Urban Co-Housing 101

Last year about this time a group of around 4 to 5 families, including mine, started seriously pursuing the idea of urban co-housing. All of us wanted to stay near the city center and all of us loved the idea of shared resources, shared childcare and shared yard work.

We spent a few months looking for a potential site, visited with a few owners, but nothing seemed to pan out. This past month a 65’ x 100’ lot was sold to a developer friend of my cousins a half-block from her house and a great neighborhood park. Four of us are now in the process of proposing a co-housing development on the site.

The time-frame is quick. We have about 60 days to obtain a building permit before the zoning changes from multi-family to single-family. (Why city lots are becoming less dense at this time is beyond me—Spokane’s Comprehensive Plan intends to increase density levels within centers and corridors, but why the reverse in the adjoining neighborhoods?) So, we have been meeting Saturday mornings over breakfast with children running around the perimeter at each other’s houses.

We can develop three “townhouses” on the site. There is the potential to sell the idea to a neighbor/owner of an adjacent lot to do the same, greatly increasing our potential “eco-village.” Initially, we thought strawbale rowhouses would be cool. Has it ever been done before? But after meeting with a local builder yesterday, we may be shifting to rastra block. (Easier to get through the permit process?)

Rastra (www.rastra.com) is a recycled polystyrene building block, where concrete fill is used. Rastra gives you an R-25 wall for insulation and an incredibly durable, fire-resistant building material. Rastra also produces very little waste on the building site. Stucco is usually used to finish the block.

Because rastra is a modular system, our design, wall lengths and window sizes and placement will be planned accordingly to work with its dimensions for cost and waste purposes.

The big question yesterday however, was “where is the common space?” Trying to fit three small rowhouses on a standard city lot and maintain a playyard has been difficult. If we add a floor of shared living, all of our costs go up and we are trying to keep the homes “affordable”. If we can start to think of this of Phase I, we might be able to feel okay just sharing some storage, and outdoor space for now, with eventual plans to buy or build a “common house” with shared rec. room, library, computers, workshops and dining area.
Most are not willing to completely give up their own personal kitchen or kids’ play area just yet. And because we all have children, the need for some acoustical separation is a must…one big house is not acceptable with potentially 7 children involved.

We meet again next week so I will keep posting updates.

Idle Time & Localism

Hopedance has an entire issue devoted to energy issues (www.hopedance.org). Below are a couple of links to articles I enjoyed.

Interview with Tom Hodgekinson, author of How to be Idle. He discusses how with the addition of free time, you can become more involved with issues at the local level. I loved his mention of the Guild systems of medieval Europe as a model for organizing labor in a sane manner and how he spends his typical day, “taking care of his three children, reading, writing, lunching with his girlfriend, gardening, and relaxing in his Mexican hammock.”

http://www.hopedance.org/new/issues/54/article11.html


Great interview with Michael Shuman author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age.

http://www.hopedance.org/new/issues/54/article9.html

The City, Tribes & Petrocollapse

Healthy community is my “thing.” I have been interested in how to build them since I started architecture school in the late 80s. After studying in Florence, Italy, the answer seemed to lie in the city. I love the city and I love living in the middle of it. In Florence (population similar to Spokane’s) you don’t need a car or even a scooter—you can walk the entire length of it in about 30 minutes. I love it when I have to walk to where I need to go. I actually get much needed exercise regularly and I get to participate in the life of a community, not just see it from a car window.

Walking from my apartment in Florence, a mixture of uses and textures surrounded me. Pastry shops, coffee shops, shoe stores, piazze, loggias—the drama of walking through Florence is incredible. I felt a part of something larger, something worthwhile and I barely spoke Italian.

Cities can do that, help you to feel recognized while still remaining anonymous. As Americans we tend to appreciate our anonymity. We also tend to downplay our need to be recognized.

A few weeks ago I went to a presentation by Spokane psychotherapist, Dr. Kent Hoffman on forming bonds with our children. Dr. Hoffman is a leading researcher in “attachment parenting.” I have seen Dr. Hoffman present numerous times in the past six years and am always amazed by the parallels between individual psychological health and the larger community’s.

Dr. Hoffman believes that at our core we are relational beings and to the degree that we feel connected to others we feel safe and secure. When we feel disconnected the pain can be unbearable. Clinical depression will end when an individual begins to feel deeply connected to someone they trust. Our underlying sense of worth comes from our soul being recognized by another.

If the city is a reflection of our consciousness, it is not surprising that so many of us are on some form of anti-depressant. The design of American cities over the past 50 years has been deeply dysfunctional. Neighborhoods where neighbors rarely talk and lot sizes that continue to increase further and further away from the city and from each other show us how little we trust one another. And roads, lots of roads.

Beyond our psychological needs, peak oil is possibly presenting us with another need for community—our survival. Most peak oil gurus, such as James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg and Mike Ruppert state that the single best way to prepare for peak oil is to get to know your neighbors—well. A tight-knit community that knows each other and starts to prepare for potential shortages in energy and food will fare much better than the lone individual trying to escape the perils of a collapsing social fabric. Society may just save us after all.

Another peak oil guru, Jan Lundberg recently wrote an essay entitled, A Return to Tribes. Lundberg believes that, “the future belongs to those who will surmount petrocollapse and adopt time-proven ways of relating to the land and fellow humans.”

For Lundberg the model for the city of the future lies in tribal cultures.

“The only model of sustainability the world has is native, traditional cultures. The dominant culture of commercialism calls them ‘primitive.’ Would you rather be part of a tribe that lives for ten thousand years or more, or be part of a technological consumer culture that appears to have a limited span of perhaps 150 years at most? The Oil Age has been going for about a century. No one knowledgeable puts the oil age past the middle of the 21st century. Some of us see it ending much sooner.”

Apocalyptic visions seem to have the uncanny ability to create the drive to build a more meaningful world. Questions I am currently asking of myself include how to best participate in and help to create the thriving community I have always dreamed of, and how can this group or “tribe” integrate in to and deepen my relationship with myself, my children and my city.

To read Jan Lundberg’s essay go to:
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=2.