'Cohousing' bolsters new urban neighborhoods
New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 6/1/2005
An alternative to the solitary household finds a place in TND projects.
Cohousing communities — developments whose residents share dining facilities, gardens, recreation space, and other amenities — have cropped up in 80 locations in the US since 1991, when the first such project, containing 26 townhouses and community gathering places, was built on a 2.9-acre plot in Davis, California. Now, as the cohousing movement learns how to organize projects faster, cohousing is becoming an increasingly promising option for new urban developments.
Cohousing communities have appeared in a few new urban projects, especially in the West. Wild Sage Cohousing, for example, occupies 1.5 acres in a the 25-acre Holiday neighborhood, in north Boulder, Colorado. Hearthstone Cohousing makes up a 1.6-acre section of the 30-acre Highlands’ Garden Village development in Denver. Cohousing seems quite compatible with New Urbanism, since the aims of the two movements overlap. Both try to reduce the isolation of individual households, encourage stronger local ties, and foster a resource-conserving, less wasteful way of living.
New Urban News recently traveled with Kathryn McCamant to FrogSong, a cohousing community completed in November 2003 in the small town of Cotati, in Sonoma County, California. McCamant and her husband, Charles Durrett, are two of the most prolific cohousing architects in the US. After studying in the 1980s in Denmark, where cohousing originated, they led the programming and conceptual design for the first American cohousing project, Muir Commons in Davis, and have since been involved in designing about 50 others. They also wrote a much-read guide, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves.
