Features

EMERYVILLE – On a drab afternoon, the rich, warm smell of vegetarian chili curls around the couch where 9-year-old Jessie flips through her math homework. 

It’s a typical living room scene in a rather unusual living room. This is the communal area in the house that Jessie’s parents and their friends and neighbors built, a blend of private and shared spaces known as co-housing. 

There aren’t a lot of houses like this around, but more are being built every year. So far, about 55 co-housing communities have been completed in the United States and Canada, a dozen of them in California, and demand for more is strong, says Stella Tarnay, executive editor of the Cohousing Journal. 

“Co-housing is a decade old in the United States and it’s proven itself,” says Kathryn McCamant, co-housing advocate, architect and Jessie’s mother. “It’s not for everybody, but it does work for a segment of the population.” 

“The good thing co-housing has going for it is it really responds to a need in the culture,” says Tarnay. “It’s a real need for community. It’s a real need for practical support among neighbors and families.” 

Although it may evoke images of tie-dyed utopias, co-housing bears little resemblance to the flower-powered communes that sprouted in California in the 1960s. Typically, a group of up to 30 people will form and start looking for a place to build a community made up of private homes and a communal space. 

There’s privacy — each unit is a self-contained home with its own living room and kitchen. But there’s one big yard and a common house where laundry is done, parties held and meals served several nights a week. 

It’s a lifestyle that appeals to many — singles, divorced parents, empty nesters and people turned off by suburban isolation. 

“What they discover when they get that dream single-family home in the suburbs is that they’re extremely lonely and their lives are utterly disconnected from the lives of others,” Tarnay says. 

McCamant was drawn to co-housing and to her future husband, Chuck Durrett, also an architect, while studying in Denmark in the 1980s. 

They came back inspired by the idea of promoting co-housing in a country where single-family dwellings define the American dream. 

“It made sense to us personally. I guess we were just crazy enough to think we weren’t the only ones it might make sense to,” McCamant says. 

McCamant and Durrett formed the CoHousing Company in 1987. One of their projects is their current home, the Doyle Street house in Emeryville, a suburb on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay. 

There, a dozen families live in what used to be a cement-mixing factory. 

McCamant considers co-housing the best of all worlds — residents get to share things such as the new hot tub, the children’s play room and meals. They also can go home and close their doors. 

“We don’t look at this as utopia where you’re committed to the rest of your life. This is a housing option,” McCamant says. 

Appraisers have a hard time dealing with the configuration, but units have kept up with the market, McCamant says. The unit’s prices initially ranged from $150,000 to $240,000. A two-bedroom unit recently sold for $325,000. 

Decisions are reached by consensus and residents take turns cooking the communal meals. The meals aren’t mandatory, but residents do have to help pay for them. 

Knowing your neighbors means being able to rely on them. Residents pick up each other’s kids, open their homes as extra guest space when they’re away and share camping and other recreation equipment. 

Families have come and gone over the unit’s 9-year history, but there aren’t too many co-housing dropouts. 

Fran Ternus is one of the old-timers of the Emeryville community, moving in as the single mother of a 10-year-old girl who is now 20 and in college. 

“I enjoy the meals a lot. I really enjoy seeing kids grow up. That is really fun. We’ve had five babies born here. This is really a microcosm of life. We’ve had several divorces and several deaths and we had weddings and babies,” she says. “We share it all.” 

Don’t people sometimes get on each other’s nerves? 

“Oh sure,” chorus McCamant and Ternus in unison. But, Ternus points out, “This is not family. You have more of a good-neighbor distance.” 

One thing holding co-housing back is the real estate market. In pricey San Francisco, for instance, there are a number of groups that want to start co-housing, but it’s hard for them to compete with big-money developers. 

Demand, though, is strong. A new co-housing community under construction in nearby Pleasant Hill is sold out. There are also co-housing communities in Berkeley and Oakland. 

At one, the Temescal Project, eight families from a church paid to develop nine houses, with the idea of renting the ninth out to a homeless person for a few hundred dollars a month.