[Dissertation] Cohousing in the United States: Utopian Ideals in the Twenty-first Century

Citation preview

The Dissertation Committee for Gale Robin Greenleaf certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Cohousing in the United States: Utopian Ideals in the Twenty-first Century

Committee:

Jeffrey L. Meikle, Supervisor Robert H. Abzug Julia L. Mickenberg Steven D. Hoelsher Omer R. Galle

Cohousing in the United States: Utopian Ideals in the Twenty-first Century

by Gale Robin Greenleaf, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2002

UMI Number: 3099455

________________________________________________________ UMI Microform 3099455 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ____________________________________________________________ ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road PO Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

Dedication

To my parents, who taught me to read.

Acknowledgements

No one completes a major project like this in a vacuum. There are many layers of people who helped me, some without knowing they did, some more than they knew. In no particular order I owe and extend gratitude to the following people and entities. To all the neighbors I met and talked to on my frequent greenbelt walks, thanks for listening to my interminable rambling on my topic over the years. To my good friends Kathy, Deb, Nance, Mark, Adrienne, Paige and Karol, thanks even more for also giving valuable feedback and suggestions. To the generous and gentle people in Central Austin Cohousing, I could not have found a more welcoming people group to work with. I’d live with you if my cats could run free. To the cohousing list folks, I salute you for being open, honest, intelligent, and willing to debate the most intimate topics. To David Beer, you gave me a chance to teach, and your relentless reminders spurred me on. To the faculty and staff at New College at St. Edward’s University, especially Paula Marks and the late Kay Sutherland, you made college re-entry a painless and exciting experience. To my committee members, two of whom were pressed into service only recently, thanks for your thoughtfulness and willingness to help, as well as your ideas. And to Jeffrey Meikle, who believed I could finish when I didn’t, your careful reading and editing remind me what teaching should be about and why I love it.

v

Cohousing in the United States: Utopian Ideals in the Twenty-first Century Publication No._____________

Gale Robin Greenleaf, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2002 Supervisor: Jeffrey L. Meikle The United States has a long history of being home to utopian communities. Early ones were based on religious beliefs, but by the 1820s utopian socialist and other kinds of secular communities were founded. There have been several waves of such foundings, most recently the communes of the 1960s and 1970s. However, there is disagreement about whether these were really utopian, and if the idea of utopia is dead. This dissertation explores a recent variant from Denmark, cohousing, to compare it to past utopian ideas and ideals; in particular, I compare aspects such as architecture, process, relationships with the outside world, and membership. Cohousing is a community of individual living units and a shared common house that residents have planned and that they manage. I explain what formal consensus is, how it developed through the 1960s, and how cohousing uses this process for most decision making. Next, after being a participant observer for over a year, I describe the formation of a new cohousing group in Austin, Texas, and the difficulties and interactions that such a group must grow through to succeed. Finally, cohousers in many parts of the country provide insight into what living in cohousing is like and how much commitment and idealism it requires. I find many links to the communes of the 1960s and

vi

many similarities to older secular and religious utopian communities. There is more continuity between waves of communalism, at least in the last century, than much of the literature indicates. Today’s intentional communities, including cohousing, are generally less radical; less likely to separate from the larger society; and more involved with the outside world, particularly the environment, than earlier communities. They are therefore more likely to be accepted by and to be able to influence that larger society and outside world.

vii

Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE: THE INTENTIONS OF UTOPIA

1

Introduction ............................................................................................... 24 Methodology ............................................................................................. 24 CHAPTER TWO: LEARNING FROM THE PAST

34

Architecture and Planning......................................................................... 38 Process and Structure ................................................................................ 42 Community Makeup.................................................................................. 44 Play and Rituals......................................................................................... 45 Writing about the Community................................................................... 46 Community Relations with the Outside .................................................... 47 Nineteenth-Century Communities............................................................. 48 Late Nineteenth and Early- to Mid-Twentieth Century Groups ............... 62 Twentieth-Century Groups: The 60s Communal Wave............................ 73 Commonalities and Differences ................................................................ 86 CHAPTER THREE: CENTRAL TEXAS COMMUNITIES AND INFLUENCES

89

Central Texas Communities ...................................................................... 92

viii

Alternative Groups .................................................................................. 106 CHAPTER FOUR: COHOUSING 101

117

Introduction ............................................................................................. 117 History........................................................................................................... Definition ................................................................................................ 121 Pioneering................................................................................................ 127 Process..................................................................................................... 135 CHAPTER FIVE: TEXAS COHOUSING

147

Central Austin Cohousing: A Year in the Life........................................ 155 CHAPTER SIX: COHOUSING IN PRACTICE

194

Evaluation and reevaluation .................................................................... 194 Pods

..................................................................................................... 198

To Screen or Not to Screen ..................................................................... 199 Self Selection........................................................................................... 199 Sample Cohousing Profiles ..................................................................... 201 Planning the Development ...................................................................... 204 Publicity and Press .................................................................................. 216 Makeup of the Community...................................................................... 222 ix

117

Rituals, Play and Celebrations ................................................................ 224 Communication ....................................................................................... 228 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: FICTION AND FACT

229

BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

VITA

250

x

CHAPTER ONE: THE INTENTIONS OF UTOPIA Introduction Utopian communities are not unique to the United States, but almost from its inception the new country offered a unique opportunity for many groups of people to experiment with different kinds of utopian community designs. This dissertation will briefly survey American utopian thought and practice over its history, with a look at Central Texas as a sampling of the current state of America's utopian ideals and practices. Many scholars think that utopia in America is dead, and that there have been no significant utopian developments since the 1960s and 70s. However, I argue that today’s cohousing movement is the twenty-first century inheritor of the utopian impulse in American, even though cohousing was founded in Denmark and in spite of some cohousers’ disclaimers of it as a kind of intentional community. To understand my framework, some definitions are in order. First, utopia: social critic Lewis Mumford explained in The Story of Utopias that "utopia" really means no place, or a completely imaginary place; "eutopia" means a good place, or a reality-based but improved place; and "dystopia" means a bad place, or the opposite of a eutopia.1 However, for my purposes "utopia" serves for eutopia also. So utopia is a particular improved place, and to be utopian an idea must be reality-based and an improvement. Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the groundbreaking

1

Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Viking Press, 1922), 4.

1

Commitment and Community declared that “the primary utopian idea is perfectibility,”2 the belief that if societal conditions were better, people could live in harmony with each other; and that “human nature” doesn’t exist in the individual but in context — in groups, interaction, and face-to-face contact. There is room for interpretation here, because harmony could mean relative harmony, or simply greater than what presently exists. The term “perfectibility” also could be interpreted according to one’s own definition of perfection, and could be defined simply as the greatest good for the greatest number of people, with the least amount of harm done to all. And if we let go of the idea of stasis and think of “perfectibility” as a process, not a destination, we eliminate the most common criticism of utopia as impossibly unchanging. Many scoff at the very word "utopia," perhaps because of that connotation of absolute perfection, and think that the utopian impulse in America is dead. British utopian historian Mark Holloway’s Heavens on Earth prematurely declared in 1966 that “the golden age of communities was over … Utopia passed into a decline.”3 Martin Fellman in Unbounded Frame, a kind of survey of real and fictional utopias, wrote that utopianism was "a rapidly fading memory" by 1900 although progressivism to a degree had replaced it.4 This viewpoint is shared by those who insist the heyday of American utopianism was between 2

Rosabeth Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972), 32. 3 Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 211. 4 Martin Fellman, The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in Nineteenth-Century American Utopianism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), xix.

2

about 1840 and 1860, an idea apparently based on the sheer number of communities founded, or at least talked about, then. However, as historian Christopher Clark pointed out, Americans have been founding utopian communities since the United States’ own founding, although some waves of utopianism are more pronounced than others.5 He also noted that the antebellum period was full of other kinds of “utopian” experiments such as penal systems, free public schools, paper money, and so on.6 So this period was not so much a golden age of utopianism as it was a spurt of innovation in social engineering. Sociologist Keith Melville said about the late twentieth century that "we are all anti-utopian now" because we have "foreclosed our sense of the future," even though we still believe in the miracles and redemption of technology.7 Oneida historian Maren Carden Lockwood called intentional communities by 1965 an anomaly, a “curious revival of a dead tradition,”8 ironically just as such communities were bursting into life again. Philosophers Jose Ortega y Gasset and Karl Popper thought that in the twentieth century naïve utopian concepts had created a mindset available to authoritarianism because of those concepts’ muted or nonexistent individualism, such as in the “groupthink” of certain 1960s communes where togetherness was interpreted as all being one.9 Steven

5

Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1. 6 Clark, 10. 7 Keith Melville, Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Style of Life (New York: Morrow, 1972), 30. 8 Melville, 50. 9 ABC-CLIO World History Companion to Utopian Movements, xv.

3

Weinberg, a Nobel-winning physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. He theorized that utopian ideas have led to “anti-utopias” — or dystopias — like the Soviet Union in this century, and thought that it was clear that only science could produce the answers past dreamers were looking for.10 And historian Russell Jacoby prefaced The End of Utopia by saying “the idea that history contains possibilities of freedom and pleasure hardly tapped” is “stone dead.”11 I disagree. Often the main reason for forming a utopian community was to live in a communistic or cooperative way while practicing certain religious beliefs together. Economics was the reason, but religion was the bond. Religion sometimes provided the basis for stability and order, but almost as often the religious beliefs themselves became outdated and a source of dissension. Both secular and non-secular groups usually wanted, or needed, to be economically self-sustaining, whether or not they separated themselves from the larger world. Earlier communities were often created as escapes from the outside world, and in order to separate as much as possible their members tried to be completely selfsufficient. The early Rappites grew their own food and produced most of their material goods; the Shakers were also remarkably self-sufficient and productive, but learned to have limited commerce with the outside world. These more successful groups offered a materially better life than their members had had on the outside in an era when living in relative freedom and 10

Steven Weinberg, “5 1/2 Utopias,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2000, 107.

4

without privation, not a single-family house in the suburbs, was the American Dream.12 The communes of the 1960s and 70s, although in many cases also based on religious or spiritual principles, were less concerned with creating material prosperity and security in a financially unstable world than with creating alternate modes of living in an overly materialistic and emotionally isolated society. A basic subdivision is between religious and secular communities. The majority of utopian communities founded before the twentieth century had religious roots, although they were often small and isolated sects. However, by the late nineteenth century and beyond, utopian socialism, populism, progressivism, and spiritualism also inspired communitarian bonding. Both kinds of communities, religious and secular, could be further subdivided by economics into fully communist economies or a more limited sharing of goods and space; into various kinds of living arrangements, for example, by family unit, such as the Hutterites; by gender, such as the Shakers; or by shared, mixed living quarters, such as Oneida; and by the leadership or organizational structure. These basic divisions and characterizations reappeared in the communes of the 1960s. Many researchers of the communal revival of the 1960s and 1970s make the distinction between “utopian” and “Edenic” communities: Judson Jerome, who visited many kinds of communities, wrote that “Edenism differs from

11

Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xii. 12 Holloway, Heavens, 223.

5

utopianism” in that Edenic communities have no plan and no shared purpose.13 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who is currently a Harvard Business School professor specializing in group interactions, theorized that lack of plan and purpose led to a lack of trust in the group.14 She noticed that such communities had no ideology or social reform program, that they “don’t look forward,” are not optimistic, and “turn their backs in horror … [at] history.”15 She bemoaned the fact that “overwhelmingly the grand utopian visions … have been replaced by a concern with relations in a small group.”16 But these “grand (and unrealizable) visions” are what cause people to scoff at the very notion of experimental communities, and to dismiss the possibility of their having any effect on the world, much less succeeding according to anyone’s criteria. If the visions were on a smaller scale, and had more realistic expectations, they might be more acceptable to the public, hence be more likely to be tried and to have a positive effect on the world. And if “utopian” is not defined as perfection but only as striving for improvement, then such visions of “relations in a small group” are still utopian in the sense that they provide hope and a spirit of positive experimentation instead of rejection and negation. Also, the groups with the “grand utopian visions” such as New Harmony and the Fourierist phalanxes often failed so quickly that they left little trace, while 13 14

Judson Jerome, Families of Eden (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 65. Kanter, Commitment and Community, 184.

