Cooperative Aging

Christian leaders' community

    Pilgrim Place, "a senior community for those called to careers in Christian service," is a continuing care community for retired Christian leaders in Claremont, California.  Pilgrim Place offers a continuum of living arrangements:   independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing care.   Residents are encouraged to be involved with the Claremont School of Theology, located just a half-mile away from the Pilgrim Place campus.  Applicants to Pilgrim Place must show substantial professional experience in a church or a Christian institution such as a YMCA.

Liberals aging together

    Sunset Hall in Los Angeles is a non-profit assisted retirement home for free-thinking elders --or, as one resident put it,"The home for the old lefties."  Sunset Hall was the subject of a 2003 PBS documentary entitled Sunset Story.  You can read more about Sunset Hall here.

GLBT options

    There is substantial activity in the area of gay and lesbian (GLBT) aging.  For example:

General

    Nina Pratt moderates a Google Group called Graying Gayly and Gracefully that focuses on lesbians living in community as they age.

    Stonewall Communities has various programs in Massachusetts and the Northeast, including the Stonewall Connections member services program that assists members of the Boston area GLBT who wish to age in place.

    The Gay Retirement Guide is a website that has state-by-state links.

Retirement Communities

    My sister Margaret is a lesbian who lives in Vermont with her partner, Mary Carol.  Mary Carol is a big fisherwoman who would love to see them retire to a southeastern state with great fishing.  But my sister will not consider moving anywhere that does not recognize her union with Mary Carol -- which would eliminate three GLBT retirement communities that have been developed in states that are traditional warm-weather retirement magnets: Palms of Manasota and The Resort on Carefree Boulevard in Florida, Carefree Cove in North Carolina, and Rainbow Vision in New Mexico.

    Margaret's position makes sense to me. Retiring in a state that does not recognize gay unions would seem to present aging couples a myriad of potential problems down the road.   So here I'm going to list retirement communities or networks in U.S. states  that do recognize GLBT marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships, and in Canada:

California:

• Rainbow Vision

• Triangle Square
  

Massachusetts:

• Paradise One

• Stonewall Audubon Circle
  

That's all I've gotten to so far -- will do more research later on GLBT retirement alternatives in Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, and the District of Columbia.

Cohousing and cooperative housing

    Although the terms 'cooperative housing' and 'cohousing' are frequently used interchangeably, there are distinctions between the two.

    Housing cooperatives are structured so that individuals share ownership  of and responsibility for the whole.  Although an individual has the right to use a given unit, the individual's ownership is not linked to that specific unit. Housing cooperatives may, but need not, include the community focus that is an integral element of cohousing.   

    Conversely, even though the concept of cohousing grew out of the housing cooperative movement, cooperative ownership is not an integral element of cohousing.  In fact, most cohousing communities in the United States are not formally structured as housing cooperatives, tending instead to be structured in the form of a condominium association, where the individual's ownership is tied to a specific unit of the whole.  Alternately, individual cohousing residents may not have any ownership at all, but may instead be renters, with the property owned not by them but by a non-profit organization.

The nuts and bolts of creating a community: Usonia

    In the 1940s a group of young couples in New York City banded together to pursue a dream of cooperative home ownership.  They hammered out an organizational structure for their community, which they named Usonia after a term coined by Frank Lloyd Wright.  They purchased ninety-seven acres of land north of the city, engaged Wright to prepare a site plan and design some of the homes, and organized weekend work parties to get the first homes built.  Nearly all of the community's forty-seven homes were built between 1948 and 1956.

    Over time the Usonians weathered financial crises and were forced to make many adjustments to their original plan.  Cooperative ownership of the individual homes, for example, proved unworkable.  But the social fabric of the community remained strong:  In Usonia's first forty years, only twelve homes changed hands, six of those to children of original owners.

    I grew up a couple of miles away from Usonia, and several of my best friends lived there.  I was always in awe of their connection to the other families in the community.  A Usonia kid  could walk into any home in the community and feel welcomed, safe and secure. But until I read Roland Reisley's  2001 book, Usonia, New York:  Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright, I had no comprehension of the vast amount of planning, discussion and negotiation that went into the creation of Usonia.   

    The originators of Usonia were diligent in documenting the group's discussions and progress.  With the benefit of these decades worth of records, Mr. Reisley's book provides a fascinating and detailed window into the immense time and effort, as well as the concessions, involved in the process of building and sustaining a community.

What is cohousing?

    Cohousing is a housing movement that is also called intentional community, or small neighborhoods, or ecovillages.  The concept of cohousing originated in Denmark in the 1960s and was brought to the U.S. in the 1980s by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett.   Quoting from the website of The Cohousing Association of the United States:

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods.  Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community.  The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space.  Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house.

    The same website lists six defining characteristics of cohousing:

1.  Participatory process.  Future residents participate in the planning of the community.
2.  Neighborhood design.  The site plan is designed to encourage a sense of community.
3.  Common facilities.  The community includes a "common house" or "common room" designed for daily use (but not as a substitute for the community's private residences) and interaction by residents. The common house might include such areas as:  recreation facilities, guest rooms, a children's playroom, and a kitchen and dining area for group gatherings. 
4.  Resident management.  Residents develop and maintain the community's policies and procedures.
5.  Non-hierarchical structure and decision-making.  Decision making is by consensus.
6.  No shared community economy.  In other words, 'cohousing' does not equal 'commune.'

    In the U.S. right now there are hundreds of cohousing communities either completed or in the development phase, typically structured as condominium associations, with the majority to be found on the two coasts.  Well-known cohousing communities include Muir Commons in Davis, California, Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, Winslow Cohousing in Bainbridge Island,Washington, Nyland Cohousing in Lafayette, Colorado, and Sunward Cohousing in Ann Arbor, MI.

    Elder cohousing is cohousing built specifically to provide continuing independence and accessibility for residents as they age.  Common areas may include living quarters for shared home health aides.   The Elder Cohousing Network links efforts to build elder cohousing.  Numerous developments are under way.  Three that have already opened include Glacier Circle in Davis, California, Silver Sage Village  in Boulder, Colorado, and the ElderSpirit Community in Abingdon, Virginia.