Reposted from News from The Cohousing Company: McCamant & Durrett Architects. To continue this conversation, please join us in Nashville for the National Cohousing Conference, where Charles Durrett will be presenting several sessions, including: If it Doesn't Work Socially, Why Bother?
Architecture plays a key role in the long-term success of cohousing, once the honeymoon phase is over. The activity around the common house is a key indicator of this. Some common houses, for example, have 100 people-hours (number of collective hours that people spend in a certain place) per week, some have 450. In each case, it cost the group $400K to build it. For a group that hardly spends time in their common house, that is a lot of humanity left on the table and a lot of lost value.

In our present time of information overload and violent world conflicts, it seems like the accusations between authentic news and fake news is never ending. So, we decided to join the fray with a salacious headline that we expect will come true this May 19-21 at the 2017 National Cohousing Conference in Nashville! ......
In the last year and a half of living in Germantown Commons, I am surprised at how much I have learned about cohousing. Observing it from the outside is totally different from the living experience on a day to day basis. I am reminded of late one night when ambulance lights began flashing around my room from the lights coming through the blinds, and the first time that I was aware that 'one of us' was at risk. Coming immediately out of sleep, the thought was about 'we' and not me or them...

Note: Durham Central Park Cohousing is a single condo building in downtown Durham. While we do not restrict ourselves to adults or seniors, our current residents are all baby boomers or older. The question of whether and how to recruit families was a recent discussion.

The Cohousing Consortium is seeking to expand and bring together the best of the best professional resources committed to cohousing, working collaboratively to create vibrant, sustainable intentional communities.

PLEASE JOIN US for an informative and open discussion on the formation of a cohousing consortium.

The idea for a consortium grew out of the following questions:

--> Just as cohousing is a different way of living, is there a different way of working that is inclusive and collaborative?

--> Can we create a work model that helps cohousing grow?

Iowa City Cohousing, aka Prairie Hill, is a sponsor of the National Cohousing Conference. Learn more here: Join Iowa's first cohousing community--Prairie Hill, in Iowa City

The members and prospective members of Prairie Hill Cohousing have been curious about how other cohousing communities get their work done. We're all assuming that we will cooperate in many ways to make our community run well. And we're also assuming that there will be some things that we just hire out.