Cohousing-L Mailing List: Multi-Generations, How to Scale Up, White Gloves Off Conversation

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I’ve been working on this email for months. It started before the current 
discussion of aging. I had already been thinking a lot about cohousing needing 
to regenerating itself. After 20 years new residents don’t have the same ideas 
about cohousing. They didn’t cut their teeth on the 1960s and 70s. 

Can it still be cohousing for residents who moved into the result, the proven 
success. With no risks. All they need is money. 

The money side worries me a lot. It means single parents or singles planning to 
adopt are not moving in. Single women of a certain age with dead or irrelevant 
husbands and professional two-income households or couples are on the waiting 
list. 

Can a community built around nuclear families and partnered people be as 
inclusive as one for more varied lives? We only had 4 of 43 units with nuclear 
families when we began. Most of the people who became parents in the first 3-4 
years were not partnered. Almost no one had grandparents living near by. We 
needed each other. That caused friction too but it also brought us together. We 
were running in place in the community, not away at the office.

We have rumbled along with voluntary participation and many fabulous 
experiences with self-management and maintaining a sustainable facility, but 
can that continue now that the first generation of Yankee-do’s have died, moved 
to continuing care communities, or retired from tasks that require too much 
physical exertion or hopping out of bed in the middle of the night? 

Two professional income households don’t have the extra time and energy to lead 
a major renovation and replacement projects. Cooking and socializing is 
different, but what happens to the sump pumps and the downspouts and the 
rotting window sills?

The income range limits both diversity and inclusivity. The commitment to 
ownership requires a stable lifestyle. 

I’ve been thinking about how nice it was to be a child when mothers (usually) 
were home all day. The neighborhood was always watched and things happened 
spontaneously. Cakes just appeared. It wasn’t a major inconvenience for a child 
to be sick. Even during the pandemic when our water bills have almost doubled 
because so many people are home all day, they still aren’t available. They were 
still working and only in the CH looking for a quiet place to take a conference 
call.

Young professionals often aren't home for dinner, much less to cook it.

My own model comes back to the extended family—or the ideal of the extended 
family. How are family traditions maintained in the large extended families? 
Who keeps everyone in line? Moving toward the same values. Not giving up on 
sustainability at home. Not forgetting to build family relationships instead of 
making autocratic decisions. 

Continuing care communities are much more conscious of the age groups they can 
accommodate. The long waiting list isn’t just because there are no empty units 
— there may be no empty units for anyone in your age group or with your 
partner’s illnesses. They screen for income, age, and health conditions in 
order to sustain themselves. Cohousing has talked about the desirability of 
balancing age groups or sometimes agility levels, but not in any actionable 
way. Perhaps interviewing continuing care communities would help us understand 
how unrealistic we are about workshare.  

Discussions are ladened with false assumptions:

1. Assuming end of life dependency. Assuming mid-life self sufficiency. 
2. Assuming we can support diversity without overtly practicing exclusion.
3. Assuming that in cohousing, of course, teenagers will smoothly become young 
adults without distracting their whole household and at least two others before 
they smooth out at 18. 

Ann said:

> What's amazing to me is that the seniors themselves believe they should 
> depart.
> What happened to community. This is personal to me.  I've spent 23 years
> helping to build Takoma Village into the community it is now.  I am not a kid
> person but I have supported the raising of children here.  And now at the ripe
> old age of 72 I am facing a decision of what happens next?

What Ann says is totally true. People who built Takoma Village and continued to 
contribute 20-30 hours a week for 20+ years — feel guilty for not keeping it up 
another 20 years. And frustrated that everyone else is still working 10-12 hour 
days.

Cohousing won’t be a model for neighborhoods if it is limited to certain age 
groups and certain income levels and certain times of life. One community can’t 
make up for all of society's challenges but what would cohousing look like if 
it considered what kind of balance is necessary to actually be inclusive and 
self-dependent?

Are we spending enough time really examining our values and applying them to 
our daily lives?

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org