We’ve had a number of groups trying to get started in these tough economic times and have heard similar concerns from each of them.  Many groups seem to be struggling with the following issues:

1.     Trying to keep the group together because you like each other, knowing that you will not get consensus on property.

2.     Having trouble committing to an offer on a site without being able to see where all of the funding is coming from.

3.     Finding that your property values (assets from their existing homes) have dropped substantially since you first started crunching the numbers.

4.     Realizing that lending institutions have tightened their lending requirements.

If you find that your group is challenged by some, or all, of these issues, we’d like to help. I’ve reserved 8-9 am PST Monday – Friday for responding to groups that are at this stage, and will happily provide a free consultation regarding these issues. Please email me at charles.durrett@cohousingco.com to reserve a morning hour, and then give me a call at: 530-265-9981 so that I can help move your group forward.

Looking forward to talking to you.

Chuck

1. GOOD AFTERNOON

a.    Thanks so much to the organizers of this conference. It was so well organized and all of the presenters and participants were set up for success.

b.    I want to introduce my daughter, Jessie McCamant Durrett. We named her after an architecture firm, hoping that she would follow in our footsteps and become an architect, but she calls it architorture. She came today because it’s Father’s Day.

2. JESSIE

a.    Got her good looks from her Mom, her brains from the cohousing community, and her height from me (I’m glad I was able to help with the important stuff).

3. PRACTICING COMMUNITARIAN

a.    I’m not speaking today as a practicing architect who designs Cohousing Communities.

b.    I’m speaking as a practicing communitarian, who appreciates community and cohousing immensely. The big moves of course—like making life easier, more convenient, more economical, more sustainable, but also…

4. THE SMALL MOVES

a.    The preponderance of small moves, the moves that you see out of the corner of your eye — day in and day out

b.    Like someone taking dinner to Meg

c.     Or a kid doing his homework at the dining table, mentored by a neighbor

d.    Consensus is the big move

e.    And it takes healthy dialogue to get consensus

5. THE FUTURE OF COHOUSING HOLDS OUTCOME STUDIES

a.    Kids grades (Jessie had straight A’s living in Cohousing and a couple of B+’s since, so there is some data right there)

b.    All things that we care about

c.     Drugs, teenage pregnancy, and other things that parents really care about are virtually non- existent in cohousing compared with every other living arrangement.

6. RECIPROCITY

a.    I believe that in cohousing, every adult is genuinely interested in the success of every child…

b.    And that every adult is interested in the success of every adult

c.     And by giving, you get back in spades

7. COHOUSING HAS SO MUCH TO OFFER, AND I BELIEVE THAT WILL BE RECOGNIZED IN THE FUTURE

a.    When it comes to solving problems

b.     Such as Americans watching too much T.V. (6.25 hours/senior, 4.25 hours/person, 7.5 hours/household)

c.    Otherwise too much humanity is left on the table, and considerable social ecology erodes.

d.     It will be recognized that community can deliver

e.    And we have just begun when it comes to sustainability (more on that)

8. THE NEIGHBORHOOD

a.    A couple of years ago I was working late with a young architect in our office. He had a band on the side called the poisoned squirrels.  When I asked him why the poisoned squirrels, he said, “I watched Mr. Roger’s neighborhood from the age of 5 by myself. I was 12 before I realized that he wasn’t saying good morning poisoned squirrels.” That wouldn’t happen in cohousing.

9. THE FUTURE IS PLAYING

a.    The Danish Cohousing Community Skrapanet:

b.    Almost 100% of the group is in choral group

c.     Almost every adult in the bike club

d.    Every woman is in a walking group

e.    Almost everyone is in a card club

f.      They have a ski trip together every year to Norway

g.    And they have theater once per month

10. SOCIAL CAPITAL

a.    Successful towns around the world with healthy economics, medical health, and high levels of education

b.    It’s more about connections than anything else

c.     It’s a question of how many connections and how long they last?

d.    These come to be the key indicators of a healthy town or neighborhood

11. MODELING AND PROVING SUSTAINABILITY

a.    What is sustainability?

