This site is about building community in coops, condos, and cohousing. It's about new neighborhoods like the one's you probably grew up in, but that now need to be built in highrises where few if any of the households have any relationship beyond a polite good morning or a query about whether the newspaper has been delivered.
A culture has built up, particularly in large buildings and new housing developments, in which we are expected to ignore our neighbors. We tell ourselves that we are respecting their privacy or protecting our own.
Cohousing communities are designed to change this, not to invade privacy, but to give everyone permission to be good neighbors. Cohousing communities are built by the people who plan to live in them with the intention of developing relationships between neighbors. Each household is independent, physically and economically, just like any other coop or condo. A difference, beyond expectations of relationships, is the sharing of comparitively large common facilities that provide opportunities to share meals, parties, concerts, or games. These lead to friendships and sharing.
While one purpose of this site is to share what cohousing has learned, it is also designed to share what other coops and condos have learned. Cohousing communities were originally very small compared to the size of condominium projects where 400 units is considered small. The early cohousing communities averaged 25 households. As land has become more expensive and cohousing communities want to build in ciites, they have become larger, some now closer to 60 units. Still small by most standards but large enough that they need professional management to maintain more complex facilities.
Almost none of the early cohousing communities had professional management and the routine maintenance work was done by residents, just as most home owners perform many tasks themselves. When cohousign become more familiar, more people were attracted to the friendlier buildings and happier communities. The Yankee-Do mentality of early cohousing, where the residents literally developed their projects themselves, has now given way to people who want community but feel that it can be achieved without hiring all the subcontractors themselves and mopping floors together.
Cohousing has focused from the beginning on green building materials, on more efficient use of space, and on encouraging use of alternative sources of energy. How can new and old buildings beging to do the same.
The information on this website is designed to explore the questions:
- How can a coop or condo become a community?
- What can a cohousing community learn from a traditional condo?
- How do we design and convert wastful and inefficient buildings into environmentally and economically sustainable homes?
- Can we transform a suburb into a small town with a center around which a community can be built?
- Where do we begin to re-create human scale, walkable communities?
- Can we return to community schools?
- How do we keep cars from dominating our landscape and our lives?
- How do we design and re-design affordable communities?
- What resources are available to help us do any or all of these things?
To join our email discussion list at YahooGroups, click here and send a blank message. You will receive a message to which you must respond to confirm that you do want to join the group -- be sure to watch your junk mail folder in case it is marked as spam. This is a low volume list and new members are moderated to prevent spam and off-topic messages.
Sharon Villines, Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
Q and A on Advertising and Getting New Members
Governance
Community Development
Sharing and Maintaining
Facilities
Tracking Community Service Hours