6

those groups like the Mennonites and the Mormons, with more structured and less universal visions, and who were more socially isolated, have been able to sustain their visions and have an effect on the outside world. The Mormons in particular have gone from being one young man’s visions and eventual martyrdom to one of the fastest growing religions in the world. If to be utopian is to change the world, having a “grand utopian vision” that fails because its scope is too wide is selfdefeating. At the same time that the Edenic communities of the 1960s were forming, the term “intentional” communities, first used in the 1940s, came into common use to replace “utopian,” which had fictional and unrealistic connotations. E. J. Green, reviewing Dynamic Utopia: Establishing Intentional Communities as a New Social Movement, thought that “intentional communities (ICs), or communes, can be viewed as mirrors reflecting societal discord.”17 However, since the time that “intentional communities” was first extensively used in the 1960s to describe not only the new youth communes but also other kinds of group living experiments, its meaning has broadened. The term now allows discussion of both earlier utopian communities and the newer communes, urban co-ops, and various kinds of loose-knit cooperative groups that have developed in the second half of the twentieth century under the same umbrella. And the term can apply to the newest form of cooperative living, cohousing. 15 16

Kanter, 167. Kanter, 165.

7

The term intentional communities is an all-purpose one that refers to any real community, from the Transcendentalists of Brook Farm in the 1840s to The Farm in Tennessee today, that is created from scratch — though sometimes by reusing existing buildings — by people with the common purpose and the conscious intent to live cooperatively to a greater or lesser degree. It is a broad label that can include communities with a religious raison de vivre and one leader or a casual group of artists living and working in a loft in a big city. An intentional community does not need to be built on the scale of a small city to have an effect on its members. Lewis Mumford pointed out that most fictional utopias were cities,18 yet most real intentional communities are at most villages. Early utopias that were based on fiction or theory, such as the Fourierists, were doomed because they tried to apply complex, society-wide plans meant for large numbers of people to relatively tiny groups. Another factor common in utopian dreams is material and economic selfsufficiency, and again, few intentional communities have achieved that goal. Both concepts — a cooperative unit as big as a city, and self-sufficiency — are likely to fail in any real community without the glue of an identical world view, and more than that, they are unnecessary concepts. People have never discovered new lands and set about building cities; they build houses and create farms, and later make villages and towns. Similarly, no real city, or town or country, is totally

17 18

In Choice, June 1998, v35, n10, 1793. Mumford, Story of Utopias.

8

self-sufficient; the more it is, the more it tends to keep outsiders out, to have less intercourse with the outside world, and to resist change. Economic stability is another concept entirely. Instead of trying to create an economically self-sufficient city in theory, or a tightly knit agrarian village of philosophically identical-minded people in reality, perhaps the dream to improve the world, or part of it, should begin with something smaller and simpler. Instead of the massive accumulation of land needed to ensure self-sufficiency, think instead of an amount of land sufficient to build shelter for perhaps fifty people and have some shared open space left over. Instead of attempting to supply the community's physical needs and wants, which our existing society can already do, why not attempt only to supply the community's social and emotional needs? At its most basic such a group would provide opportunities for group cooperation and support but freedom of individual thought. Cohousing is a step in that direction. The American Heritage Dictionary defined cohousing for the first time in its online edition of 2000 as “a living arrangement that combines private living quarters with common dining and activity areas in a community whose residents share in tasks such as childcare.”19 This definition only hints at the key features of cohousing that both link it to and separate it from earlier American utopian communities. Cohousing does not create intimacy, like Oneida did, by forcing residents to live in the same building; rather, it encourages cooperation and

9

closeness by creating a common house that all can share, in addition to private living units. And cohousing’s task sharing is entirely voluntary, but the years of planning that go into creating a cohousing group forge a unity of purpose among residents and not coincidentally weed out the less cooperative members. Today’s cohousing groups’ goals seem to be a synthesis of those of past utopian communities and those of the 1960s communal movement. Cohousers are not seeking economic improvement for their lives, as did many older communities; the general understanding is that a cohousing unit will cost a little if not a lot more than a standard suburban house. But they are also not seeking to improve on their sometimes privileged economic status by joining a gated community; they do not seek a “too-perfect, Truman Show-esque enclave of refugees and retirees.”20 Most cohousing groups earnestly include diversity and affordability in their mission statements, although few have figured out a way to accomplish either getting lower-income residents or building lower-priced units. Instead, their goal seems to be to use what resources they have to better spread them around the group, and to open up this way of life in small increments to the slightly less advantaged. A master’s thesis by Mary Murname in 1993 compared the needs and wants of a Habitat for Humanity group of owner-residents and a proposed cohousing group, both in Austin, Texas. The researcher concluded that although 19

American Heritage Dictionary, 2000 edition, education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/.

10

the cohousers wanted to include lower-income units in their proposed development, the lower-income Habitat group was generally antithetical to the idea and even the look of cohousing.21 It may be that the problem of including affordable housing in cohousing is not only economic, and that if such units were built, they would not attract occupants who would provide the kind of population diversity that cohousers want. The American Dream of the single-family home in the suburbs is still only a dream to many, and it is still something to strive for. To cohousers who have already attained that dream, however, it is no longer desirable; they have found that such a life is not in accord with the cooperative ideals that many have spent years developing in the peace movement, as Quakers, in various cooperative ventures, and often as residents of earlier — perhaps some would say failed — experiments in communal and communalist living. Holloway concluded that “ideal democratic communism, as attempted by New Harmony and among the Icarians, was a disastrous failure in the one case and less satisfactory in the other than the communism of the religious communities.”22 New Harmony was a much-publicized utopian socialist venture in Indiana in 1825 that was founded by Robert Owen, a wealthy Scotsman; after spending most of Owen’s fortune, and after discarding five different constitutions, the town of a thousand or so disbanded in acrimony in 1827. The French Icarians 20

Michael Benedikt, “Less for Less Yet,” Harvard Design Magazine, winter/spring 1999, www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/affiliated_publications/hdm/. 21 Mary Murname, “Detached Desires: Austin Habitat for Humanity and the Creation of a Cohousing Community” (M.A. Thesis, the University of Texas at Austin, 1993). 22 Holloway, Heavens, 223.

11

sailed to Louisiana, settled in Texas in 1848, then went to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1849, and an offshoot moved to Iowa in 1852. The Nauvoo group disbanded in 1864, and they never came close to prosperity, in spite of their practice of “rational democratic communism.”23 Examples like these led Holloway to conclude that “absolute, ideal communism was a failure. The expedient communism of the religious groups was successful.”24 Sharing all worldly goods was one thing within the framework of a strong religious orientation and leadership structure; it was another thing entirely when all there was left to divide was power and authority. What we are seeing in cohousing is again “expedient” communism, or a modified version of it: limited common ownership by agreement, but no shared incomes. One of the benefits of cohousing is that a group can decide to own jointly many amenities, such as laundry equipment, hot tubs, lawn care and gardening equipment, and workshop space and facilities, that each ordinary suburban household must own singly. The reason is not entirely economic; cohousers often express a frustration with America’s conspicuous consumption and a strong interest in “voluntary simplicity.” Voluntary simplicity is a recent movement to eliminate redundancy, cut back on materialism, and reduce dependency on devices and appliances that most Americans seem to consider essential to life, such as cappuccino makers, leaf blowers, microwave ovens, and compact disk 23

Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and Observation (New York: Dover, 1966), 339.

12

burners. (Ironically, a glossy magazine devoted to voluntary simplicity called Real Simple appeared in 2000, complete with a hefty subscription rate, much advertising, and articles that urge readers to buy many more things.) Many of us have lives so materially improved over those of eighteenthand nineteenth-century utopians that we do not need to dream of changes in society that address material needs. Instead we dream of more personal values like cooperation, trust, sharing, communication, and mutual assistance, the kinds of emotional bonds that in earlier eras the kinship group and the village provided. Cohousing does have its material advantages such as a pedestrian-centered environment, familiar and cooperative neighbors, and access to a big common house and more land than a single-family house, but it also has its material disadvantages. Drawbacks such as proximity to neighbors, having to get along and make decisions together, noise, and upkeep are those of any inner-city neighborhood, which cannot provide all the advantages of cohousing. What cohousing offers beyond any material advantages is a kind of return to the village, to the best of what a neighborhood might provide, to community. Besides material considerations, another difference between earlier communities and cohousing is the possibility of solitude. Holloway pointed out that, between shared sleeping quarters, “constant communal activities” including work and eating, pairing off to monitor each other such as in Shaker communities, and various other mechanisms that most groups had for tracking the activities and 24

Holloway, Heavens, 223.

13

whereabouts of its members, solitude was rare.25 Even in the communes of the 1970s solitude was often suspect because it was seen as a threat to group solidarity, and the group nature of eating, cooking, working, and sleeping again left little opportunity for simply being alone. Zendik Farm, a commune formerly in Bastrop, Texas that I profile in Chapter Three, offers a striking example of this kind of mindset. Cohousing, however, tries to include the best of being alone with the opportunity for not being alone when desired by having completely private and independent living units; even when built with common walls, the universal concern is that the walls should be as soundproof as possible for the greatest possible privacy. This concern is not from a desire to separate from the group but to avoid the pitfalls of communal living that many cohousers have already experienced in other group living situations, such as noise and lack of independence. The common house and the physical layout of the cohousing site encourage interaction when desired but do not eliminate the possibility of solitude. Timothy Miller specializes in American and religious studies, and utopian studies in particular. In reviewing David Janzen’s Fire, Salt, and Peace: Intentional Christian Communities Alive in North America in 1998, Miller convincingly explained the current state of American intentional communities (AIC):

25

Holloway, 225.

14

AICs, so focused on a vision of human harmony and oneness, are divided into several camps that rarely communicate much among themselves and often are even unaware of one another's existence. Many communities rooted in Asian religious traditions tend to be contemplative and not terribly interested in inter-communal exchange; many Christian communities have a particularistic outlook that precludes extensive contact with persons of other faiths, or of none; and the predominantly secular idealists of the Fellowship for Intentional Community groups often find themselves at odds with the patriarchal and disciplined structures that mark much of the world of religious communitarianism. The quest for unity is, ironically, quite a fragmented and disparate one.26 Although this is mostly true, my point is that the quest is most certainly ongoing, and in several different ways. A cynic might look at the appalling statistic of just over fifty percent of voting-age Americans bothering to participate in the close presidential election of 2000 and conclude with some justification that apathy is the country's dominant mode of political and social involvement.27 However, as long as there are significant numbers of people who want to work on ways to update, renew, or reinterpret the principles this country was founded on, for example by creating alternative communities in which different modes of discourse and social interaction can thrive, the possibility of change still exists. Even Russell Jacoby, who wrote The End of Utopia, conceded that "we are all utopians" insofar as we are trying to build a better world or to "bring ideals into reality."28

26

Timothy Miller, review of Fire, Salt, and Peace: Intentional Christian Communities Alive in North America, by David Janzen, Utopian Studies, Spring 1998, 285 (1). 27 Federal Election Commission, Voter News Service, www.fec.gov/pages/2000turnout. 28 Quoted in Cummings, “On Being Communal and Political,” in Utopian Studies 1, 175.

