Tag Archive for 'Cohousing'

Senior Cohousing: Establishing a Healthy, Sustainable Lifestyle for an Aging Generation

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by
charlesdurrett
on July 16, 2009
in Cohousing and Senior Living
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Senior Cohousing: Establishing a Healthy, Sustainable Lifestyle for an Aging Generation – by Chuck Durrett

Last year Americans drove 5 billion miles caring for seniors in their homes (Meals on Wheels, Whistle Stop Nurses, and so on).  In our small, semi-rural county in the Sierra foothills, Telecare made 60,000 trips in massive, lumbering, polluting vans-buses – usually carrying only one senior at a time – schlepping a couple thousand seniors total over hill and dale to doctor’s appointments, to pick up medicine, or to see friends.  In our cohousing community of 21 seniors, I have never seen a single Telecare bus in the driveway.  In cohousing it happens organically by caring neighbors: “Can I catch a ride with you?”; “Are you headed to the drug store?”, etc.  And this alternative is much more fun and inexpensive for all involved, and much less damaging to the environment.  Wolf Creek Lodge, a new senior cohousing community about to start construction, has 30 units to be built on 1 acre within walking distance of downtown Grass Valley, population 12,000.  Top of mind, one future household will be moving from a 20 acre lot, 9 miles from town, another from 15 acres, also 9 miles out of town, and another from 13 acres, 7 miles from town. These are young seniors planning not only to live more sustainably, but more fulfilling as well.  

Bill Thomas, M.D. and prominent author on issues affecting seniors, describes our currently predominant scenario of caring for seniors as the “$3 trillion dollar dilemma.”  The cost of care for  the 78 million new senior/baby boomers “coming of age” in the next 20 years will be $3 trillion dollars more per year than it is now (and that is in a nation with a $13 trillion dollar GDP — to put it into perspective).  It goes without saying, that the current pattern is not sustainable from an environmental, cultural or financial point of view.  

President Obama has announced that for us to arrest global warming, we will have to reduce carbon emissions by 2% per year until 2050.  It seems doable, but last year, carbon emissions increased by 1.4% — we are headed in the wrong direction.  Given this situation, we’ve got to do something. We need to think collectively about how to set seniors up for success and to help them achieve their full potential into their last 20-30 years and how to set the environment up for success at the same time. Cohousing is for seniors who want to be a part of the solution.  

We can help seniors fulfill their desires for a more rewarding living arrangement that better supports their well being, physically, socially and emotionally.  And the good news is that I haven’t witnessed anyone having more fun since the college dorms, than seniors living in cohousing — and I’ve never seen anyone live more sustainably (for example, my electric bill last year was minus $83.84).  Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living, second edition published by New Society Publishers (www.newsociety.com) — and the type of communities it describes and helps to create — allows seniors to live lightly on the planet and to enhance their quality of life at the same time. 

My presentation schedule is here:  http://www.cohousingco.com/senior-cohousing.cfm

Please send to your friends, family, and other folks who you believe would appreciate a more supportive and sustainable lifestyle.

Thanks very much,

Chuck Durrett, AIA

When Local is Not Appropriate

Published
by
charlesdurrett
on April 3, 2009
in Cohousing
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When you’re trying to do something special, when it is unique, when it’s sensitive to emerging sensibilities — like a new common house for a new cohousing community, for the new lifestyles and behaviors that you hope to happen there — in these circumstances local is not always best.  Sometimes the appropriate thing to do is to find someone who knows exactly what they are doing.   

It wasn’t until Katie and I visited 185 and  closely analyzed 46 cohousing common houses in Europe some urban, some rural, over 13 months that we figured out in great detail the nuances of why some work and why so many don’t.  We planned to stay only 6 months, but found that we didn’t quite understand it in that short amount of time — so we stayed for 13 months  instead, interviewing banks, architects, and developers in the mornings and residents late into the night.  That is we couldn’t exactly say for sure why a third worked phenomenally well (200 to 500 people hours of use per week) helping 60 or 100 neighbors manifest their aspirations for the place they shared, a kind of place that while they had never experienced before had become an extension of their houses and why a third failed miserably (less than 100 people hours per week) and why a third were mediocre — especially unfortunate given that they all spent comparably the same amounts of money.

