Cohousing-L Mailing List: INCREDIBLE East Bay Express article on coho

[Raines Cohen (raines-coho-L]

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/

(or free at corner bins throughout the Berkeley-Oakland [CA] area for the 
next week; everybody in the area should pick up a bunch, as I think this 
one's a great tool for explaining what we're all about)

Cover story:
Community Under Construction
The triumphs and trials of the cohousing movement
By Elizabeth Hollander

[it takes up SIX FULL PAGES in the newspaper with many pictures, so I'll 
include just some excerpts and highlights here]

Very balanced... centered around "local couple makes good" with Chuck & 
Katie + history, noting that there's more coho here than anywhere else 
(in Oakland alone 2 built communities, 2 retrofit; 2 other built comm 
within a mile, plus CHC and Karen Hester's Cohousing Consultants), 
getting into the evolution of the movement, quotes from many in local 
communities including a former member. The reporter attended the 
conference and visited several common dinners and at least one meeting of 
a group in formation, plus phone interviews.

The lead paragraph:
>When Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett literally wrote the book on 
>cohousing, they weren't trying to start a revolution. "It was just the way 
>we wanted to live," says McCamant with a modest, almost incredulous, 
>laugh. "It was an idea that made sense to us personally." But, now, ten 
>years after the first American cohousing community opened its doors, 
>McCamant and Durrett's landmark book has set the standard for over 55 
>village-like developments across the country. Last month, the movement 
>came home to the East Bay for its anniversary conference, an event that 
>attracted not only three hundred participants but a considerable buzz.

One theme is the variety:
>When it included the word "cohousing" in its 2000 edition -- for the 
>movement, a sure sign of having arrived -- the American Heritage 
>Dictionary defined it as "a living arrangement that combines private 
>living quarters with common dining and activity areas in a community whose 
>residents share in tasks such as childcare." But what you see when you 
>walk into a cohousing community may vary from place to place -- even 
>within Oakland. 

It's always good to see someone 'get it right' re TCN's independence, and 
turn to the Network for the big-picture perspective:
>Last month's conference, organized by the nonprofit Cohousing Network -- a 
>group that is independent of McCamant and Durrett -- certainly dramatized 
>the movement's momentum. Cosponsored by UC Berkeley's College of 
>Environmental Design, the conference attracted private and nonprofit 
>developers interested in offering the same kinds of services as McCamant 
>and Durrett's Cohousing Company, and an international collection of 
>individuals interested in everything from their first taste of cohousing 
>to new financing models for low-income cohousing. "In the last couple of 
>years, the number of complete communities has doubled, and so the 
>visibility we have is at a new level," says Cohousing Network Executive 
>Director Zev Paiss. "My expectation is that cohousing will continue to 
>grow. There's a lot of people who are saying, 'We've been living in the 
>suburbs for so many years, and it doesn't fulfill us.' Now that we have so 
>many cohousing communities built, people can start to walk though them and 
>they realize, 'This is not what I thought it was -- I could live here.'"

as well as the critical-mass aspect:
>With over fifty cohousing communities up and running around the country, 
>cohousers agree that their movement has reached a critical mass, a turning 
>point. Durrett points out that Denmark built 20 cohousing developments in 
>the first ten years, and 250 in the next decade; that projection would 
>bring over 500 cohousing communities to the US by 2020. 

And, with Joani's help, we get the "you have your own kitchen" and "it's 
not a commune" FAQ's out of the way:
>"You will do the cohousing movement a huge favor by not using the word 
>'communal,'" begs Swan's Market resident Joani Blank. "Say we have 
>'common' meals. That's the one thing that really freaks people out about 
>cohousing -- they can be sitting in your kitchen in your private residence 
>and ask, 'Do you have your own kitchen?' It really pushes people's 
>intimacy buttons." She adds, "We're neighbors. We're a neighborhood. I 
>don't use the word 'intentional community' -- our intention is to live 
>much closer to our neighbors than is common. We don't share an ideology -- 
>except for that. That's why you can't start cohousing with ten households 
>that are all your friends -- a neighborhood is not like that." 

and retrofit is fully represented, which I'm glad to see. And 
community-building. Developing groups. The "Honeymoon-is-over" phase. 
Kids issues. The amount of work going into the process. The amount of 
time it can take. The consensus process. Green Building. Church-based 
cohousing. "Get together with friends" cohousing. The development 
process. Communities include: Pleasant Hill, Cotati (Southern Sonoma 
coho), Swan's Market, Doyle Street, Sacramento Street, Temescal Creek, 
Temescal coho, with references to Muir Commons.

Plus some perspective on building community, including a favorite slogan:
>For the Cohousing Networks Zev Paiss, the fact that for most communities 
>these planning stages run relatively smoothly, is one of the movements 
>great achievements of the past ten years. We know how to build buildings, 
>but how to live in a community is something we all need to relearn, he 
>says. Everyone says they want diversity, but learning to deal with 
>idiosyncrasies and quirks is not something were taught to do in this 
>culture. Cohousing is the longest and most expensive personal growth 
>workshop you will ever take. Its very much a growth experience.