15

Utopian communities, from the seventeenth century through today, have one thing in common, that they are intentional: some guiding principle or idea brings people together in a particular place to attempt to manifest that idea in their daily lives. People have founded utopian communities for many different reasons, as noted earlier, but the one constant is that the founder or founders thought the society they lived in could be better, if not perfect, and usually better in specific ways. The heart of utopianism is the desire to improve human lives. The people who founded utopian communities had this desire, had what they thought were new or improved ideas to live by, and were willing to test those ideas and principles on themselves. And while religious groups may still prefer to be cloistered and separate from other groups, as Miller suggested, today’s communitarians and in particular the cohousing movement are actively reaching out to the rest of the world. The Fellowship for Intentional Community compiled a list of myths about modern communitarianism that they are trying to dispel. Number thirteen is “Most people in communities are running away from responsibilities.” But they think the truth is that “they can engage more effectively with the wider society. In fact, many communitarians are deeply involved in their wider community of neighbors, and often provide staffing or even leadership for various local civic and social change organizations.”29

29

www.ic.org.pnp.myths.

16

The movement has developed an active Web email list ([email protected]), several companies that specialize in getting new groups off the ground, and a library of resources. The email group in particular is lively and discusses at length issues from the mundane — e.g. whether to serve children different dinners than adults — to the most basic of all, how to resolve group issues. The list, which archives discussions by thread, is a valuable research tool. I use this list extensively in Chapter Five to let cohousers speak directly about working toward and living in cohousing. In this work I chose not to include what I consider to be dystopian communities such as David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; rightwing militia groups like the Montana Militia, who sometimes live in close-knit groups; or Rajneeshpuram in Antelope, Oregon, which was founded in 1981 by followers of the controversial late Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.30 My interest is more in the positive aspects of utopianism, which include creativity, optimism, and the continuing willingness to tinker with, not destroy, the system. I exclude as dystopian communities those that withdraw from the political process, live as much as possible “off the grid,” have high levels of dissatisfaction with and hostility toward the status quo, manifest this hostility by being highly armed, trained and willing to violently resist any authority, or refuse to compromise in any way with what they consider to be “first principles.” There are hundreds of

30

www.religioustolerance.org/rajneesh.

17

such survivalist, tax resistance, and quasi-military groups in America that have radical ideas about changing our society. It could be said that such communities are also creating alternatives, but many seem determined not to change society but only to destroy the federal government. (For more on these groups, see the Southern Poverty Law Center at www.splcenter.org; the Anti-defamation League at www.adl.org; and militiawatchdog.org, which has an excellent page of links.) In contrast to dystopian militancy and exclusiveness, most other types of alternative communities in America today are peaceful or espouse nonviolent principles, have a high degree of involvement with the larger community, reject some but not all of the dominant American values, and most significantly do see themselves as part of the utopian tradition of creating new models for society. A note on the term “community” is probably also necessary, with the rise of various internet groups that some have termed communities. I use the term in reference to built communities, because exploring the kind of communication and interaction that exists among groups with common interests but who are not living cooperatively is not my intent. Some groups of people who refer to themselves as communities no doubt are communities in a broad sense, but not in a physical sense. For example, Michael Niman’s People of the Rainbow argued that the Rainbow Gathering should be considered a utopian or intentional community, even though the group — or family, as they call themselves — has no permanent

18

physical location.31 At any yearly Rainbow Gathering the majority of the as many as 30,000 or so neo-hippie attendees may not even be the same individuals who were at the previous gathering. The Goodenough Community in Seattle, Washington, is a loose group of about 100 followers of pastoral leaders John and Celeste Hoff; it calls itself an intentional community but does not live together, the basis of its community being therapy and feelings.32 Shared feelings and interests do bring people together, but do not teach them how to live cooperatively. Sociologist Jerome Judson said, and I concur, that a community is primarily a place peopled by mostly unrelated people, while a family is people who are related by blood or marriage, even though they may not live together.33 Timothy Miller, among others, differentiated a family from a community by calling a residential group of more than five people, some of whom are unrelated, a community.34 The Intentional Communities web site defines intentional community as “an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives and other related projects and dreams.”35 I also limit my use of the term to a specific, limited group of at least five people, some of whom are unrelated to the others, who live together or intend to live together in a specific place. For the group to be an

31

Michael Niman, People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 1997. 32 www.goodenough.org. 33 Jerome, Families, 188. 34 Timothy Miller, The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998), xxii. 35 www.ic.org.

19

intentional community it must also have some common purpose or principle, however broad, an intent to be and a consciousness of being a community. This eliminates groups such as casual roommates and rehabilitation centers. Michael Cummings made a distinction among utopians between radicals who want to transform the entire society and communalists who want to create examples, microcosms that society can use as laboratories to learn from and to modify and use their principles.36 Both groups discount the other as trivial or pointless. Both groups want change, but radicals think communalists' fatal flaw is narrowness of scope and perspective.37 But one major cause of failure of utopian communities from Oneida through the communes of the 1970s was hostility from the outside world, largely caused by outsiders’ perceptions of groups as being too odd, too far away from the norm, or too unacceptable to society. So if communalists could develop a new kind of community that was not too far from the norm, hence more acceptable to more people, would not that community be more likely to be accepted and therefore learned from and imitated? Communitarians fault radicals for alienating everyone, and doubt the purity of their motives, suspecting that radicals are more into power for its own sake than for the changes any power might bring.38 The danger of radical change is that it will be feared and rejected, while the danger of more conservative communalist

36 37 38

Cummings, “On Being Communal and Political,” 147. Cummings, 148. Cummings, 151.

20

change is that it will be co-opted by society, its ideas accepted but watered down so much that the ideas become adapted to society instead of the other way around. There are many possible ways to compare past utopian communities with today’s cohousing movement. Kanter was one of the first to methodically describe similar traits among very different kinds of intentional communities in Commitment and Community. She developed a list of six commitment mechanisms that were present in most successful nineteenth-century communities and that many researchers still use to identify and describe such experiments. These mechanisms are sacrifice, which includes abstinence and austerity; investment, which if financial may be irreversible; renunciation, which can refer to the outside world or the family unit, or both; communion, which is fostered by homogeneity, communal sharing, work, regular group contact, ritual, and real or imagined persecution from the outside; mortification, which includes confession and mutual criticism, sanctions, spiritual differentation, and de-individuating mechanisms; and transcendence, achieved by guidance, ideological conversion, tradition, and institutionalized awe created through ideology and through power and leadership. However, not all communities exhibit all of these aspects, and because I compare a secular movement to earlier utopian groups, many of which were religious in nature, I have no basis for comparison when discussing spiritual leaders and doctrine. Instead, I will pay particular attention to six aspects of old and new communities: architecture and planning; process and structure; 21

community makeup; play and rituals; community relations with the outside; and writing about the community, both from the outside looking in and the inside looking at, and trying to explain themselves to, the outside. Every utopian and intentional community has architecture, process, people, some kind of relationship with the outside world, ritual, and some kind of written recognition of their existence, whether from within or without. I am interested in who lived there, what kind of people they were, and why they chose to break from the mainstream. Researchers have been interested in some of the following questions pertaining to utopian communities: How did people make decisions and adapt to each other? How did they promote themselves and communicate with the outside, and how did the outside communicate with them? Were the communities perceived at the time as true alternatives, and something for society to learn from, or were they of only temporary interest as havens for misfits and oddballs? What were the places themselves like physically, and did they have any lasting influence on design and architecture elsewhere? What have been some of the experiences of past utopian communities in terms of their effect on and absorption into the outside world? If cohousing is indeed utopian, and a continuation of the communitarian movement, these questions are just as relevant to ask about today’s intentional communities and about cohousing. The founding principles of utopian communities are also important because when looked at over a long period they tell us what problems our country 22

was experiencing and what their founders thought was important to change, or to maintain. I will try to briefly summarize in the context of their times these founding principles of the few communities I describe, and later compare cohousing principles and what problems those principles are trying to address. Central Texas has a variety of alternative communities. I will briefly describe several representatives of different varieties: Homestead Heritage Village, near Waco, is a 30-year-old Christian farm and crafts community that is partially nonresident;39 Zendik Farm, until the late 1990s located in Bastrop, is another 1960s commune run by one couple since its inception; and Whitehall is an independent cooperative house at the edge of the West Campus area in Austin. There are also at least two as-yet-unbuilt cohousing developments, Central Austin Cohousing (CAC) in Austin and Hilltop Cohousing in San Marcos. All but the cohousing groups are examples of ideas extant in America since the nineteenth century. Homestead Heritage has some Shaker elements, such as the emphasis on simplicity, religion, and craftsmanship; Zendik Farm, although a modern commune, was run by a strong leader with an apocalyptic message, like Bethel in Missouri and its founder William Keil; and Whitehall demonstrates peace-loving and cooperative living like Brook Farm. I will describe these current communities and compare them to historical communities and to cohousing, which I will explain in more detail in Chapter Four; and I will look for the some of the links between the communal revival of the 1960s and 70s and what is happening today.

23

Methodology I have been fortunate to be allowed to be part of Central Austin Cohousing (CAC) almost since its inception, in spite of my frank admission that I did not intend to live in cohousing, only to study the group. I was actively involved in all major meetings from the late winter of 2000 until late May 2001, when I went out of state. Since I returned to Texas in late August 2001, I have attended a few meetings and have kept in touch with several members, but have mostly been following the group’s progress by way of its email list, its posted files and messages, and its website. Because it would have been easy for the group to exclude me because of my lack of future participation, I may be biased in my mostly positive evaluation of the group and its processes. Many such groups are wary of researchers and allow them little or no access; I felt privileged that they were so open. However, I, along with many ethnographers and sociologists, believe that it is impossible for a participant observer to be completely objective, and further that it would serve no purpose even if it were possible. All human beings develop individual sets of beliefs and frameworks that help them make sense of the world. As long as we are aware of our own subjectivity, we can often understand events and people better within that understanding than if we try to see events as if we were making no judgments or comparisons.

39

www.homesteadheritage.com.

