The Cohousing Company

June 2024 Newsletter

National Cohousing Weekend tour led by Charles Durrett

Upcoming Events

June 2024

• June 13: AIASF Housing+ Symposium, Building Tomorrow's San Francisco: From Legislation to Livability (LINK)

• Talks in Denmark & Iceland
• Monday June 24: Grundtvigskforum
• Friday June 28: Vandkunsten (not open to public)
• Sunday June 30: Skråplanet
• July 2 or 3 (TBC): Presenting our new book, One Life, Live it, to President of Iceland

• July 6–7: Looking for a new site for cohousing in San Francisco



• July 8: Talk on book A Solution to Homelessness @ Clio's Bookstore, Oakland

• August 1–4: National Cohousing Conference (More details below)

• Antioch Classes (More details below)

2024 AIASF Housing+ Symposium

Building Tomorrow's San Francisco: From Legislation to Livability

AIA San Francisco in collaboration with the AIASF Housing Knowledge Community present the 2024 AIASF Housing+ Symposium. Join us for ongoing conversations that navigate the future of housing in San Francisco. Discover insights from frontline organizations on the City's latest legislative landscape and its implications for residential zoning and design. Delve into the efficacy of these laws in supporting vulnerable communities and explore innovative approaches leveraging land values and financial strategies to enhance housing accessibility.

Registration

AIA Member: $90 | General Admission: $125 | Student: $30

Keynote Speaker & Moderator

Architect and co-founder of the Cohousing Company, Charles Durrett, will introduce and moderate the day's program. Drawing on his 35-year career as an activist architect, Charles will frame the discussion around the value of housing and the roles those involved in housing delivery — including architects — can play in changing the future of housing design.

“The future of housing in San Francisco will include much more community action, much more participation, much more heart, and much less bureaucracy. As the motivation to make affordable housing continues to grow, the impediments – both institutional and cultural – will come down, and we will evolve towards action and solutions. Come hear a dozen key San Francisco organizations and individuals who are contributing to this momentum.”

Charles R. Durrett, AIA

Principal Architect, The Cohousing Company



Other Speakers Include:

• Lisa Chen, Principal Planner, City and County of San Francisco
• Mark Rhoades, AICP, President/CEO, Rhoades Planning Group
• Leah Rothstein, Co-Author, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law
• Sujata Srivastava, Chief Policy Officer, SPUR
• Tamara Knox, CEO/Co-Founder, Frolic
• Joshua Morrison, COO/Co-Founder, Frolic
• Karen Parolek, President, Opticos Design and author, Missing Middle Housing
• Derek Sagehorn, Attorney, California High-speed Rail Authority; Housing Advocate
• Vivian Schwab, Project Construction and Development Manager, Northern California Land Trust
• Doug Fowler, Director of Real Estate, Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco
• Jim Heid, FASLA, Founder, Building Small: The Network
• Alberto Benejam, Associate Director of Housing Development, Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC)

2024 AIASF Housing+ Symposium

Building Tomorrow's San Francisco: From Legislation to Livability

Love is paramount. Kinships and relationships, neighbors and family no doubt, but family is ephemeral, which leaves neighbors. Neighbors come and go—I’m not saying that they are interchangeable, but I am saying that you probably have them—neighbors that is. If you relate to them, know them, and care about them, the aggregate sum might be that you attain more, even much more support from them than all of the support from the family put together. It happens.

So life support systems, that is alternate family, has to grow to be there when you need them. Proximity, people that can or are willing to learn to talk with each other, and the goals of empathy, patience, and love, is the long-term solution to it all. New village neighbors have the newfound familiarity without the baggage of rivalries, or neglect, or favoritism. Find a high-functioning neighborhood that loves—or make one—that seems easier. Come to the Cohousing Conference in Denver August 1–4, 2024 in order to get started.

Charles Durrett

The Evolution of Cohousing in the U.S.

While attending the architecture school at the University of Copenhagen, I lived in the town of Birkerød, a suburb of Copenhagen. I walked by many typical suburban homes (single family, rowhomes, apartments) where there was no life between the buildings. But there was one community where every time I passed by, I saw neighbors chatting with each other outside in the central green, having meals together on the picnic tables, hanging laundry. There was consistently lots of life between the buildings. And so one day I stopped and asked one of the people there, in my broken Danish, “What’s going on here?” And she answered, in her perfect English:

Well this is a bofællesskab” (which directly translated to English means, “Living Community”). My husband and I both grew up in high-functioning neighborhoods, and we want our 2 children to live in one as well. Finding one is a crapshoot. We didn't want to take that chance. We needed to make one.

Amused, she explained over tea,

“We wanted to make our own neighborhood. The people who built this neighborhood felt it to be too important to leave to chance.”

In a way they are very conservative or at least traditional in their view of importance of neighborhood. In her own house she explained, that the “busy” side of the residence (the kitchen side) is toward the courtyard in front, and the private side (the living room) is toward the rear. "Ultra-responsible" came to mind at least in terms of raising children in a very safe place—the cars were very remote.

Like many other cohousing developers, the residents were motivated to develop Tornevangsgarden by the bustle and impersonality of contemporary living. The woman told me:

It got to the point that we had to make appointments to see our friends: “Let’s get together sometime next month.” Even that became increasingly infrequent; we were drifting away from the very people that we appreciated and enjoyed being with most. Friendship, a more spontaneous environment, and the notion of shared child rearing motivated us.

This place was my introduction to cohousing, and Kathryn and I returned four years later to get the whole story.

When I came back in 1981, I showed the three slides that I had over and over again. Then at dinner one night, a wonderful friend, Daniel Meyerowitz, said, “Chuck you need to go back to write a book.” And I started planning for it the next day.

I wrote 50 letters to 50 individuals in 50 communities (all in Danish) over the 6 months....

Story continues in the next newsletter. Make sure to stay tuned!

Why Books Matter

The Importance of Literature in the Cohousing Movement

Making a case for books.

The very first cohousing in the US, Muir Commons in Davis, California would not have happened if the book Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities had not been in every Davis bookstore and library. A dozen bookstores, new and used, and every library (almost 10) carried it. That community took exactly two years to get built—from the night of the public presentation to the morning of move-in. Every adult in the group read the book and we were always on the same page (at least figuratively).

State-of-the-art Southside Park Cohousing in nearby Sacramento would not have been built without the activism of my mother, Rosemary, the ultimate grassroots organizer (she organized her bra-making union during WWII!—“It was hard to get support for that project,” she would say...). She went to every Sacramento bookstore (about two dozen in 1991) and asked, “Do you have this book?,” “Can you order this book?,” “Can I leave this book on consignment?” Every bookstore took it in.

I know that I’m going counterculture here, but there seems to be a big correlation.

In this era of information chaos, it’s time to bring a little balance back into our information consumption.

Upcoming Learning Opportunities with Charles Durrett

With Antioch University Continuing Education

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 and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) directly to get bulk discounts, and I find that successful projects get started when lots of folks do this fun homework. I usually need to give a dozen copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living and Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods 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, and most importantly makes for a better project.

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 today largely because the bookstores in town have sold more than 1,000 copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities and the San Francisco area has over 20 cohousing communities largely because the book has sold more than 2,000 copies there.

Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods

Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities

with Kathryn McCamant

The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living

Also available in Spanish

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

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

Facilitator Guide - Senior Cohousing Study Group 1 Guides

Participant Guide - Senior Cohousing Study Group 1 Guides

Architecture for Ageing Population

with the staff of Images Publishing

The Cohousing Company