Is Co-housing the way of the future?

Sarah -

I am one of the members of Daybreak. (Members are those of us that belong to the community and plan to live in it). I sense some curiousity within your post. Is this accurate? I'd invite you to come get to know us a bit if you are curious. Our events are listed on our website. We just had a neighborhood meet and greet over at Yeti's to meet more of our future neighbors. We invited at least 100 immediate neighbors, plus the neighborhood association. We hope to be good neighbors and hopefully be a positive contribution to this already fabulous neighborhood and community. My husband and I moved into the neighborhood last December and are loving it!

Also, in case folks are interested, I'll let you know a little bit about us. (You can also find out a whole lot from our website which Sara has linked in her post (thank you). You can also look at gleam lots more information about intentional communities and cohousing specifically from many of the resource links on our website including: Cohousing.org.

Some members in our community may fit into one's vision of being hippy-like, but I'd venture to guess that most of us do not. If you come to meet us, I think you'd find a bunch of pretty regularly quirky people (as I believe most people have querkiness of some sort) that really are looking for a closer sense of community where we live. We are interested in living in what we like to call an "urban village". Our members currently range in age from about 8 weeks to 70 years.

We will eventually be 30 households (and are building 30 units). Sustainability was very important to us and have tried to be sustainable as much as we can. I understand your thoughts about the 12 units that went down. It was a difficult decision for us to make as well. I'll share a little here and I'd be happy to share more about it if you want to hear it.

Sustainability is very interesting to me. I personally work in a field where we work to be sustainable. However, there are trade-offs to everything it seems. For instance, in this case, putting 30 units on a close-in property that previously only had 12, is providing more density in an urban setting. Removing the cars from the site and providing more green space on the property is also sustainable for stormwater management, etc. However, then it is taking more resources to build those 30 units and there is energy and some additional resources in being able to reuse the materials that came out of those 12 units. And what can't be directly reused takes energy to be recycled (and sadly some of it - though really very little - did end up in a landfill). And we get the benefit that the new units will be better insulated, more energy efficient, the site will now manage stormwater on-site, etc. etc. So the long-term use of the site is arguably more sustainable then continuing to have 12 units which are leaky, has 100's of SF of asphalt,  doesn't manage stormwater onsite, places 18 more units somewhere else, etc. etc. But the materials would then be staying intact, they wouldn't require lead paint mitigation, or any of the extra energy or materials, etc. that I listed above. And with some additional work and materials, they could have been rehabbed, insulation increased, different heating systems put in, etc. It's an interesting philosophical struggle to me and there isn't a right or a wrong. They are just different approaches.

So Sara, thank you for taking notice of our project and posting this. I hope you do decide to come and meet us at some point. Perhaps you'll even want to join us for a meal in our common house sometime after we move in. Or perhaps you'll decide you want nothing to do with us, and that's okay too. We hope to be a positive addition to this neighborhood. Karen, thank you for your support as well. Which communities were you referring to? Where are your neck of the woods? We hope not to be clichish or NIMBY like either. Our intention is quite the opposite and we are all learning as well.

Cheers!

Sara,

It's great to see appraisers interested in learning more about cohousing. So often we get evaluated just based on our (relatively small) units, without factoring in the benefits of the extensive common facilities.

As Kristin mentions, this movement is all about building sustainable community, private homes (condos) with large shared areas, with resources to support being good, connected neighbors.

I've visited more than 80 of the 115 established cohousing neighborhoods across the U.S., including all of the Portland ones, and never cease to be surprised and amazed by the power of this unique mix of privacy and community to find innovative solutions that go way beyond the "sticks and bricks" of green building to promote sustainability and quality of life.

There is a vibrant resale market in cohousing, with units selling at or above comparable prices for nearby equivalent-size and -age and -type properties, often with shorter times on market.

A PDX-area bank was recently quoted as saying that they can proceed with cohousing in this market when they can't with conventional development, because the future residents are engaged and co-invested in the project, so the risks are lower.

Don't forget to also check out the just-finishing Columbian EcoVillage not far from the Daybreak site, as well as other long-established area communities, including Trillium Hollow and Cascadia Commons.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach, Planning for Sustainable Communities (at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing)

Northern California Cohousing Regional Organizer (who promises never to move to OR, fear not ;-))

Me again,

Sara - the "hot-bed" areas for cohousing are generally considered to be: Northern California, Seattle, Colorado, WA DC and Boston. But they are scattered throughout the US and Canada. Originally started in Denmark, where there are far more. There are a few books on cohousing now (cohousing is actually a term coined in the US, it has a different name in Denmark, which escapes me). And there are multiple in Portland already.