By scrutinizing these buildings, these cultural edifices so closely, we’ve been able to consistently design common houses with 250 to 500 people hours of use every week — about as good as the best ones in Denmark, while other common houses that cost the same $300,000 to build garner only 100 or so people hours per week.  I hate seeing this kind of waste, but you see it over and over again in the U.S. — and in Denmark for that matter.  You could immediately tell when you walked into a community — if it was designed by someone who knew what they were doing or a local, perhaps a future resident with a license to practice.  

In Denmark today there are two kinds of cohousing architects:  Those who have designed 15 or more communities and those that have done one.  You could tell the minute you walked on site.  You could see it in the way people relaxed at the common terrace and lingered over tea.  You could tell because people would come to dinner early and stay late after dinner.  The macro feel worked, and the micro point 7 or point 8 second reverberation in the common house acoustics allowing people to have easy comfortable conversations.  People weren’t always asking “what did you say?”  Nor were they too uptight when a kid ran through the common house because the acoustics worked then as well.  The kids room was just right, the guest room was comfortable, the laundry room met their needs, and so on.  Then there was the design of the common house and community by an architect who had never designed a common house before.  And you could immediately tell that one as well.  There was a peep hole between the kitchen and the dining.  The cook looked forlorn and felt like the slave for the day.  The feel was like the church basement, because they did one of those once. And if the terrible acoustics didn’t kill you then the glare from the inappropriately placed windows would.  They just didn’t know, didn’t have the benefit of trial and error, didn’t get to watch and learn how people used their spaces but it was actually the process that really compromised the space.  The thing that made the stellar architects stand out is that they were so organized.  They know how to walk a group through the process so that everyone is heard and that would best assure the group achieve its highest potential.  They were very, very organized because if you set out to design lots of communities you have to be.  And you can walk a group all the way through 400 decisions in due course over a 2 day workshop.  If you weren’t organized, you waded through maybe 30 decisions and everyone wanted to stop long before they were done, “but why didn’t we think of this and 370 other things” haunts the architect and group all through the design process and lingers far too long — as in forever — after moving in.  And those architects never want to do another community — it was too painful, and the group usually doesn’t recommend them much.  At Sunday morning common brunch today in Nevada City Cohousing, a resident described how last year he kayaked down 7 miles of the Yuba and how negotiating the almost 100 rapids took his group over 8 hours because none of them had ever been down that part before.  Then a couple of weeks later he went down with a group where one had been down it many times and it took 2 hours and he had more fun because he was able to kayak and not just fret.  It’s like that with everything; your taxes, mountain climbing or designing a cohousing community.  

How does a new architect break into it.  Our recommendation is that they apprentice with another architect who has done it many times —either participate as a resident, observe like an architect on their project or go and watch a seasoned architect work with another group.  We have had great experience with this method, and architects have left internships in our office to design wonderful common houses or have worked with us and finished the construction documents after attending our initial workshops.  The apprenticeship/mentor learning method is far from dead, and in fact is one of the best ways to learn something new.  For 13 months, day after day, we watched the best masters in the field work with group after group to reach the pinnacles of their potential, make a common house that really fit like a glove and own the building emotionally, and not beat each other up along the way with a process that was too clumsy, and filled with acrimony.  For the apprenticeship approach to work the ego needs to subside — architects need not believe that they can design everything and anything and that they can’t design what they don’t know.  What amazes me most, even if they have not visited nearly 300 communities now, not lived in three over sixteen years, not already designed several dozen, is that they might not have ever even visited one at all — nor even been to the national cohousing conference where they can learn from a large covey of experienced architects.  

