At 75, May D’Marie has visited enough retirement homes to know that she never wants to live in one. “They’re boring,” she says. “Everyone is the same age practically. And even the elevators move slowly.” But she also doesn’t want to live alone, doesn’t have family in her area and doesn’t want a roommate. That seemed to leave the retired librarian with no options–until she heard about a new community being built near her in Sacramento.
At Southside Park Cohousing, D’Marie now shares three meals a week in a central dining hall with 65 other residents of all ages. Her apartment, like the others, looks out over a common lawn, gardens and playground. Here, there’s always someone to talk to. When she needs help moving a couch or changing the battery in a smoke detector, neighbors are ready to assist. In return, she hems their clothes or makes applesauce for them from the community orchard. “I’m very comfortable here,” she says.
Sound like one of those hippie communes that disappeared along with bellbottoms and VW Bugs? It is. Like so many icons of the ’60s, they’re back now and being marketed successfully to the mainstream. A few still feature free love and organic farming, but what’s more common is a form of collective housing built by and for property-owning, car-driving, middle-class former suburbanites.
“The general public has the impression they all died out in the 1960s,” says Michael Cummings, a University of Colorado, Denver, political scientist who has studied communes for 17 years. In fact, Cummings estimates, there are now tens of thousands of “intentional communities”–groups of people who reject conventional neighborhoods and live with others who share their values or interests.
Behind the resurgent interest in such communities is a significant demographic shift. The average household in America is half the size it was at the start of the century. About a quarter of Americans live alone–and many of these are widowed, retired or both. There are also more single parents. The new breed of communes is more likely to have members named Ozzie and Harriet than Mad Dog and Rainbow. They keep a low profile and strive for respectability. They’re just folks who simply found life in the atomized suburbs lonely.
The founders of Southside Park Cohousing set out to prove they could create a village in the heart of a big city. Their block of pastel clapboard row houses blends smoothly into the surrounding neighborhood. Seven years ago, the block held only the burned-out ruins of 80-year-old Victorian houses trashed by prostitutes and crack dealers. When the band of would-be communards wanted to buy the site, the city was so delighted that it helped finance the project.
“I had lived in a commune back in western Massachusetts in the 1970s,” says Susan Scott, 52, one of the community’s founders. “I thought it was a great way to raise children.” But in the 1980s, Scott, like so many other flower children, took a right-hand turn. She became a lawyer for the state of California, got married, bought a house, had a child, got divorced.
Then in 1988 she paired up with David Mandel, who had once lived on an Israeli kibbutz and shared her longing for the collective lifestyle. That same year the two attended a slide show by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett. The Berkeley, Calif., architects are the principal American evangelists for cohousing–a type of intentional community in which buildings are designed to encourage social contact while preserving private space. “You have the choice between privacy and community,” Durrett says. “It’s a 21st century housing solution.” Instant converts Scott, Mandel and a few dozen like-minded families set about designing the ideal community.
Five years later, they got their dream, the 25-unit Southside Park Cohousing. Front porches on the neo-Victorians look out on the surrounding community. Inside, kitchen windows and plate-glass back doors face one another over the common green space, as if two dozen families had one huge backyard. In the central building, residents share a dining room, playroom, mailboxes, laundry room, TV, exercise equipment and a lounge with a fireplace. They take turns cooking the three common meals served each week. Afterward, they relish the opportunity to share cars, swap furniture and get together without planning it.
Children like the arrangement because they can roam freely from one friend’s house to another. Parents appreciate having lots of help keeping watch, and singles enjoy the companionship. “My kids were grown up and gone,” says Susan Barnhill, 57, a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman, as she rolls her wheelchair in the front-door of a flat especially adapted to her needs. “Here, there are instant friends.”
Immediate neighbors often oppose cohousing proposals but tend to come around once the homes are built. “It’s pretty cool,” says Ken Tate, 40, who lives across the street from Southside Park. “More neighborhoods should group together like that.” Although drug deals go down daily on the sagging porches and litter-strewn sidewalks that surround Southside, no one has ever broken into one of its houses. There are too many watchful eyes.
So far, cohousing construction hasn’t kept up with demand. There are 44 projects built in the U.S. and Canada, with 160 soon to be completed and 15,000 people on a list of potential residents. Cohousing units have appreciated or held their value better than comparable homes nearby.
Building one is no cakewalk, however. Sites are difficult to acquire. Prospective residents must spend years in long meetings with architects, bureaucrats and neighborhood groups. They must be willing to put up thousands in advance for units that cost slightly more than mainstream condos. (One-bedroom Southside flats went for $87,000, though the city provided generous loans to the cash poor. Homeowners’ dues range from $100 to $150 a month.) And the endless meetings continue after everyone moves in. Instead of delegating to a board of directors or voting, Southside residents, like most cohousers, make every decision by consensus. Also, gossip runs rampant. “There have been three romances in the community,” says resident Pam Silva, 49. “They were great topics of conversation and entertainment.”
Scott’s son, 17-year-old Finian Scott-Small, says he quickly made friends with other children at Southside. He got an unexpected bonus when his father fell in love with another resident and decided to move in. Now he can see both parents daily, despite their divorce. “If I get into a fight with my mom, I can go over to my dad’s house,” he says. On the other hand, there are few opportunities for his rock band to practice. “You have to worry about disturbing your neighbors,” he says. “Because you know them, you can’t ignore them.” It’s a burden more and more Americans would gladly bear.
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