THE FUTURE
At the end of our trip, we went with Charles Durrett to Fair Oaks, a Sacramento suburb, where a new community of townhouses is being built. We visited with a young couple, Andrew May and Rachel Yamada, who are excited about moving in (with daughter, Freya and Rachel’s mother), to the home they were watching being built. It’s one of many cohousing communities now under construction, but Durrett wants there to be a lot more, and as soon as possible. He’s excited by many of the new communities, including one in American Canyon, California full of small houses for homeless veterans. Durrett is deeply interested in ways to make cohousing more affordable for the poor and to increase diversity of all kinds. Many cohousing residents are activists with a liberal bent, but after a visit to new project in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Durrett says conservatives are taken with the idea as well.
He’s not Pollyannaish about it, however. Cohousing isn’t for everyone. You have to be willing to work with others, compromise, and, especially, listen to each other, sometimes during long meetings. That was the hardest part for Durrett to get used to, having grown up like the rest of us in an individualistic culture where if you don’t like something, you just walk away. “I’ve come to realize that other people have some good ideas too,” he says with a smile. Some people never adapt to the consensus approach and drop out, but the attrition rate is dramatically less than that of other American communities. The great majority of residents stay on, happily. Creating a cohousing community can be tough in other ways. Groups looking to establish a community may quarrel over what land to purchase and some, especially in areas where the idea is new, may wait a long time for city permits and bank loans.
But the trend is distinctly positive and establishing the communities is getting easier. Charles Durrett and Katie McCamant saw the future in Denmark in 1980. Cohousing’s offer of community as well as privacy, has proven immensely popular and offers a way out of the lonely, unsustainable housing patterns that have for too long been the norm in American life.
John de Graaf has produced dozens of award-winning documentaries including the PBS hit, Affluenza. He is currently directing The Best of Both Worlds, a short film about co-housing.
Nevada City cohousing: by Charles Durrett