So, if you want to hear from those who have designed many, and have figured out how to best facilitate the creation of a wonderful cohousing community in your neighborhood, please seriously consider coming to the Seattle Cohousing Conference in June, and be ready for creative and motivated mentors willing to share so much with you.  It probably won’t mean that you’ll go forward and design your community with confidence.  But it will help you realize what you don’t know, then perhaps you’ll apprentice with someone who does, and then there after go forward and design fantastic common houses from a place of real knowledge and real confidence, and real abilities.  As so many others have in Europe and America.  

While the items at your breakfast, lunch and dinner table travel an average of 1,500 miles — that is a daily occurrence and local therefore does mean a great deal.  But when it comes to making a great common house (which, by the way, does more to encourage local than any other tool I know) then it’s important to make that critical investment work.  They say that to make our emerging local economy work, we have to make our local investments work.  Often, the best local union organizing happens by someone from out of town, the local farmers market has been organized with the help of folks who have successfully organized one elsewhere.  Make it work locally no doubt by first and foremost making it work so that local can work.  

Cohousing as the Seed to Good Redevelopment

Published
by
charlesdurrett
on March 18, 2009
in Cohousing
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Cities and towns across America suffer from too few new houses being built in or around the core of town, and far too many built three traffic jams away from downtown. If the economic stimulus efforts facilitate new housing construction, let’s make sure that it doesn’t result in more costly, low density sprawl. If used inappropriately the economic stimulus efforts will simply add to the long-term problems of our cities and towns. At its best this effort will realize this opportunity to address several key planning and development issues at the same time, including:

  • Land use and development;
  • Public transportation; and, 
  • Infrastructure. 

Actually, land use, transportation, infrastructure and development are one and the same. To get public transportation to work we need to infill, or “refill”, our existing cities and end sprawl. Sprawl devalues our landscape and environment like no other activity we engage in. It’s worse than mining; it’s worse than factories; it’s even worse than logging. Living in towns and cities with appropriately scaled houses (perhaps nothing over four stories); retail, services and employment opportunities; natural open space (allowing for drainage and run-off); conveniently located parks for children and older folks; places for neighbors to meet, play volleyball, play chess; and neighborhood design that allows citizens to connect to others, forming a community and being a part of something more than their own individual houses.

We need to better use our existing infrastructure by building where roads already are, where water and sewers already are, and where we can enhance the probability for future public transportation. We must stop building on irreplaceable farmland. We must reduce driving distances and stop paving over acres of land per house for new roads.

But building new houses in town is much harder than building outside of town. The two major hurdles of building in town are:

  • Neighbors, and
  • Security

As an architect, project manager, and co-developer, I have found only one consistent means to overcome these two hurdles – and that is by designing and building cohousing communities. Co-housing communities are redevelopment schemes that are designed to evolve into socially and environmentally sustainable communities. 

 

What are Cohousing Communities?

Cohousing communities, despite their peculiar, or perhaps “unfamiliar” name, are nothing new. They are simply families and singles, elderly and young people, a cross section of the population who are in fact quite conservative about what they think a neighborhood is.  They believe that a neighborhood is a place where you can easily walk to your neighbor’s house, you know all of your neighbors, and while you have your own house of course, you also have a neighborhood place that kids can walk to and play with others and where you can share a meal with your neighbors on occasion. And you might have other common facilities that make your life easier, more practical (a shared workshop, for instance), and more fun (you have a place where you can have a neighborhood dance), as the future neighbors decide for themselves

Developers usually like building in the sticks because there is no one there to object. As soon as you try to build where there are neighbors, they will find reasons to object to what you are doing, usually couched in potential traffic and parking problems. But generally it’s the fear of change that is the real problem. When the new cohousing development is out of town and citizens don’t see it (despite the real effects of more driving, more traffic, and more pollution), they don’t seem to object to it. It’s a temporary case of “out of sight, out of mind”. 