24

My own interest in intentional communities, although I hadn’t heard them called by that term then, began in the 1960s after high school when group living situations proliferated all around me at and near my college in northern Vermont. I grew up in suburban Fairfield County, Connecticut, in a little three-bedroom house my father built for my mother, older sister, and me after World War II. He went to college at night to finish a business degree while my mother stayed home baking cookies and overcooking vegetables. Like many children of that era, I never really knew or cared what he did, or what any of the adults around us did. My sister and I and all of the many kids in our neighborhood had our own benign and largely unregimented world of school, bikes, safe streets to play in and nearby woods to explore. My family life was probably typical in that my parents were almost comically mismatched but somehow stayed bound to each other. My father was the boss, the one who got mad at us for mysterious and tiny infractions; and my mother was the ineffectual defender. Dinners were often tense with suppressed anxiety or annoyance, and no adult ever thought it might be a good idea to talk about such things, or anything that meant anything to us children. From those grim silences and the unpredictable disapproval I learned to be a comedian and a wiseass to entertain my father and to deflect his criticism. I knew from much reading — mostly fiction — that there had been and still were many other ways for people to live together, but I didn’t experience any of them until I went to

25

Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1964, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius. For the first time I had roommates, and housemates, in small groups that were more like family than my own family felt like — family members who would let me act out and talk about my feelings and my opinions, who would react honestly with anger and with love, and who were all so complex that I stopped thinking I was the most interesting person in the room. But I was illprepared for the intensity of community life on a tiny 300-person campus, and intolerant of the endless hours of community meeting held in the dining room once a week. It was such a contrast to the authoritarian household I came from that I felt I’d explode if I had to be part of one more five-hour debate on some minute aspect of academic life. Meetings weren’t mandatory, so I found my own place at Goddard without them for the most part, and found ways to be a part of but apart from the dorm life also. I could understand the appeal of group acceptance and closeness, but could not tolerate what I perceived of as restrictions on individual freedom. Then I deviated from the pattern by getting married rather abruptly after my parents refused to let me return to college. Suddenly I was mistress of my own domain at barely 19 and didn’t have to suffer through anyone’s disapproval or advice. Meanwhile, other Goddard dropouts were living in a macrobiotic ashram in Vermont, or renting farmhouses communally much like Raymond Mungo describes in Total Loss Farm, or running off to Haight-Ashbury in California, or 26

participating in various other mostly group options for living. When I got back to Goddard a couple of years later while my husband was elsewhere serving in the Air Force, as a married student I had to live off campus and I found I didn’t much like having a roommate I wasn’t sleeping with. But all around me in Vermont and in the rest of the country the similarly alienated youth my age and younger flocked to groups and communes both rural and urban. I spent one more year at Goddard as an atypical, nonresident undergraduate. Later, when I left my husband and returned to Vermont with my little son, my first decision was to buy my own house so no one could tell me what to do with it, or how to live with myself. The upside of growing up under authoritarianism is that you aren’t responsible for any of the decisions; the downside is that you don’t learn how to make them, or how to share the power if you ever get any. As a musician I was very aware that most of the people I knew, also musicians, were in group living situations and that they seemed to like life that way, and I couldn’t understand it. I tried to figure out my strong antipathy to even considering such a situation, when at times living with others would have eased many financial and emotional burdens. It all came down to control. I just was not willing to give up control of any aspect of my life to a committee. So as a partial outsider, I took a kind of distant, sociological interest in the doings of my hippie friends, but felt that I could never really understand the urge to cohabit in a group until I had done it. The time never seemed ripe; time passed: fast forward to the 1990s, in Austin, Texas, where again I had managed to avoid 27

any group living arrangements in spite of the many cooperatives and group houses extant since I arrived in 1975. But more than ever, my curiosity was alive and well about those who chose group living, and my respect for their motives and their opportunities for personal growth has grown as I have learned that living alone can be just as limiting as having to gain approval for major decisions may be in a group. None of my experiences or reactions to them and to the events of the 1960s and 70s were unique. However, having been a part of yet set apart from what many in my generation were doing helps me see many shades of gray in the picture, and I think qualifies me to describe common experiences in a way that relates them to the bigger picture, no matter how intimately I may have been involved in some of the experiences. Everyone has to make decisions about how they are going to live their lives, what is important to them, and what they are willing to do to get what they want. Even those who never questioned the suitability of the “normal” family as a pattern for their own lives have had problems living in that model, especially as our society has grown and speeded up. The popular press abounds with information on how to be happier, to improve relationships, to find peace, to feel a part of something bigger than the individual — in short, to find or create a sense of community that has all but disappeared in much of life as America now knows it. The ideal American pattern of living has for some time been the nuclear family — father, mother, and child or children — living in a detached house 28

without any unrelated people living with them. We sometimes forget that this pattern has only in our recent past become the ideal, and that almost as quickly as it became the ideal it ceased to be the norm, even though some groups would have us believe otherwise. (In 2000 only 53 percent of Americans lived in this situation, down from the last census. Families with only a mother accounted for 12 percent, and families with only a father accounted for 4 percent; these numbers were up from the 1990 census.) Twenty-six percent of us live alone, and 5 percent classify their living arrangements as “other.”40 Out of necessity, choice, and often preference, people find benefits in living in group situations. At the same time, suburbia oozes further and further away from our cities and workplaces, necessitating longer and longer commutes from faceless developments where no one knows anyone else, and nostalgia grows apace for the imagined warmth and friendliness of yesteryear’s small towns and close-knit neighborhoods. Advertisers in the Austin American Statesman real estate section coo over the virtues of front porches, and local musician Sara Hickman sings on television ads for Clark Homes from the rooftop of a gazebo that all she wants is a real front porch and a real “home town.” For some of us who do not live in the “ideal” household, and apparently for many who do, the single-family house lifestyle is missing something important: a sense of community.

40

Statistical Abstract of the U.S.: 2001, The National Data Book, 121st edition (U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington, DC, Library of Congress Card No. 4-18089), 48.

29

When I returned to college in my forties I discovered utopian fiction, a genre of literature that I had had little exposure to except for the dystopian Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Zamiatin’s We. It was fascinating to see how many people had the same interest and how thoroughly some of them had thought about how to accomplish creating such communities. I began to learn more about historical utopian communities and to relate them to the communes I knew of in the 1960s and 70s, as well as to the fiction that had inspired some of them. For example, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two described a utopia based on the theory of behavior modification by positive reinforcement. Its practices included communal living and dining, a communal nursery, and reduced work hours.41 The novel inspired Kat Kincaid and a few other people to found Twin Oaks in Virginia in 1967, which is still thriving today with eighty residents.42 I was interested in what sparked these waves of communalism, what made the communities work, what made them fail, how they were alike, how they were different, and how they were a unique or at least distinct part of American history and culture. However, several professors I talked to and many authors I read dismissed utopianism as something that had already been “done,” and that was dead as a doornail. From what I could see, as a newcomer to academia but no stranger to the counterculture, the communal impulse was alive and well even in

41 42

B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1969). www.twinoaks.org/community/index.

30

conservative Texas. The Inter-Council Coops thrived in the campus area, the Wheatsville cooperative food store had flourished for many years in spite of competition from the much newer and bigger Whole Foods Market, and cooperative houses such as Sunflower and Whitehall, unrelated to the University of Texas, were into their third and sixth decades respectively. There are movements like permaculture and sustainability that had local groups with small clusters of people living if not always communally at least in close proximity to each other. There was a commune called Greenbriar that ran a school in the 1970s; I kept hearing rumors Greenbriar was still around, but much diminished. Architect Pliny Fisk and his wife created the Center for Maximum Potential in the 1970s, also known as Max’s Pot, to research, build, and teach alternatives to standard buildings, systems, and materials. Today the Center also works with local nonprofit groups such as Casa Verde, and in the 1990s helped the Bastrop commune Zendik Farm develop a plan for future building. There were also links between many of these ideas and people that kept recurring and it became clear that the “six degrees of separation” between them spanned time and space, and was more like two or three degrees than six. And although Austin is a liberal and green town compared to the rest of Texas, if even here there were so many 1960s leftovers that had morphed into 1990s ideas and movements, then what must be going on in the rest of the country? It seemed likely that these same links and transformations simmered everywhere. I decided to try to take the temperature of the cooperative-minded community in Central 31

Texas to find out how much, if any, utopianism in the form of communitarian living remained. As I hunted through the above sources and newsletters and attended potlucks where the same people met and exchanged information about green building, straw bale houses, rainwater collection, cooperative farms, public transportation, and other topics of environmental interest, I kept running into dead ends. I heard of Rainbow Hearth, which supposedly was a commune in Boerne: a contact tried without success to get permission for us to visit, and other people told me it was defunct. I looked in the Intentional Communities Directory for groups in and around Austin and came across such misleading listings as the Catholic Worker House. I knew that it was only a small house in West Austin that an old neighbor of mine, Lynn Goodman-Strauss, runs; she lets a homeless person or two stay there and does a wonderful job of gathering and allocating food, clothes, and other resources to needy individuals, but it is by no stretch of the imagination an intentional community. I went to meetings of the Sustainable Building Coalition at the Parkside Community School at 1701 Toomey Road, a complex that also houses Casa de Luz, a macrobiotic restaurant and gathering place, to meet people and to find communities. People told me about small groups of four or five, and there were rumors of a few people experimenting with permaculture in Oak Hill. But I did not find as many of either 1960s survivors or new variations on intentional community as I had hoped to find, although there was a significant larger community of like-minded people. What I did find was 32

cohousing, and cohousing seemed to be the inheritor of the communitarian impulse of the 1960s. Chapter Two provides some historical background on a number of older utopian communities, to create a basis for comparison with cohousing and to further explore what has already been tried. Chapter Three discusses some of the ideas and movements that followed those older communities and that exist independently of cohousing and serve as links to many of the concepts and credos of cohousing. Chapter Four defines and briefly discusses cohousing history and explains the idea of consensus. Chapter Five focuses on Central Texas’s budding cohousing groups and in particular the people and the processes they use to create a sense of community. Chapter Six looks at the internet community at [email protected] to show how cohousing in the rest of the United States is like earlier utopian communities in its idealism and in specific practices. I argue that, even though many in the movement would not call it so, cohousing is very much in the utopian tradition of the United States, and even shows signs of being utopianism all grown up.

33

CHAPTER TWO: LEARNING FROM THE PAST Many utopian communities in the nineteenth century were inspired by fiction such as Edward Bellamy’s 1888 futuristic utopian novel Looking Backward,43 William Morris’s romantic craftsman’s utopia News From Nowhere,44 or by detailed plans for a new society such as Charles Fourier and his phalanxes or Robert Owen’s writings on how the social environment affects people’s behavior. A number of people in America have tried to transform such imagined utopias into real ones. But no one seems able to agree on how to categorize utopian communities, except fictional ones. Many of the earliest real communities had religious roots and those almost always had a strong leader; usually when the leader died, the community was not far behind. One exception was the Shakers, who had many communities — mostly in New England and New York — and who lasted until recently. They had a strong leader in founder Mother Ann Lee, but she did not live long; the Shakers found many able leaders after she died, and set up a governing hierarchy. Another exception is the Hutterites, whose religious farming communities in the Midwest have thrived for over a hundred years without any one central leader.45 There may be many things we could learn from such religious communities about cooperation, local control, dispute resolution, and communal economic problems, but given the heterogeneous and, to a large degree secular, 43

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: New American Library, 1960).

34

character of America, large-scale religious communalism seems unlikely and unwanted for the present. However, there is still much to learn from other utopian or intentional communities, even those that eventually failed. Twin Oaks in Louisa, Virginia, is a successful 1960s commune that was aware of American utopian history and during its founding tried to avoid some of the mistakes of the past. For example, they “tried out” new members before committing to accept them; they avoided chaos by having an organizational structure; and probably most importantly, they tried to follow behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two model. Researchers have defined utopian communities in many different ways. British historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth only discriminated between religious and utopian socialist groups. Rosabeth Moss Kanter looked at religious and secular groups, and found that, in both cases, successful groups used similar commitment mechanisms. Ed Schwartz defined four kinds of groups: therapeutic, fraternal, utopian, and organizing principle or common idea.46 However, this typology ignores religion. Sociologist Bennet Berger thought the four basic categories were those who did and did not have a creed, and rural and urban47. But those categories can be combined, and whether or not there is a creed is itself debatable in some cases. Miller, Veysey and Fogarty believed the intention to 44

William Morris, News From Nowhere (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Holloway, Heavens, 213. 46 Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 94. 45

35

make a change was an important defining characteristic of a utopian community, but besides that such communities might not have much in common, regardless of being in similar categories such as religious or secular. Veysey looked at the differences in structure and leadership, for example contrasting anarchism and centralized leadership. The most recent work does not even try to categorize utopian communities but instead uses them to examine whichever aspects of community researchers think is most relevant. I find this way of looking at them useful for my purpose. Benjamin Zablocki found the question of leadership essential.48 Sometimes a group is run by a charismatic figure; the group could be a religious community or, less often, a secular group that was founded by a strong or magical-seeming leader. The difficulty with maintaining this kind of community is that if the leader dies or leaves, there is no real reason for the members to stay together. Because of their personality traits or habit, its members tend to need to follow another leader, which the community is unlikely to produce because the leader may have discouraged competition throughout his or her reign. Oneida in New York was such a community; although it was founded on John Humphrey Noyes’s Bible Communism in 1848, the emphasis was more on economic communism and on Noyes himself. Oneida fell apart about 1881 when Noyes designated one of his sons as the new leader, although the change of leadership 47

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, ed., Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 9.

