Charles Durrett grew up in northern California, in a town of 325 people. As an adult, living and working in San Francisco, he loved the excitement of the city. Yet he couldn't forget his first community. "There was a humanity about it I missed," he says, "a sense of belonging, a sense of accountability. Security."
He and his wife, Kathryn McCamant, are both architects. Together, they began to search for a way to build a community. They traveled to Denmark and visited dozens of sites where people were living in something called co-housing. They came back to California and started looking for other people who wanted to create a new way to live.There are hundreds of co-housing complexes in Europe now, and more than 100 already existing or under construction in the United States. In Utah, too, a group called Wasatch Cohousing Inc. is meeting to try to build a cohousing community.
If they are successful, the first cohousing complex in the Salt Lake Valley will probably Look a lot like cohousing complexes around the world: A group of modest-size homes, many with common walls, will be gathered around a central green space. Parking will be at the exterior of the property.
The most unique aspect of the whole project will be the common house, with workshop and playroom and a big kitchen and dining room. There, four or five nights a week, 40 or 50 people will gather to eat a dinner they take turns preparing.
Though a big house and sporty wheels may seem the epitome of the American dream to some, "a castle and a car didn't fit our needs," says Durrett. Nor did they want to come home from work and relate to the rest of humanity by popping a video in the VCR.
They wanted to be able to have privacy when they desired it but also have neighbors that were more like an extended family.
Cohousing turned out to be, for Durrett and McCamant, not utopia, but a good way to live. Their new home is close to Berkeley, where they have their offices. Yet they say they feel like they are living in a cozy village.
They had also wanted to scale down, to live a simple life. Because their laundry and workshop and children's playroom - and even some of their entertaining areas - are located in the common house, Durrett and McCamant and their two children don't need the 1,800 square feet of living space they had before. Today they live in an 800-square-foot house. Durrett figures his cohousing community uses only 26 percent of the energy the residents were using in their previous homes.
As for Salt Laker Diane Hamilton, she began looking for community five years ago, when she had a child. With her son's birth came the desire to be connected to other parents, children and older people.
"Cohousing seems like an absolutely ideal environment. Children always have people to play with and other grown-ups around. It takes some of the pressure off the parent/child relationship. We need new models. The nuclear family is too isolated.
"This is a little more tribal. I know people who live in cohousing who feel sustained by it. Women have always known this feeling, been going down to the water hole together."
Several years ago Hamilton, who works as a group facilitator and mediator, joined with another group of Utahns to try to purchase 2,000 acres in Montana. Nothing came of that attempt to build a community. She thinks trying to relocate so many people was "too big a jump."
But Hamilton did not give up on the idea of cohousing. With Wasatch Cohousing, she is happy to be working on a community again. "It was beautiful property in Montana, but there is a new sentiment, I like, about staying within the Salt Lake Valley and trying to improve the city."
Even though she knows the Wasatch group is in the early stages - they haven't even decided on any property - and that it will be two to five years before she could actually move in, Hamilton has no doubt the community will come together.
There are many other groups under way around the country now, many developers gaining cohousing experience, many neighbors who have learned to work together. To Hamilton, the idea of cohousing in Utah seems quite possible.
Several hundred people who believe in this type of community came to Boulder, Colo., last month, to the first National Cohousing Conference. They call themselves "The Burning Souls." Other than their burning belief in cohousing and a certain penchant for Bir-ken-stocks, the Burning Souls are a diversediverse group.
At the conference, there were grandmothers, young single men and two-parent families with nursing babies. Two men came from Salt Lake City, from the Wasatch group. And from Moab, in Grand County, came Nicholas Brown and Dori Bozung.
Says Bozung, "We are in an isolated part of the state. It was really nice for me to go the conference and see what other people are doing and get that boost of energy."
Her group consists of nine households, right now, Bozung says. They ultimately want 12 households to live on land that is being purchased: 120 acres, 30 miles outside of Moab, in a valley surrounded by BLM land, and containing two springs and a creek.
Bozung says her group has just hired an attorney to draw up bylaws but won't have enough money to hire a cohousing consultant. "We are looking at ways to do creative financing for the homes," she says. They are also trying to find ways to attract some families with small children and to make a site plan that will maintain the maximum amount of green space with a cluster of homes around the co-house, and several homes on the outskirts of the property.
Two of the most sought-after burning souls at the conference were Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant, who wrote a book about what they observed in Denmark and now have a cohousing consulting firm. They travel North America, from Canada to Ensenada, helping cohousing groups get off the ground.
In some ways, all cohousing groups that were represented at the conference were hoping for the same thing: cultural diversity and neighbors of different ages and marital status.
But various cohousing groups also have special agendas. Some, like the Nyland community, near Boulder, pride themselves on state-of-the-art energy efficiency.
Also at the conference, a middle-aged woman from Chicago talked about how proud her group is to be keeping a place in the city safe for families.
A young architect showed his plans for affordable housing in downtown Atlanta: 12 attractive townhouses and a common house line both sides of a green space with cobblestone walk and two fountains. His design looks like a historic European city and makes good use of the 11/2 acres. His main agenda is to keep the homes small and the prices low, for the three single mothers in his group. Right now he thinks he can sell a 900-square-foot studio home (with the top floor, 450 square feet, unfinished) for less than $50,000.
At the conference, the people who were already living in cohousing wanted to learn more about group dynamics. Even though they had attended endless meetings while they were planning and building their community, they wanted to deepen their sense of community and increase the level of sharing and cooperation.
