The Real Wealth of Neighborhoods
Designing for People, Not Cars
When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose places to be.
—Rick Cole
The loss of a forest or a farm is justified only if it is replaced by a village. To replace them with a subdivision or a shopping center is not an even trade.
—Andrés Duany
The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.
—James Kunstler
The only way you run into someone else in LA is in a car crash.
—Susan Sarandon
Imagine “zooming in” with satellite imagery all the way to the roof of your house or apartment. Beneath that virtual roof, sitting at your computer, you’re effectively hooked up to a consumer-support system. Not only is your Internet cable an umbilical, but also the natural gas lines, pipes that carry water in and wastes out, electrical wires, telephone wires and waves, streets, postal trucks and delivery vans. These days, just about everything we need to be champion consumers is delivered right to our homes—except of course the money to buy it all, and the ethics and values to make sense of it. The fact is, beneath that zoomed-in roof, you may not be as healthy as you’d like. Maybe you spend so many hours browsing on the Web (and we can see what you’re looking at) that you neglect other important aspects of your life.
You may feel isolated from people in your well-equipped castle, disconnected from nature, or short on time. Your diet of fast food and ready-to-eat meals conveys an abundance of calories but not much in the way of energy. The evening news upsets you and your stomach rumbles from job-related stress and unpaid bills. The relaxation you need may not happen since you’re not sleeping that well lately. You’re a mess! (We all are, really, because the culture we’ve created is off balance.) Like all of us, you want your home to be a place of comfort but it sometimes feels more like a house of detention.
Maybe it’s time to think differently about the way you live. For example, by literally thinking “outside the box” of your house or apartment, you can tap into intrinsic assets your neighborhood and town have to offer. Instead of consumption, you can have community. Though the housing market in general is sagging in 2007, the quest for housing alternatives is going strong. In every large metro area and many smaller ones, there are now “new urbanism” projects and traditional neighborhood developments where these kinds of features are part of the design: stores and public buildings; parks in central locations; narrow, traffic-calming streets; shade trees; front porches; small yards and common open space; and functional alleyways. The idea is to create a sense of place and encourage interactions among neighbors, just as in the well-designed neighborhoods of a hundred years ago, which often become a town’s flagship neighborhoods. Like Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood, which has a great park as a centerpiece and restaurants at the fringes, these neighborhoods are as strong as the bricks and hardwoods they’re made of. I lived in Wash Park for a few years, and I admired this sturdy, functional place.
There are also many examples of neighborhoods codesigned by the people who will soon live there. Since 1989, two hundred “cohousing” neighborhoods have been built or are in the planning stages, and I’ve lived in one of them for ten years. As described in chapter 5, there are even ways to give existing neighborhoods extreme makeovers, creating community culture out of what used to be just a collection of houses and streets.
I believe that neighborhoods and communities offer the best counterweight to the corporate dominance that takes away our voices. Whether or not we realize it yet, the grassroots power we collectively wield in our communities can tilt civilization in a more sensible, peaceful, democratic direction. Neighborhoods can be places where Americans make the transition from “me” to “we,” getting our priorities straight and becoming citizens again.
Writes mainstream real estate columnist Blanche Evans, “Homes are about more than houses—they are about proximity to jobs, services, community resources, schools, parks, dining, entertainment, friends, and family …”1 Three-fourths of Americans now say they’d give up their
dream homes to live in great neighborhoods. Yet the habits of privacy and “the good life” are deeply ingrained in our generation. Many people don’t know where to look for a neighborhood rich in real wealth. Or if they already live in one, they don’t take advantage of it by getting to know their neighbors, being active in local politics and places of worship, helping to make improvements in the school system, or learning about the history and natural characteristics of the place they live in.
Where we live is one of the most tangible indicators of what we value. So the question, “What makes a neighborhood great?” is really asking, “What do we value the most?” There are many annual lists of Best Places to Live, most of which place the familiar categories near the top: jobs, crime, property values, cost of living, low taxes, and average commute time. Other qualities often considered are average income in the neighborhood, average education level, and average number of divorced residents. Toward the bottom of many a list are access to public and cultural amenities and health considerations.