36

was not the only reason for its demise. One problem was that Noyes did not groom his son to take over, or help the community adjust; he only reluctantly let go of the reins when the community began experiencing dissent from within and disapproval from without over their practice of group (“complex”) marriage. On the other hand, a religious community run by a charismatic leader who may also have been its founder may survive because the leader sometimes grooms someone to take his or her place, and because the religious principles, and the hierarchy and system of governance, provide enough common bonds to serve as glue until another strong leader comes along. Examples of this are the Shakers and the Mormons. Because of the work already done on utopian communities, and the lack of consensus about defining them, this chapter will not summarize the history of utopian communities or categorize them in any new way. For older sources that do this very well, see John Humphrey Noyes’s The History of American Socialisms, journalist Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States, and Alfred Bestor’s Backwoods Utopias. More contemporary analyses include Laurence Veysey’s The Communal Experience; historian Robert Fogarty’s All Things New; and religious and utopian studies professor Timothy Miller’s American Communes, 1860-1960: a Bibliography and his other works. Instead, this chapter will explore a variety of communities that best demonstrate the six aspects of previous utopian and intentional communities mentioned in the 48

Benjamin Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma (New York: Macmillan, 1980).

37

first chapter: architecture and planning; process and structure; community makeup; play and rituals; community relations with the outside; and writing about the community, from within and without. I hope to show the ways that cohousing is like earlier utopian communities in these aspects and some ways that it is different, although no less utopian. Some communities may only be comparable to each other in one or two aspects, while others may encompass all six. I will also discuss gender roles and equality where it is manifested in ways comparable to cohousing, and explain the communities’ founding principles and ideals.

Architecture and planning Not only architects have long thought that the built environment has a powerful influence on how people live. British writers Pamela Neville-Sington and David Sington in Paradise Dreamed suggest that harmony in architecture will create harmony in the people who live with it.49 The use of symmetry in design was one primitive attempt to discover and impose order on society, as fifteenth-century writer Tommaso Campanella’s fictional Solarians tried to do. Shaker buildings were simple, symmetrical, and arranged at right angles to each other; their communities had straight paths and orderly arrangements, to further mental orderliness. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, communities and cities were sometimes seen as “machines for living,” as in architect Le

49

Pamela Neville Sington and David Sington, Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 32.

38

Corbusier’s “unite d'habitation,” and in the French dreamer and writer Fourier’s huge “unitary” buildings (phalanxes). Writers, utopian dreamers and architects created grand unified schemes that tried to provide for every possible community need. These schemes were attempts to define and design the perfect city, which because of its built-in perfection people would naturally adapt to. I think this idea goes against the reality of thousands of years of human beings adapting their environments to suit themselves, and adapting to environments only when they must. It also goes against human nature, which generally does not like to be told what it ought to do. The progressive movement of the late nineteenth century in America was predicated on the idea of man's perfectibility, particularly the notion that science and technology would inevitably bring progress that would improve people's lives. But technology and science are no better than the people who use them, and man's perfectibility is unlikely. The mistake anyone makes when starting from the buildings, or the overall plan, and not from the individuals who are going to be using the plan, is the same mistake the progressives made: people cannot be reformed by other people, or by buildings. As Fellman wrote in The Unbounded Frame, the “inadequacy of progressive programs to deal with human needs through large-scale social engineering and ameliorative legislation [is] becoming clearer.”50 If we could be molded so easily, we would surely be perfect by now.

50

Fellman, Frame, xix.

39

At about the same time, in the late nineteenth century, planners like Ebenezer Howard and those of the Garden Cities movement thought of the ideal community as being more like villages of old, with smaller, cozy dwellings clustered around buildings that were larger and had more community-wide uses.51 Which model works best, large planned cities or small decentralized villages, is a question that leads to aspects of process. Often, as in the case of Fourier or Le Corbusier, the planning process is all top-down: one “expert” decides what will work for a group — any group — and designs and perhaps builds the model; the people who populate it have little or nothing to say about the physical structures and layout, however much they may modify them after they move in. Del Webb’s Sun City adult retirement communities of today are pre-built to strict standards and promote a rigorous conformity that brooks no dissent: for example, one Florida group specifies the kind of grass residents must plant. Howard’s English communities were meant to be more cooperative, and residents were often part of the planning process. However, is the outcome any different if the design process varies, or does human nature act on its environment more than the environment acts on it? Can social order be created by repressing “anarchic” individuality, to the extent that is possible, or by allowing it, so that no one is in the wrong no matter what they do? The Singtons in Paradise Dreamed wrote that “post moderns reject absolute truth,

51

Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: the Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984).

40

rational planning and standardization, and advocate … the urban fabric as … fragmented. Post moderns are essentially anti-utopian.”52 According to this conclusion, the communes of the 1960s would be considered anti-utopian, because many were architecturally unplanned, and grew like Topsy any way that individual residents wanted at the moment. Indeed, scholars such as Russell Jacoby and sociologist William M. Kephart agreed that the communal movement of the 1960s was not at all utopian because many communes rejected and retreated from society’s values and lifestyle but offered nothing positive to replace them. But those same anarchic communities were often strongly idealistic and bound together by a desire to create community. Participant observer and researcher Robert Houriet ended his year-long live-in study of communes across the country by starting his own in Vermont, and wrote in Getting Back Together that “we hope to be part of a community, one of hundreds that will change history by example.”53 Architect Dolores Hayden provides in Seven American Utopias a useful list of six design principles that enhance community; these principles are utilized in many older utopian communities. Today they are practically the backbone of any cohousing planning. I briefly list them here but go into more detail in the chapters on cohousing.

52

Sington, Paradise, 79. Robert Houriet, Getting Back Together (New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, Inc. 1971), 408.

53

41

1. Tentative group designs do more good than one architect-designed plan. 2. Resident involvement in construction, landscaping, and decoration “complements collective design frameworks.” 3. Reducing private space does not necessarily mean public space becomes more communal. 4. “Needs for private territory are not best served by private family houses.” 5. Spaces that link public and private space need special attention. 6. Uniqueness can come from simplification and standardization, not just from expensive and/or unique features and materials.54 To give one example that illustrates principle 6, Shaker communities were easily recognizable as being similarly designed and influenced because of the design simplicity of the buildings, the way they were placed in relation to each other with straight lines and at right angles, and by their considerable size and minimal decoration.55 They did not have an extravagant plan like the earliest designs for Fourier phalanxes — so extravagant that they were never built — but relied on using the same elements in the same way to achieve design consistency and character.

Process and Structure Again, no one seems able to figure out why some communities work and others do not. One attempt to do so was that of sociologist Henry Frundt, whose index of community solidarity rated sharing of a common purpose, consciousness

54

Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 351-353. 55 Robert P. Emlen, Shaker Village Views (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1987), 164.

42

of sharing, and group interaction.56 He theorized that the frequency of interaction correlates higher with sharing than does having a common purpose. Sharing a common purpose can be evidenced in sharing personal property, rotation of and responsibility for tasks, using consensus, quick resolution of personal conflicts, and the method of handling guests and newcomers. Frundt measured interaction in seven aspects: eating, meeting, community ritual, celebrations, formal decision sessions, common action projects, and the length of the community's existence. However, his study of twenty-two twentieth-century communities did not find any strong evidence of correlation.57 Does this mean the reverse is true, that having a common purpose is more important than frequency of interaction? It might only mean that having a process in place to help deal with all the issues he mentions is more important than both shared purpose and frequency of interaction. There is no consensus among researchers of present and past communities about what makes one community “succeed” and another very much like it fail, nor is there even agreement about what constitutes success or failure. Many use Rosabeth Kanter’s and John Humphrey Noyes’s yardstick of longevity, but others, like Timothy Miller and Robert Fogerty, think that self-evaluation of happiness or satisfaction is just as relevant, if not more so. I do not view the outbreak of the 1960s as a history of experiment and failure as much as part of an ongoing process of discovery that has led communalists of all ages to lasting 56

Richard Fairfield, ed., The Modern Utopian (San Francisco: Alternatives Foundation, 1972), 142.

43

discoveries about how to create community. In the case of cohousing, the lengthy process of planning a community and the use of consensus for most decisions indicate a synthesis of both what worked in the past and how cohousers want to live in the future.

Community makeup Communalists are a heterogeneous lot, but woe to the group that has only sensitive artists, writers, and visionaries; unless they are members of an arts colony with separate incomes, they will fail as quickly as the free-spirited Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands experiment did in 1844. Alcott’s "sensitivity" did not extend to Abigail, his wife, who "had to bear almost the entire domestic burden."58 Someone has to be willing and able to work to keep a commune going. The one commonality most groups had was that they were rarely racially integrated. This holds true through the 1960s communes and into today’s cohousing groups; neither turned away minorities, but few minorities were or are interested in joining. Some groups’ members such as at Brook Farm; the Ferrer Group and its Modern School at Stelton, New Jersey; and Twin Oaks, were generally well educated and had other economic choices, while others, like New Harmony and the 1930s Father Divine movement.59 had members who were often 57

Fairfield, 143. Seymour R. Kesten, Utopian Episodes: Daily Life in Experimental Colonies Dedicated to Changing the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 98-99. 59 William M. Kephart, Extraordinary Groups: The Sociology of Unconventional Lifestyles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 121. 58

44

uneducated and sometimes unskilled and were seeking a means to economic betterment. The more open the membership policy, the more likely the group was to have a dangerously high proportion of unstable, slacker, or in some way incapacitated members. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived at Brook Farm for a while, wrote, “Persons of marked individuality — crooked sticks as some of us might be called — are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.”60 Age or family status was usually not a factor until the 1960s, when the majority of communards were single and young, in their twenties and thirties. Cohousing includes families and all age groups but does not have much income diversity.

Play and Rituals Americans are a hard-working lot; to unwind, we spend millions on sports and movies but little time playing Scrabble with our friends. One of the benefits of living in a small, close-knit community is the expanded opportunity to share fun with others, to celebrate together, and to create your own traditions. There is always mention of but often little detail about how early communitarians entertained themselves. Sectarian communities like the Rappites and Zoar had built-in rituals for observing their religion; some of them apparently had fun, but others were serious, sober and inclined to disapprove of fun. Secular communities recognized the need to play, but in their formative days were usually too busy surviving to do so. However, the communal movement of the 1960s was unique 60

Quoted in Hayden, Seven Utopias, 42.

45

in putting fun first: the watchword was, “go with the flow, and if it feels good, do it.” This was not a strategy that promoted longevity, however.

