar box. On Sundays we walked to the nearby park for pick-up soccer. It was a terrific couple of years. 

Fast forward four decades, and I am looking for a place to live after my divorce. I’d always wanted to live in cohousing, what I considered a grown-up version of my 1970s group house. I found cool cohousing communities but none with room for me. My therapist said, “build it yourself.” What?!

Off I went to the national cohousing conference in Portland in 2019 with two goals: find other cohousing wannabes in Seattle, and learn how to build it myself. There I was introduced to Emma, another enthusiast. What an exciting weekend that was! Back home a group of us formed Seattle Urban CoHousing, or SUCH, and began regular meetings to create our dream community. As we slid into the pandemic we met by Zoom, learning Sociocracy, creating circles, setting priorities. There I met Carrie and Ian, who had moved here from Colorado in search of a great community. Some folks were passionate about creating low-income housing and others wanted to aim for net zero energy buildings. Some wanted to build in a south end neighborhood, and others didn’t want to participate in gentrification. Everyone talked about their dream designs but the group as a whole seemed pretty uncomfortable talking about money. It became apparent we had competing goals and no viable path forward. After about a year, Carrie and Ian and I made the difficult decision to leave. The group disbanded. Feeling discouraged, I didn’t think about cohousing for a while.

Then my daughter Lisa moved back to Seattle from Los Angeles and said, “Mom, when are we going to build cohousing?” When your adult child asks you to create a community where you both can live, of course you say yes. I reconnected with my cohousing buddies from SUCH, chose the amazing Emma of Marjorie Design to be my project manager, and gathered about five families with similar visions. I took a different approach this time, funding it myself and making most of the development decisions. 

Our north building under construction with the big trees and the blue sky

Emma and I chose a creative local design-build firm called Hybrid. They had a real estate agent who could find us the land, a development consultant to help with permitting, surveying, groundwater and utilities, architects to design our community, and a construction company to build it. Most importantly, they were people who listened carefully, asked questions, thoroughly embraced our vision even though it was different from what they usually built, and were eager to work with us. Emma and I were stoked.

Right away we found two adjacent houses for sale in the Northgate neighborhood, on flat sunny quarter-acre lots filled with eighty foot tall douglas fir and cedar trees, in a residential neighborhood, centrally located, close to businesses and light rail. Because the lots were so big we were able to turn two lots into three. And because Seattle is all about density, residential zoning allows each lot to have a single family residence plus two accessory dwelling units, ADUs. So we could put three attached homes on each lot, and have nine households total, set around the courtyard filled with the giant trees. And a common house in the corner. 

Our team met regularly for the next two years. Community members and friends joined monthly work parties in raincoats and rubber boots with lopping shears, knee pads and shovels. We spent countless hours digging out ten-foot-tall masses of blackberries, English ivy, and invasive holly. We collected free orphan native plants from friends and planted in one corner a Pacific Northwest native forest with sword ferns, Oregon grape, coastal strawberry, and a rescued potted western hemlock Christmas tree. We selected the perfect spot for the hot tub, fire pit and fragrance garden. 

Last summer the final permits came through. Then came asbestos mitigation, rat mitigation, a salvage assessment, and an environmental study to show there had never been a dry cleaner or gas station on our site. Giant machines demolished the houses. We held a festive groundbreaking celebration with our architects and new neighbors and a couple dozen friends who came to support me. I didn’t know how to throw a party on a pile of dirt, so I decorated hardhats, bought champagne and ordered custom M&Ms in two shades of green that said Crow Woods on them. 

Emma and I met up in Denver for the national cohousing conference in August. I filled my brain with the ins and outs of condo associations, how to run community meetings (use improv!) and creative marketing strategies to sell the five available homes in Crow Woods. I had a blast meeting folks on the same journey, from all over the country, many building the first cohousing community in their state. Back in Seattle, I banded together with the founders of four other new communities in the region. We call ourselves the Pacific Northwest Emerging Cohousing Coalition, and the energy of these folks is amazing.

Party table at our July Groundbreaking Celebration

At one of our early SUCH potlucks, Carrie admired my salad bowl. Her partner Ian said, “when we live together, you can just borrow Jane’s salad bowl whenever you want.” In a year, Carrie and Ian and I will be neighbors and the salad bowl is up for grabs.