I like this quote from the "dealing with difficult members" session at 
the conference:
> "I see every difficult person as a lesson. I had expectations of what a 
>community is, and I realize now, this is what a neighborhood is: 
>acceptance, tolerance, compassion." 

And it's only mildly disquieting to see this quote from Chuck near a 
picture of common dinner prep:
> In a small town, people are highly accountable for their behavior -- that 
>it's a safe place to be even if there is a creep in your community. Do you 
>realize Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate seventeen people in his apartment 
>before anyone noticed? That's what happens in an anonymous society."

[hmmm, I can't find any threads on cannibalism at common dinners in the 
archives... anyone have advice on this topic? Should it be 
cross-referenced under "dealing with problem members"? ;-)]

I think it's great that the article has the perspective of a former 
cohouser, and we should make sure that the network is learning from them 
in order to help people make the best decisions about whether cohousing 
is right for them:

>Cohousing certainly has its discontents. Joan Braun was one of the 
>founding members of Doyle Street; she moved out in 1999. For her, a key 
>disappointment was the continual process of reshaping the community as 
>founding households were replaced by new tenants. "I just wasn't ready to 
>build community again over specific issues," she says. "You'd find 
>yourself going over the same territory. 
>
>"Consensus is a messy project, and it very seldom flows well. It did have 
>a dark side. I think there were times that people felt pressured into 
>consenting to something, and they would have stood a firmer line if they 
>didn't feel compelled to be a good neighbor. And conversely, people 
>invested more sometimes than [issues warranted] because they had something 
>personal about being validated. The personal became very closely aligned 
>with the political. Sometimes people would make long impassioned speeches, 
>but then say, 'But it's okay with me.' So why did we listen to them for 
>twenty minutes?" 
>
>Braun still says cohousing was a wonderful experience that she would 
>"never have not done." But ultimately, for her, it came down to a question 
>of just how much community a person really wants out of life. "There are 
>differing levels for how much individuals want to feel joined. It was 
>clear to me from the first day that I was holding down one end of the 
>spectrum -- and after a while, I was tired of holding down that end of the 
>spectrum. And as we changed, the balance between those who wanted more and 
>those who wanted less also changed. It was going towards being slightly 
>more than I felt comfortable with. You felt bad if you didn't show up for 
>dinner, because everybody else did. You start not doing things that you 
>would otherwise do. You are aware that you haven't showed up for something 
>-- you think, If I were doing this right, I would go." 

And, of course, the "D" word: Diversity:
>Cohousing now is a mostly a white, middle-class movement -- although 
>cohousers like to point to the high concentration of immigrants that 
>diversify their communities, and they also note that most cohousing 
>communities contain a greater diversity of household incomes than 
>traditional suburban developments. "To a certain extent, the white middle 
>class needs an injection of community more," says McCamant. "We've done 
>the best at destroying it, and therefore have a stronger desire for it." 
>But she and Durrett are also committed to bringing cohousing concepts to 
>nonprofit developments. They've already designed a single-room-occupancy 
>hotel in San Francisco where formerly homeless residents cook meals for 
>one another and manage their own building; other current projects include 
>a community for single moms on welfare, where shared meals and childcare 
>leave time for homework. "We have quite a number of projects on the boards 
>right now where nonprofit developers have come to us and said, 'We can't 
>do cohousing for this reason or that reason, but we want community in our 
>project,'" says Durrett. "'We want there to be a viable social experience 
>in our 41-unit project. We don't want to just warehouse people.'"
>
>"One could argue we needed to prove it works first, and I think we've sort 
>of done that," adds McCamant. "Now we've got a base to build on; we know 
>this works; now maybe we can have better luck pushing into other places. 
>That's what I'd like to see happen over the next ten years." 
>
>In the end, McCamant and Durrett say, it's less important how much 
>cohousing is built than how far the terms of the debate are shifted. 
>Innovation is hard to achieve in city planning, the two say, because 
>consumers aren't even given choices to advocate for. "As a consumer, 
>you're looking at this from the perspective of what you know," McCamant 
>says. "But when you're looking at a site plan, you can say, yes, we can do 
>it that way, or we can do it this other way, and what does it give you 
>this way? Over and over again I've seen people do 180-degree turns on what 
>they thought was important when they hear other people and really see the 
>impacts and begin to understand how one thing affects another. It takes 
>time. When you're doing something that hasn't been done before, or you 
>want to push the limits, it takes time." [END]


Raines Cohen <coho-L [at] raines.com> <http://www.swansway.com/>
Putting together a cohousing booth for the Solano Stroll.

  Vice President, Swan's Market Cohousing [Old Oakland, CA]
Cooking gazpacho for common dinner tonight AND hosting an overlapping 
event.

  Member, East Bay Cohousing [no site yet] <http://www.ebcoho.org/>
Which had a nice social/orientation Sunday and will have another in Sept.

  Boardmember, The Cohousing Network <http://www.cohousing.org/>
Still following up on loose ends from the conference.


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