Writing about the Community The press has always had a field day with intentional communities, from reports of interracial sex at Nashoba, Tennessee, in the 1820s to articles about free love and anti-government activity at 1960s communes. The New York press vilified Upton Sinclair’s socialist Helicon Home Colony in 1907.61 Even more directly, at Llano del Rio in California, Miller suggests that “it is possible that some of the [disgruntled members] were saboteurs planted by Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, a classic robber-baron capitalist.”62 Depression-era New York newspapers made much of Father Divine’s airplane and his Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces,63 just as the national media did in the 1980s with Oregon’s Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his many Rolls-Royces. Anthony Comstock, father of the 1873 “anti-obscenity” Comstock Bill, fomented stories about the vice at Oneida, and Professor John Mears also conducted an obsessive campaign of news articles, speeches and sermons against Oneida.64 In the 1930s a local newspaper “undertook a crusade against” School of Living founder Ralph Borsodi and his Liberty Homesteads project at Dayton, Ohio.65 The Manson Family (1967-1971) 61

Miller, Quest, 117. Miller, Quest, 101. 63 Kephart, Extraordinary, 151. 64 Kephart, 94-95. 65 Miller, Quest, 130. 62

46

gave the media about fifteen bloody reasons to fan the flames of mistrust against hippies. But press coverage of utopian communities, although often sensationalized, did get the word out to those who could read between the lines, and therefore unwittingly recruited new members. And Zablocki notes that in the 1960s the same institution, the mass media, that reviled the movement also provided information about issues to protest about. Mass culture and production provided records, underground papers, satirists, and inexpensive paperbacks on counterculture views that hippies and communalists could bond around.66

Community Relations with the Outside Although scholars have called utopian communities a safety valve for the larger society, because they siphon off seeming eccentrics, their closest neighbors often do not have much appreciation for them. Even the orderly, quiet, wellbehaved Shakers had problems: Elizabeth de Wolfe described a particularly hostile series of events in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1818 and concluded, “since the Shakers first practiced their sectarian faith in post-revolutionary New England, they had been the target of public scorn and collective violence.”67 The founder of the Koreshan Unity group in Florida, Cyrus Teed, was badly beaten in 1906 by police.68 Communalists in New Mexico in the 1960s were shot at and beaten;

66

Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma, 156. In Susan Love Brown, ed., Intentional Community: An Anthropological Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 107. 68 Miller, Quest, 25. 67

47

their houses were burned and their cars bombed.69 Minding their own business was not enough to create local goodwill; in many cases, communities had to work carefully to win acceptance — and sometimes only tolerance — from the outside. Visitors were always a mixed blessing. Sometimes visitors became residents, or carried word back to the outside that the community did not deserve its bad press. More often, though, the sheer number of visitors was overwhelming for a small, hard-working community. Oneida had over 45,000 visitors between 1862 and 186770; the modern Amish and to some degree the Hutterites live in a kind of Disney World environment.71 Some hippie communes put notices in underground newspapers telling people not to visit72; at Oz, in Pennsylvania, sometimes a thousand cars daily drove by to gawk.73

Nineteenth-Century Communities New Harmony, Indiana Robert Owen’s experiment at New Harmony, Indiana, from 1825 to 1827 was a spectacular venture and an equally spectacular failure; some writers make more of this one expensive and brief attempt than it warrants, perhaps in part because of Owen’s lasting legacy. However, Owen’s effect was more on British political and economic thought than on the history of utopian communities, 69

Houriet, Getting, 173-177. Robert S. Fogarty, Special Love, Special Sex (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 4. 71 John W. Bennett, in Communes: Historical and Contemporary, 34-35; Roy C. Buck, same book, 235-250. 72 Houriet, Getting, 126. 70

48

except for the sheer size, audacity, publicity, and expense of the thing. If someone else with a comparable amount of money had gotten 800 people together in the middle of the country in 1825, then pretty much abandoned them to their own devices for a few years, the event would only be a footnote in history. But Owen was a celebrated success as a factory manager in Scotland, and a writer, thinker, social tinkerer, theorist, and publicist for his ideas before and long after New Harmony. He was naïve about government, however; in his buttonholing of public officials he often "mistook polite interest for conviction,"74 which probably led him to believe he had more support than he really did. Owen’s major contribution to American utopian history was that he was one of the first of many in the busy antebellum period to begin new communities; about a hundred were formed then.75 New Harmony was also unusual for the time because it did not have a religious foundation. His community attracted more people — a "heterogeneous group of 800" — than most such communities did because of his money and his tireless generating of publicity, notably twice speaking in Washington to Congress76 and privately with Monroe and Madison. John Quincy Adams had invited him to speak in America in 1816 after his books began to be published, and he visited Jefferson at Monticello.77 Owen’s

73

Kanter, ed., Part 4, in Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life, 479. Robert Owen, Life and Times (London: W. Pickering, 1993), 105. 75 Melville, Communes, 43. 76 Alfred Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 113. 77 Owen, Life and Times, 118. 74

49

contribution to utopian theory in his writing was that man is shaped by his environment, not born cast in stone, which was a revolutionary idea at the time. He demonstrated at his New Lanark, Scotland, factory town, locally nicknamed “Happy Valley,” that given good housing, food, education, and treatment, people, especially children, could adapt, learn, live and work together quite successfully.78 His success as a factory manager made his ideas on molding character seem plausible; his money made them seem feasible. Owen was so encouraged by the steady stream of interested and influential visitors to New Lanark that he used most of his fortune to buy a Rappite town, Harmony, Indiana, to conduct a grand experiment in community living. Also known as the Harmonists, the Rappites, a German Lutheran Separatist sect led by Father George Rapp, started a colony in Pennsylvania in 1803.79 In 1815 they moved to Harmony, Indiana, settled on 20,000 acres, and built a thriving town. But they sold the town in 1825 to Owen so they could start another new colony at Economy, Pennsylvania. In spite of all the advance publicity, the reality of Owen’s New Harmony included five versions of a constitution in one year, which indicates a turbulent and somewhat rudderless community.80 Not only was there little organization, there was little leadership, partly because Owen was away for long periods. Compare this to the little-known Women's Commonwealth, otherwise known as 78 79

Owen, Life and Times, 78. Holloway, Heavens, 89.

50

the Sanctified Sisters, in Belton, Texas, which found no need for any constitution until after it had been in existence for 35 years and which nevertheless lasted from 1867 to 1983. 81 Historians tend to focus on the same relatively few utopian communities and to judge the validity of utopian impulses based on the success or failure of those few, by whatever criteria they are using. Smaller communities, those that generated less publicity, and the few communities run by women have gotten less attention than places such as Brook Farm, Oneida, and New Harmony. Yet including all of these communities in any evaluation of utopianism in America gives a different picture than the relatively few well-known or large ones. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the variety, diversity, and sheer numbers of intentional communities as a whole to evaluate their impact instead of tearing apart only a few. As bohemian and Zen popularist Alan Watts has observed, our culture uses a spotlight, not a floodlight, to examine itself.82 Some of Owen’s ideas for his "villages of co-operation" may have helped create those of newer models. He believed in communal meals and thought children over three years old should be housed in dorms, which is like kibbutz practice. Schools were important to him; every child began some kind of schooling by age one at New Lanark. This idea was far ahead of its time. His son Robert Dale Owen, who remained at New Harmony while his father was away for 80

Melville, Communes, 43.

51

long periods, later helped launch free universal education for children in Indiana. The elder Owen also thought people learned best without beating or coercion, and by doing, not by reading books, and that singing and dancing were important. He thought celibacy was “a crime,” but he did not think much of traditional marriage and the dominance of the single family. The object of marriage was happiness and affection, and he felt a bad marriage should not be merely tolerated.83 Owen’s belief in the value of singing and dancing, and play for children, probably made village life in New Lanark happier and more cohesive than it had been before his management, but this particular commitment mechanism wasn’t enough to keep New Harmony together. Early utopian community observer Charles Nordhoff noted that the dull Ohio Zoarites forbade dancing and were “unintellectual,” but they lasted more than fifty years.84 Modern psychologists tout the value of laughter to physical and mental health, and a cheerful, entertaining atmosphere is a plus for any community, but fun does not appear to be necessary for successful bonding. However, many utopian communities do make a point of developing games, rituals, and entertainment, and they are fondly remembered by members. The sober Shakers had a very vivid life of the imagination and expressed the normally inexpressible through dancing and other physical manifestations. 81

Wendy Chmielewske, Louis J. Kern, Marilyn Klee-Hartzell, eds., Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 64. 82 Melville, Communes, 182. 83 Owen, Life, 133-167. 84 Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 110-111.

52

Architecture was not a major factor in life at New Harmony; residents inherited their built environment and did not add much to it. They already had “stately two-story brick houses that were the envy of the frontier,”85 and the physical plant housed thriving small industries and stores. Although accounts of other failed communities describe poor living conditions as one of the factors in their demise, good conditions by no means ensured success. Bonding through hardship can be more powerful than merely being comfortable. New Harmony, then, was the brainchild of one man with a number of innovative ideas, no real structure for governance, no one strong leader, no common set of beliefs or principles, and no screening of prospective members. In an era when religion was central to most people’s belief systems, New Harmony was an anomaly, and the lack of religion must have created uneasiness or at least provided no basis for bonding. There were so many variables that were open to interpretation that it was a wonder it lasted as long as it did Owen’s son Robert Dale published the New Harmony Gazette for two years; when the community collapsed, he moved to New York, changed the paper’s name to the Free Enquirer, and specialized in social reforms such as women’s rights and abolitionism.86 Frances Wright, a celebrated young Scotswoman who spoke and wrote on those causes and who had founded the integrated community Nashoba in Tennessee, was co-editor. Interest in utopian 85

Michael S. Cummings, review of America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald E. Pitzer, Utopian Studies, Spring 1998, 193.

53

communities brought these people together even though their respective communities had failed, and they continued to write about and publicize what were then radical ideas, including ideas about communities. The elder Owen returned to England and also continued writing.

Fourierism Many writers on utopian communities cite the North American Phalanx (NAP), founded in 1843 in New Jersey, as an example of a relatively successful Fourierist community. Charles Fourier was an eighteenth-century French mathematician who thought people were ruled by “passional attractions” and worked out a complete and complex system for a society that would satisfy everyone. Albert Brisbane, a wealthy young American, brought Fourier’s ideas to the United States and publicized them, influencing many utopians, notably Brook Farmers. The NAP was one of the few utopian communities that rented rooms to people "brought together not from a personal knowledge and attraction for each other but through a common love of the social principles."87 Cohousing also does this, but its process adds the personal knowledge and attraction that develops during the planning process, before people actually have to live together. Charles Sears's history of the NAP community, which Noyes quotes in his History of American Socialisms, describes the friendliness of the group and its 86

Holloway, Heavens, 115.

54

merriment, and how they worked, cooked, and made music together. Lest this be dismissed as part of an unrealistic party atmosphere that contributed to such communities' downfall, consider that Kanter noted that rituals and celebrations were an important part of the commitment mechanisms that kept successful communities together.88 In the Central Austin Cohousing group, every meeting started with a noncompetitive game and ended with a round robin sharing of impressions and evaluations of the meeting. These served as both celebration and ritual, and also gave everyone a chance to get to know each other a little more at each meeting in a nonjudgmental and playful way.

Oneida, New York Oneida, by any standard one of America's most innovative and successful intentional communities, was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermont minister with some radical ideas about marriage and the relations between men and women. He led his followers, some of his family, and a few friends to New York State after they were threatened out of Vermont. Although I question the veracity of a source that talks about wolves eating people in

87

John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870), 475476. 88 Kanter, Community and Commitment, 75.

55

Vermont, Robert Parker's A Yankee Saint fleshes out Noyes and puts faces and personal interpretations on the people who founded and lived in Oneida.89 Relative gender equality was one of its more unusual features, and women's sexual rights in particular included their right to reject potential suitors and the Oneidan custom of post-menopausal women initiating young men into sex, to teach them the famed method of "male continence" — withholding ejaculation — without danger of accidental impregnation. However, Noyes himself deflowered most if not all of the virgins, who may not have had much say in the matter.90 Although Oneida is often touted as a bastion of gender equality, women mostly had secondary supporting roles with prestige but not necessarily power. Oneida's communal childrearing could be seen as a boon to the mothers, freeing them to do more stimulating things, but to some women separation from their children was acutely painful and something they had to steel themselves to go along with. It is true that they had no choice in the matter and that mutual criticism was brought to bear on those who held on to the “special love” of motherhood. One of Noyes’s granddaughters, Constance Noyes Robertson, stressed in her autobiography that what Oneida residents thought and believed in, which was Noyes’s Perfectionism and Bible Communism, was most important to them and 89

There has never been a documented case of a wolf eating a human being in the U.S. See www.nps.gov/olym/issues/isswolf. However, this myth does not automatically invalidate Parker’s lively history. 90 Wendy Chmielewske, et al., Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States, 197.

