The Cohousing Company

Lantern Walk for Chinese New Year in Nevada City Cohousing.

Cohousing: A Political Act, a Business Act, and Culture Change

RE: New York Times Articles: They Took a Chance on Collaborative Living. They Lost Everything. February 11, 2022

After seven unbelievably positive articles by The New York Times about cohousing (see cohousingco.com), it was inevitable that they would “balance” that track record and point out one when things went south. But it was also inevitable that a cohousing business deal would go south eventually.

Katie and I perhaps overemphasized in our first book, which brought cohousing to North America, how grassroots cohousing development was in Denmark. We were young and idealistic and enamored with “the people just doing it” and that was what we emphasized. But it wasn’t until my fifth trip back to Denmark when Jan Gudmand-Høyer finally got it into my head all of the various clearly extraordinary skilled players that it really took to make a successful cohousing community happen.

And he was right—good cohousing is just as complicated as flying a commercial airplane if not more. The emphasis on community is critical to the ultimate success no doubt, but navigation on the business side is just as critical.

It is a political act, an anthropological study, a business act, a careful design process, and culture change.

And it takes a village—a village of passionate cultural creatives who truly believe that high-functioning neighborhoods are the future we all deserve, and we need experienced professionals to make that future come true.

While we extensively cover the design principles that contribute to what make a cohousing project successful in our latest book Community-Enhanced Design: Cohousing and Other High-Functioning Neighborhoods—from having thorough sets of programs & design criteria to common house designs that maximize people-hours, we also emphasize the importance of group process and project management in the success of cohousing. The New York Times article about the new cohousing group in Connecticut provided us with a wake-up call and a number of valuable lessons on this topic, including:

1. Not having adequate timelines, which translates to under project managed.
2. Under-considered feasibility/due diligence (Rocks).
3. “Bureaucratic” delays because someone didn’t know how to get the politicians on board. Projects should take no more than 9 months to get approved—and that process has to be specifically engineered.
4. A project in Eugene, OR originally had a $465K water hook-up fee requirement that went to a $45K hook-up after talking to the right (5^th) engineer. You have to find the right people and negotiate every line item.
5. Yarrow had a perfect on-site sewer system (See C-ED and Creating Cohousing).    
6. Renegotiate with the bank (see Katie McCamant or similar).

But believe me, professionals alone do not and cannot create a successful cohousing community. There is no better example than the story of Nevada City Cohousing. Prior to our submission to the city, 3 different experienced developers each spent great fortunes developing a non-cohousing proposal and they all failed.

However, with the involvement of the residents, including schoolteachers and single moms—sharing their needs for affordable yet high-functioning neighborhoods, the proposal of Nevada City Cohousing was approved by the city despite the existing nimby culture.

There are also other instances where the developers alone tried to make cohousing projects (Colorado and Petaluma, CA) and proved to be complete and total flops.

With our experience designing more than 55 cohousing projects in North America, we highly recommend you getting The Cohousing Company or similar to help you figure out if your development scenario will succeed or fail. A group that is too head strong will fail. This recently happened in Northern California. A professional developer who knows the tricks of the trade but carries the predominant attitude of the trade (control, control, control) will fail, fail, fail.

In the book Community-Enhanced Design, we delineated the stories of 18 projects that are very affordable because of a good mixture of group and professionals.

Cohousing takes humility on all sides and an ability to work together in harmony. But you have to have the minimum cast of characters at the table. Yes, it is “heart breaking” what happened in Connecticut, so please look at both Creating Cohousing and CED—do the homework necessary to do these projects right. As my Mom used to say, “if you can’t find the library, you will forever be lost.”

Other Updates in Cohousing: Table of Contents

March 2022

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

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

• Antioch University: Cohousing & A Solution to Homelessness Class



• Auburn Cohousing: Affordability Model

• Newfoundland Cohousing

• Diversity in Cohousing Part II

• Meet a Cohouser: Nadthachai from Nevada City Cohousing, CA

San Luis Obispo's Homelessness Public Presentation

March 19th 7:00 PM Mountainbrook Church

Currently, we have a presentation on March 19th in San Luis Obispo, CA. Ms. Becky Jorgeson, who reached out to us for this presentation, has been working with unhoused people, doing outreach on the streets and now searching for land for a model sustainable community village for unhoused veterans and others.

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

For more information, please contact Becky at

beckyrjorgeson@yahoo.com



Spokane's Homelessness Public Presentation

March 26th 7:00 PM First Presbyterian Church

Homelessness in America is not intractable and new housing models are proving to be doable. We need more and more possibilities for housing, especially affordable and supportive housing.

Please join us to learn, discuss, imagine, and work toward. solutions to the homeless crisis in Spokane. One hundred and sixty two people died on the streets of Spokane last year. The average homeless person in America dies at 49 years old. It’s a thirty-year death sentence.

This is not something that we can explain to our grandchildren. Let’s be proud of getting people off the streets.

For more information, please contact Ross Carper at RossC@spokanefpc.org

Seattle's Homelessness Public Presentation

April 8th 7:30 PM at University Friends Meeting

The Cohousing Company recently completed a 70-unit housing project in the town of American Canyon for many previously homeless folks—the book, A Solution to Homelessness in Your Town was written about this project.

