Cohousing-L Mailing List: SF Bay Area cohousing

[findley (findley]

I've been reading the cohousing mailing list for several weeks, and have
just begun actually looking for cohousing opportunities in the San Francisco
Bay area.

I'm a divorced woman with older children (the youngest is 15), and I'd
like to live in a community; actually I've been interested in comunity
living for years, and my divorce gives me an opportunity to do something
about it.  I like the combination of independence and sociability that
cohousing seems to offer.

I've learned about a group in Emeryville that has already moved into their
building, a converted warehouse, that's very beautiful architecturally but
also, because of the urban industrial setting, lacks a real contact with 
the earth.

I'm also in touch with a women's cohousing group that's buying a property 
in Berkeley with a house and cottages already on it and planning extensive 
remodelling and repair, and with a group that's looking at land adjacent 
to a park in El Sobrante, a more distant suburb where there is a little 
more room.

If anyone is aware of other groups in the Bay Area, especially the East Bay,
I'd like to know about them.  

I'm not sure how much common interests or philosophies of life are
necessary to make a cohousing community work.  I know I'm looking for
a community with a good mix of ages and household structure, children
and older people, and I'm looking forward to helping to create the
kind of environment I would have liked for my kids when they were younger--
a community in which they have close relations with more adults than
just their parents.  Gardens and the outdoors are important to me, though
I like an urban setting.

How many of you on this network have experience actually living
in cohousing or similar arrangements?  How does it really work for
the children?  How does it really work for middle-aged adults?

Does anyone know how many people are on this mailing list, and where
they are geographically?

Looking forward to learning more--

Rachel Findley (findley [at] math.berkeley.edu)
findley