Cooperative Aging

Pocket neighborhoods

    A recent book by Ross Chapin, Pocket Neighborhoods, explores a range of ideas for living in a way where you feel connected to your neighbors.  

The book's subtitle is 'Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World,' and the reader indeed emerges with a sense that there are multiple ways to skin that cat.  Certainly, co-housing is given its due. But for people who are looking for a connection that is more bounded, the descriptions of neighborhoods created around walk streets or shared courtyards  will provide a launchpad for new daydreams.

The cost of well-designed aging

It seems like many of the best ideas out there for aging share a common element:  expense.  I think about them the way I do about the fantastic homes pictured in gorgeous shelter magazines like Architectural Digest:  Lovely, but completely unattainable.  So often, these innovative retirement communities, or continuing care communities that require an immense up-front deposit along with substantial monthly payments, seem like something accessible only to those families that have amassed wealth. 

Take, for example, the lovely Taunton Press book, The House to Ourselves.  Subtitled "Reinventing Home Once the Kids Are Grown," it chronicles in loving detail the design decisions made by twenty empty-nester couples and one group of empty-nester friends [Cheesecake, discussed in other posts within this blog]. Other than the Cheesecake group, and one couple who moves into a new university-sponsored retirement community and engages an architectural firm to make the unit they select less cookie-cutterish, all the exemplars, even if they are technically downsizing, involve either new construction or very significant rehab of existing dwellings.  

As with all Taunton Press books, including the Sarah Susanka Not So Big House books, this one is filled with lovely homes, all architect-designed, on incredible properties, and with gorgeous high quality materials and  and undoubtedly extremely expensive finish detailing.    It's dispiriting.  I guess that the most positive takeaway is to focus not on the incredibly costly shelter ideas depicted here, but upon the perhaps universal values underlying these baby-boomers' choices, as interpreted by the architects who translated their desires into reality:  single level living, an open floor plan, accessible design, space flexible enough to allow for visits from family or possibly eventually live-in help, and personalization of that space to permit hobby and craft rooms.

Cheesecake

In the late 1980s, eight long time friends  in their fifties and sixties decided to build a vacation retreat with the intention that they would ultimately retire there.  Some were singles and some were couples. Ultimately they were joined by four more people.  They purchased twenty acres in California's Mendocino County), hired a landscape architect and then an architect, and in 1993 were able to start to occupy the finished compound, which they named Cheesecake.

The three-building compound houses seven apartments, a communal living space, a laundry room, a library, and a workshop/craft room.  There are also porches and lofts to accommodate visiting children and grandchildren.  While accessible design was a consideration, and provision was made for future ramps and wheelchairs should they be needed, the property was not designed for continuing care of seriously ill members.   To ensure members' ongoing control of the community, Cheesecake was organized as a general partnership, so that an individual who wanted to sell or pass on his or her share could only sell it back to the partnership.  

Cheesecake's story is detailed in this 1994 New York Times article, and updated in this 2005 story in the East Bay Monthly.   There is additional information, as well as eight pages of photographs and architectural information, in a 2004 Taunton Press book, The House to Ourselves, by Todd Lawson and Tom Connor.

Slow process of community design

Here's a window into some of the steps involved in developing a cohousing community.  It comes in an update from New Earth Song Cohousing LLC   (Bethell, Washington) in the Intentional Communities Directory that lists the milestones the group has achieved in their quest to build a community:

MILESTONES ACHIEVED

1: Membership process defined - to help new families understand our vision/plan

2: Development legal structure (LLC) registered with WA state

3: Startup funds raised, more is committed

4: Half acre w/3BD house bought by subgroup as probable site of initial development

5: Experienced Project Manager hired

6: Feasibility study prepared for initial offer made on 4.8 acre parcel

7: Offers made on that and another 1.3 acre parcel

8: 10-week Aging in Place study group completed with 6 Songaia families

9: Resale of Songaia unit to New Earth Song family

10: Site plan for surrounding 28.7 acres being developed

COSTS: LLC members have committed several thousand dollars during the formation. Future costs depend on which specific properties can be puchased and development options.

 

The Eden Alternative

    The Eden Alternative is a non-profit organization established by William H. Thomas, a geriatrician, and his wife Judy, to disseminate their theories regarding aging.  The premise of the Eden Alternative is that most long-term housing ignores residents' key problems of loneliness, helplessness and boredom, focusing on seniors' physical needs without adequately addressing their psychological needs and thus creating a track where seniors' implicit focus is downhill, towards death. 

    The Eden Alternative advocates a cultural change in senior housing, promoting a community focus and hearth-like approach through what it calls Green Houses, designed as private rooms for six to ten seniors, centered around an open kitchen and dining area. The Green House is intended to look and feel like a home, containing few medical signposts.  The goal is to provide a place where elders can receive clinical care and daily support without the assistance and care becoming the focus of their existence. 

    Although the concept is interesting, the Eden Alternative's website is dense and not reader-friendly.  This article on the National Real Estate Investor website may provide an easier introduction to the 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.