These familiar lists seem to evaluate neighborhood assets largely in terms of income, appearance, and exclusivity—what we have rather than who we are. However, writer/editor Jay Walljasper looks at places through different lenses. “Cities can rank quite high in these categories and still be dreary, soulless places,” he believes. “Indeed, such qualities sometimes diminish the spirit of a community, as the push for a narrowly individualistic vision of the Good Life results in economic inequality, environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and lousy public services. A good place to live ought to offer more than just high salaries and low crime rates.”2
Walljasper looks for great spots to “sip latté, watch foreign films, and browse used-book shops.” In ranking the ten most enlightened towns in America, he and his team looked for communities “showing the way to a better future” and gave Ithaca, New York, and Portland, Oregon, the highest rankings. Access to preventive, alternative health care was important; as were strong evidence of civic involvement; diverse spiritual opportunities; homes that are affordable to the town’s hairdressers, janitors, and teachers; a celebration of regional culture and regional products: locally baked bread, locally grown produce, local artists; and governmental policies that reflect the specific needs of a place, such as Portland’s promotion of downtown development.
We use the question, “Where do you live?” automatically, without really thinking about it. Sometimes the question just means, “How far do I
have to drive to get there, and how long will it take?” Too often “where you live” means where you park your car, consume energy, watch three or four hours of TV a day, generate four pounds of trash, and argue with your spouse. Hopefully, in your case, it means something far more magnificent: where you have your best relationships, and your most creative ideas. Where you feel the most content and energized. Where you come to life.
Ideally, where you live is about a place and not just a house. A place where neighbors know and value you enough to be there for you if you need help, and where you can meet the universal human need to offer your own support and caring. A great place to walk, because a thriving pedestrian population results in healthy neighbors, cleaner air, human-scaled architecture, and lower crime. A great neighborhood creates less stress and offers more “social capital” and trust than a typical neighborhood; and it creates less stress on the environment by using less land, water, energy, and materials. While the general assumption is that a house in the upscale part of town would always be preferable, it may not necessarily have the most value overall. To afford that mini-mansion, you may be stretching your paycheck tighter than the rubber band on a toy airplane, spending many hours vacuuming unused rooms, and climbing ladders to squeegee endless, impossible-to-reach windows.
If we think about what we need to be happy, great neighborhoods can provide many of those needs directly. We need a sense of belonging and participation, a sense of security and safety; we need healthy food, connection with the no-worries feelings that nature bestows, and activities that we enjoy, to name just a few. Think of the places you’ve lived, and how they met or failed to meet needs like these.
I’ve been pretty lucky in the neighborhood department; I’ve spent at least half my years in places that really supported my growth. One of them was Larchmont, a small suburb of New York City with great connections. It’s connected to the ocean, by passenger rail to the city and all the culture that goes with it, and to a rich heritage that’s reflected in its sturdy, sometimes opulent homes. It’s linked with the Boston Post Road, developed in the 1670s from an old Algonquian Indian trail that King Charles II made America’s first official mail route. President Washington traveled this road through New England on his 1789 inaugural tour.
To live in Larchmont is to be into sailing, fishing, or at least swimming. Chances are the household includes commuters to jobs in the city that are stimulating—often linked with company headquarters, entertainment, or the financial sector. And then there’s upstate, a huge universe of forests, farms, and delightful small towns that don’t seem to notice that New York City’s on the same planet.
I learned how to drive in Larchmont, and how to play guitar (my dad brought a ukulele back from a Hawaiian business trip). I had my first job there at the age of fourteen—as a caddy at the local golf course. I kissed my first kiss, published my first poem, cut high school classes to go to Jones Beach and Greenwich Village, and watched my older sister and her friends dance to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” I watched my parents weave a network of friends from church and people in the neighborhood. We didn’t have a large yard, but my mom loved to take care of her azaleas and rhododendrons.