b.    Chief Seattle described it as considering 7 generations form now (150 years)

c.     Fundamentally does an infant born 150 years from now have the same opportunities as one born today

d.    Americans drivers attending seniors: 5 billion miles (Kansas City has taken meals from 14/wk to 1/wk)

e.    In Western Nevada County, 60,000 trips in large lumbering buses (carrying only one or two seniors at a time) for 2,000 Seniors (30 trips/year/senior)

f.      No Paratransit in cohousing, they have neighbors

g.    The way I see it, community is the key antidote to global warming

h.     And a few other environmental concerns

i.     FSC lumber (instead of clear cutting)

j.     PV (instead of bombing people to get their oil)

k.     Water use (low instead of high)

l.       35 seniors in California died during heat wave recently; 2/3 had A/C

m.       A person only needs 3 things to survive a heat wave

n.     Damp cloth

o.     Something to fan

p.     And someone who gives a damn

q.     It’s easy to prove that no one would die of heat stroke in cohousing

12. I USED TO MAINTAIN THAT

a.    Cohousing boiled down to:

b.     Quality of life

c.     Living lighter on the planet

d.    But they are merging

e.     A house bathed in light like our own—never having to flip a switch during the day, adds to quality of life

f.    Natural Ventilation

g.    $20/month heating, minus $83 in electric for the year

h.      Cheap energy gives people more time to play

13. ME / WE

a.    Anyone know the shortest poem in the English language? Me/We

b.    Harvard 1978, Mohammed Ali wrote this poem on the spot at the commencement speech

c.     Martin Luther King said “I can never reach my potential unless you do as well”

d.    Mayor of Cucuron “I won’t help you unless you can show how it serves everyone—as well”

e.    In Cohousing you get, “I can’t fully serve me unless I serve we & me”

14. COHOUSING IS READY TO TAKE OFF

a.    What will it take to get to the tipping point?

b.    When we have made enough, and when they obviously work

c.     When enough of your friends believe that their life will be better and that they can more easily live their values in Cohousing

d.    Like cars; like computers; once enough people see their value, once it was obvious, then everyone had to have one

e.    Cars and computers are engineered into reliability.  Lessons learned has got to be our method.

15. WHEN DOES COHOUSING OBVIOUSLY WORK?

a.    Meal agreements…Cohousing in Austria: Liberhaben put into place that all new residents have to cook (1/4 currently don’t cook)

b.    Like a nomadic Bedouin tribe moving across the sands of Asia minor, they gather at the end of the day. This is how community and commitment is sustained…Oh did I say commitment…I did.  I know that as a culture, we want good without commitment.

c.     In Emeryville, 3 elders who weren’t afraid to say you cook this day if you didn’t sign up on time.

d.    Maintenance. Equitable. No one moves into Cohousing to take advantage of the neighbors, but it happens when people don’t pull their weight.

e.    One of the biggest fears that people have about moving into cohousing is the ‘tragedy of the commons’, the attitude that someone else will do it, and that someone else will be me.  Even if it’s just a minimum commitment of 20/hours per week of outside maintenance, when you know that someone will do 50—make the commitment.

f.      Skraplanet – would not miss a work day. That’s when cohousing works, and it has worked fantastically there for 40 years.

16. AFFORDABILITY

a.    Cohousers bring an attitude to the table that we have to get this affordable—and they manage to do so, and they inspire affordable housing projects to be more affordable

b.    In the context of sustainability/energy efficiency

c.     Aesthetics: “Wow, this is affordable?”

d.    Cost effectiveness comes out of cohousing over and over again

e.    Self-management (the right wing will have a legitimate complaint if we can’t make affordable housing affordable to manage as well.  Because we have the people there. We don’t have to manage, they can manage themselves, we have shown that over and over.

f.      Affordable housing across the land people are boxed up, warehoused really, and with 6-7 hours of t.v. per day, there is too much humanity left on the table.  They could be on someone’s front porch talking about the issues of the day.

17. LEGACY

a.    Casa Valencia: Largely self managed affordable housing, and a functional community after post-occupancy workshops

b.    Petaluma Ave. all rental, cohousing inspired

c.     Depot Commons all single mothers on welfare and in school, cohousing inspired

d.    Home Safe (mothers and children coming out of abusive households)

18. PROCESS

a.    Every time we work with another client type (church, university, etc.) we realize that this is what cohousing has to offer—good group process

b.    Cohousers reach out to accomplish healthy process

c.     1+1=3 (you have an idea, I have an idea and third (ours) is better)

d.    To go quickly, go alone. To go far, go together.

