Cohousing-L Mailing List: Is the term Cohousing hurting us?

[Stephen Farley (sfarley]

I know that the term "cohousing" is by now well-entrenched as the main
descriptor of the movement, it being the title of the main book, the main
journal, and the main mailing list, but I want to risk heresy by suggesting
that the term may be hurting us and preventing us from sharing cohousing
with a larger, more mainstream audience.

Why? Here are some thoughts:

I recently got back from a short vacation to visit cousins in the small
town of Panguitch, Utah, a community based primarily on agriculture and 
the tourist trade from nearby Bryce Canyon. I have gone there just about
every summer for the last 25 years, but this was the first time I have gone
back since I became more conscious of the concept of community.

I was struck by how most of the people in Panguitch, predominantly
conservative in many ways, seem to be living the ideal of cohousing in 
most aspects of their lives. Farmers help each other with tasks for free,
in the expectation that someday they, too, will be helped in return.
Mothers in the community often act as mothers for children not their own.
The entire community takes part in the high school sports program, 
whether rooting on the basketball teams, or sewing costumes for the drill
team. And everyone seems to know everyone else in the entire county of
nearly 4000 people. 

And yet, if you told these Panguitch citizens of "cohousing", you would likely 
be 
be met with a blank stare, uncomfortable shifting, or suspicions that you
harbored communist leanings. 

Why do we have this disjuncture? Why can't we seize the deep American roots
of cohousing, and show Americans that this is a form of living steepd in
American traditions and, yes, in many ways very conservative.

Perhaps we should be talking less in the language of academia or leftist
intellectualism, and more in the language of everyday people?

I don't really have any answers; I just feel that what we all want to see
happen in the way we live isn't all that different from what people on the
right seem to want when they talk of family values and community. Cohousing
may become a much larger tent if we drop the labels.

Then maybe we won't be ignored next time Newsweek does a story on
American housing alternatives.

Any thoughts?

Steve Farley
(sfarley [at] igc.apc.org)