I went back to Larchmont a few years ago after thirty-five years away, observing again how great communities meet needs. I parked at my old house and spent a few hours walking through the old neighborhoods—even sneaking across the corner of a backyard the way I used to on my way to elementary school. I was a time traveler, on a spring day somewhere in my past. The dogwoods were in full bloom and the houses still echoed with the voices of my friends. Munching a classic hot dog from the same stand I went to as a kid, I analyzed this place through the eyes of a filmmaker (I’d recently produced several programs on sustainable communities). My old hometown had great bones: well-designed pockets of public space in each neighborhood; a great school; and big, old hardwood trees that forested the whole village. In fact, I recognized a few familiar cracks in the heaving sidewalk in front of my old house, created years ago by wandering oak tree roots (A grown-up kid would notice). The same steel steps and stone walls were still securely in place at my elementary school, and I wished the school was open (it was a Sunday) so I could try to retrieve a baseball card I’d flipped under the school’s metal threshold forty years earlier. (A coat hanger might possibly get it, and I just happened to have one in my suitcase.)
I tested a standard indicator of a great community, walking from my old house to the business center in a little more than five minutes, which makes it quite possible to pick up a quart of milk without burning a quart of gas, and say hello to neighbors along the way. A similar indicator still seemed viable in Larchmont—an eight-year-old girl could safely walk to the park or the public library. This indicator presupposes a library worth walking to, sidewalks to walk on, and neighborhoods safeguarded by the active presence of the neighbors themselves. I was tempted to try developer Andrés Duany’s blindfold test, in which you assume that slow-moving cars will stop if you cross a commercial street with a blindfold on. But my faith in modern-day Larchmont didn’t extend quite that far.
I observed with older eyes that the town offered a place for people, not just cars. I observed great parks, great attention to lush landscaping, increasing ethnic diversity, and the classic, fully functional railroad, still
running right on schedule. To my delight, I reexperienced a town worth living in (if you could afford it), a town whose residents cared about its continuance. And I realized that community greatness is built on caring, good design, citizen participation, and a strong vision of what a community can be. From these desirable qualities flow a strong fiscal base and a satisfied population. Yet many of America’s seventy thousand or more communities don’t reach these goals, partly because the “factory” that builds and maintains communities (zoning regulations, building industry, government incentives, certain patterns of thinking) is out of step with what people need.
Since Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best days, America’s demographics and values have changed significantly, yet we are still platting and building neighborhoods and homes that assume upwardly mobile families live there with jobs in the city and plenty of time to take care of the lawn. In fact, fewer than 50 percent of America’s suburban homes (where more than half of Americans now live) are occupied by traditional mom-and-pop families; more than a quarter of our houses are occupied by single people. As author Joel Kotkin points out, “Roughly three out of five jobs in American metropolitan areas are now located in the suburbs, and more than twice as many Americans commute from suburb to suburb than from suburb to city.”3 The ethnic mix of the suburbs has changed, too, enriching the culture and diversity of its neighborhoods. For example, a majority of Asian Americans, half of Hispanics, and 40 percent of African Americans now live in the suburbs.
Because it was assumed that Americans would always love our cars and never take account of how much we were consuming, builders accommodated a doubling of the U.S. population (between 1950 and 2005) with a drive-in design strategy. The idea of community was rarely part of the equation, and streets were laid out with little thought of such human needs as socializing, solar exposure, and exercise. Locating the new subdivisions on cheap farmland resulted in several dysfunctions at the same time: It not only paved and smothered the region’s best agricultural land but also put miles of resource-intensive travel between our houses and our jobs, stores, and friends.
