COHOUSING: A MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING

Shared living communities can alleviate urban sprawl and provide social, economic, and environmental benefits. Cohousing - which offers residents both private and shared spaces and resources - provides one model. Diane Meisenhelter describes her own cohousing community and its benefits.

Last summer, some friends and I went to one of our favorite berry-picking spots on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, only to find that the berry fields had become the latest casualty of urban sprawl. Instead of succulent blueberries and marionberries, all we found was a landscape dotted with enormous, castlelike dwellings with three-car garages, sited on five-acre parcels of land. For me, this incident highlighted Portland's struggle over preserving regional growth boundaries and the critical importance of conserving farmland and open spaces.

Yet as a low-income housing activist living in an inner-city neighborhood, I am well aware of public skepticism and resistance to the higher-density developments required if growth boundaries are to be maintained. The fear is that we cannot increase density or inner-city crowding without having a negative effect on quality of life, particularly within communities that are already somewhat fragile and battling other urban problems. Our challenge is to create models for sustainable living and higher-density development that are appealing. The cohousing community in which I live is one example.

Cohousing is a form of shared living community that seeks to strike a balance between privacy and supportive community sharing. Generally, each household has private space (a house, an apartment, or a studio), yet shares extensive common facilities and other resources with a larger community group. Over a hundred examples of cohousing exist in the United States today, in a variety of sizes and styles. Some feature a large common house with smaller private homes clustered in pedestrian-oriented, ecologically designed communities uncut by city streets. Others might offer apartments configured around a central meeting and dining area in a large, remodeled warehouse. Ours was formed in an inner-city Portland neighborhood through the rehabilitation of several abandoned or rundown houses to form an urban cooperative block.

No matter what the community's form, certain elements define the essence of cohousing:

• A participatory process among residents, with shared decision-making.
• An intentional design that encourages a sense of community and incorporates ecological concerns.
• Extensive common facilities.
• Shared resources.
• A cooperative management style that meets and adapts to residents' changing needs.

This last element is essential, and might be reflected in such features as flexible interior designs to accommodate changing family sizes - including the use of shifting modular panels that permit reconfiguring the number of bedrooms between adjacent units.

Our own cohousing arrangement offers many advantages:

Social benefits. In our mobile, fast-paced society, traditional families are often geographically dispersed, and many people are too busy even to meet with friends. Cohousing offers an alternative support network that provides emotional support and a sense of unity and belonging; opportunities for shared child care, plus the presence of other caring adults who can help watch over children and provide role models; more free time for individuals, thanks to shared efforts with routine chores and major projects; emotional and practical support during stressful times such as childbirth or illness; and a healthier lifestyle, because of shared information, peer support, and a wide range of community activities.

Economic benefits. Cohousing can lead to lower living cost, both through sharing of some items (in our case, such things as tools, children's play areas, gardens, some major appliances and electronic equipment, magazine subscriptions, and a pickup truck) and through bulk buying of other items ranging from food to solar water heaters. Pooled financing also permits the purchase of shared facilities that would be unaffordable for individual families, such as a ceramics studio, a darkroom, a music room, or guestrooms. Even the costs of the houses themselves can be lower. Our rehabilitated houses, for example, ranged from $30,000 to $60,000 - much less than the cost of new construction.

Ecological benefits. Our cohousing community used existing structures, so it did not require large amounts of new materials. The houses have been retrofitted with solar panels, weatherized, and landscaped according to ecological and sustainable agriculture goals. A recent study that compared our cohousing community with five similar houses in the same neighborhood found that, on an annual basis, the cohousing homes used 2,000 fewer kilowatt hours of electricity and 3,500 fewer cubic feet of water, produced 1,000 pounds less solid waste, and averaged 2.1 fewer auto trips per day. New-construction cohousing communities have an added advantage: they can incorporate an ecological design and environmentally sound materials from the outset.

Neighborhood benefits. Our community is far from insular. Members are actively involved in a wide range of neighborhood sustainability projects, including tree- planting and community gardens; speed bumps, bicycle lanes, and other safety projects; a neighborhood skills bank that might evolve into a barter network; a community development corporation working to preserve long-term affordable housing through a community land trust; recycling, lead abatement, and neighborhood rideshare programs; community-supported agriculture and neighborhood greenspaces; a possible neighborhood tool bank or tool registry; a Christmas tree recycling project that raises funds for a local youth program working with gang-affected youth; and the Community Cycling Center, which runs a job-training program for at-risk young people and employs older youths to teach youngsters about bicycle repair, safety, and maintenance.

Cohousing is just one of numerous options that people can develop at the local level to help create cooperative, ecological, and socially just communities. Sustainable development needs to occur on many levels, but we must begin in our own backyards.