19. MEETINGS

a.    Cohousing gets criticized for meetings

b.    But the beginning of change is to convene a gathering

c.     The change agent is the convener of a gathering.

d.    Tools for democracy

e.     Ability to dialogue

f.     Place to dialogue

20. IMPROVE MEETINGS

a.    Focus on gifts that people bring to the table

b.    Everyone has something to contribute

c.     And as a culture we have to get comfortable with disagreement. We do a sort of Italian inspired childcare that focuses on the child’s curiosity. When disagreements (what are they curious about? For example) people dialogue.  Too often in America when people disagree, they can’t dialogue. It’s a sort of emotional maturity that we can disagree and still dialogue, and move forward.

21. CITY FLOAT AT 4^TH OF JULY WITH COHOUSING GROUP

a.    M.C. stated that Nevada City Cohousing is the town’s experiment- I thought not

b.    Then, months later, sitting in a common meeting, I thought that he’s dead right

c.     The central question that makes us different than all of the villages for millions of years is, “Can we be with each other as equals?”

22. THE EXPERIMENT

a.    THE #1 reason that we have a large brain is because we were primates who communicated

b.    But much of our brain goes under-utilized

c.     We can even get better

23. RECENTLY

a.    A friend asked me, “Chuck, could you ever move out of cohousing?”

b.    I said no…I am too interested in the experiment.  The experiment is, “Can people sit in the room and be as equals and manage the farm by consensus?”

24. COHOUSING AS AN EXAMPLE

a.    American Indians, typical HUD scenario. On one-acre lots, house equal distant across the landscape. Argue they had better community when they lived in trailer courts. Ironic that a “gringo” was talking to American Indians about how to build community.

b.    Design excellence awards community oriented architecture.

c.     City council. Consensus

d.     Too often 3:2 with acrimony

e.     They don’t know where to begin

f.     I urge those of you who live in cohousing to go to your city council meetings.

25. THE FUTURE: SPECIAL NEEDS HOUSING MODELED BY COHOUSING

a.    Autism (Chicago) 2 developments of 20 units each.

b.    One thing I’ve learned from designing Cohousing: We’re all special

c.     Orange County (2) projects: I.Q. 40-70,  I.Q. 70-90

d.    21-35 year old “kids” who need to move away from home and move to a community

e.    Too much humanity left on the table

f.      We need outcome studies

26. TO GET FOLKS WITH VISIBLE DISABILITIES

a.    Out of institutions

b.    Focus on gifts, what people can do: one kids shops, one knows the bus schedule.

27. COMMUNITY BRINGS

a.    Identity – I am someone

b.    Belonging – I belong somewhere

c.     Accountability – People only feel accountable to what they helped create or those close to your heart created.

d.    These are basic

28. SUPPORT COHOUSING U.S.

a.    If you have a say you will support. You have a say, so support cohousing US

29. CONCLUSION

a.    What’s in the book

b.    A webpage is a sound bite

c.     Ann Zebaldo mentioned that with early groups, every person read the book and they moved forward successfully

d.    More than a sound bite or even a webpage

e.    In latter projects, they come to the meetings woefully underprepared. They hadn’t read the book and the projects didn’t move forward

f.      Read the book

g.    Thanks very much

Last week, in Washington D.C., I was told about two cohousing neighborhoods that were successfully organized and built in the D.C. area.  I was then told that the same organizer (Ann Zabaldo) and developer (Don Tucker) recently tried to organize another cohousing development but couldn’t get traction.  After six months of hard work the cohousing community, that had everything going for it, (affordable, team with a good track record, etc.) could not get off the ground and was abandoned.  I asked Ann what happened?

I would think the third should be easier since there were two great local, and both prize-winning model projects to look to.  Ann said that the main difference was that in both of the early projects, everybody who came to the table had read the book.  What book?  The cohousing book, now called Creating Cohousing:  Building Sustainable Communities by Katie McCamant and Charles Durrett.  In the third project, no one who came to the table had read the book.  There was incessant explaining, backtracking, clarifying, and discussing.  People were always in different places on the understanding scale.  They couldn’t coalesce, and when it became clear to some people, others were just starting and bogged the rest down.  People became frustrated and disappeared, until finally the project could not afford the dialogue necessary to get enough people moving forward at the same time with a predictable pace.  Predictable enough so that people didn’t think that they were wasting their time.

