By Genevieve Marsh
Image: Katie McCamant
When I recently visited the Cohousing community in Nevada City, CA, I was impressed with the walkable location, the regional vibe of the architecture, and the friendliness of the people. From what I knew about Cohousing, I was expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was to feel immediately connected to my community and my inner self.
In an age where many of us move away from home and keep on moving, it’s difficult to build a fulfilling life outside of work. While we try to make friends, it’s difficult to build or find a true community. When buying a house for the first time, it is difficult or even impossible to know what type of community you are joining. With the rise in remote working and digital communication, it is difficult to find and foster real relationships and community support. Most people in the suburbs never meet their neighbors. My attraction to authenticity, artisanal goods, and locally grown food are all desires to connect the everyday activities of my life to a community with the same values. But however nice buying produce at the farmers market may be, it’s only a small moment in my life – in my neighborhood, it only happens on Saturdays.
What I felt at the Cohousing visit was a larger sense of belonging, and it felt immediate, empowering, and grounding. A humble feeling of awakening to and living in one’s higher nature by being accountable to others came with the stability of knowing that those around me are committed to similar values. These values underpinned all our interactions.
These feelings are the components of belonging. As social creatures, in an age of social anxieties, this is a refreshing antidote. It makes one feel healthy and strong. This is preventative care at its most fundamental. Where we live affects our lifespan and health. Despite this being common knowledge, many of us do little to carefully consider the soil in which we plant our roots or the social and psychological dimensions that accompany a lack of connectedness. Cohousing members watch less TV, and they experience more in-person social interactions. In Chicago, people belonging to strong neighborhoods had a better chance of surviving devastating heat waves, independent of affluence, than those disconnected from their neighbors.
Having neighbors to garden with increases the chance of actually planting vegetables that make it to harvest and to your table. Having neighbors of different ages and backgrounds helps to show the roadmap of life. Not to mention how a Cohousing project creates a village to help support and raise children or take care of pets – a place where they can run and play safely with other neighborhood kids and pets. Being close to parks and recreational spaces makes cohousing projects perfect for entertaining children, socializing dogs, and getting exercise and fresh air.
In Cohousing projects, the location is carefully chosen to maximize the proximity to amenities and community resources. Located close to jobs and local businesses and in up-and-coming neighborhoods allows residents to achieve a holistic work-life balance for excellent value. Deepening relationships and strengthening the community are intentional goals in designing cohousing situations.
Being the change you want to see requires more than you can accomplish alone. The power of change comes when people support and amplify the actions of others. Cohousing offers this across the board, from a healthier lifestyle to a healthy sustainable home. For example, your per capita GHG emissions decrease by 2/3rds compared to if you lived in a single-family house. By utilizing eco-friendly building materials, and installing energy-efficient features, the overall cost of housing goes down dramatically, and you can feel good about your personal resource use. Doing the right thing usually comes at a higher cost, but in cohousing communities, designing spaces for sharing decreases the cost to each individual. The space you get in a cohousing project is often bigger and better. An individual unit may be 1,500 square feet but the common space is often double that. When you join a cohousing project at initiation, you can pick your unit size – simply put, your money goes further.
There is a new cohousing project coming to Vancouver. It is being designed with Charles Durrett, their development consultant. Charles has designed more cohousing communities than anyone else and his projects are considered extremely successful. To learn more about a current cohousing project in the Vancouver area, check out https://www.facebook.com/eastvancohousing.