Cohousing Tour, Part Three: Peninsula Park Commons.

There's a particular type of 1930s apartment design you see a lot of in Portland.  It's single-story, typically brick, laid out in a row that's usually bent into an L or a C in order to squeeze as many units into the lot as possible.  If you've lived here, you know the ones; some of you have even lived in them.  In 2003, local developer and contractor Eli Spevak bought one of these old complexes at the edge of Peninsula Park, not far from I-5 in North Portland.  "We just sort of stumbled into it," he says of the purchase, and thus Peninsula Park Commons was born.  After renovations, he sold 5 of the 7 units, most to young families like his own, for about $80,000 apiece.  The 6th unit became a common area, and he and his wife moved into the 7th, where his daughter was later born.

The apartment courtyard soon bloomed with an ebullient communal garden, a certified wildlife habitat and the scene of many social gatherings for its residents.  Eli, who has met us on the street to welcome us in, explains, "Every cohousing community has its own themes, and our themes are biking and gardening."  Sure enough, the concrete at the base of a nearby bike rack is studded with ceramic tiles, lovingly hand-painted with bikes and tiny poems about riding them.  The residents of the community are having a yard sale in the courtyard today, and many of them stand smiling beside tables and racks of cast-offs.  We smile back, and I deliberately avoid looking at their wares.  (Now is not a good time to bring home more stuff.)

Cohousing Tour, Part Two: Daybreak Cohousing.

At Daybreak Cohousing, the first thing you inevitably notice is the brand-shiny-new, ultra-conscientiously designed architecture: warm bright colors, ample windows, spaces laid out to facilitate eddies and clusters of residents.  A gorgeous old maple towers over a tidy community garden and a circular play area, a perfect peninsula of fresh wood chips on a lake of green lawn.  There's a spacious rooftop deck with a hot tub and a fine view of the humped green spine of Forest Park.  Electronic fobs allow access to elevators and common areas.  The place strikes me as a tad on the posh side, an impression reinforced by the price sheet I pick up off a table in the Common Room: the cheapest unit available, at 665 square feet, is $225,000 (not counting utilities and HOA dues).  To me, that seems like a lot of money for such a little space.

Cohousing Tour: Part One.

Yesterday I went on a day-long guided tour of four of Portland's six established cohousing communities. In a sense, this was Stop Zero on my intentional community research project, so I took copious notes, which I intend to share with you over the next week or so.  I'll devote a post to each of the communities I visited (Daybreak Cohousing, Peninsula Park Commons, Cascadia Commons, and Kailash Ecovillage), and also give you some highlights from the panel discussion we had with members from each of the six communities.

Cohousing is defined by the Cohousing Association of the United States, which organized this event, as "a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods."  All four of the communities we looked at were urban in design, and thus "dense" in the sense that all residences were apartments within larger buildings.  They ranged from shiny new construction to slightly shabby rehabbed apartments, and from heavy membership involvement expectations to more of a laid-back approach.

We met in the common room of Daybreak Cohousing, a spacious multi-purpose area with lots of windows.  Bagels, juice, and coffee were set out for us.  The morning sunlight, which we've gone so long without around these parts, made the clean, warm colors of the walls glow.

Our guides introduced themselves: Terri and Kristin, Daybreak co-founders, and Ken, an early joiner of Cascadia Commons.  Then the 35-odd folks here for the tour made their introductions.  About half the group had carpooled all the way out from Boise, and some had come from farther afield, from Corbett to Ventura to Nashville, and an intrepid couple with a toddler who had come all the way from Australia. (I was intrigued to hear they were just winding up a tour of sustainable commmunities. More about them later, of course.)

Everyone there looked white and solidly middle-class, ranging in age from late 20s to 60s, with a ratio of roughly one single person for every couple.  A lot of them were empty-nesters who were looking to retire into cohousing.  I guessed that this group was a fair representation of local cohousing populations, and based on what I saw later, I wasn't too far off.

When asked why they had come, nearly every single attendee said s/he was there because of an interest in either beginning or joining a cohousing community.  I think I was the only one who didn't state such an interest (I said I was doing research for a book on intentional communities, which led to some interesting conversations later).  I kinda like the idea of cohousing -- it seems like a pretty decent lifestyle for those who can afford it -- but I don't feel a strong pull toward it.  So I didn't go into this expecting to find my dream lifestyle, but I was still intensely curious about these communities and what makes them work.