56

was the reason they had come together in the first place.91 But that alone might not have bound them together for over thirty years without some successful strategies for community building. Most Oneida chroniclers such as Pierrepont Noyes provided glowing reports of life there, and the process of forming and maintaining community was one of their main topics. Not only did residents have the same belief system to bring them closer together, they also consciously worked to make themselves better cooperators. To facilitate this process, Noyes developed a ritual of mutual criticism thought to have been derived from early Christian brotherhoods. Charles Nordhoff visited Oneida in 1872 and was told that mutual criticism was the “cornerstone” of their lives.92 Oneidans could be called in for a session of mutual criticism when others felt it was needed, and sometimes residents requested it themselves as an aid in personal growth. Even children had their own mutual criticism sessions. Many 1960s communes, Twin Oaks in particular, used some form of mutual criticism, although the potential for abuse was high. At Oneida, the criticism may have been less an instrument of personal growth than a means of group behavior modification. Pierrepont Noyes said that his father was dictatorial and charismatic, and in reality maintained total control. "Conformity ... [was] enforced by public opinion or the desire for [Noyes’s]

91

Constance Noyes Robertson, Oneida Community: An Autobiography (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 100. 92 Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 289.

57

approval."93 At the end of each session of criticism, a description of which sounds like a modern group intervention for drug or alcohol abuse, Noyes would summarize the criticism and weave praise and hope for improvement into his message to conform to group norms.94 Although Oneida was democratically operated and practiced many unusual ideas that worked surprisingly well, the core of the enterprise really was Noyes himself.95 He never let things become “stale or humdrum,” an interesting comment and one rarely heard about other communities with single strong leaders. Noyes seems to have had a rare facility for injecting his ideas and wishes into the consciousness of the community so that they appeared to be coming out of it, not from him.

Press and Outside Relations Oneida is a good example of a community that knew how to promote and present itself in the press. Noyes could use a printing press and taught others the trade.96 They had their own press in another Noyes commune in Brooklyn, New York, as well as upstate at Oneida, where they printed the colony journal, the Circular. They sent it to 2,000 people “whether they paid or not,” which demonstrated that Noyes knew the value of publicity.97 Noyes kept daily journals, where some of the material for the Circular and The American Socialist 93

Quoted in Felman, Frame, 51. Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 292. 95 Robertson, Oneida, 104. 96 Robert A. Parker, A Yankee Saint (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1935), 105. 97 Holloway, Heavens, 190. 94

58

originated.98 Many members wrote and published letters about the group, and they took many photographs. Oneida history is rich with personal stories and details about daily life that some other communities did not document. The highly literate and literary Noyes, who wrote a still-useful survey of utopian communities of his era, published The Witness while a student at Yale, and published The Perfectionist and Theocratic Watchman after he returned to Putney, Vermont, to live after college. He knew the value of a preemptive strike. Having endured public and private criticism to the point of being drummed out of Vermont, he took care to keep the public informed about the Oneida enterprise, although the details of his system of complex marriage and stirpiculture were not as readily available as information on their latest economic undertaking or their plans for future building. (Stirpiculture was the Oneidan term for their experiment in planned parenthood.) Such details were in a secret coded language, called Munson.99 The Circular, unlike the Shaker publication Shaker and Shakeress, was not just about religion, but about their busy, happy daily lives, and even its mock advertisements showed a lively sense of humor. The communiqués were effective; an 1872 Circular remarks on the neighbors’ change of attitude toward the community to one of good will.100 The next year Nordhoff reported that 200

98

Fogarty, Special Love, Special Sex, 31. Fogarty, 33. 100 Robertson, 123. 99

59

people applied for membership, a sign of good publicity and general goodwill. None were accepted; Oneida was very careful about taking in new members.101

Architecture/Physical Planning The Circular had many articles on landscape design and nature demonstrating Oneida’s belief that surroundings influenced people.102 The Oneidans used physical planning to increase sociability, for example by forcing foot traffic to pass through areas of communal activity and by retaining an old wood stove even after central heating was installed because the stove drew people around it. To keep everyone informed and involved about what was going on, they had a centrally located bulletin board,103 which was also a common feature of many twentieth-century groups such as Twin Oaks. For the first twelve years, the architecture consisted of preexisting buildings on the site and whatever they could throw together. But when prosperity permitted, they built their first Mansion House, where everyone lived together.104 Oneida’s main building had a “large interior window opening into the library,” an architectural feature that created visual openness, which tended to keep people in contact with each other instead of to isolate and separate. According to Hayden, all of these Fourier-influenced features made “their collective home a machine for

101

Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 264. Hayden, Seven American Utopias, 198. 103 Hayden, 218. 104 Holloway, Heavens, 189. 102

60

communal living,”105 and today they are favored elements of most cohousing groups. Hayden notes, however, that the Oneidans could not replicate their design into a communal “working model”106; other scholars also mention this inability to replicate themselves as being one of the problems of past communities. Cohousing’s approach does not exactly replicate successful models, but each group uses many of the architectural principles and features of other groups to create and enhance sociability, cooperation, ease of maintenance, and multiple uses of precious — and expensive — space. Melville thought that most Oneida residents were middle-class idealists,107 but Nordhoff in 1873 found that most were farmers: this was no group of intellectual, educated Brook Farmers unfit for hard labor or privation .108 However, the tone of life there was distinctly cultivated and playful compared to most utopian communities of the age. There were also some clergy, businessmen, professionals such as doctors and lawyers, and teachers. In the end, the fact that the majority were neither refugees seeking economic improvement nor intellectuals conducting a temporary experiment may have worked against permanence. Younger Oneidans wanted to marry and have their own families as people could on the outside, and by 1881 the “complex” marriage was over. 105

Hayden, Seven American Utopias, 219. Hayden, 197. 107 Melville, Communes, 46. 108 Jonathan G. Anderson, “Coming Together and Breaking Apart,” in Brown, Intentional Community, 139. 106

61

Late Nineteenth and Early- to Mid-Twentieth Century Groups Hiawatha Village, Michigan The number of intentional communities founded during the mid- to late 1800s was high, but declined in the early twentieth century. Fogarty lists 141 founded between 1860 and 1914.109 (This decline coincides with the beginning of World War I and the emergence of the individualistic Modernist movement, and illustrates the shift in interest away from home and community.) Many populist communities formed in the 1890s were inspired by Edward Bellamy’s popular 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. One of these, Hiawatha Village, was both a result of and a casualty of the 1893 depression. Local historian Olive M. Anderson, author of Utopia in Upper Michigan, describes its genesis and decline. Abe Byers, a farmer, lecturer and evangelist, was inspired by reading The Product-Sharing Village by Walter Thomas Mills to create a cooperative village out of several homestead tracts in northern Michigan in 1894. At its peak the Hiawatha Village Association had as many as 125 residents on a thousand acres, but it lasted less than two years. Misunderstandings, property and legal disputes, and lack of money unraveled it in half the time it took to create. This pattern is fairly typical for utopian communities, and Hiawatha does not loom large in history, but what I find notable is that even in such a short-lived and unremarkable venture one finds

62

many of the same characteristics, ideas, and problems that separate utopian communities from others. Byers and one of his sons worked for several years, traveling and speaking in the Midwest to drum up interest in communal living based on equable economic sharing. He found land and bought several adjoining tracts with a few other families and various extended family members. His idealism was not equal to the task of figuring out exactly how to get people to work and to overcome all of the interpersonal problems that accompany community. Like Owen, his ideas did not make up for his lack of charisma. Sickness and squabbling were not mitigated enough by economic sharing. But although obviously not everyone was happy, residents described a notable spirit of play. At night after the work was done, they all gathered around a campfire and played games and made music. Every new house had a housewarming, and holidays like Christmas and the Fourth of July were scenes of day- and night-long dancing, eating, and participating in contests, plays, sports, and games. Although the community was Christian and alcohol was banned, this was a fun-loving group.110 Even the unhappy Huey family, who lost two members to tuberculosis while living there, must have been fairly satisfied with cooperative living,

109

Fogarty, New, 227-233. Olive M. Anderson, Utopia in Upper Michigan (Marquette: Northern Michigan University, 1982), 31-33.

110

63

because after Hiawatha collapsed they moved to Equality, Washington, which was another cooperative venture.111 Anderson’s conclusion flatly states that utopian enterprises “invariably fail” and attributes this to their expectation “that they could establish a little society of their own … and isolate themselves from the world.”112 (The thousands of Hutterites still living in fairly isolated little communities in Canada and the American West would seem to give the lie to this assertion.) Although I do not know what would constitute success in the author’s mind, it is true that most, if not all, small isolated utopian communities have failed, for many different reasons. Because of this reality, it is worth noting that cohousing developments are rarely isolated even geographically from the larger society, and never to my knowledge in any other way. Cohousers work, go to school, interact, vote, and deal with the economic system of the outside world, although some barter and home schooling exists. So if there is anything to the notion that utopian communities fail because of isolation, this is not a problem that cohousing will fall prey to. Hiawatha did not fail only because of isolation; its members came together mostly to improve their economic situation, not because of a common idealism or principle, so the association’s financial troubles were enough to pull them apart. Hiawatha failed for lack of strong leadership, or barring that, lack of a

111 112

Anderson, 46. Anderson, 48.

64

detailed, comprehensive plan that included details about land ownership and finances.

Stelton and The Modern School After anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer was executed in 1909 in Spain, sympathetic anarchists held a meeting in New York to create the Ferrer Colony Association. They began with twenty-two members, among them Emma Goldman, Harry Kelly, and Leonard Abbott, and by its first anniversary the group had 163 members. Abbott served as president, and Grace Potter, Bayard Boyeson, Amy Mali Hicks, Henrietta Rodman, and Dr. Cecile Greil gave speeches. Emma Goldman spoke sarcastically of the “good reform lambs” (progressives) who did not try to overturn the system but to change it from within.113 One of their goals was to keep Ferrer's educational ideas alive, which they did by founding the Modern School (also called the Ferrer School) about 1910. Most of the socialists, anarchists, writers, and even progressives of the Greenwich Village group had something to do with this school — Margaret Sanger sent her children there, and Will Durant was an early headmaster — and similar schools started around the country. By 1915 they decided to move the school to nearby New Jersey. The issue of the radical newspaper Mother Earth for June 1915 described the creation of their new community in an article entitled “The Opening of the Ferrer School at Stelton by One Who Was There.” On May 16, 1915, 200 people

65

trooped out to Stelton, New Jersey in the rain to start a community based on the Ferrer School. They had a farmhouse and nine acres that adjoined 200 acres belonging to Fellowship Farms, near Metuchen, New Jersey. The colony lasted until 1954, by which time it had become just another part of the larger community. Not only did the colony itself have constant internal economic and political problems, so did the school. There was a high turnover in headmasters. Elizabeth and Alexis Ferm ran the school very successfully for a long time, their reign broken by a spell with someone else at the helm. They were anarchists and good with the children, but Elizabeth had some personal peculiarities, such as a Victorian dislike of nudity and sex. She tended to impose these views on her charges in ways that were difficult for the liberal-minded parents to swallow, and some felt her teaching was not political enough.114

Home, Washington Several other socialist and anarchist colonies started in the Puget Sound area in the late 1800s; the latest and most modernist, Home, existed from 1894 to 1921. Communal living there was not necessarily inimical to individualism. Home was a "community of individuals ... united by differences.”115 They had separate lots and houses. They started publishing a newspaper, Discontent: Mother of Progress, in 1898 to provide an "open forum for liberal views." They 113 114

Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 45. Veysey, The Communal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 150-153.