We have been involved in over 50 cohousing developments in North America now. Only two of them have been stopped by neighbors, although on average neighbors stop almost half of other types of proposed infill projects. The difference between the two takes place at the public podium. Future cohousing residents themselves make the best case for why they should be able to build their cohousing project and join the community. They talk of being able to walk to school, walk to work, or using public transportation. They talk about car-sharing and carpooling and driving less. Residents from nearby cohousing communities also tell their personal stories and experiences. One resident with four children talks about how he previously needed to plan two to four play dates a weekend, in the last two years of living in a cohousing community hasn’t needed to plan one. 

The neighbors and city officials get to know cohousers as real people, not just their driving habits and the color of their car. It’s easy to say no to a developer, with his white shoes, white belt and slick story, but it’s very difficult to say no to a young mother discretely nursing an infant to keep him from fussing as she takes her turn at the podium to tell her story. 

We had one of our recent projects fully approved in nine months, while three developments previously proposed on that infill site had been soundly rejected by neighbors and town officials. One rejected proposal was a subdivision of single-family houses, similar in size to those of the opposing neighbors.

 Our new infill cohousing community was approved in eight months. Meanwhile three new residential projects that now surround the cohousing site took 5 to 7 years to get approved. These projects morphed several times, and once everyone was exhausted by the protracted public battle, they let very unattractive projects get built. In contrast, cohousing communities have won a wide range of prominent architectural design awards.

Security

Most people are leery of marginally safe inner-city neighborhoods, and that is understandable. But I have seen over and over again that people who build their own  (use other word than “custom”) neighborhood to reflect their specific needs, and move into it at the same time as 30 or 50 other people, feel nowhere near as threatened as if they were to move into the same neighborhood on their own. We moved from an old bucolic Berkeley neighborhood to the rough and tumble, formerly industrial center of Emeryville. This was at a time when few residences existed in the area. Those that did had barred windows or were more safely located on the second floor (with the downstairs devoted to storing autos). One residence on the street graffited itself “Fort Apache” to note to would-be intruders: “bother us at your own risk.”

Katie, our one-year old daughter and I moved to Emeryville in 1991 when this under-developed donut hole of the Oakland-Berkeley area had only 2,100 people. We never would have moved there without the comfort, sense of community and support cohousing provided.

Today, there are almost 10,000 people living in Emeryville cohousing. Nora Davis, the then Mayor, is still the Mayor 17 years later. Mayor Davis continually credits the cohousing community as having a significant, catalyst role in the turnaround of Emeryville. Jerry Carnillia, still a neighbor on the street, says that before the cohousing community was built, and given the hidden nature of the street, someone dumped a pickup load of garbage on the street just about every week.  Since the cohousers moved in, it’s only happened one time.

Cohousing projects are approved more easily because, not only do the future residents win over the officials, they also win over their future neighbors in the larger community. Often, and before it’s all said and done, area residents come to testify on the project’s behalf. Not only does the public now know them as Ms. Carsten, who is the librarian at the local high school, and Mr. Moore, a local firefighter – they also can now see that they are planning a great project. They bring security to a neighborhood that was tenuous, uneven, and that really could use a positive shot in the arm. For the people moving into cohousing, the move brings them closer to jobs, and culture, and it means a lot less driving. Cohousing can be the catalyst for building and rebuilding neighborhoods and communities.   

Cohousing achieves several goals that are important to growing and maintaining a sustainable living environment: cohousing projects are often stitched into an existing community through infill development or rehabilitation of existing buildings, thereby limiting additional sprawl and greenfield development. Cohousing brings socially and economically diverse residents to a downtown where they can benefit from proximity to services, employment opportunities, recreational facilities and public transportation.   They become an active part of a neighborhood’s street life. And finally, cohousing provides opportunities for collaboration and a localized lifestyle that binds a community through social, economic, safety and environmental benefits.    

For more information on how to plan a new cohousing project in your town, please contact:

Charles Durrett, McCamant & Durrett Architects: 

Email: charles.durrett@cohousingco.com 

Website: www.cohousingco.com

Publications: 

Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett. Cohousing. A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1994 (2nd edition).