Now, we’re faced with an ironic but pressing question: How do we strategically rebuild some of what we’ve just built to make it work better? In addition, how do we (quickly) refine the focus and priorities of new construction in the near future, because much will remain in place for hundreds of years? All new construction needs to be resource efficient, because the days of unlimited fuels, raw materials, and land are over. And it needs to enrich life rather than degrade it; to be less about buying life and
more about experiencing it. The cultural components of American expansion have provided various ways to escape. The TV, automobile, and the suburb (country life without the mud) taught us we could always choose to be somewhere else. Consequently, we undervalue and underutilize where we already are.
Now that the brightness of the American Dream is flickering, making neighborhoods and villages livable and sustainable again should be a top priority. As we reshape existing components of suburbia, for example, we need to determine the best location for village centers, as well as who will fund their creation. Small businesses that convert existing houses and lots into stores is one source. Tax dollars invested in public infrastructure like community centers is another; and new alliances with utility companies may be a third. To avoid the high costs of adding power plants and water treatment plants, the utilities may fund capacity (including purchase and demolition of certain existing buildings) at the neighborhood scale. New, low-impact ways of generating electricity, such as large fuel cells (with pure hydrogen as a fuel source), would work well at the neighborhood scale. Such mini-power plants could supply electricity, pure water, and heat to networks of houses, generating neither pollution nor noise. This technology is still very expensive but its value may be much larger than its cost.
Instead of spending half a trillion dollars (EPA estimate) to repair and replace sewage infrastructure in upcoming years, wastewater utilities might begin to look closely at neighborhood-scaled “Living Machines” that mimic the way nature purifies sewage. Snails, fish, cattails, and other natural species live in tanks inside of greenhouses; the wastewater flows through them at a controlled speed. Because these systems perform as well or better than resource-intensive conventional treatment plants, some state environmental departments such as in Indiana have certified their use. I toured a Living Machine in Indiana, where wastes from about eighty employees at the PAWS office (headquarters of cartoonist Jim Davis’s Garfield empire) are efficiently treated. Since decomposition is quick and natural, the facility smells as earthy and sweet as its final stage—a crop of marketable roses.
Conceivably, a neighborhood’s homeowners association could become a for-profit business, leasing/owning and operating small neighborhood businesses and mini-facilities that make their neighborhoods far more sustainable. As Michael Schuman suggests in the book Going Local, community-owned enterprises are not only possible (the Green Bay Packers is one), but seemingly inevitable. Why not invest directly in our communities? Another force to be reckoned with is the confederation of Homeowners Associations; fifty-seven million Americans are now “citizens” of a quarter of a million private jurisdictions. What an opportunity to
promote sustainability! Instead of just decreeing and enforcing what neighbors must not do (such as have sculptures on their front lawn or put up basketball hoops), imagine neighborhood associations that begin to encourage resource efficiency and the creation of neighborhood culture!
One very interesting example is the Norwood-Quince neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, where neighbors are determined to make the car an alternative form of transportation. Neighborhood resident Graham Hill is leading the charge. Expert in out-of-car experiences from electric assisted bikes to Segway scooters, Hill and his neighbors have taken one step after another—often literally—to make their neighborhood people-friendly. Out of 210 households in his neighborhood, for instance, 130 have Eco-passes for the well-managed bus system. The city provides discounts for neighborhoods that participate cooperatively.
The neighbors also have excellent pedestrian access to a shopping area, open space in a nearby park, several bike-pedestrian walkways, and even a solar-lit walkway paid for by a neighborhood mini grant from the city. “We observed that many neighbors weren’t walking to the Boulder Market at night because the street was too dark and seemed unsafe,” explains Hill. “So we applied for a grant to install solar-powered lights with battery storage. Now pedestrians can be seen—and can see—even at night.”
Forty people in the neighborhood are members in a car-share club—essentially car rental by the hour—and more than fifty have become members in an electric bike-share operation; the electric bikes are powered by solar cells incorporated into a bike shed.
