The Cohousing Company

Love during the snowstorm in Nevada City Cohousing.

Updates in Cohousing: Table of Contents

February2022

• Loving Cohousing Webinar February 19th: Loving in the Age of Covid

• A Solution to Homelessness Presentation in Spokane & San Luis Obispo

• Port Townsend Public Presentation in April for a New Cohousing Community

• Newfoundland Cohousing: Aspiring Affordable Cohousing Model in Canada

• Diversity in Cohousing

• Meet a Cohouser: Suzanne from Wolf Creek Lodge, Grass Valley, CA

Loving Cohousing Conference

Love in the Age of Covid

The Cohousing Association of the United States is hosting a Zoom Conference on February 19th, 2022 on the topic "Loving Cohousing

For most people, being more connected to others is a main motivation for living in cohousing, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. This event will review topics and tools helping you keep love alive in your community. 

Charles Durrett will be presenting and leading discussion on the topic "Love in the Age of Covid." He will be sharing insights from his new book Community-Enhanced Design: Cohousing and Other High-Functioning Neighborhoods related to how Cohousing alleviates isolation, especially in light of the pandemic. The talk will discuss previous patterns of social connection and how cohousing communities are adapting to covid, such as greater numbers of people working and studying from home. How to be socially distanced when necessary, but not necessarily socially isolated?

San Luis Obispo's Homelessness

Written by Becky Jorgeson

Becky Jorgeson here, Founder and President of Hope’s Village of SLO.  I’m a 58 year resident of San Luis Obispo County. We’ve been working with local unhoused people doing outreach on the streets for 15 years and providing them with what they need to survive. We’ve also been searching for a viable site for our model sustainable community village for those folks who have little to no income and not a chance in the world of getting into housing. 

We invited Charles Durrett to come to SLO because we need his expertise and help. Our homeless population is increasing—far too many homeless people are suffering needlessly and dying. 

We will continue to look at possible sites with him, and encourage more momentum and participation to attract more talent. Our tiny house village will serve as a model for the rest of the county. Many local folks want this to happen.

We need your support, more funders, and most of all political will. That’s a lot to ask for but we will make the progress necessary to build on.  

Because we can reduce homelessness in our town, in our time. 

Becky Jorgeson, M.A.

HOPE’S VILLAGE OF SLO

805-234-5478



Community organizing not only creates a sense of belonging and empowerment to people who are experiencing homelessness, but it also creates an opportunity for an open dialogue that allow other people to hear their stories and see them as human beings, instead of being criminalized and dehumanized by outdated laws and false narratives. This is what we tried to achieve when we spent three days at Washington-Jefferson Park in Eugene, which we covered in great detail in our December newsletter's article: Anna Got Her Rake

Public Presentation in Port Townsend for Newt Crossing Cohousing Community on April 9th

The Making of a Contemporary Village

Using Zoom Meetings and a Book (article by Nadthachai K.)

With his experience of designing over 50 cohousings in North America, we sometimes joke around here in The Cohousing Company and refer to Chuck as “The Godfather of Cohousing in America.” Over his career, he has spent countless hours facilitating design workshops, listening to people’s ideas of the perfect neighborhood, and meticulously translating them into drawings that ultimately turn their dreams into reality—into community-enhanced design.

However, due to the risk and uncertainty that come with traveling during the spread of Covid-19, we have recently taken on more projects as a consultant, providing our knowledge and expertise to new cohousing groups, including a very unique and exciting group from Newfoundland, Canada.

Newfoundland Cohousing group is started by a very curious and inspiring student, who not only wants to create a high-functioning and sustainable ecovillage, but also uses her knowledge in finance and social enterprise to create a model of cohousing that is more affordable and more broadly adopted in Canada. Inspired by this vision, we are determined to help this group in any way that we can.

Prior to our first meeting, the group sent us a number of analysis documents they have generated, as well as some feasibility sketches (enough to generate pro forma). At this point, they have already done a site analysis and a couple of design workshops, where the group used several methods like survey and bubble sorting to generate list of programs for the common house and the common outdoor spaces.

While we were impressed by all their works so far, it was clear there were certain critical details that we found to be missing, and they can truly make or break the project. This is when having the book Community-Enhanced Design was so beneficial and crucial—not only in this consultation, but also in designing any cohousing projects. We were able to tell our student to go to specific pages, referenced the program documentation we haven done for an existing group, and explained how it became a crucial form generator & prioritization matrix.

There are many meticulous details that one can miss when generating these programs, such as determining whether each activity needs its own space or giving each place clear dimensions and layout. While these details can seem minor to some, they are very important in the process of making a community along the way and a high-functioning community long term. Specific details like these prevent the group from cultural confusion and second-guessing themselves ad nauseam.

Diversity In Cohousing

A Panel Discussion in Madison We Hope For

I know a lot of people that are anxious to be a part of the diversity solution in cohousing. Cohousers take initiative—you can see that in the fact that they are not accepting tired housing and neighborhood solutions. They want to live in a neighborhood that they are proud of—a neighborhood rooted in love and understanding between human beings.