Cohousing is more than a sound bite.  Nowhere on the internet is the story of why and how a cohousing community won neighborhood of the year in the USA in 2004, or a hundred other stories and distinctions of how these projects hold a vision and move forward in a deliberate fashion.  The internet is great for some things, but telling a story and having that story sit on the coffee table available to discuss with friends and visitors at a moment’s notice because when they say “what’s this,” only a response with sentences, paragraphs, and complete thoughts will be fully understood.  It is sometimes beneficial to hold in your hands the whole story, or at least enough of the story for there to be a foundation to build from.  Web pages come and go in a matter of seconds in some people’s hands.  Those first two projects were developed before the switch to internet-based communication, yet they were highly successful.  The internet has firmly established its place in our daily lives, but it’s not a panacea, and an email or a web page, will never replace a good face-to-face with a friend, or a book.

Empirically, it has been clear that the cohousing book makes projects happen.  When we started the Nevada City project, the first thing that we did was to go to the local library.  All three copies of the book were almost continuously checked out, in a town of only 3,000 people.  Of the 25 families who started that project, virtually all of them had read our book.  That made it possible for the Nevada City cohousing to happen.

Set future residents of your cohousing up for success; give them a copy of Creating Cohousing to read.  Set your group, and your future community, up for success by getting on the same “page” – read the book.

Charles Durrett and Katie McCamant | Authors & Architects



Recently we’ve taken on an important task – helping burgeoning cohousing groups organize a successful cohousing presentation. A well-attended presentation can build the critical mass necessary to catalyze a group of dedicated future cohousers and move a cohousing project forward. We thought it would be helpful to share our “to do” list:

To Do List

1. Secure a venue for the event.

2. Create a flyer with time, date and directions.

3. Write Press release.

4. Letter to stakeholders: city planners, local officials, neighbors.

5. Get info on all free calendar listings for papers, radio, etc.

6. Get event posted on local websites.

7. Make sure cohousing books are in all local libraries.

8. Contact churches, community centers to circulate information.

9. Send Press release to all radio stations, newspapers.

10. Print 500 Flyers (to start).  Take them everywhere and hand them out.

11. Add flyer as insert to local newspaper.

12. Contact Craig Ragland at U.S. Cohousing database (www.cohousing.org) for quote to send your notice to their database for the area.

13. If have a site, plan a site visit for morning after the evening presentation.

14. Have flyer at evening event for site visit.

15. For site visit: include table, water, and snacks at site.

16. Radio and Newspaper interviews as we get closer to date.

17. Order box of books from NewSociety.com by bulk (distribute to VIP).

18. Call bookstore and libraries to make sure Cohousing and Senior Cohousing books are readily available.  Donate additional books to libraries.

19. Post on Twitter, Facebook, Craig’s list.

Suggested locations to disseminate flyer:

• Public Bulletin Boards

• Restaurant waiting areas

• Co-ops, Grocery Stores, Library

• Neighborhood Post Offices including subdivisions

• Flyer in the book at local bookstores

• Coffee Shops – posted, stacked and in the bathroom

• College bulletin boards

• New teacher packages and teachers’ Lounges

• Hospitals and nurses’ lounges

• Caregivers

• Preschools

• School and/or Church Newsletters

• Family publications/Seniors magazines

Resources:

Guerilla Marketing is a good book on how to hit everyone.

1. Buyers — pre-qualified buyers means less risk.  Why not build communities where future residents are already signed up?  In these days when spec building is frowned on by banks, why not pre-qualify and basically pre-sell units? Banks are more likely to finance pre-sold projects.

2. The Market— it seems that developers are always guessing, “What does the market want.” How many millions of dollars go into trying to answer this question and yet only 70 percent of the answer is ever correct.  Why not ask the market directly?  Why look in the rear view mirror when the market you care about lies in the future.

3. Powerful entitlement allies — there’s nothing like a group of motivated, articulate future residents who, interested in developing a new cohousing community, help get a project through the local approval process (even a project larger than their own.  See #6 below).  These organized, voting members of the community are extremely effective in getting elected officials to listen and act on their project. It’s the number one reason that in 50 projects we’ve only had one turned down.

4. New development model — Cohousing communities include a number of characteristics that are a model for future sustainable development: walkable neighborhoods, proximity to services, mixed-use, green building features, design elements for social interaction, etc.