The neighbors are now looking into creating better access by linking several existing pathways with easements through the edges of several private yards. To dramatize the efficiencies of muscle-power versus fossil fuel power, Hill and his colleagues staged a race between the mayor, who rode a bicycle, and the county commissioner, who drove a hybrid car. After each ran several compulsory errands, the bike-riding mayor won.4
Originally settled during the gold rush of the 1850s, Boulder’s gold now lies in its quality of life. Over the years, city leaders have championed a great system of bike trails, a well-used bus system, and an extensive tapestry of open space, funded through a small tax levy at the county level. The city maintains a geographical identity with a surrounding buffer of farms and ranches, and preserves the quality of its drinking water with a “blue line” above a certain elevation, to protect reservoirs and springs fed largely by snowmelt. Twelve percent of the electricity Boulder uses comes from small-scale hydroelectric turbines installed in the large pipes that gravityfeed water to city users. Boulder has been a victim of its own success: Its well-educated and civic-minded residents are willing to pay top dollar to live there. This has resulted in congested streets, as teachers, nurses, firemen, and merchants commute from more affordable areas. It also limits the social and economic diversity of the city.
What Makes a Neighborhood Great
Cultural Assets
• Great neighborhoods have active residents who participate in newsletters and e-mail listservs for sharing tools, tickets, civic information, and good-hearted jokes. They have discussion groups, community projects such as park cleanup or creek restoration, potluck dinners, volleyball games and skiing parties. (The neighbors of Elgin, Illinois, have a four-foot-tall, wooden Blue Tulip that makes monthly rounds from one yard to another. When the Tulip appears on your front lawn, it’s your turn to host a Friday night neighborhood party.)
• Skill sharing, tool sharing, mentoring of the young by the elderly, job referrals, day care, dog care, neighborhood rosters with telephone numbers and e-mails, bulletin boards—these kinds of activities and tools encourage the creation of “neighbornets.” (In Seattle, famous for its distinctive neighborhoods, Phinney Eco-Village—an existing neighborhood—has a Home Alone group, a natural health group, a peace group, and other networks. It has recently begun taking pledges from neighbors to fight global warming by driving less, not using dryers, using compact fluorescent bulbs, etc.)
• Free entertainment, like twilight conversations in the park; wine-tasting parties in someone’s backyard; or spontaneous, no-pressure bike rides to a landmark in the town (an overlook, favorite bar, or ice-cream parlor).
• Sharing of life’s ups and downs. (If I let you vent your frustrations as we each get home from work, I know I have a listener when I need to vent. If you show me your family album, I’ll show you mine.)
• Neighbors who live in their house for years, creating neighborhood history and neighborhood stewards. (Studies show that hometowns are the most popular places to retire, despite all the literature about “where to retire.” Of the thirty-five million people 65 and older who lived in the U.S. between 1995 and 2000, only 22 percent have left their homes and neighborhoods.
Physical Assets
• Community gardens on vacant lots, utility rights-of-way, and land donated/lent for tax write-offs. Also, the trading of garden produce and recipes from private gardens and kitchens, and neighborhood contracts with local growers (community-supported agriculture). Information about local growers can be found at www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/csa/.
• Transportation by proximity: location, location, location, and planning, planning, planning. Great neighborhoods need stores, parks, pathways, bike trails, and access to public transit (Some banks offer lower interest rates and down payments—often called location-efficient mortgages and green mortgages—to homebuyers).
• Slow, safe streets. Working with city governments, many neighborhoods have requested and received traffic circles, narrower streets, and so on. Studies have shown that the speed and volume of traffic often determine the number of friends and acquaintances neighbors have, with fast, high volume streets reducing that number by a factor of ten. In about twenty states “Safe Routes to School” has won public funding to improve and safeguard sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike paths that link children and their families to schools.
• A gathering place in the neighborhood: a community center or possibly an HOA-owned, formerly private residence with meeting, dining, office, and guest room space. Or at least a familiar space at a library, school, or church near the neighborhood.
