Cohousing: America's Next Frontier

Where are we going as a society? 


As a family? 


As a loosely knit group of people on a mission?

These questions do not always have obvious and predictable answers.

Open any newspaper, any news-aggregating web site or turn on your electronic audio-visual communication device to identify the events of the day and what you will find are headlines – ATTENTION GRABBERS!!!! which are not necessarily indicative of their content.

I have been away from you for awhile. This past week I learned that my absence from the Internet creates a kind of blog irrelevance. In fact, my headline might not find you!

Oh well. That's life. But, it is not as if I stopped thinking or I stopped interacting with this world. Yes, I have been sitting over here in the corner, drinking coffee and digging into my memory with my pen.

Next Conference in San Fran in 2011

In fact, I have just returned from the Annual Cohousing Conference in Washington, DC. It was the BEST conference I have ever attended. Over a career, one attends hundreds of technical, civic, and celebratory events at which speaker upon speaker settles into lecture mode. And, if I had not gone for the subject matter, I would have gone for the experience of being with and interacting with highly accessible and very smart speakers and participants. (Gasp!!! They understand housing loans, among many other subjects, universally!) This was a break I am truly grateful for.

What is cohousing?

Nevada City Cohousing (2004)
(19 public hearings and 3-2 City Council Vote Later)

This is the TNT-loaded question that even the originators (Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett) of the idea's name, and its realization in America, might pause and re-visit before they answer. And, I am a novice and completely unqualified to answer.

Beware attention grabber ...

It is the recycling of the small, purposive communities that we once knew but accidentally placed in a landfill.

Now, that 's not very nice. Nor have you acknowledged the considerable physical and social architecture. And, it is not my final, final answer. I am on a gigantic roller coaster learning curve. The intention is to resurrect a sense of community that was once much more in evidence, but somehow stepped into a soon forgotten hole. Please continue.

The conference was indicative of a group of familiar people. The first neighborhood. You knew them. They were the people who addressed you by your first name. Said hello when they saw you picking up the morning paper. Asked how you were. Included you in a conversation. There was some expectation that we would be respectful, civil, helpful, and accountable in some way. Road rage was an unknown, unknown.

"Could I please borrow some milk, a stick of butter?" Borrow. Could Billy accompany you into town? He wants to go to the five and dime. Protective gesture. That means that we expect to reciprocate and want to acknowledge a societal and serial practice.

Even though my name tag did not confess my lack of knowledge about cohousing, I was barely registered and I met Bill from Katywil who proceeded to connect me with people he had just met. And, like the Breck Shampoo Commercial, the situation repeated and the conversation grew richer and richer throughout the conference.

How many conferences do we go to, where a a small group assembles and talks quietly and secretively in a corner? How many speakers do we hear that are indignant to our questions, unless we have sufficient standing to even ask them? How often do we sit at a luncheon table where little communication takes place and we are glad that someone is speaking at a podium?

Imagine a conference where sessions run on time, because the speaker and audience are cognizant and respectful of each other's time. Volunteers, who might have been first-time attendees, are pre-organized and serving all. Where a participant raises their hand and succinctly asks a question or comments in way that takes the speaker's presentation and informativeness to another level of learning. Imagine a conference where all the attendees are well-schooled in the art of meeting facilitation and actually listen carefully to one another and make sure that no one is left out of the conversation. Amalgamate a perfect conversation and mutual learning and discovery, I dare you.

Our neighborhoods were inclusive communities, lively with interaction. And, then we grew and we moved geographically. Often. My own family, the Trench Family, moved often. Honestly, it was refreshing to move. I would not change these decisions.

What I would change is the way I interacted in the place I was. "Could I please borrow a cup of sugar?" I might have asked, whether I needed it or not. I would have asked and a conversation and a more meaningful relationship ensued.

It is with pleasure that I will soon start reading Creating Cohousing by McCamant and Durrett. What an incredible couple and family.

Imagine two young California architects travel to Denmark, for different reasons, perhaps meet and fall in love there (not sure), and bring home the seed of an idea, which germinates into a movement, against all odds, and 120 thriving cohousing communities in North America, in 30 years. All without a patent.

Whatever else we are, Americans are productive creatives. We know how to originate or adapt an idea and turn it into something that makes everyone want to come here. The freedom to live and fail, and get up, again and again, is our identity.

Could we live in a more risked-filled, uncertain, and adventuresome time? I don't think so. For the past 30 years, I have been wondering when America would be really be tested. We had not, in my opinion. And, maybe that test is still ahead.

Regardless, we can try with all our might to be individuals, living isolated, alone in the world, with our survival food, water and generators, but we wouldn't be around for very long, if you really thought about it.

So, for me, cohousing, as a form of intentionally organizing and living together, is a brilliant, and rehearsed, idea that has the capability of bringing out the absolute best in what it means to be American. We can fight it, live behind our walls, and quietly suffer the solution of our problems, or begin to embrace the idea that we are small neighborhoods. Small pockets of families that look after one another. We always were.

The three hot topic take-aways from the conference: (1) retrofitting existing communities, (2) affordability, and (3) financing through a national cohousing credit union.

Behind me are empty homes. Are they candidates for micro-cohousing communities? Generation Y will graduate with incredible student loan debt, patiently wait for us to step into different roles, and not make the mistake of living large and self-isolating lives. Banking. Isn't it time to rediscover the community bank, faith and trust in one another, and take back the reins?

My conservative and libertarian friends may think, uh-oh, he dove off the wrong end of the swimming pool. A possibility.

Here's the thing. Do we not care about community? Do we not care about personal and community responsibility and accountability? Money, are you kidding?! Of course, we care about its expenditure and management. Are we excited to exhaust natural wealth and expense our personal financial resources and our mutual world's health? And, do we hate bureaucracy? With a passion. Well, guess what?

Cohousing is a community of people actively getting things done. Cohousing is a small, intentionally organized, accountable community that is indistinguishable from an employee-owned enterprise, as one participant described it. Cohousing, or some facsimile of a small group, intentioned, with purposive living ... a radiant zone of sorts ... will be our future. Energy efficiency, proximate food sources, and environmental and personal health ... are embedded concepts.

I doubt there is a person in America who honestly believes that we need to await decisions emanating from a central source, Washington, DC., to breath. We need to act now and locally.

There is no doubt in my mind that 120 cohousing communities will appear to be a very small number in a few years. Whatever form communities take, they must re-find neighborhood, if for no other reason than a gloomy discussion of survival. But, for cohousers, based on my conference experience, they are having an entirely different conversation, as Chuck Durrett put it so well in Cohousing 101 and his closing comments, that looks ahead and not in the rearview mirror. Creates the next frontier in American living.