5. Sustainability – a lot of people are talking about green. Cohousing clientele are more likely to readily implement low energy use (last year my electric bill was -$83.84), to use materials with low toxicity, and to reduce their carbon foot print (driving less, walking more, staying within the community to socialize).

6. Success breeds success — Cohousing communities anchor the success of a new neighborhood.  In a recent case, Elitch Gardens in Denver, Colorado, where a new 32-unit cohousing community successfully energized the social and marketing efforts of a much larger development of many hundreds of units.

7. Reduced risk of a lawsuit — these folks are essentially co-developers.  Together you are motivated to build a great project – and give each other the benefit of the doubt when it comes to intent and remedy and the professionals working for cohousers feel much more accountable and work harder to do a better job.

8. Equity – A cohousing group brings equity in the way of early investments to the table.

9. Much smoother, more predictable development.  With the more players you have to stay organized and deliberate.

10. Much lower risk — much better profit protection.

11. Gratification — there’s nothing more gratifying for a builder than meeting a group of people who want a village, building it for them, and then seeing a life between the buildings that is rarely seen elsewhere.

Senior Cohousing: Establishing a Healthy, Sustainable Lifestyle for an Aging Generation – by Chuck Durrett

Last year Americans drove 5 billion miles caring for seniors in their homes (Meals on Wheels, Whistle Stop Nurses, and so on).  In our small, semi-rural county in the Sierra foothills, Telecare made 60,000 trips in massive, lumbering, polluting vans-buses – usually carrying only one senior at a time – schlepping a couple thousand seniors total over hill and dale to doctor’s appointments, to pick up medicine, or to see friends.  In our cohousing community of 21 seniors, I have never seen a single Telecare bus in the driveway.  In cohousing it happens organically by caring neighbors: “Can I catch a ride with you?”; “Are you headed to the drug store?”, etc.  And this alternative is much more fun and inexpensive for all involved, and much less damaging to the environment.  Wolf Creek Lodge, a new senior cohousing community about to start construction, has 30 units to be built on 1 acre within walking distance of downtown Grass Valley, population 12,000.  Top of mind, one future household will be moving from a 20 acre lot, 9 miles from town, another from 15 acres, also 9 miles out of town, and another from 13 acres, 7 miles from town. These are young seniors planning not only to live more sustainably, but more fulfilling as well.  

Bill Thomas, M.D. and prominent author on issues affecting seniors, describes our currently predominant scenario of caring for seniors as the “$3 trillion dollar dilemma.”  The cost of care for  the 78 million new senior/baby boomers “coming of age” in the next 20 years will be $3 trillion dollars more per year than it is now (and that is in a nation with a $13 trillion dollar GDP — to put it into perspective).  It goes without saying, that the current pattern is not sustainable from an environmental, cultural or financial point of view.  

President Obama has announced that for us to arrest global warming, we will have to reduce carbon emissions by 2% per year until 2050.  It seems doable, but last year, carbon emissions increased by 1.4% — we are headed in the wrong direction.  Given this situation, we’ve got to do something. We need to think collectively about how to set seniors up for success and to help them achieve their full potential into their last 20-30 years and how to set the environment up for success at the same time. Cohousing is for seniors who want to be a part of the solution.  

We can help seniors fulfill their desires for a more rewarding living arrangement that better supports their well being, physically, socially and emotionally.  And the good news is that I haven’t witnessed anyone having more fun since the college dorms, than seniors living in cohousing — and I’ve never seen anyone live more sustainably (for example, my electric bill last year was minus $83.84).  Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living, second edition published by New Society Publishers (www.newsociety.com) — and the type of communities it describes and helps to create — allows seniors to live lightly on the planet and to enhance their quality of life at the same time. 

My presentation schedule is here:  http://www.cohousingco.com/senior-cohousing.cfm

Please send to your friends, family, and other folks who you believe would appreciate a more supportive and sustainable lifestyle.

Thanks very much,

Chuck Durrett, AIA

Katie and I gave a slide show in Nevada City, California in 1989. Between 1989 and 2002, inspired by the presentation, six different cohousing groups came and went. Finally, impatient with the progress and wanting to move to Nevada City ourselves, we went to Nevada City and, in a week, secured a site (optioned an eleven acre site with the right to sign it over to a group). A couple months later, 25 households were deep into the site plan, common house plan, and so on. Today, 57 adults (21 seniors) and 37 children live in 34 different houses in a bucolic cohousing setting. That project probably never would have happened if we hadn’t stepped up, because the previous six group had become too discouraged.