At the Holiday neighborhood (named for a old drive-in theater that once occupied the site), the city-linked Boulder Housing Partners mandated that close to half of the 330 homes must be permanently affordable as well as lively, pedestrian-friendly, and energy efficient. Says Cindy Brown, codirector of BHP, “From the beginning, our goal was to create a great place to live and work for people earning different incomes and seeking different types of housing choices.” By hiring a whole team of the region’s most forward-looking developers (rather than just one), the city and BHP arranged diversity by design. Specific features began to appear in the plan, including a community garden and orchard, small neighborhood businesses, a pedestrian walkway, state-of-the art efficiency in building design, space for arts studios and work/live residences, and a mixture of home ownership and rentals.
Various interesting spots to work and play were incorporated on the site plan, which also laid streets out to optimize solar energy. The pedestrian “greenway” extends from one side of the development to the other, cutting through a two-acre “park at the heart” and also through a live/work cluster of residences called Studio Mews, where neighbors and visitors can watch artists and craftspeople create.
Boulder’s environmentally progressive policies helped guide the neighborhood toward sustainability by design. For example, to receive a building permit, any new project must comply with the Green Points ordinance concerning building and landscape elements—from foundations and plumbing through air quality, indoor air quality, and solar energy.
Says green building expert David Johnston, primary architect of the Green Points system, “It keeps housing costs and sizes down so more people who work in the community can afford to own a house here.” As Johnston points out, buildings are one of humanity’s greatest impacts: “Forty percent of all the stuff we make and use in the U.S. goes into buildings, with all the associated pollution and impacts.” He says. “Thirty-five percent of all the raw energy we use—the oil, natural gas and coal—is directly attributable to buildings, and 66 percent of all the electricity that’s generated is used in buildings, primarily for heating, cooling, lighting and appliances. We are also using approximately seventy trillion board feet of softwood (a board foot is a one-inch board, twelve by twelve inches) in our buildings every year to build houses.”
Adds John Wolff, chosen as the developer of three separate Holiday sub-neighborhoods, “Building at thirty units per acre is probably the smartest thing you can do in terms of conservation of land, water, and energy. Consider a typical suburban development of three units per acre—you need ten times as much land area for houses and ten times as much infrastructure for water sewer, utilities, and roadways.” Part of Wolff’s strategy is to build houses around a courtyard or community green—both to reduce the size and expense of individual lawns and create community.
The Holiday neighborhood demonstrates that the way buildings and streets are laid out affects quality of life for the whole lifetime of the neighborhood. For example, residents of the Holiday neighborhood are less likely to accumulate consumer goods because houses there are smaller than the average American home. At the Wild Sage Cohousing community (one unit of the Holiday neighborhood) some carriage houses-over-garages are as small as 600 square feet. The neighborhood will always have physical spaces in common that connect them: the large park, the walkway, and the community garden.5
I’ve had an opportunity to directly experience the full range of value that neighborhoods can offer because I helped design the twenty-seven-home cohousing community where I live, in Golden, Colorado. I used to have contingency plans for where I wanted to live in five years; maybe I’d move to New Zealand, or upstate New York, or a small town in western Colorado that doesn’t feel the pace or swim in the smell of smog. But a few years ago, I stopped thinking about moving. And apparently, so did many of my neighbors—we’ve had only three turnovers (four if death is a turnover, and I’m sure it is!) in the last ten years.
From the original group of six households that bought our property together, all six are still here. At the meeting where we decided to buy the land, we weren’t sure others would join our community. We worried that we might be out $320,000—a pretty great price for ten partly wooded acres, in hindsight. The process of building a community wasn’t effortless, and we lost many would-be neighbors as we looked for land. A gem of a parcel right next to the world-famous Red Rocks amphitheater fell through, and other properties either cost too much or offered too little. I happened to be driving around one day, cruising the For Sale signs, when I had the idea of stopping by the Golden planning department to ask them what was available in incorporated Golden—a great little community with a solid downtown area. Tucked right up against the foothills, the city was the territorial capital of the state until 1867, and has a rich historical feel to it. (Sometimes I see hobbyists panning for gold in Clear Creek.) In a place like Golden, we could be less dependent on cars. We could locate our neighborhood within this larger community, building the southwest-style neighborhood we’d been talking about for several years in meetings. What started out as a dream, discussed endlessly in living rooms and borrowed workplace meeting rooms, became a reality!