I asked a good buddy of mine, who worked with me at the City of San Francisco Housing and Community Development Office, John Harris, why didn’t he want to live in Cohousing. It looked like it would be perfect for him, a young family in a single-family house and all of the inefficiencies that go with that. John, an African American, replied in semi-jest— “Chuck, you white people are always changing the goal post. First, I was supposed to get a bachelor’s degree, then I had to get a master’s degree. First, I was supposed to buy a house and now a cohouse, what’s up with that?”

The North American current predominant culture has a long and sullied history of wanting the minority cultures to be assimilated and to be just like “them.” Therefore, we came up with boarding schools and other means to strip people of their native languages, habitats and cultures. A lot of white people feel that their cohousing community is incomplete if it doesn’t have more folks of color. We felt that way when we first moved into the Nevada City where we had none at move in. Fifteen years later there are 10 people of color here (about 9 fold compared to the rest of the County per capita).

Love is patient, love is kind.

Patience yes, but we have worked on it as well. And if you consider all of the social issues, affordability, physical disabilities, single mom families, and energy efficiency—global warming is increasingly resigned as a social justice issue—cohousing is on it!

We started out to mitigate the negative impact of the American middle-class culture on this planet. A culture that has evolved to consume, consume, and then consume some more. It evolved to affordability, and soon evolved to groups working hard to include diversity and is becoming increasingly successful at.

Harambee House, as outlined in the book, Community-Enhanced Design: Cohousing and Other High Functioning Neighborhoods, was a project where Perry Bigelow and I made an attempt at building cohousing for an all-black population in Chicago. It didn’t work out that well. It’s built but cohousing is not something that someone can build for others. To be successful, to be cohousing, it has to be grown from the people up. That said, it is definitely cohousing inspired and is definitely a high-functioning neighborhood.

If you try to do everything you won’t accomplish anything—do one thing at a time—do it well—show that high-functioning neighborhoods have legs and then do the next one better. The secret seems to be getting the word out to communities of color. Some have argued that those communities have a heightened sense of community already. That may be so—but make the advantages of cohousing widely known anyway. I grew up in a high-functioning neighborhood, but in my humble opinion it is nowhere near as great as cohousing. But try not to convince communities of color just so that you will feel better, but so that everyone can feel better about OUR community. I feel better about my community now. I love the diversity. And interestingly enough, we are working with an Indian tribe who is very clear that cohousing is much closer to their original habitat than the 5-acre lots per house sit on now. Now none of them live in a village.

John Harris, said that one of the worst things that ever happened to his hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, was when the equal housing law passed. Then many, many of the most can-do and capable elders moved out of the neighborhood, the model citizens were gone, and John worked in the Office of Housing and Community Development in San Francisco. He had seen it all and had a thoughtful opinion about everything. This and affordability are the issue of today, but white people do not have the answer.

This is the topic that I’m proposing for a cohousing panel conference topic. So, I’ll be proposing a 5-person, 2-hour panel discussion. I’m soliciting 4-5 others to join me on this panel to share their perspective and have an open dialogue about this issue. I’m really looking forward to it. Hope the conference organizers feel the same.

We have opinions and should share them because I’ve noticed when cohousing folks have their hearts in the right place. Things happen. And we obviously can’t guilt trip anyone, but we can get flyers and notices and books into the right place—like we did in Nevada City.

Our work towards more diversity in cohousing has to be real, sustained, and rooted in love—love for our own family and our fellow people. It is time, and I know that we can do it

Your thoughts and opinions for this topic are very welcome, and if you would like to be on the panel, please feel free to write me. I realize that this can be a sensitive, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversation to have. But it is a necessary one, and it has to be had with all to be successful. So feel free to send me your diversity essay for a subsequent newsletter, as we plan for this to be an ongoing series, and we'll see you in Madison.

Books by Charles Durrett

Books have played a major role from the beginning in terms of getting cohousing to this country and built in your town, starting with our first book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (The European Story). Bookstores normally play a key role in culture change in general, and cohousing is no exception. Many groups have contacted the publisher (New Society Press) directly to get bulk discounts, and I find that successful projects get started when lots of folks do their homework. I usually need to give a dozen copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities and/or Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living away to planners, banks, neighbors, mayors, new residents, local architects, builders, and so on—to give them context. It saves the group thousands and thousands of hours, dollars, and delays. Cohousing is more than a sound bite; it is cultural pivot, and it takes folks doing some fun research first.

State-Of-The-Art Cohousing: Lessons Learned from Quimper Village

with Alexandria Levitt

Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities

with Kathryn McCamant

The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living

Also available in Spanish

Happily Ever Aftering in Cohousing: A Handbook for Community Living

Revitalizing Our Small Towns

Cohousing's role in positively effecting waning small towns.

Community-Enhanced Design: Cohousing and Other High-Functioning Neighborhoods

Also available on Amazon

Finding A Site: Cohousing From the Ground Up

Growing Community: How to Find New Cohousing Members

A Solution to Homelessness in Your Town

Also available HERE

The Cohousing Company Website