April 20-24, 2009 Boulder, Colorado - Silver Sage Village
Cost is $1,250 for 5-Day Workshop. $100 non-refundable deposit holds your spot. Price goes to $1,450 after March 20, 2009.
$100 non-refundable deposit holds your spot. Participants limited to 20.
Who should attend: Anyone who’s excited about creating senior cohousing and wants to take a leadership role in creating a community. You might be a builder, a developer, an executive of a senior living organization, an individual who works with older adults, a government housing leader, or an individual who wants to organize a new senior cohousing community for yourself.
If you want to start a senior cohousing community, you couldn’t get a better grounding than to spend five days with three of the country’s leading experts exploring the many facets of this innovative option for seniors. Chuck Durrett, Jim Leach and Annie Russell will be bringing you five days of experience, tools, and invaluable coaching focused on you – the participants – and your projects.
This workshop is highly experiential. Mornings will be spent exploring the many issues faced by seniors who are contemplating a signifi cant life change to support them as they age. These topics include aging in community, working with your neighbors to provide a supportive environment, the physical realities of aging, the economics of aging, what seniors have to offer each other and their communities, and the risks and rewards of senior cohousing.
This information will arm you with everything you need to recruit seniors to your project.
Afternoons will be spent working on case studies drawn from the participants, examining the many opportunities and issues of developing senior cohousing. The focus of these cases, tailored to the needs of the group, will include fi nding land, feasibility, the development timeline, roles and responsibilities of a project team and its members, financing, building community, and marketing. The story of Silver Sage through these development steps will be presented.
You’ll have a chance to meet and talk with Silver Sage Cohousing residents about their experience after the first year, and on Friday a tour of other cohousing communities in the Boulder area will be provided.
At the end of these five days you can expect to leave with comprehensive written materials, and significant understanding of how to market, sell, and develop a senior cohousing community.
Your trainers: Chuck Durrett, an architect, pioneered the first cohousing communities in the United States after studying cohousing communities in Denmark. Fifteen years later he visited Denmark again to study Senior Cohousing and authored the book, Senior Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Independent Living – The Handbook. Chuck has been a tireless advocate for cohousing for 20 years and has designed all or part of over 50 cohousing communities in the US, many of which have received numerous awards. Chuck, his wife and partner Katie, and daughter Jessie live in Nevada City Cohousing.
Jim Leach has been a developer of innovative housing since 1965 and is president of Wonderland Hill Development Company, the largest developer of cohousing in the US. Since 1990 Jim has developed 18 cohousing communities, including Silver Sage, one of the first senior cohousing communities in the US. Jim is known for his commitment and creativity in putting together the business end of each development. Jim and his wife Brownie live in Silver Sage Cohousing.
Annie Russell has been a team builder and organization consultant for 15 years. She was a founding member of Wild Sage Cohousing and the Community Builder for Wonderland Hill Development Company and Cohousing Partners. She has coached many communities in community building, and she led the marketing and community building efforts of Silver Sage. Annie lives in Silver Sage Cohousing.
“As an architect, I’d like nothing better to do than just design these wonderful communities, but there is much work to be accomplished before drawing the very fi rst line on paper. People need to explore the realities of their future before they are ready to make changes, be less in denial, and become self-determining in terms of maintaining the highest quality of living — both independently and intra-dependently — as they grow older. Planning for the future is an essential component of being able to create appropriate senior environments.” Charles Durrett
SENIOR COHOUSING is a form of housing that offers a smalltown-like alternative to isolation, institutionalization, and expensive assisted-living facilities. Important, yes, but perhaps even more important is that the residents of senior cohousing seem to have a wonderful time.
Designed with the consensus of its residents, senior cohousing creates community, communication, and support, and a lot more fun than any living arrangement since the college dorms.
By design, it includes both private dwellings and common areas. And by way of intent, it makes life easier through cooperation with others. This is true of inter-generational cohousing as well, but what makes senior cohousing unique is the time spent prior to design – time where the seniors themselves examine the issues related to aging and how the world in which they live will influence successful aging.
I have signed up for your workshop and I have some questions for you. I am a builder/developer in the small town of Taos NM. Most people here 55 and older have heard of elder co-housing and I anticipate a healthy turn out if I do the work outlined in your website.
I have a 2/3 of an acre piece of land zoned for 8 units. Is this enough land to do cohousing? Do I need more than 8 participants to do a project? Land in the downtown area of Taos is prohibitively expensive. Even in this economic environment I could expect to pay hundreds of thousands for anything larger than an acre.
Looking forward to seeing you. No problem about your land size - you can do something on 2/3 of an acre. The 16 unit project you are going to see in Boulder is on 3/4 acres. 8 units is a little small. Perhaps you can get a variance for a dozen units. We did a really sweet project in Emeryville, California, of 12 units on .29 acres, and a very sweet project in Berkeley, California, of 14 units on .75 acres. If you want to view these projects, click on the links in the right column of my blog under “Cohousing Communities”.
Charles, I had a meeting with a couple of friends who have been following co-housing for years. We have concerns about the cost of the units here. A similar piece of land (1 1/4 acres) is selling for $800k. Re-zoning for more than the 8 units is like poking a hornet’s nest expect a year long struggle, court costs etc. There is a Senior Co-housing group that is in its second year and who knows how much in the way of money fighting their way through a zone change and other issues that the community found to stonewall them. Alan
Alan,
of course, in any development, it has to “pencil out” first and foremost before it is a viable project that can attract financing and buyers. Yes, it takes more work, and it is a political process, to build at higher densities, even when clustering means that you’re preserving more open space and minimizing impacts on neighbors. No matter what you do, NIMBY challenges can arise. I think the key difference the cohousing model can provide is the resident engagement so that you have local on-the-ground allies going to bat for the project, as future homeowners, who can relate to neighbors directly and individually, rather than you as the “evil”/”greedy”/”out of town” (choose your epithet) developer without a vested interest in the end result.
There are some cohousing neighborhoods with as few as eight units, but it is hard to get good economies of scale and sufficient common facilities to make the units small enough to benefit when you’re that small. I moved from a 20-unit community to a 14-unit one (Berkeley cohousing, which Chuck mentions above) and find that it is harder to get critical mass for events and more work per person per quarter to enjoy three meals a week together.
I highly recommend planning not just for this gathering in Boulder, but the national cohousing conference in Seattle in June, for extensive exposure to the full range of cohousing movement leaders and ideas.
Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach http://www.CohousingCoach.com/
Planning for Sustainable Communities
at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing
Co-Author, Audacious Aging