It takes a
cohousing village

Concept entices a sense of "tribe"

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

The phrase "cohousing" was probably chosen because "cohabiting" has already been co-opted. Whatever you call it, this Danish notion of designing micro-neighborhoods around extended families has caught fire in the United States. A meeting last night on the subject drew several families interested in creating such a neighborhood.

The first American cohousing complex opened in 1991 in Davis, Calif. "Now there are more than 30, and another hundred or so under way," said Honolulu architect Alan Ewel, whose recently completed master's thesis was on cohousing. These range from rural units that look like townhouse condos to a block of row houses to a one-time inner-city manufacturing plant.

The idea originated in the last century as the industrial revolution created a class that lived in one place and worked in another. The traditional rural farm or the urban apartment gave way to the suburb. The suburb, however, is designed as a series of shoulder-

to-shoulder, privately owned fiefdoms. Privacy is the primary concern, and the face of the average suburban home features walls and garages on the public streets.

What was lost was the sense of neighborhood, of a cohesive unit of families who look out for each other. It goes way beyond neighborhood watches; anthropologists call it the sense of "tribe," which is the extended "family" of people the average person can easily keep track of, usually only a couple of hundred people. As Hillary Clinton wrote, it takes a village to raise a child.

"Everyone I talk to about their lives in a standard housing arrangement comes back to the sense of isolation they feel," said Nancy Wilcox, school teacher and a cohousing enthusiast who helps organize the local group.

"A person with a small child really feels isolated these days. You drive the child long distances to see the grandparents, to play with someone their own age, to go to a library. That's not natural," said Wilcox.

Hawaiian concepts of ohana and hui and ho'oponopono "make Hawaii an ideal place for this kind of extended family," said Ewel. "Instead of being passive, some people hunger to share themselves, to help their neighbors without stepping over artificial boundaries."

Berkeley architect Charles Durrett, who with Kathryn McCamant wrote the best-selling "Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to House Ourselves," calls this sort of lifestyle "the kind of pathology the 20th century has brought us ... Mom is working. She's not at home all day managing the whale of a house and the larger family that goes with it. When I see a single mom or even a married couple trying to maintain a typical single family, I see them busy all weekend."

Cohousing generally works like this: A group of families set up an organization to design, manage, modify or build from scratch a grouping of about 10 to 20 homes. These are clustered around a "common house," which is used for communal meals, laundry, gatherings, storage of group-owned tools like lawn mowers, and guest rooms. It's more like a kibbutz than communism.

Because the grunt-work and expense of home-ownership is amortized across the whole community, costs are generally lower and square-footage higher. The communal meals, for example, mean that someone need only cook once a month or so, and the rest of the time a meal only costs a couple of bucks.

Ewel, who lived in a cohousing system California while studying with Durrett and McCamant, particularly liked the meals, which were served three times a week. "You could have dinner time conversation with people, or go off and eat by yourself. And it was a great time saver if you knew you weren't cooking that day. You just show up and eat! And you quickly found out who the good cooks were."

Wilcox said that people with singular skills will probably be called upon to contribute in their particular arena. "Me, for example - I'm good at composting. I go around my neighborhood and see bags of leaves and wish they were on my compost pile. In a cohousing environment, I'm sure I'd be the compost lady, just as other would share their skills."

This sort of commitment to the environment and the quality of life, ironically, lowers costs because the cohousing community doesn't consume or waste as much.

Utility and child-care expenses are also lower when they're shared; the common house generally become a day-care center in many cohousing complexes.

The physical design of cohousing is "more of an evolution than a revolution in architecture," said Ewel. "It's a lot of subtle things. In most homes, you're designing to screen the world out. Physically, a lot of townhouse condos have all the required features. In cohousing, you're intentionally creating a sense of community. You park in a lot or on the outside of the complex.

"Units are arranged so you can see people coming and going. Kitchens and dining rooms are fair game; they generally have large glass windows that face into the common areas. For privacy, bedrooms and bathrooms are in the back. Mailboxes and laundry are in the common house - that sort of thing. The idea is to deliberately create spontaneous interaction."

This interaction is also the biggest problem with cohousing. It takes a lot of time to arrive at group decisions, particularly in the planning process. "Most of the cohousing complexes I looked at, once they were up and running, usually had a meeting once a month," said Ewel.

"Democracy is not simple," said Wilcox. "The only reason people and families will work together on this is if it makes economic and social sense to do so."

The American experience is different from the European one in cohousing. "We've discovered that Americans value privacy far more, and cars are a much bigger issue here.

"I like my privacy," said Wilcox. "I'm not going to give that up in cohousing. Cohousing is not a commune; the only thing shared is common areas, not everything. If you want, you can make yourself available."

One group of cohousing enthusiasts are the recently single, widows and the elderly who feel isolated. "My own mother likes the idea of having children around, even if they're not hers," said Wilcox. "It makes the little community feel more like a family."

There's been a breakthrough recently in financing as banks, at first jittery about a novel housing scheme, grew used to the concept.

"It's not an experiment any longer; it's proven and a success. Where these units go up, there's a rush of people wanting in," said Ewel. "In some of the early cohousing complexes, the banks required a laundry room built in each unit anyway, just in case the thing failed."

Ewel has talked to some native Hawaiian groups about creating such complexes as a way of moderning the traditional Hawaiian village. "It's absolutely ideal for homestead land," he said. "But you know, it's hard to start from the top down. Ideas like this need community support from the bottom up. We're so locked into the vision of a typical suburban tract house that it's hard to break."