Housing Ourselves : These Architects Say Society Has Changed but Homes Haven’t; They Have a Solution

You wanna be where you can see

Our troubles are all the same

You wanna go where everybody knows your name.

--Theme song from NBC’s “Cheers”

When Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant got married and began thinking about starting a family in the early 1980s, they were living in a small San Francisco apartment, both working full time as architects. “We looked at our personal logistics and the implications,” Durrett recalls.

“Our extended family is scattered all over the country. We both worked late almost every day. Just to get together with friends took about two weeks of planning. Basically, we saw having a baby in a San Francisco apartment as an isolating affair.”

Discussing their apprehension with friends, they found similar concerns:

Everybody seemed to be living in places that didn’t meet their needs. Young couples were spending all their spare time shuttling children to and from day-care centers. Widowed mothers were living alone in the sprawling six-bedroom homes where they had raised their families. Single career people were going broke making mortgage payments, or sharing a house with other singles and arguing about who left the dirty dishes in the kitchen.

‘Custom-Built Neighborhoods’

“We were all mis-housed,” Durrett says. “We’ve been dealing, at least in the media, with the ill-housed and the homeless. Being mis-housed is not in the serious category with those problems, but it’s a problem nevertheless.”

Now Durrett and McCamant are certain they have found a solution--a concept they call “cohousing,” which was introduced about 20 years ago in Scandinavia but is virtually unheard-of in the United States.

Cohousing, in brief, is “custom-built neighborhoods,” planned from beginning to end not by professional developers, but by the people who will live in them. Although there are none in the United States, they are becoming increasingly popular in northern Europe where the number has quadrupled in the last five years. They vary in detail and design but essentially provide a mix of privacy and community, combining individual houses with facilities for shared meals, child care and other support systems for a household in which both parents work. At Trudeslund, north of Copenhagen, for example, 33 families live in houses clustered along two pedestrian streets (cars are parked on the periphery), and a wooded area makes a natural playground for the community’s 50 children. The adults, mostly professionals, range in age from 28 to 67. There are four households with no children, nine one-parent households and several singles. A large common house includes a dining hall where most residents eat three or four times a week. Meals are planned and prepared by the adults on a rotating basis (which means each resident cooks one day a month). A cooperative store, laundry facilities, photography darkroom and television room also are located in the common house.

Book Published

Durrett and McCamant, who became interested in cohousing as architecture students in Copenhagen, made Trudeslund their home base when they returned for more study of the concept. After 18 months of travel and research, during which they visited 46 cohousing communities and lived, for varying periods of time, in 15, they came back to the United States cohousing converts.

Their book on the subject (“Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves”) has just been published by Habitat Press in Berkeley, and they spend their free time (Durrett designs day care for the city of San Francisco and McCamant works full time for an architectural firm) meeting with fledgling U.S. groups that might be interested in forming their own neighborhoods.

“We have a commitment to cohousing mostly based on wanting to live there ourselves (they currently share a six-bedroom Victorian house in Berkeley with another couple), but also wanting to open it up to other people who we know are unhappy with their situation,” Durrett said. He and McCamant were in Los Angeles over the weekend at the invitation of the nonprofit Cooperative Resources and Services Project, whose Shared Housing Network brings together people interested in forming communities. About 100 gathered in a Santa Monica auditorium to hear them, a group of potential cohousing converts that CRSP director Lois Arkin says is growing.

Earlier Saturday, the husband/wife architecture team sat in the CRSP workshop/living room at 3551 White House Place, and talked about their work.

Development Process

“We coined the word cohousing, “ McCamant said. “The Danes call it bofoellesskaber , which means ‘living communities.’ There was this enormous quantity of experience there, which is why we wrote our book--to put it into useful form.”

That 200-page reference work not only describes life in eight cohousing communities--richly illustrated with photographs of what appear to be utopian communities of pastel row houses lining pedestrian streets, and solar-paneled houses clustered around village greens--it offers case studies of the development process and essays on such psychological aspects of community living as body language and candid communication.

Of course, not everyone embraces the cohousing concept. “The biggest consideration (in American home-buying) continues to be cost: How much down and how much a month,” said Dale Stuard of El Toro, president of the National Assn. of Home Builders. “I don’t think people want a lot of change in housing design. I don’t see any revolution coming.”

