If you’re the kind of person who loves being involved with your neighbors and would rather age around ones you consider friends, cohousing might be a better fit. These small-scale neighborhoods average between 12 and 45 homes—with residents ranging in age from babies to the very old—and balance privacy and socializing. Neighbors are committed to living as a community, and even the design makes it “easy and natural” for them to interact,” said Lisa Poley, president of the board of the Cohousing Association of the United States.
Houses don’t face the street; the street is behind the house, along the periphery of the village, and that’s where all the cars are parked. Homes, clustered together and small, open inward toward each other and the sidewalks and courtyards, leaving more room for open space, which is shared. There are common play areas for children and community vegetable gardens, and informal group meals a few times a week as well as meetings for business and pleasure. All of this leads to stronger bonds among neighbors.
So, “If somebody just wants a place to live and doesn’t want to commune with their neighbors, this is not for them,” a 68-year-old resident of one cohousing community told USA Today.
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Cohousing is intergenerational, which appeals to older adults wanting daily contact with children and younger adults. There are more than 100 completed intergenerational cohousing communities, and another 100 more in the process of development. For seniors who prefer being around older adults, there’s a fairly new option: senior cohousing communities. Only three are up and running—the first opened in late 2005—and two more are nearing construction starts. Others are in the discussion phase.
It sounds ideal in many ways. But cohousing is not always ready and waiting for you to hop aboard. Communities are the creation of their future residents and take a lot of time—and consensus—to plan, design, and construct. Land must be purchased, and workers hired. From the time the group begins meeting to the completion date can take between two and four years. “It can be taxing and exhausting,” Poley said. “It’s a lot of work unless you hire a developer to take on the whole thing, in which case there is a cost consequence.”
And when the cohousing community is built, the residents’ job isn’t done. They continue to work together to run their new neighborhood, solving problems and developing policies. There are no homeowners association boards making all the decisions, Poley said. In cohousing, “everybody has to sign on.”
Sense of Purpose
Cohousing can be found in rural and urban areas. Some were formed from warehouses retrofitted into apartments with common spaces. Some are condos, and some are small attached or single-family homes. But most communities follow the six core principles that distinguish cohousing from other types of collaborative housing: the participatory process, a neighborhood design, common facilities, resident management, nonhierarchical structure and decision making, and no shared community economy.
Each community has a common house, the centerpiece of cohousing. It’s the community’s social center, with a dining room, kitchen, lounge, recreational facilities, laundry facilities, guest rooms, and other features. It’s where the group meals (prepared by the residents) are served and the meetings are held. Neighbors also gather there for celebrations. If you want to throw a party or put up guests, the common house is equipped to do that. Having this larger common space allows the individual homes to be built smaller, which helps hold down the cost of utilities and maintenance.
Cohousing communities often have missions, which are determined by the residents. “Some place the environmental ethic very high,” said Poley. “Others place affordability and diversity very high.” At Winslow Cohousing near Seattle, the aim is to have “a minimal impact on the earth and create a place in which all residents are equally valued as part of the community,” according to the Cohousing Association’s Web site. Tierra Nueva Cohousing in Oceano, California, exists “because each of us desires a greater sense of community, as well as strong interaction with and support from our neighbors.” ElderSpirit Community in Abingdon, Virginia, “is a participatory membership organization for older adults that provides opportunities for growth through later life spiritual programs and through the formation of communities and residential centers.”
ElderSpirit, opened in 2006, is one of the three senior cohousing communities. The first to open was Glacier Circle Community, in December 2005, in Davis, California. Silver Sage Village opened in Boulder, Colorado, in 2007. As of December 2009, two more senior cohousing communities were nearing the construction phase: Washington Village in Boulder, and Wolf Creek Lodge in Grass Valley, California.
Silver Sage Village’s design earned McCamant & Durrett Architects the Silver Award for Best of Senior Living by the National Association of Home Builders in 2008. Husband-wife architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett introduced cohousing to the United States in 1988 in their book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves after studying the concept in Denmark. Durrett applied the cohousing model to senior communities in his 2005 book Senior Cohousing, A Community Approach to Independent Living—The Handbook. One reviewer called that book the “gold standard for anyone interested in this subject.”
Though communal housing for the elderly is new, intergenerational communities have been around since the early 1990s. Wonderland Hill Development Company began its focus on cohousing at that time and has since built 16 cohousing communities. Nationwide, the numbers are inexact, but overall another 60 to 70 intergenerational communities are in the talking stages.
The Cohousing Association, a nonprofit going on its 10th year, is a place of networking, which Poley considers “vitally important” because of the grassroots nature of the movement. It gives people the resources and direction for starting their own cohousing communities and helps raise awareness about cohousing “as a viable housing option.”
“A Wonderful Way to Live”
Poley lives in Shadowlake Village Cohousing in Blacksburg, Virginia. She visited many cohousing communities as part of research for her doctoral dissertation. “Across the board, people who live in these neighborhoods are thrilled with it,” she concluded. “I’ve lived in one for 10 years. It’s a wonderful way to live.”
Before moving in, she had fears about living that close to her neighbors. But she has been struck by how different life is now compared to her previous traditional neighborhood. “There I knew my neighbors enough to say hi at the mailbox,” she said. “Here I have such a wonderful sense of community around me. For me, I don’t think I desire to live in a regular neighborhood again.”
Though younger families like Poley’s are missing from senior cohousing, those communities often want a balance of young and old retirees. “The younger ones go in fully knowing that a big part of their life is supporting and caring for members of their community,” she said. “Everybody has that commitment to going through the stages of aging in place and helping those older, and then being helped later.”
What if an elderly resident is becoming too frail to be alone? “When someone gets to the place where neighbors and friends can’t support them, there’s a sense of solidarity in helping that person figure out what to do,” she said. It’s part of what being in a real community is all about.
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Related Links
The Cohousing Association of the United States [http://www.cohousing.org]
McCamant & Durrett Architects [http://www.mccamant-durrett.com/
McCamant & Durrett Architects video on senior cohousing [http://www.mccamant-durrett.com/media.cfm#]
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Wonderland Hill Development Company [http://www.whdc.com/]
Sources
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El Nasser, Haya. Seniors at home in co-housing. USA Today, May 4, 2009. http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-05-03-co-housing_N.htm?csp=34
Kennedy, Christine. Aging in Place: Cohousing: An alternative for America’s Older Adults. Cohousing, 2008 posting.
http://www.cohousing.org/2008/pgrogramming/older
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Silver Planet® empowers boomers and seniors to make informed decisions about aging in place and housing options. Silver Planet’s team provides the latest information on scams, housing, financial planning, caregiving, spirituality, elder law, health, and new tech tools for staying at home, thus providing the information you need to make aging with choice a reality.
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