Many valuable lessons learned from this new community and others can be applied in Seattle. Charles will share those lessons in this presentation.

For more information, please contact Dan Nord at daniel_del_norte@outlook.com



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

"It is time to re-kickoff a public presentation for Newt Crossing in Port Townsend."

Please spread the word to anyone you know (your email list) who might be interested in joining a new community in Port Townsend, or just wanting to know more about cohousing.

Location: Quimper Grange

1219 Corona Street

Port Townsend, WA 98368

Date & Time: April 9th, 2022 @ 3:00 PM

For more information, please email newt@olympus.net

Auburn Cohousing: Affordability Model

County-Initiated Program: Model Project for Affordable Community

The Cohousing Company recently hosted a progress workshop with the Auburn Cohousing following the meeting we'd had with Placer County. Both the county and the group shared the same enthusiasm in making this project a community that is both high-functioning and affordable.

This is the first cohousing project in America where county officials reached out to an aspiring cohousing effort and offered their help to make the project affordable to all levels of income. What's more, the county also wants this project to be a model project for future housing and neighborhood development, as they recognize the benefits that a cohousing can bring—not only to its residents, but also to the whole county.

These incentives resonate deeply with the whole group, and they are currently working hard to expand their numbers, gather their momentum, and move the project forward.

If you would like to know more about the project, the group is hosting a FREE Introductory Presentation about cohousing on March 17, at 6:30 PM.

Email information@auburncohousing.com to sign up or visit auburncohousing.com for more information

Newfoundland Cohousing

High-functioning Village in the Making

If you want to live on an amazing piece of land in an amazing landscape, with an amazing group of people, in what promises to be a new but high-functioning village, get a hold of Hillary King in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada at:

cohousingnlnewsletter@gmail.com

And if you want to be part and parcel to the creation, reach out to Hillary before May 1st (May Day), 2022. Charles Durrett will be going there this spring to finish the site design, common house design and private house designs to fit their needs.

We started on the programming last month—we will build on that and look at what it will take to get a state-of- the-art and affordable community (resonating to their own wants and desires) built and moved into in the next 2.5 years.

Come check it out! https://cohousingnl.wixsite.com/coho

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEI) in Cohousing

Written by Ivy Summer

I’ve once heard a memorable saying that goes,

“If diversity is about being invited to the party, then inclusion is being asked to dance.”

We can take this analogy even further to say that equity is about giving every party-goer whatever it is they need to both get to the party and to get paired up with a dance partner–and sense of belonging can be measured by an after-party poll to determine whether [at least 80% of] party-goers say they felt like they belonged there throughout the event.

The analogy is creative, but each component of DEI has a data-backed benchmark (Culture Amp & Paradigm, 2015) to guide all types of groups, teams, organizations, and communities in gauging where there’s a gap between each benchmark and how an organization measures up against it.

Metrics related to DEI can be key indicators of where a community can improve in aspects like psychological safety, or fostering a space for its members to offer creative ideas and solutions to nuanced and complex social challenges. These kinds of metrics can indicate key areas of opportunity–from community engagement and retention to growth mindset and integrity within named values. What metrics should be monitored? This is entirely up to the community, based on its values and what it wants to prioritize.

When a community has established its DEI vision, values statement, and metrics, it needs to determine how to apply it to its recruiting, interviewing/vetting, and hiring/onboarding processes–for both its members and its organization’s partners (e.g. suppliers, lawyers, consultants, etc.)–on an ongoing basis.

As a result, a community develops its own DEI best practices that stick (and make sense for its members). Not only do these best practices influence the community’s impression on others, but they also prompt potential new members, whose values do not align with those of the community, to rule themselves out of the process.

Every action a community takes and every decision that it makes–as long as it comes from a place of alignment with its DEI values–will inherently further its mission with a DEI lens. Instant actions a community and its members can take right away include, but aren’t limited to:

• creating a [free] User Manual workshop
• scheduling a series of professional-led unconscious bias workshops and/or timely workshops that coincide with heritage/awareness months
• creating relationships with businesses that are supporting refugees with [a portion of] their proceeds, making their websites and virtual meetings accessible (i.e. WCAG-compliant, closed captions, etc.),
• hosting [free] lunch-and-learn roundtables to discover more about and empathize with one another’s intersectional identities.

The best part about the realm of DEI is that there’s always room to grow and learn. To end with another memorable quote, I’ll close out with my favorite, by Rainer Maria Wilke, which goes something like this:

“Be patient with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not look for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because then you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps gradually then, someday far into the future, you will, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”



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. Seattle and the surrounding areas have about a dozen cohousing communities largely because the bookstores in town have sold more than 500 copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities

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

Also available on Amazon

A Solution to Homelessness in Your Town

Also available HERE

Revitalizing Our Small Towns

Cohousing's role in positively effecting waning small towns.

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

Finding A Site: Cohousing From the Ground Up

Growing Community: How to Find New Cohousing Members

The Cohousing Company Website