Why Am I Doing This?
In 2004, four years after I moved into a cohousing community in Washington, DC, I was sitting in a shopping mall parking lot in nearby Silver Spring, MD, wondering why cohousing communities weren’t growing by leaps and bounds. Why were we still building huge parking lots for cars instead of human-scale village squares? Roads instead of pedestrian paths?
One reason, of course, is that there is less available land. Land as a percentage of housing costs has increased in value so much that the only affordable housing is in high rise buildings in the city or in rural areas. On the East Coast and in other highly populated areas, even rural land is becoming more scarce and thus more expensive.
The shopping center parking lot was a canyon surrounded on three sides by eight high-rise residential buildings. How many people were housed there? Certainly a few thousand.
The parking lot was the size ofleast two large city blocks. It was surrounded by a wall. Some of the buildings had additional walls around the base of their buildings, I supposed to shield them from a view of the parking lot. There were no sidewalks except those immediately in front of the stores. None going through or around the parking lot. None leading to the buildings.The size of the parking lot, the barrier walls, and lack of sidewalks ensured that almost every person in each one of those buildings would drive to the shopping center.
Why were we still building such contradictory neighborhoods? Residential buildings immediately next to shopping malls that the residents cannot easily reach without a car? All these people should have been able to walk to shopping.
But the mindset wasn't there. No one was thinking about the environment, the people invironment. About how nice it would have been to have walking paths, sidewalks and trees. How much smaller the parking lot could have been if the shops had been accessible to these thousands of people without using cars.
Cohousing communities are designed by people who value people-space more than car-space. Most cohousing residents are conscioulsy trying to escape car culture. The cars are behind the houses, not in front. The buildings line greens and pedestrian walkways. Often front porches have returned and there are shared piazzas and gardens. The children have playgounds. Even when the building is a renovated urban office building, like Eastern Village in Silver Spring, MD, a few blocks from the infamous parking lot, there is a shared piazza built on a former driveway and loading dock. On the roof there is a large garden and a playground.
Looking a those buildings and wondering how to change the pattern of high rises and cars and parking lots, I realized that each floor of each of some of these buildings was as large as a small cohousing community. Cohousing communities are getting larger but are at their most comfortable are 25-35 housing units. By having one apartment used as a common space, each floor could have a shared guest room, a kids playroom, and a multi-purpose room for potluck dinners, watching football games together, and for use for private parties. Like cohousing communities, the residents could begin to think of other ways to meet their collective needs in more economical and convenient ways. The building could have shared shopping carts, for example, to make the trips to those shops even more possible.
Could coops, condominiums, and housing projects, even dying communities, become neighborhoods of people who not only knew each other's names but shared their lives, like cohousing?
I think the answer has to be yes. Billions of dollars have been invested in constructing apartment buildings and suburban housing tracts. Billions more are spent maintaining them. They are filled with people of every sort. A much richer diversity than most cohousing communities are able to acheive. This diversity is what makes urban neighborhoods vibrant. It can't be fabricated when you build from scratch.
Building Community was born in that instant. A place to put information about how things could be different. How to make the changes. Where to find resources. Where to find ideas. And where to find other people who are trying to do the same thing.
Building communities in condos and other neighborhoods will require cultural as well as physical changes. Like many suburban communities, condo culture says, “Don’t talk to your neighbors. Respect their privacy.” Or, “If you invite them in, you’ll never get rid of them.”
The majority of condo boards have as their main objective keeping the residents quiet, uninvolved, and under control. There is usually no invitation to engage with neighbors or an understanding that it is possible to both preserve personal privacy and establish a sense of commmunity. Common spaces are controlled by staff, not residents.
Building Community is about creating community where we live now, environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable communities that work. Places that are home. Places designed to be home. How to convert a city street into a pedestrian walkway and park to connect the houses on either side. How to change a sprawling suburb into a village.
In our cities as well as in many small towns, and certainly in the suburbs, more square feet are now dedicated to parking cars than to hobbies, playgrounds, gardens, or community gathering places. We have lost our town squares and neighorhood pubs. While we cherish our cars because they provide us great freedom and opportunity, what have we lost by having them dominate our lives? How does our car culture affect our sense of place and belonging? Our relationship to cars is only one example of the habits we need to question in order to create living spaces in place of concrete spaces.
These are the questions Building Community will explore. So please come back frequently and consider how your building could become a community.
Back to the Top
Back to the Home Page
Governance
Community Development
Sharing and Maintaining
Facilities
Tracking Community Service Hours