Prioritizing Belonging when Buying My First Home

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.

The Micro & Macro of Cohousing Design

By Nadthachai Kongkhajornkidsuk

One of the first projects I was fortunate enough to work on at The Cohousing Company was co-writing and editing our most recent book Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods—now published by Wiley.

In all honesty, as a young designer, I was quite overwhelmed by the breadth of information that the book had to offer on my first read. There seem to be so many factors that are crucial to make a cohousing community successful and high-functioning from a design and social point of view—from two-hands clapping philosophy in site design to 0.70 second reverberation in common house's acoustic.

However, as I started editing the book and talked to Chuck about his experience and intention for the book, it became clear to me that while all these design factors are related to one another, there's a logical sense of order and scale in which these design factors play a role in designing cohousing.

I believe we have all heard the saying "You can't see the forest for the tress,” or “The devil is in the details.” And I believe that both of these sayings hold true when it comes to cohousing design and the success of cohousing communities. As you can see in Chapter 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, & 12 of Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods, we always start off each design workshop with establishing:

1. Goals

2. Activities

3. Places

This order of operation allows us to ensure that both the architect and the future residents understand who the group are, who they want to be, and how their future cohousing community can help them best realize their goals and values. Once the criteria is established, then we can dive into all the design details that will ultimately serve the goals, activities, and places that we established—from party wall detail to reduce sound transmission between the units, to the proportion and acoustic treatment of the common house that reduce the reverberation, so neighbors can enjoy their common meal and have meaningful conversations during and afterwards.

With this understanding of the Macro and Micro of cohousing in mind, I tried my best to make sure that we conveyed this important lesson into the book Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods, so that it can help other designers who are interested in designing high-functioning cohousing community or anything with community as the emphasis, just like myself.

This book is written with our 30-year experience designing more than 50 cohousing communities in North America, and many more around the world. While we made some mistakes along the way, we learned from them and we can now confidently say what works and what doesn’t when it comes to designing a high functioning community—especially many small details that make all of the difference when it comes to designing cohousing. We also live in cohousing, and we hear from our neighbors what works and doesn’t, and we share that with this book. We hear from the residents who live in all of the 55 cohousing that we have designed—both the good and the bad. We are in contact with them all of the time, so we can ensure that their cohousing communities are sustainably high functioning.

If you’re going to do a cohousing—do it right, and we fully believe that this book gives you the tools.

Poland Update #9

Last Set of Photos from the border

The last photos from the front.

Ukrainian kids, some orphans, getting a little bit of the love right across the border in Poland. The forth and last classroom in three different buildings.

I cleaned out the bank account today at Chase there was ten dollars and 94 cents left.

My month in Poland was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. But as you can see looking at these kids, how absolutely gratifying it was and is. Thanks for all of your support

Please visit our website to see more photos of this classroom HERE

Love, Chuck

Neurological Diversity in Cohousing

Lessons Learned from Solheimar EcoVillage

Cohousing has got so much going for it...

However, on the outside it might look like it has one shortcoming ­– that is dealing with neurological diversity. For the most part, cohousing appears to be chock-full of the ultra-responsible’s in society, people who want to get the most value out of life, I sometimes feel guilty because I feel as if, with a few exceptions, we took the coolest people in the county and put them in one neighborhood. The people who know how or want to learn how to cooperate, share, give, take, grow, and live lighter on the earth, all the while being happier. I feel like we made a cool people hub.

So, when someone comes around who was picked on throughout their youth because of a glitch, not the most well-adjusted, for one reason or another, they can sometimes feel invisible, prejudiced against, and on occasion express aberrate behavior.

But what encourages me the most about cohousing, and Solheimar Ecovillage specifically, is their deliberate attempts to address neurological diversity, physical disability, classism, racism, sustainability and more.

The neighborhood level is just one place to address these issues, but it works well, especially in influencing children about tolerance, empathy, and developing healthy social connections with others.

Something just happens in cohousing....

People have one opportunity after another to learn something or more likely a whole bunch of things that they would have learned earlier if they had extraordinary parents or grew up in a supportive village. They become a little happier, and they prosper.

Over and over again, folks who had rough lives because of their neurodivergence and look at their shoes when they first move in, then just a few months later look you in the eye, smile, converse, tell stories, make dinner for everyone and all the rest.

The project above, Soleheimar Ecovillage, which currently has an approximate population of 100 people, many of whom deal with learning difficulties.

Now powered with thermal and solar energy, the village is fully sustainable, boasting a greenhouses, an arboretum, egg-laying facilities and forestry programmes.

Here’s to putting the pieces together, and here’s to making a more viable society.

SB 9, ADU, Affordable Housing, & Community

An Opportunity for Creating Community within Single-Family Fabric

Sixty-nine percent of housing in America is single-family housing—the epitome of separating people.

The new Senate Bill 9 (SB 9) in California encourages infill and more affordable housing development. This will result in a more walkable towns—making places close to each other and allowing commerce to prosper and community to flourish. SB 9 reintroduces a more historical type of land use where people fit into affordable housing—literally stitching it right back into the fabric of the town.

Nevada City, the town I live in, had 10,000-16,000 residents in 1900, according to historical records. And it was one square mile then. Now, it’s two square miles, and right at 3,000 residents. The town once had a hardware store, 2 drug stores, a grocery store, but now it has none of that. Single family housing took over, leaving the city underpopulated and unaffordable. Supply & demand is real.

Now, thanks to SB 9, things can start to shift back. Imagine in this elegant little neighborhood you add a common house and clustered parking, and soon you’re well on your way to a high-functioning neighborhood. SB 9 allows owners to subdivide their lots into 2 lots. Then it allows each lot to add on an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), sometimes known as a granny flat or a mother-in-law unit.

These additional units will do a great deal for the neighborhood.

First of all, the kids who grew up in this town might be able to afford to move back to town. The housekeeper that I used to have would like to live in the town that she grew up in, Nevada City, instead of Roseville, which is 50 miles away. Almost all of our service workers, baristas, restaurant workers, and more, currently drive from considerable distances to work in town. So infill will also mitigate the ridiculous traffic into our town every morning, and lessen global warming.

Some of the towns around San Diego have the same problem, so we are proposing a cohousing community in Ramona, San Diego County, that not only provides entry level housing there, but will also ultimately helps revitalize that charming town, both economically and culturally, as young people who work in the town will be able to afford to live and stay in the town.

I suspect that Nevada City will never have a population of 10,000 people again, but it might get to 3,500 someday which would be a step in the right direction when it comes to people having an affordable place to stay in our town and other suburban towns like Ramona, and many more.