Cohousing Communities – Why do people get involved in developing them?

Last year, nine of MVCC’s members cooperated in an ethnographic study of why people get involved in creating cohousing communities. The results of that study will be presented to a national audience in Washington, DC, on March 30, at the 2012 Aging in America Conference which attracts 3500 professionals in a variety of fields.  Medical ethnographer Monique Lambert, PhD, of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and Benay Dara-Abrams, PhD, CEO of Kinnexxus, Inc., plan to conduct a workshop based on this study.

 At the workshop, Dr. Lambert will present her original research based on interviews with a number of mid-life people who are creating intentional cohousing communities where they intend to support each other as they move forward in their lives. Dr. Dara-Abrams, a Los Altos resident who is an MVCC member, will discuss the behaviors that community members hope and plan to change for the better by creating and moving into an environment that promotes positive social interactions and healthy living.

 What is ethnography?  It’s a qualitative research method—a field study–aimed at learning about and understanding cultural phenomena that reflect the knowledge and system of meanings that guide the life of a cultural group.  The method was originated by anthropologists, but is now used to study many different contexts, from health care to consumer behavior to the “culture” of Wall Street.

 We’re eager to host a local event here in Silicon Valley, at which Drs. Lambert and Dara-Abrams will share their findings and observations with the public.  Look for more information later this year.

Cohousing – A Post-Thanksgiving Fun Day

Building an “old fashioned”neighborhood from scratch is a lot of work and very time consuming.  We have to get involved with everything from the size of the rooms to the door handles to the lights on the walkways.  There are tons of meetings and lots of research.  But it’s all worth it.  In the end, we’ll have a community that’s a wonderful place for us to live.

It’s important that it’s not all work as we move towards our goal.  After all, part of our vision is to have fun together.  So we regularly plan fun days, times when no business is allowed….just fun. 

Last weekend we had one of those days.  We met at my home in Half Moon Bay.  The weather was perfect – sunny and warm – and we went for a long walk on the beach.  We got so caught up in conversation, walking and watching the waves that it seemed as if we could have continued walking forever.   

But we returned to the house to share all of the Thanksgiving leftovers from all of our holiday celebrations that had taken place earlier in the week.

We all have much to be thankful for at this time of year and our cohousing community is one of them.  The fun day was a good way to celebrate that.

Friendship favors cohousing option

A recent article, “The Company You Keep”,  emphasizes friendship ties as a strong factor favoring cohousing, as well as  other new housing arrangements.

When I hear the stories of contemporaries and those a bit younger about their relatives & adult children, and also think of my own experiences, I can see why the option of living with friends is so appealing. Today’s middle-aged no longer look at their families as folks did in the small town and rural life of our grandparents.  They think of the divorces, the odd configurations of blended families, the scattering of siblings and children across the country into places they themselves might never choose to live. They think of their adult children in  two-earner households, at least some of whom seem to value grandparents
primarily for the baby-sitting services they can provide. They look at their houses—a bit too big, now that the kids are grown and gone, and too expensive  to maintain—and realize the un-joys of home ownership. From those somewhat  older, they hear tales of newly-retired husbands driving their wives crazy and  of couples divorcing in their 60s and 70s.

These changes are broad social changes, many of which we may personally applaud—moving to a different part of the country, getting out of a bad marriage, women having careers. Still, we can see these social changes in aggregate provide strong motivation for changing how one might choose to live one’s retirement years. This is the context in which cohousing is becoming an appealing option—living near people one knows, with whom one has a lot in common—including generational perspectives.

Cohousing expert Katie McCamant,  who has been working in the cohousing field for decades, says that she  frequently hears from groups of friends who want to create a cohousing  community. However, these efforts seldom pan out, because different people in  the group are at different phases of their lives and/or have different priorities  when it comes to turning the vision into reality. In her experience, it’s more  effective to bring together a group of people who are ready to make the  transition to cohousing at the same time. The highly interactive process of  working together on the whole design and development process leads to the  development of new friendships within their community.

The Mountain View Cohousing Community, of which I’m a member, has grown out of a hybrid of these two models. A group of six couples who had been friends for years, going on vacations together with their growing children, initially started talking a decade ago about how nice it would be to live close to each other. Over time, three of the six households went off in different directions.  The three that remained founded MVCC, but even one of those couples dropped out as they realized what a profound commitment they would have to make to see it come to fruition.  Other individuals and couples, however, were attracted to the very specific vision of a cohousing community in its specific location in Mountain View, found its timing compatible with their own needs, and have joined together to form the present the current cohousing community, which recently received City Council approval for its buildling plans.

And in the process, we’ve found new friends.

Cohousing interest is global

This week another story was written about our cohousing group, its goals and its progress towards a physical presence.  But it wasn’t published in the United States; rather, the article appeared in a British paper – The Guardian.    Why you might ask would someone in England be interested in our group. 

The author, Leon Kaye, talks about the old fashioned neighborhood he remembers from his childhood vs the way people live today.  He says that “much has changed over a generation. American homes are frequently built as fortresses, usually without a porch and a tiny yard at the back….New housing developments not only exclude open space, but lack sidewalks because there is no point in taking a walk in your neighbourhood if you have room for a treadmill or gym inside your house.”

He goes on to say, “Nevertheless attitudes are slowly changing on both sides of the pond. The trend to build mixed use developments has morphed into “co-housing,” the practice in which homes are built to share resources and space.”

And cohousing brings back the old fashioned neighborhood, one in which we are proud to know our neighbors, care about them, share common goals and participate together in making our community a wonderful place to live.

Great publicity about our latest milestone

I was very excited to read a few of the articles that appeared when we got approval from the Mountain View City Council.  People seem genuinely interested in what we’re doing and happy to see us moving ahead. 

One of the best appeared in the Palo Alto Weekly a few days ago.  It gives a summary of what we’ve done and what our next steps are.  Check out the article to learn more about us.

Sliders, folders or regular hollow core doors?

As our cohousing community very slowly becomes a reality, we have to make decisions about everything from the countertops to floors to door bells and doors.  It’s really amazing how time consuming it is to research all of the available options, get prices and formulate a recommendation for the members of our community.  Latest project – figuring out the doors to use.

To find out more about our community, visit our website mountainviewcohousing.org.

City Council Approval

On September 27th, the Mountain View City Council approved our project.  That means we can finally proceed with building our wonderful community.  It was a very exciting night for the 13 households already committed to construction of our new “old fashioned” community.

[Click the picture to see it larger.]

To learn more about us, check out our website mountainviewcohousing.org.