This is a new service that we will provide starting August 2009. We will come to town, help evaluate sites and the possibility of a group locally, and, if we believe in the site, we will help secure it with the intent of signing it over to the local group. We will be paid with a small fee to sign it over, and we will do this with the participation of the others currently involved locally.

Let us know if you’re interested.

Thanks,

Charles Durrett, Architect
916-716-6721

Dear all,

I was reticent at first — another conference?  But then I know that fundamentally this is the time for cohousing and expanding our individual groups possibilities by sharing at this crucial time.  I know that we can do so much more together to not only survive but to thrive and yes, even have some fun.  

Down the road from us, in Lincoln, California, there are 7 out of 10 houses in foreclosure on one cul-de-sac.  I don’t know of this current economic downturn creating one cohousing foreclosure — do you?  And I know of movements within cohousing to help others if some get close.  This is the time for simple houses, simple living, cooperation, cheap land, smart construction, cooperation and sharing.  Come to the Cohousing Conference in Seattle in the end of June if you possibly can — in order to learn how to make your project more economical, more successful, and yes, more fun.  

“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny: caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  What affects one directly affects all indirectly.  For some strange reason I cannot be all that I ought to be until you are all that you ought to be, and you cannot be all that you ought to be until I am all that I ought to be.  This is the way the universe is structured.”  - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Staying Awake Through the Revolution

“As a Baby Boomer, I’ve joked for a few years that we’ll all end up living communally again because Social Security will be broke . . . this is one of the better ways to envision it.”  (Book review of Senior Cohousing in the Sacramento Bee, April, 2009).  

See www.cohousing.org for details.

One of the best ways to get a new senior cohousing community started in your town is to organize a book signing at your local, if not larger, yet preferably independent bookstore.  The best method to get that started is to walk into the store with a copy of the new book, and several press clippings about senior cohousing — which is easy since last year cohousing was on the front page of the L.A. Times last year, and the N.Y. Times the year before that — and a great A.P. story by Andrea Sainz just appeared in 320 newspapers nation wide.  If you’re serious about planning a book signing or just want to get the book into your local book store, send a self addressed 10” x 17” envelope and we’ll put a press package in the mail to you with 10 – 15 news articles about Senior Cohousing.  

Bookstores often say that they only carry books if the book or the concept has received significant press or if people are coming in the door asking for it.  You will need to show the “significant press.”  But we find that once we show the plethora of news articles, bookstores are game to give it a try — and end up pleasantly surprised with the number of book sales.  Rick, the bookstore manager of Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Washington says that our first book sold over 550 copies after the signing we did there.  It also resulted in about a dozen communities being built in the Seattle area.  

For more information on this topic check out the blog at http://www.mccamant-durrett.com

When you’re trying to do something special, when it is unique, when it’s sensitive to emerging sensibilities — like a new common house for a new cohousing community, for the new lifestyles and behaviors that you hope to happen there — in these circumstances local is not always best.  Sometimes the appropriate thing to do is to find someone who knows exactly what they are doing.   

It wasn’t until Katie and I visited 185 and  closely analyzed 46 cohousing common houses in Europe some urban, some rural, over 13 months that we figured out in great detail the nuances of why some work and why so many don’t.  We planned to stay only 6 months, but found that we didn’t quite understand it in that short amount of time — so we stayed for 13 months  instead, interviewing banks, architects, and developers in the mornings and residents late into the night.  That is we couldn’t exactly say for sure why a third worked phenomenally well (200 to 500 people hours of use per week) helping 60 or 100 neighbors manifest their aspirations for the place they shared, a kind of place that while they had never experienced before had become an extension of their houses and why a third failed miserably (less than 100 people hours per week) and why a third were mediocre — especially unfortunate given that they all spent comparably the same amounts of money.

By scrutinizing these buildings, these cultural edifices so closely, we’ve been able to consistently design common houses with 250 to 500 people hours of use every week — about as good as the best ones in Denmark, while other common houses that cost the same $300,000 to build garner only 100 or so people hours per week.  I hate seeing this kind of waste, but you see it over and over again in the U.S. — and in Denmark for that matter.  You could immediately tell when you walked into a community — if it was designed by someone who knew what they were doing or a local, perhaps a future resident with a license to practice.  