Charles, Durrett. Senior Cohousing. A Community Approach to Independent Living. Berkeley, CA: Habitat Press, 2005.

Grassroots Organizing for Cohousing Communities

Published
by
admin
on February 10, 2009
in Cohousing and Group Formation
. 0 Comments

GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING – 1/22/09

McCamant & Durrett Architects
The Cohousing Company
241-B Commercial St.
Nevada City, CA 95959

Anyone can organize a grassroots campaign. However, not every grassroots campaign results in a measurable success. Paul Revere rode northwest of Boston and effectively rallied a consequential resistance to the next day’s British advances.  William Dawes rode just as far west, carried a similar message, went through just as many towns but turned out almost no resistance.  Paul was a natural community organizer, and William needed a manual.

I’m not a professional grassroots organizer. I’m just an architect. But I have successfully organized several grassroots campaigns to get  cohousing communities built. People showed up to informational meetings, the local community’s resistance waned, eventually transforming foes into allies, and the project got built.

How did we do it? Let me introduce you to a method I call “The Full Court Press.” But before I get into the details of The Full Court Press, I need to get one important bit of business out of the way.

PR Firms and Other Distractions
Information can be disseminated in a lot of ways. If you need help, you can hire a PR firm and flood the airwaves with your message. However, I know of few cohousing groups that have successfully implemented this strategy. PR firms rarely get the cohousing message right and, most importantly, sound-bite publicity (the method utilized by most PR firms) doesn’t work very well for publicizing cohousing in our culture.

Cohousing to some extent defies the sound bite. Cohousing is Community; and this community is complex, because it is privacy balanced with community that enhances a person’s quality of life. This explanation of cohousing already goes beyond the scope of a sound bite. What to do? Build a bigger stage.

In this case, the bigger stage takes the form of an elongated presentation/discussion—a public forum. A public forum requires more than a public space. It requires a public—a public who is ready to hear the cohousing message. Enter The Full Court Press.

The Full Court Press
I used The Full Court Press to organize and recruit enough people to build a new 34-unit cohousing project in Nevada City, California, a town of 3,000 people. People showed up to informational meetings. We transformed resistant citizens into allies. We built the cohousing community. Our efforts resulted in a measurable success.

For the Nevada City project (which I will use here as a case study), I had to walk before I dared to run. But before I even thought about walking I needed to find out how much, if any, local interest there was in a cohousing project in Nevada City. This is what I did. Step-by-step.

1.    On a sunny day, July 20th  to be exact, I moved to the area—with the intent of finding enough public interested in cohousing.

2.    In keeping with the “cohousing is not a sound bite” sensibility, I went to the four local book stores to make sure that they each had at least a couple of copies of our book: Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. I mentioned to the book store staff that I’ll be giving a slide show on August 22nd, and that I would be telling folks where they could go to buy the book—locally.  I also carried with me a couple of national press articles about cohousing.  Bookstores only care about two things — are people calling to ask for the book and/or is there press on the topic.  Three of the bookstores ordered a copy from the book’s publisher, Ten Speed Press, or took it on consignment from me. *

3.    I went to the local library and informed the staff that their one copy of our cohousing book was checked out continuously and that some readers were probably missing the opportunity to read it. The library ordered two new copies.  I also took press there, but they didn’t care as much.

4.    I located all of the 27 “billboards” around town—grocery stores, community centers, etc.—and put up a flyer on each one that announced the August 22nd presentation.  I left flyers anywhere that folks would let me — coffee shops, and at the local hospital.

5.    I wrote a news release and sent it to the (liberal) radio station in town and one to the (conservative) station in the neighboring town of Grass Valley (population 11,000).

6.    I wrote a news release to the newspaper that serves both towns.

7.    I sent a letter to the 35 people in the area who, over the previous years, had expressed interest in forming a cohousing community. The letter was an invitation for them to join me in creating the Nevada City cohousing community, or at least come to help to organize the public presentation on August 22nd.