Nor does the near future seem to offer an array of new housing designs. This year, the NAHB, which accounts for about 80% of the houses built in the United States, will start construction on about 1,455,000 housing units, according to association spokesman Jay Shackford. Of that number, 1,070,000 will be traditional single-family dwellings.

Not Given Much Choice

Home builders say they keep churning out the same basic house (with ongoing modifications such as larger bedroom suites, more bathrooms, microwaved kitchens, whirlpools, skylights, round windows, component parts and computerized systems) for a solid reason: This is what middle-class consumers want.

Other experts, such as Karen Frank, a specialist in environmental psychology who teaches in the School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, suggest that the American public hasn’t been given much alternative choice. “You can’t want what you have never seen,” she said.

And with more people living alone and more single parents raising children on their own, she believes the second issue favoring alternative housing arrangements is a “concern with community.”

It is that issue, proponents believe, to which cohousing may speak most eloquently.

Common Characteristics

Although cohousing developments vary in size (as small as six families and as large as 80 families), location (from inner cities to farm lands), type of ownership, design and priorities, four characteristics are common to all. Durrett outlined them:

--Participatory process: “Residents are involved from the outset in the planning and design process for the housing development, and are responsible as a group for all final decisions.

--Intentional neighborhood design, usually with cars relegated to the periphery of the site. “You can’t Genie open your garage door and walk into the house, in total isolation.”

--Extensive common facilities. “This is what makes cohousing particularly special. Common dinners have proved overwhelmingly successful, with more than half the residents participating on any given evening.” Cohousing can also include a large functional workshop, common laundry and teen-age room.

--Complete resident management without the intercession of a professional manager. “That sounds burdensome, but they have learned to make a three-hour agenda an hour and a half.”

Requires Much Work

Cohousing, they emphasize, also is a lot of work: A new community does not spring into being effortlessly. The start-to-finish time line can take as much as five years, and along the way, participants drop out, others are added and everybody learns a lot about working cooperation.

Trudeslund, for example, was launched in 1978, and construction was completed after 2 1/2 years of “hectic and frustrating” meetings by a flood of work groups wrestling with the new challenge of participatory democracy. The difficult process, residents say, eventually helped to strengthen community spirit. Upon completion, the price of a house (privately owned) and a share of the common facilities ranged from about $91,400 to $117,700, figures comparable to single-family residences in the area.

‘Denmark’s Secret’

The architects also have to explain what cohousing isn’t. “It isn’t a method of financing,” Durrett said. “That’s what cooperative housing is and what condominiums are. This is a way of building housing to form a neighborhood.”

“The concept, really, has been Denmark’s secret,” McCamant added. “The first one was developed in 1972, and there are now close to 100 in Denmark. It has really snowballed.”

Although the idea of shared communities in the United States meets with an initial skepticism (“It might work in Scandinavia, but Americans are different--we like our privacy,” is a typical reaction), the architects say they chose Denmark because it is an appropriate model.

Potential in U.S.

“They went through the same process we are going through,” Durrett said. “It wasn’t a natural thing to do, and it wasn’t government supported. It was a grass-roots movement that grew directly out of people’s dissatisfaction with existing housing choices--families moving out of little houses because having their own home didn’t turn out to be the dream they thought it would.”

Durrett and McCamant see the potential for similar growth in the United States. From their workshops, at least seven groups already have formed in the Bay Area to start the process of forming cohousing neighborhoods.

Clearly, they acknowledge, cohousing is not for everybody. One Danish expert interviewed in their book estimates that “For every 10 families who want to live in cohousing, there is only one that is prepared to take on the burden of the planning period, and for every 10 of those, there are only a few who can take the initiative.”

Still, they are finding that the response of U.S. audiences echoes the mood they recognized in Denmark.

It is a mood reflected in responses to a questionnaire they give people interested in cohousing. “Although there are practical aspects to cohousing, such as saving time and saving money, those are not the things they check first,” McCamant said.

“They say the same things the Danes say. They want to live in a place with a strong sense of community, a place where you know your neighbors.”