In Denmark today there are two kinds of cohousing architects:  Those who have designed 15 or more communities and those that have done one.  You could tell the minute you walked on site.  You could see it in the way people relaxed at the common terrace and lingered over tea.  You could tell because people would come to dinner early and stay late after dinner.  The macro feel worked, and the micro point 7 or point 8 second reverberation in the common house acoustics allowing people to have easy comfortable conversations.  People weren’t always asking “what did you say?”  Nor were they too uptight when a kid ran through the common house because the acoustics worked then as well.  The kids room was just right, the guest room was comfortable, the laundry room met their needs, and so on.  Then there was the design of the common house and community by an architect who had never designed a common house before.  And you could immediately tell that one as well.  There was a peep hole between the kitchen and the dining.  The cook looked forlorn and felt like the slave for the day.  The feel was like the church basement, because they did one of those once. And if the terrible acoustics didn’t kill you then the glare from the inappropriately placed windows would.  They just didn’t know, didn’t have the benefit of trial and error, didn’t get to watch and learn how people used their spaces but it was actually the process that really compromised the space.  The thing that made the stellar architects stand out is that they were so organized.  They know how to walk a group through the process so that everyone is heard and that would best assure the group achieve its highest potential.  They were very, very organized because if you set out to design lots of communities you have to be.  And you can walk a group all the way through 400 decisions in due course over a 2 day workshop.  If you weren’t organized, you waded through maybe 30 decisions and everyone wanted to stop long before they were done, “but why didn’t we think of this and 370 other things” haunts the architect and group all through the design process and lingers far too long — as in forever — after moving in.  And those architects never want to do another community — it was too painful, and the group usually doesn’t recommend them much.  At Sunday morning common brunch today in Nevada City Cohousing, a resident described how last year he kayaked down 7 miles of the Yuba and how negotiating the almost 100 rapids took his group over 8 hours because none of them had ever been down that part before.  Then a couple of weeks later he went down with a group where one had been down it many times and it took 2 hours and he had more fun because he was able to kayak and not just fret.  It’s like that with everything; your taxes, mountain climbing or designing a cohousing community.  

How does a new architect break into it.  Our recommendation is that they apprentice with another architect who has done it many times —either participate as a resident, observe like an architect on their project or go and watch a seasoned architect work with another group.  We have had great experience with this method, and architects have left internships in our office to design wonderful common houses or have worked with us and finished the construction documents after attending our initial workshops.  The apprenticeship/mentor learning method is far from dead, and in fact is one of the best ways to learn something new.  For 13 months, day after day, we watched the best masters in the field work with group after group to reach the pinnacles of their potential, make a common house that really fit like a glove and own the building emotionally, and not beat each other up along the way with a process that was too clumsy, and filled with acrimony.  For the apprenticeship approach to work the ego needs to subside — architects need not believe that they can design everything and anything and that they can’t design what they don’t know.  What amazes me most, even if they have not visited nearly 300 communities now, not lived in three over sixteen years, not already designed several dozen, is that they might not have ever even visited one at all — nor even been to the national cohousing conference where they can learn from a large covey of experienced architects.  

So, if you want to hear from those who have designed many, and have figured out how to best facilitate the creation of a wonderful cohousing community in your neighborhood, please seriously consider coming to the Seattle Cohousing Conference in June, and be ready for creative and motivated mentors willing to share so much with you.  It probably won’t mean that you’ll go forward and design your community with confidence.  But it will help you realize what you don’t know, then perhaps you’ll apprentice with someone who does, and then there after go forward and design fantastic common houses from a place of real knowledge and real confidence, and real abilities.  As so many others have in Europe and America.  

While the items at your breakfast, lunch and dinner table travel an average of 1,500 miles — that is a daily occurrence and local therefore does mean a great deal.  But when it comes to making a great common house (which, by the way, does more to encourage local than any other tool I know) then it’s important to make that critical investment work.  They say that to make our emerging local economy work, we have to make our local investments work.  Often, the best local union organizing happens by someone from out of town, the local farmers market has been organized with the help of folks who have successfully organized one elsewhere.  Make it work locally no doubt by first and foremost making it work so that local can work.