Harmony Village, in Golden, Colorado, is codesigned and governed by the people who live there. Its twenty-seven homes are all oriented to collect solar energy. Courtesy of the author
What exactly was the dream? It varied among our original households, of course, but was loosely organized around a concept imported from Denmark called cohousing (a translation from the Danish word for “living community” or “living together”). As architectural students in the 1980s, Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant toured many Danish neighborhoods, noticing something unique about a certain kind of development. Says Chuck, “Whenever we walked into one of Denmark’s several hundred cohousing communities, there was such life there—unlike most suburban or multifamily developments—such a joy and sense of interaction, that we began to comment, “This is unique. This is working. It made other housing seem more like warehousing. There were picnic tables between the houses where neighbors sat. Some would stand and chat for a minute, others would be there for longer, talking, laughing, sometimes eating, engaged. When you walked into a cohousing community, it felt like people had a choice between as much community as they wanted and as much privacy as they wanted. In other housing projects, the choice was just privacy and … privacy.”
Harmony Village has economic, age, gender, and cultural diversity. It also has diversity in personality traits: some are visionary, some excel in dealing with the details. Credit: Julia Rainer
Durrett and McCamant wanted a good place to live and raise a family back home in California, but they didn’t see it on the market so they designed and built it themselves in Emeryville, adapting the Danish model of cohousing. They wrote the book that helped launch a small movement, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, which explained that cohousing included clustered housing with lots of open space and pedestrian paths; remote parking to keep cars and people separate; a community building or common house that typically includes dining room, kitchen, living space, guest room, workshop, and office—shared and maintained by residents. Other shared amenities typically include such things as gardens, playgrounds, picnic areas, and recreational areas for Frisbee, soccer, and lounging. Features like these reduce the need for large private homes and yards, and increase the potential for people to meet their social and physiological needs right where they live. The word is getting out, because since McCamant and Durrett “imported” the idea, a hundred cohousing communities have been designed and built, with an equal number in the planning stages. There are hot spots for the concept in Massachusetts, Colorado, California, Washington, and Oregon, but there are enough other locations to travel across the country, east to west, and visit a different community every night—once a community in Lawrence, Kansas, is completed.
I originally joined a cohousing group because somebody had to save the planet. I knew that building houses closer together would use less land, and that organic gardening—my passion—was a central element in many cohousing communities Since future residents of a cohousing neighborhood participate in its design, surely our group could come up with the world’s most sustainable neighborhood at lower than market costs. We learned differently, of course. Our southwestern-style village couldn’t actually be made of adobe because it would take too long to build and cost too much. We couldn’t generate all of our own electricity for similar reasons. But Matt Worswick, the project’s architect, who lives in the neighborhood, and Jim Leach, the developer, did produce an award-winning development with great passive solar orientation and energy efficiency—with the active participation of our expanding community. Piece by piece, we’re incorporating additional features that make the neighborhood more sustainable. Hybrid cars are appearing in our parking spaces, more fruit trees in the orchard, and solar panels on our roofs.
