Renew America Success Stories

Pine Street Co-Housing

Description 

The Pine Street Co-Housing project has brought together a group of resident-developers to design and build a small, eight-home intergenerational community that emphasizes resource efficiency, environmental preservation and a deep sense of community. 

Located on a 5.3-acre parcel near Amherst, Massachusetts, the project consists of eight small homes, built as duplexes, in a configuration that maximizes open land and concentrates living quarters near community areas. The size, shape, orientation and construction of the homes emphasize energy and resource efficiency while the community design favors pedestrians over automobiles. 

The brainchild of architect Bruce Coldham, the Pine Street Co-Housing development group was formed as a way to combat conventional urban sprawl. "My wife, Mary Sayer, and I were living here with just our two daughters," says Coldham. "We owned the house out by the road, the same place we live now, and we also owned the barn. There were three vacant lots next to our lot. We realized that if we didn't do something, pretty soon we'd be looking at three new driveways and three big suburban houses. We thought we could improve on that." 

Starting in the summer of 1990, Coldham brought together as many as 200 people to participate in a community planning process, during which participants met three weekends per month for five years to define the project, master the development process, and determine who, ultimately, would become resident-developers within the community. Over time, individuals relinquished options until the target of eight committed households was achieved. 

The vision of the group was to create a mutually supportive community in which the incessant demands on child rearing, meal preparation, gardening and building maintenance could be ameliorated by collaboration between parents and neighbors. Rather than each house functioning as an autonomous unit, the community would operate interdependently: cooking chores would rotate, meals would be eaten together, maintenance projects would be shared, a community garden would flourish. 

To realize this vision, the boundaries of the subdivided set of four contiguous parcels were reconfigured to cluster the lots, thereby retaining the bulk of the site as open land, and the homes were built as duplexes, with each pair of homes connected by a shared entrance. 

The project has been an unqualified success. While people often feel isolated in conventional housing, the automobile having severed the links between neighbors, Pine Street neighbors know each other, they work together, and they support each other. 

"Different people do different things," says Coldham. "One guy isn't very outdoorsy, but he's fabulous with numbers. He's an expert on black holes who teaches at UMass. He keeps track of the accounting with a fastidiousness you'd find only in an astrophysicist. Two other guys love to mow the lawn. Another resident, the chief oboist in the Springfield Symphony, likes to operate the snow blower. Another is an entomologist who's taken to the orchard." 

Program Highlights 

Planning and Construction 

• During the planning process the participants developed a Development Timeline Game, which models the development process using colored activity cards on a long table.
• Decisions were made by consensus, which required more upfront discussion and deliberation, but ultimately produced better actions and shortened implementation time. The respect for the group process has persisted to instruct the shared living and community management routines.
• Houses are much smaller than is typical -- they range from 800 to 1,200 square feet -- but residents also have access to a common house that provides additional living area and community interaction.
• Pitched roofs increase spaciousness on the second floor.
• The basements are constructed to provide a livable environment.
• The houses are attached in pairs and share a common entry. This space isolates the houses acoustically and provides an energy-efficient entry to each one.

• The project retained 3.5 of the 5.2 acres as open arable land, which can be farmed organically without pesticides, herbicides or industrial fertilizers.
• Dependence on automobiles has been reduced by carpooling, and by providing many business necessities in the common house, including printers, a copier and fax machine.
• More than 90% of construction waste disposal was directed away from landfills to useful ends.
• The clustered design diminished paving, draining structures and utility trenching.
• Space heating and cooling are provided using geothermal heat pumps.
• The buildings use cellulose insulation blown into the roof wall and cavities.
• The buildings are located on land that is elevated above remaining open land. Future ponds have been mapped out and a system for directing rainwater runoff to the ponds has been designed.
• Roofs are sized, oriented and inclined so that photovoltaic arrays can be added in the future to help supply the houses with their electrical needs.

• Residents assisted other residents with unsecured, intramural loans that enabled them to secure fixed rate mortgages at more attractive rates.
• The group is renovating the lower portion of the existing barn to become a permanent community kitchen and dining room.

Vital Statistics

Program Management/Partnerships: The Pine Street Co-Housing project was designed, built and is managed by the residents of the project. 

Budget: The annual budget for the Pine Street Co-Housing project is very small since the residents are an extremely collaborative group that provides all routine maintenance themselves (i.e., mowing the lawns, caring for the orchards and community gardens, shoveling the snow and performing building maintenance). Accordingly, the annual budget for operating the housing is $11,500, which funds trash collection and long-term building and grounds maintenance. 

Community Served: The eight households of the Pine Street Co-Housing project. 

Measures of Success:

The publicity associated with the completion of the project has drawn visitors and callers from all over the country.

Pine Street Co-Housing residents contribute continually to the national forum on co-housing conducted through the Co-Housing Network.