Those who were in the process of planning a cohousing community came because they were curious about what daily life would be like in such a community. For them, a tour of the Nyland community was the highlight of the conference.
Charles Durrett tried to answer some of those daily life questions when he visited Salt Lake City last summer. People asked him how con-flicts get resolved.
"Generally things rectify themselves," said Durrett. "We weren't all friends when we moved in, and we don't think we have to be best friends. But you learn. I don't want to irritate Margaret on Friday because I might want her to baby-sit for me on Saturday."
You learn to find your own balance between privacy and community, Durrett says. "I want to be able to run into my neighbor and talk for 10 minutes, but I also want to be able to say `Hi' and keep on walking."
He and his neighbors have learned to pick up on the subtle cues and to be honest about who they want to spend time with and who they don't. Durrett says the Danes found a formula that has proven true in this country as well: "You will like about 1/3 of your neighbors, another 1/3 you will feel neutral about, and then another 1/3 you won't spend time with."
As for downscaling, Durrett says most of those who are planning a cohousing community are very concerned about the design of the kitchen in their own homes. They don't think they will use the community dining room. But they do. Eventually, 60 percent of them end up eating at least four dinners a week in the cohouse.
Most of his neighbors don't have television sets in their homes, he reports. If there is something they want to see, they head for the cohouse. As for Durrett, he'd never think of going back to watching the football games alone, because "it just doesn't pay to make all these insightful comments about the coaches and players if there is no one to hear you."
When there is a job to be done, such as fixing a bike tire, Durrett finds he's less likely to put it off, the way he used to, because he knows there will be other people in the workshop. Fix-it time goes by quickly.
Be sure to build some guest rooms in or near your common house, Durrett advised. In one cohousing community Durrett and McCamant visited, 21 households found that four guest rooms in the common house just weren't enough.
When teenagers and parents are having strife, teens will often move into a guest room, "sometimes for years," says Durrett. Recently in a California cohousing community, a mother moved into a guest room for two weeks to study for her architecture test, while dad took care of the kids. She saw the family only at meal time.
Successful cohousing communities generally have four things in common, says Durrett:
1. They are designed with the future in mind. Although the central paths look like walking paths, they are wide enough for a fire truck and also cars. A resident who doesn't mind parking away from his house now, might change his mind when he grows old or disabled.
2. Cohousing communities are designed to facilitate conversation. There are benches near playgrounds. The mailboxes are centrally located. There is a common laundry.
3. There are extensive common facilities. In the common house there is a room for teenagers - which they generally use to form a band - and a playroom where younger children like to disappear to after dinner while their parents chat a bit longer. And there is usually a dance floor. "I haven't seen so much intergenerational dancing since I was a kid," says Durrett.
4. They are self-managed. "If I move in to cohousing, I don't want my main social activity to be going to meetings," said a man at the Boulder conference. Some people would rather clean the toilets in the cohouse or mow the lawn, than be on the management committee.
Collette Bruegel; her husband, Bill; their 10-year-old daughter, Karlin; and their dog, Pepper; live at Nyland, a cohousing community in Lafayette, Colo. They came in search of family, Bruegel says.
Karlin is an only child, and neither Collette nor Bill have any nieces or nephews. "We are the end of the line. We were looking for an extended family, some support."
They have pretty much found what they are looking for, says Bruegel. Even though there have been philosophical differences among the members, right from the first.
Karlin has spina bifida and has had several surgeries. There are times when Bruegel has to carry her daughter. The Bruegels were one of the families who needed to be able to drive up to their home. They wanted an attached garage behind their house and a roadway leading to the garage. When they met together, in the early days of Nyland, they learned that several older prospective residents also wanted garages and vehicle access.
But some of the other residents were philosophically opposed to garages. "What will you do when you get old?" Bruegel asked. "How would it feel to have to leave the home you've lived in?" They talked about it and talked about it, and finally agreed to allow one row of houses with a roadway running behind them. And now the people who don't have garages can't even remember having been opposed.
They don't often eat dinner in the common dining room, Bruegel says, even though she and Bill take their turns cooking, once every 51/2 weeks. "They are very heavy into beans, and we have a child who doesn't like beans."
And for a time, also, the dining room was too chaotic. Bruegel didn't like to take Karlin there on a weeknight, because the child would come home too jazzed up to do her homework.
Some parents at Nyland expect good table manners from their children. Others wanted their children to have all the freedoms of home in the dining room, even to the point of going naked and sitting on the tables.
Recently, says Bruegel, the parents got together and worked out a set of rules that will basically have all the children dressed and behaving as if they were in a restaurant. "If a child acts up, the adult he is with will take him out," she says. "No more bare bottoms on the table."
Building a community is an ongoing process, she says. People start out being polarized on an issue, but then everyone comes to the center.
As Bruegel talks, she glances out the window occasionally. At first, Karlin is walking Pepper, on a leash, through the meadows. Later, she is talking to some neighbor men who are working in the garden near the greenhouse. Even later, Karlin disappears from view entirely. Bruegel says she isn't worried about where her daughter went. And that is the peace of mind she was seeking when she moved into Nyland.
"We know all 125 people who live here. Everyone calls Karlin by name. She's got playmates all the time.
"We have become close to some of the people at Nyland, really good friends. We would never go back to an old-fashioned neighborhood."
For information on cohousing in Moab, write to Nicholas Brown and Dori Bozung at P.O. Box 1171, Moab, UT 84532. For information on cohousing on the Wasatch Front, call Scott Cowley, in Salt Lake City, at 262-3291.