8.    Eight people who received this letter, and a couple of their friends, showed up at the afore-mentioned meeting. We discussed where and how to publicize the August 22nd presentation. I handed each of them 50 flyers to distribute around town (workplaces, childcare centers, churches, etc.), or to hand to friends at parties. I asked them to help me patrol the town’s 27 bulletin boards to ensure our fliers stayed up.

9.    I walked around town to make sure that our fliers were prominent at the 27 bulletin boards. All of them were gone. (Apparently, a couple of vocal neighbors were afraid that our cohousing community might bring traffic or lower their home values). It turns out that these vocal neighbors were in the habit of stopping projects. I assumed that they (mostly she) was walking around behind us, taking down our flyers. I stepped up my vigilance.

10.    I went to the book stores to make sure our cohousing books were in-stock. Since they were in-stock, I prominently displayed our book on the shelf and placed a flyer for the August 22nd presentation between the covers of each book.

11.    I went to the library and put the flyer between the covers of each cohousing book — and prominently displayed one or two.

12.    I was called into the radio station in Grass Valley for a radio interview. They were very, very supportive of the project, and the interview was great fun.

13.    I called up the Nevada City radio station to remind them of the press release.

14.    I reinstalled the 27 flyers on the 27 bulletin boards, mostly by foot — and through out the local hospital (a little surreptitiously), at flyer layout tables, etc.

15.    I was interviewed at length by the local Grass Valley/Nevada City newspaper about the cohousing project. The gist of my message was simple: I described what cohousing is and what makes it different from a typical condo project.

16.    I called the Nevada City radio station to remind them of the news release.

17.    I replenished any missing flyers in the cohousing books in the bookstores and the library.

18.    I walked into the Nevada City radio station to introduce myself and to ask them if they saw the news release.

19.    I called up the now 10-strong force of volunteers to make sure they had enough flyers.

20.    I delivered flyers to some of the volunteers.

21.    I walked into the Nevada City radio station and was interviewed on the spot. I was interviewed by Steve, on his show. Steve was the head producer for the Nevada City radio station. Steve informed me that a new community right in the middle of town wasn’t something that citizens of Nevada City had considered to be sustainable. They thought that the only location for a sustainable community was way out of town, and off the grid. They had never considered the cost of fuel (children, for example, need to go to school, they need other forms of socialization and nurturing, not to mention piano lessons and soccer practice). Nor had they considered the isolation of lonely housewives, or elderly people, or teenagers who are too young yet to drive. But by the end of the interview Steve understood the possibilities of cohousing — especially right in the middle of town.

22.    I went to replenish the 27 billboards, except most of the flyers were still there. It seemed to me that the only ones taking the flyers now were those taking them to show friends. I had outlasted the vocal neighbors.

23.    I replenished the fliers in the bookstores and the library. I should mention that I did all this while I talked to everyone I met along the way. And though I’m just an architect, I can talk about cohousing and put up flyers about cohousing, just like any professional grassroots organizer might.

24.    I went over the details of my presentation. Then went over them again. Not only was I the project’s manager and wanted to design it, but I was personally motivated to move into it with my family. The latter, personally, was all the motivation I needed. But how many people would attend? How well had I publicized the event? I saw the August 22nd presentation as a litmus test. If you hold a public presentation and 50 or more people show up, you probably have a project. Forty nine or less, you don’t have a project—you have a lot more work to do.

25.     In the course of the previous 4 weeks, I gave away 14 copies of the book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves.  One to the head of planning (with 3 flyers in it); one to the city manager; several to city councilors and planning commissioners; several to the more concerned neighbors; one to each radio station and to the newspaper; two more to the library that hosted our event several to interested community officials and politicians; one to the head of the Sierra Club; one to the superintendent of schools (to interest teachers that were new to town and in case we needed his political support — we ended up with eleven teachers); one to the head of the contractors association; and one to the hospital (in order to interest nurses — we ended up with three); all with flyers in them.  The books were essential because cohousing as a housing option, and as stated before, is so much more than a sound bite.  Not to bribe politicians — you’re not going to bribe them with a book — but give them a lot of thorough information so they can judge it fairly.