How Cohousing Neighborhoods Meet Human Needs
(Needs are from Max-Neef table)
| Subsistence: | Efficient homes with passive solar, access to garden produce, lots of home offices. |
| Protection: | There are always meals, medical advice and other support for those who are sick. |
| Affection: | Many good friends are a one-minute walk away. There are many parties and celebrations. |
| Understanding: | Skills and perspectives gained from neighbors, directly, and via e-mail and bulletin boards. |
| Participation: | Each neighbor is a neighborhood citizen, making decisions about common property. |
| Leisure: | Gardening, playing music, and sharing community meals are some leisure activities. |
| Creation: | Neighbors codesign new landscaping, aesthetic features, and celebrations. |
| Identity: | Strengths, passions, and accomplishments are respected by neighbors. |
| Freedom: | Each person “has a piece of the truth” and can safely express dissent and approval. |
In fact, the installation of solar energy is a hot topic right now in the neighborhood. With federal tax credits and utility rebates already in place, solar-generated electricity has become very tempting. We have already installed solar panels to power the heavy-duty pump that irrigates our large garden, and now a handful of neighbors are working on how to get good prices and reliable installers for solar energy on our roofs. A core group of environmentalists and sustainability nuts are leading the quest for solar
energy, and several have calculated the exact payback of systems that can deliver 100 percent of their household’s electrical needs. For example, at .08 cents a kilowatt-hour, one system would pay itself back in fifteen years. After rebates and tax credits, homeowners would need to finance $4,000, and we’ve been discussing a self-help strategy in which our homeowners association would make loans out of funds we’ve set aside for long-term repairs.
In any group of people, there will be different personality types, skills, and ways of looking at things—we’ve always considered our neighborhood diversity a great asset in problem solving and creative ventures. My role in the solar discussion has been cheerleader. I’m not that interested in the financial details—my strength is more in big-picture thinking, but I really want to see more solar in the neighborhood, to take a stand against climate change. So when the payback calculations seemed to be stalling forward progress, I wrote in an e-mail, “Do we ask for an exact monetary Return on Investment from a new carpet, vacation, or charitable contribution? What about a thirty-year mortgage? We want quality in each of these transactions, but I think some of the ROI for solar is nonmonetary.” I referred to some of the pondering I’ve doing for this book. We also get direct benefits in terms of the human needs we satisfy:
• Security against rising costs (security)
• Ultimate “free” energy and equity, just as if we paid off a mortgage (sustainability, autonomy)
• Satisfaction from being less of a consumer and more of a producer (self-esteem)
• An opportunity to take advantage of a very attractive offer WE made possible with Colorado’s Amendment 37, that gives rebates for solar (political participation)
• A slightly greater chance to live in a world that steers clear of desperate, screw-the-future nuclear energy (empathy, purpose, cooperation)
Ultimately, I don’t think these issues are completely about technology or money but the way we seek satisfaction. One kilowatt of panels, even though expensive, would make me feel good in a way that other purchases wouldn’t. I do the same thing with organic apples from Whole Foods—I don’t even look at the price because their value is greater than their cost differential: they make me feel great physically, keep me from getting sick, taste great, have more minerals, and support good farming in a world that really needs it. Solar panels do similar things, although I wouldn’t want to eat one.
Our neighborhood has already become a community culture, and we’ve already begun to plan for its continuity. I envision a garden that continues to improve over the next three centuries. Because of its layout, with a community building as the central focus and walkways that interconnect the houses, it’s quite possible the neighborhood culture will persist until at least 2307. The water rights we acquired a few years ago (600,000 gallons a year) will still be irrigating a garden endowed with grape vines, raised beds, greenhouses, and shade houses. Enriched with three centuries of compost and cover crops, Harmony Garden will grow some of the region’s finest herbs, and be known throughout the area as a producer of high-quality pesto.
The park we saved from development by proposing that it be acquired as city open space will still provide a rest stop along the bike path that goes past the neighborhood. And that little three-quarter acre parcel will still be landscaped with native species that appreciate a little rain but can get along without it. The mission bell we imagined in early meetings and then acquired from the barn of a neighbor’s parents will still be calling people to dinner and neighborhood meetings, and the artwork of many very creative future residents will join the great photographs already on the walls of our common house. The brick walkway that contains sixty-five thousand bricks that we laid ourselves will still be here, and possibly our sturdy townhouses, too. Downtown Golden will still be eight blocks away, and light rail will still interconnect Golden with the metro area. In three centuries, thousands of people will have lived here. We are just the first sixty.