RE: New York Times Articles: They Took a Chance on Collaborative Living. They Lost Everything. February 11, 2022
After seven unbelievably positive articles by The New York Times about cohousing (see cohousingco.com), it was inevitable that they would “balance” that track record and point out one when things went south. But it was also inevitable that a cohousing business deal would go south eventually.
Katie and I perhaps overemphasized in our first book, which brought cohousing to North America, how grassroots cohousing development was in Denmark. We were young and idealistic and enamored with “the people just doing it” and that was what we emphasized. But it wasn’t until my fifth trip back to Denmark when Jan Gudmand-Høyer finally got it into my head all of the various clearly extraordinary skilled players that it really took to make a successful cohousing community happen.
And he was right—good cohousing is just as complicated as flying a commercial airplane if not more. The emphasis on community is critical to the ultimate success no doubt, but navigation on the business side is just as critical.
It is a political act, an anthropological study, a business act, a careful design process, and culture change.
And it takes a village—a village of passionate cultural creatives who truly believe that high-functioning neighborhoods are the future we all deserve, and we need experienced professionals to make that future come true.
While we extensively cover the design principles that contribute to what make a cohousing project successful in our latest book Community-Enhanced Design: Cohousing and Other High-Functioning Neighborhoods—from having thorough sets of programs & design criteria to common house designs that maximize people-hours, we also emphasize the importance of group process and project management in the success of cohousing. The New York Times article about the new cohousing group in Connecticut provided us with a wake-up call and a number of valuable lessons on this topic, including:
1. Not having adequate timelines, which translates to under project managed.
2. Under-considered feasibility/due diligence (Rocks).
3. “Bureaucratic” delays because someone didn’t know how to get the politicians on board. Projects should take no more than 9 months to get approved—and that process has to be specifically engineered.
4. A project in Eugene, OR originally had a $465K water hook-up fee requirement that went to a $45K hook-up after talking to the right (5th) engineer. You have to find the right people and negotiate every line item.
5. Yarrow had a perfect on-site sewer system (See C-ED and Creating Cohousing).
6. Renegotiate with the bank (see Katie McCamant or similar).
But believe me, professionals alone do not and cannot create a successful cohousing community. There is no better example than the story of Nevada City Cohousing. Prior to our submission to the city, 3 different experienced developers each spent great fortunes developing a non-cohousing proposal and they all failed.
However, with the involvement of the residents, including schoolteachers and single moms—sharing their needs for affordable yet high-functioning neighborhoods, the proposal of Nevada City Cohousing was approved by the city despite the existing nimby culture.
There are also other instances where the developers alone tried to make cohousing projects (Colorado and Petaluma, CA) and proved to be complete and total flops.
With our experience designing more than 55 cohousing projects in North America, we highly recommend you getting The Cohousing Company or similar to help you figure out if your development scenario will succeed or fail. A group that is too head strong will fail. This recently happened in Northern California. A professional developer who knows the tricks of the trade but carries the predominant attitude of the trade (control, control, control) will fail, fail, fail.
In the book Community-Enhanced Design, we delineated the stories of 18 projects that are very affordable because of a good mixture of group and professionals.
Cohousing takes humility on all sides and an ability to work together in harmony. But you have to have the minimum cast of characters at the table. Yes, it is “heart breaking” what happened in Connecticut, so please look at both Creating Cohousing and CED—do the homework necessary to do these projects right. As my Mom used to say, “if you can’t find the library, you will forever be lost.”