26.     On August 22nd, 2002, 150 people came to the slide show in the Madelyn Helling Library. Success!

Of course, the reward for working hard is more work. During our presentation we outlined the next step in building this cohousing community: a two-day “Getting It Built” workshop, which was scheduled for the following month. We outlined what the workshop would cover: costs, design process, development process, group process, entitlement process (how the project works through the political process) and much more. Twenty five households put down a $200 check for that up-coming workshop. Following this Getting It Built workshop, twenty-one households proceeded with the site design workshop. We were on our way.

The Full Court Press: Overtime
How you organize your grassroots campaign depends on a lot of factors: your location, your resources, your personality, your timeframes, your volunteer help, and so on. What worked for me may not work for you exactly, and I’ll be the first to admit I could have done more. I could have:

•    Written articles for newsletters. This type of publicity work, for me, is too time-consuming. The lead times are long and they require a lot of effort to produce. But if you have someone who can devote their efforts to newsletters and you have more than ten weeks of lead time to work with, then it’s to your advantage to explore this method. Church bulletins are a great avenue to introduce cohousing.
•    Reached a broader audience. I could have sent news releases to beyond Nevada City’s very small local paper and radio stations. But, in this case, I wanted the first effort to be very local. If I had not received good coverage from these local sources I would have gone for a broader audience—regional papers, the Internet, etc. However, in the local newspapers, we even received front page coverage, above the fold with photographs. Likewise, we eventually received excellent local radio coverage.
•    Spent money on advertising. Had the grassroots efforts I outlined not been successful after the second or third tries, I would have started to advertise.

During the “Getting It Built” workshop, we asked the twenty-five households how they found out about the August 22nd presentation. The results were interesting:

•    Word of mouth: 6
•    Posted flyers or book flyers: 5
•    Newspaper: 4
•    Radio: 4
•    Directly from me: 6

In the context of cohousing it sounds odd to describe a project in terms of one person’s experience, and there were others, but of course almost all existing cohousing communities were started by one motivated person.  In other words, if you want to organize a grassroots campaign to help organize cohousing communities you have to believe that every method contributes to the best results—and you have to follow through with as many as you can. You can’t be shy nor mess around when you organize cohousing communities.  Half measures will get you half an audience and then, unfortunately, you don’t know if you have half a project or a whole project. But if you go all the way, if you go all-in, the Full Court Press may be all you need.

This effort took about 6 hours a day for 4 1/2 weeks (with another 6 hours each day devoted to the political approval process).  And while others were involved, I wrote this article, I hope, in a way that would encourage any individual to feel that their passion, their creativity, and their hard work can accomplish a lot and will become catchy and encourage other to help.  As Thomas Edison put it so well, “All things good come to those who wait, as long as they work like hell while they’re waiting” — or something to this effect.

* Bookstores say that they only order the book if it has received national press, or local press if it’s a new topic, or people are calling to ask for the book, or it is a topic people are talking about.  Although you may have press regarding an upcoming public presentation, or an upcoming project, national press always helps.  If you show the manager broad media support, and show them a copy of the book, then most times they’ll accept the book — if only on consignment.  If you are interested in getting a press package from us and are serious about getting the book into local bookstores in order to assist a new project, then please send a self-addressed, pre-paid (8oz., first class postage) to our office in Nevada City, California.  We will send you a pre-prepared press package that has articles about Intergenerational Cohousing, Senior Cohousing, and articles about cohousing as a sustainable and green development approach.  We find that these articles go a long way to no only moving the bookstores along, but also bureaucrats, neighbors and so on.  Mix and match them for the various audiences.

Charles Durrett, Architect
McCamant & Durrett Architects
The Cohousing Company