Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing and suburban sprawl

[David L. Mandel (75407.2361]

OK, here's something totally different I got out of the Boulder conference ...
and I'd like to provoke a discussion.

I've always felt ambivalent about what seems to be the most mainstream cohousing
model: Find a nice-sized parcel, say 30 acres, on the suburban fringe and
develop a new community with all the great aspects we know so well.

On the plus side, it's certainly better use of that parcel to put 30 homes and a
common house on 5 acres and keep the other 25 open than it is to build 30 homes
on 1-acre lots. Aside from being conducive to community, yes, I know it means
less concrete, more room for big trees and open space, fewer resources wasted on
infrastructure, etc.

But isn't this still a very small drop in the bucket of suburban sprawl? Zoning
regulations dictate that this 30-acre site will probably be pretty much
surrounded by other developments in which 1 house per acre is the norm. And even
if cohousing became the mainstream trend we fantasize about and this
hypothetical cohousing community were surrounded by other 30-unit cohousing
communities on 30 acres each, would that have much impact on automobile use? On
the despoiling of any open spaces of really significant size in our metropolitan
areas? I think not.

Richard Register's keynote speech in Boulder and continued discussions with him
and others afterward at dinner reinforced my unease with this suburban model.
Yes, one big problem with the suburbs is the lack of community, and cohousing is
one answer (not the only one, by the way: our daily newspaper's weekend home
improvement supplement last Saturday had a cover story extolling the wonderful
community that often exists in suburban cul de sacs -- cohousing site design
turned inside out). 

But the other big problem is with the sprawl itself. Richard's long-range
blueprint for Berkeley, and all healthy urban areas of the future, actually
resembles the picture I painted above of clusters of communities surrounded by
open space. He speaks not of 30-house clusters with 25 acres of green, however,
but clusters of thousands of people living much more densely than almost any of
us do today, surrounded by thousands of acres of open space. Cohousing
communities, small and large, could certainly exist within the densely populated
areas. But this is a vision of Earth-friendly living much bigger than the
typical suburban coho village that seems to be the movement's current ideal.

I am convinced, for now, of the correctness of Richard's views. And it was an
enlightening experience to catch some flak from him and others at Friday's
dinner when I admitted that my cohousing community was built at less than the
maximum allowable density for our neighborhood. While we are infill, highly
urban and a lot denser than most other cohousing sites (25 units on 1.3 acres),
we too wanted to have some internal open space, to look as much as possible like
the cohousing pictures we saw in the book. I think my dinner partners forgave us
when I explained that the only housing in our neighborhood that reaches the 36
per acre limit is rectangular blocks of tiny apartments with no green at all.
Our project includes 4- and 5-bedroom units for families, and we were still
limited by a two-story maximum. Most of the neighborhood is still single-family
or duplex at a density of 10 units per acre, I'd estimate, so by clustering and
attaching walls we're still more dense than the norm and we fit in well with it
visually.

Back to the main point: I read a lot of messages here and in the journal from
groups in formation that say they're looking for a "semi-rural" virgin site of
100 acres or so where they want "to live lightly on the land" by clustering
their couple dozen homes and doing all sorts of environmentally correct things
as far as construction methods go. My hunch, however, is that these groups are
not really serious about rural -- as in agricultural -- life. If they do find
land (probably more like 30 acres than 100) and actually get communities built,
zoning laws and general plans will likely put them more on the suburban fringe,
and if their site is not already surrounded by other suburban developments it
probably soon will be.

No matter how "lightly" such a group lives on the micro level, aren't they
really contributing to the bigger problem -- suburban sprawl -- almost as much
as their non-cohousing neighbors? And by choosing the suburbs, aren't they
likely minimizing the chances of ethnic/cultural/economic diversity that so many
of us say we seek?

I don't mean to be harsh. I'm eager to see how "ecovillages" turn out and I'm
sure they'll have something to teach us about environmentally friendly design
and energy use. But Richard and some other visionary planners at the conference
turned me on to a bigger picture that I had felt intuitively when I and my core
group came down definitively six years ago on the side of doing cohousing
downtown and making it affordable. There are others, too: Doyle Street, Cardiff
Place, are urban and dense. The downtown Oakland group hopes to be even more
affordable than we were. How about considering it for your group too instead of
that "semi-rural" fantasy that will probably end up as all white, middle class
suburbia?

Looking forward to your slings and arrows.

David Mandel, Southside Park Cohousing, Sacramento