Mid-Atlantic Cohousing

5 star rating

October 14, 2006

Tom L. 1 review Send Message | Add to Friends

Cohousing concept expands across America

Cohousing began in Denmark in the 1960's and has been in a vigorous growth mode ever since it was introduced to the US in 1988 by Architect-spouses Chuck Durrett and Katie McCammant.

There are now over 20 active cohousing communities in occupancy, construction, development, or planning in the Mid-Atlantic area of the US, stretching from Atlanta, GA to New Jersey, including Eno Commons at Durham, NC, Shadowlake Cohousing at Blacksburg, VA, Blueberry Hill in Vienna, VA, Takoma Village in Washington, DC, Eastern Village in Silver Spring, MD, Liberty Village in Libertytown, MD and many others. All the communities may be identified and contacted through the Mid-Atlantic Cohousing (MAC) website at www.cohomac.org.

The defined purpose of this concept is to create new sustainable residential communities in a collaborative effort focused at developing a very strong sense of community among the initial and future residents. Communities are typically planned together in a joint venture between the developer and the intended residents. New communities spring up wherever a core group of future communitarians come together and decide, "We want this - let's do it!

The movement has generated a ground swell of very committed development experts who have focused their traditonal community planning, architectural, engineering, financing and development skills on the cohousing concept. They are now developing new planned communities with parking restricted to the periphery instead of in front of every home. Geo-thermal ground source heating is often used to tap the earth's energy for residential heating and air-conditioning at 1/3 the cost of conventional fossil fuel syatems with no onsite fuel storage, fire hazard, or emissions of any kind. Homes are designed to be extremely energy efficient and scaled in accord with the future residents budgets.

The center piece of each cohousing community is the common house, a community center planned to include enough kitchen and dining space for community meals, meetings, arts and craft activites, child care, or whatever other functions the community members desire to share in common. The larger the community, the larger the common house may become. The availability of the common house allows each resident to scale down their personal residence to their household's essential needs and invest about 15% of their total household budget in the community facilities, including the common house, gardens, woodlands, open space or on site recreational facilities for kids.

Nationally, the early growth rate of cohousing exhibited an annual doubling rate as every community developed spawned two or three others nearby. Currently, the demand continues unabated with over 100 communities completed and occupied or in development at present and several more in various stages of formation, planning and site acquisition across the entire country.

Tom L.'s keywords: sustainable community, intentional community, cohousing, housing, ground source heating, geothermal

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