66

were early libertarians, with few regulations of any kind, and they did not censure members for any beliefs or actions. “Mind Your Own Business” was the watchword116; “those who are inclined to boss, or to insist on conformity to their ideas, had best stay away, as they will find no congeniality here."117 This description sounds remarkably like many 1960s communes: “Wash your own dish” was the only rule at one I knew of in Vermont. Many residents at Home were not married, or had a variety of partners, or were partners without a marriage ceremony. They had cooperative stores; used barter; built a school, dock, and roads communally and voluntarily; and shared items they did not need all the time.118 By 1901 there were ninety-four people, and by World War I up to five hundred. As other such communities declined, Home grew, and so did its reputation. Emma Goldman visited a few times, although she called it "the anarchists' graveyard," because she thought the residents were more interested in farming than in propaganda.119 Again, this sounds very much like ex-Liberation News Service writer Stephen Diamond’s description of commune life after some members “liberated” the LNS printing press and hauled it up to their Vermont farm in 1968.120 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, the famous Wobbly orator, Lucy Robins Lang and other

115

Charles Pierce LeWarne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 171. 116 LeWarne, 187. 117 LeWarne, 195. 118 LeWarne, 192. 119 LeWarne, 176. 120 Stephen Diamond, What the Trees Said (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972), 6-8.

67

activists visited Home. Although it grew out of the communal movement of the progressive era, its intent seems to have been to provide more of a particular haven for individualists than to be a blueprint for social change. The Seattle area did not have a Greenwich Village where rebels from society could hang out and support each other, but it had a Home.

The Bruderhof The Bruderhof is a Christian communist pacifist group founded in Germany in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold; it has had communities in the United States since 1953. Many early supporters were from Germany’s youth movement and wanted to live simply, peacefully, and closer to nature. By the time the group fled Germany, then Paraguay, it had developed a complex system of governance. In an anecdotal account of living in the Bruderhof from the 1940s to the 1960s, Robert Peck discussed his reasons for being interested in such a community, some of the problems of the group, and the governing process. These reasons included the opportunity to live his utopian ideals and to be with others who practiced what they preached. But this preaching became a problem as it became clear to him that the preaching was all geared to the group, never to the individual, and that its goal was to create a kind of group-think. Sociologist Benjamin Zablocki explained in The Joyful Community that the Brothers never hid this goal, and that the “joy”

68

was part of a roller-coaster ride of guilt, confession, and relief.121 Peck and his family left the group after becoming uncomfortably aware of its narrowness. Today the Bruderhof has 2,000 members in ten communities who still live communistically, and the group has survived many changes and challenges. When Peck was there, individuality was perceived by those who made decisions to be a divisive factor, so rather than deal with it in the cases and instances where excessive individuality impinged on group goals and activities, Bruderhof policy discouraged and squelched it as a matter of principle.122 One of the conditions of joining was to “practice brotherly admonition,”123 a phrase that brings to mind the mutual criticism of Oneida. Apparently the time for individual decision-making and analysis was during the novitiate period, but when the novitiate decided to fully commit to the group, that commitment included giving up further criticism of the group and its process. In cohousing the process is very different, and the goal is to learn how to share power and make decisions jointly during the long formative period, so when living together begins, residents can use those skills to get along even more intimately. From the outside, this group-think mentality might seem to mean that the Bruderhof process would never change or adapt regardless of outside circumstances or the makeup of the group, because every new member would do 121

Benjamin David Zablocki, The Joyful Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 277. 122 Robert Peck, “The Bruderhopf,” in Utopian Studies I, ed. Gorman Beauchamp, et al. (Latham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987), 79-97. 123 Zablocki, 116.

69

and act only as those before him did. It also indicates that guests or novitiates might not become fully aware of what they would have to give up, because the group makes fewer demands on and places fewer restrictions on them at that early stage. One compensation for giving up so much of one’s individuality and ability to discriminate and make decisions is that after one is a full member and has confessed all her sins, she is considered pure and speaks with the divine authority of those who are without sin. If, however, after becoming sinless, one still had the occasional critical thought about the process, or saw a way to improve it, such thoughts would create real conflict in the individual, much less the group if the thoughts came to light.124 This sort of conscious self-limiting of criticism and change is a common theme in the history of utopian communities. If the common idea or belief that drew the community members together in the first place is strong enough, the group can stay cohesive and even thrive for long periods. Eventually, though, because the group cannot or will not adapt to changes in the outside world, it will become more and more limited and withdrawn until it fails. One group that has avoided this pitfall so far because of its financial success and its ability to increase its members through a high birth rate is the Hutterites.

124

Zablocki, Joyful, 117-118.

70

Hutterites The Hutterites are an old German sect that has been persecuted for centuries. They came to the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century to separate from the rest of society in the remoteness of the western frontier. They have succeeded, although the modern world has been steadily encroaching during the last couple of decades. Elders are having more trouble keeping worldly influences out, partly because Hutterite economic success depends on being in touch with the outside world, and the interaction is not one-way. One unusual Hutterite coping strategy is that when a village grows to about 150 members, it divides in two; certain members leave to start a new village. They have learned that when a group reaches that critical mass, it becomes unwieldy and it is harder to maintain the status quo. Goretex Company founder Bill Gore discovered that same principle in late twentieth-century New Jersey. His corporate culture was unique: employees were hired for their capabilities, not to fill a particular job slot; they were encouraged to experiment and work in many different areas until they found their own niches. Goretex employees even made up their own titles, such as Top Wizard. In the late 1980s when the popularity of the outdoors created a huge demand for Goretex’s breathable and waterproof products, the company grew to about 300 employees. It was not long before management noticed things were not working as well as before; productivity and morale decreased, and people did not seem to have the

71

same high company loyalty. So Gore opened a new branch and moved half the employees there, and the problem was solved.125

Size Doesn’t Matter One criticism leveled at small communities is that because they are small they are inconsequential. The literature on utopian communities is riddled with dismissal of small but successful, happy and long-lived communities like the Spirit Fruit Society (1899 - circa 1928) of Ohio, then Illinois, and later California and the Woman’s Commonwealth of Belton, Texas and intense scrutiny of bigger but failed experiments like New Harmony. The evidence of Goretex and the Hutterites suggests that there may be an optimum size for certain kinds of human groupings, or that size has nothing to do with longevity or success. Cohousing proponents differ about the optimum size for development, but most groups have between 20 and 60 residents. They are small, but multiply them by the rate at which they are increasing — fifty in 1995, 150 in 2000 — and they may become a sizable influence.126

Competition a problem The Hutterites have something else in common with many 1960s communes and with cohousing: they dislike competition, although their rationale 125

Alex Dominguez, “Goretex Maker Thrives Without Bosses, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 2, 1998, C5.

72

for doing so is different. Sociologist John W. Bennett studied six Hutterite colonies in the mid-1960s and concluded that Hutterites thought competition and innovation tended to produce self-realization, which to them was sinful, and worked against subsuming the individual personality to the group. Like the Rappites, who apparently moved to new and difficult surroundings at least twice partly because their prosperity was creating dissension, not cohesion, the Hutterites found that too much prosperity was destructive to their communal ethos.127 Although the Hutterites continue to live simple, community-oriented, religious lives, they have adapted to modern ways well enough to survive and prosper. Their common culture and history help maintain some of their old ways. So while they are “successful,” they are less forward- and outward-looking than many utopian experiments. Also, they have never been utopian in the sense of wanting to provide a model for the outside world; their goal was to keep to themselves and be permitted to live and worship as they always have.

Twentieth-Century Groups: The 60s Communal Wave Anthropologist Margaret Mead saw the twentieth-century communal movement as part of a shift from the nuclear family to more community-based

126 127

http://fic.ic.org. John W. Bennett, Communes: Historical and Contemporary, 30-32.

73

relationships.128 From this observation one might theorize that most communalists came from broken homes and were trying to recreate what they had lost. Interestingly, Timothy Miller’s “Commune Project,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1990s and still ongoing, found that the majority of the people who lived in communes in the 1960s were from unbroken nuclear families.129 But these people also grew up in the age of the organization man, when mothers stayed at home and fathers were usually at work. Suburban life in the 1950s was not the idyllic picture of contentment at home that today’s conservatives claim; instead, the children of the fifties often had bored, dissatisfied mothers and virtually nonexistent fathers. Families were also smaller in the 1960s than during the previous wave of communalism; lonely, alienated hippies sought bonding with their peers in communes perhaps as a substitute for the imagined warmth of the big families they had not experienced. Many communes even called themselves tribes or families: the Oz “family” in Pennsylvania, the New Buffalo “Tribe” and The Family, both in New Mexico, are a few examples.130 Members of the Zendik Farm commune, now in North Carolina, change their last name to Zendik when they join; spiritualist Thomas Lake Harris gave his converts new names.131

128

Redbook, Oct. 1970, 22. Miller, Hippies and Beyond, Book II, 172. 130 Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma, 229. 131 Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 46. 129

74

Oliver and Cris Popenoe, founders of a nonprofit agency and of Yes!, a book- and health-food store in Washington, D. C., define “new age communities” in Seeds of Tomorrow as “formed by groups of people … who share a commitment to some common purpose and usually some transcendental value.”132 All these communities, however, thought society was inadequate or was not working. The Popenoes think that the period that produced this outburst of communes, the 1960s and 70s, was one of chaos, and that these communes were not little utopias, but serious experiments that often had a disproportionate effect on the world. Some of the purposes and values that these communes shared were voluntary simplicity, environmental awareness, and conservation of resources. These issues resurfaced in the cohousing movement but in much more coherent and practical ways. The Popenoes’ description of 1960s communards sounds much like cohousers: they were mostly white and middle- or upper-class; there were only three African Americans and no Asians in the communes they surveyed. One unusual surviving group, Stelle, near Chicago, with an offshoot near Dallas, is more pro-technology than most of the back-to-nature communes of the time. Its 200 members are much older and the membership is more stable than the average commune. Founded by Richard Keininger in 1973, Stelle manifested a “curious

132

Oliver and Cris Popenoe, Seeds of Tomorrow: New Age Communities That Work (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), iv.

75

mixture of middle-class way of life combined with New Age values.”133 People wore suits and ties and skirts, but were interested in Reich and rolfing. (Today that description might fit many upwardly mobile suburbanites across the nation.) Residents’ average IQ was 128, and the marriages and mothering were traditional, but they believed in alternative sources of energy and fuel, practiced green building, and used greenhouses and solar collectors. Their Co-op Food Mart ran on the honor system, and they advertised in such publications as New Age, Mother Earth, and Psychology Today to attract new blood.134 They did not attract much of it; from an initial 44 houses, they grew to only 75 by 1988.135 They had their own printing plant. Today the group, although diminished in size, publishes the alternative journal Communities, which is an important source of information on twentieth- and twenty-first-century intentional communities. The “messianic” Keininger first gained followers after publishing the novel Ultimate Frontier in 1963, a supposedly autobiographical story of visitations from spirits from an ancient, mysterious “Brotherhood,” who told him to found a new society that would survive the coming holocaust. In spite of this odd beginning, Stelle has remained part of today’s community movement and, if anything, demonstrates that almost any kind of peaceful group can offer something to the movement.

133

Popenoe, Seeds, 39. Popenoe, 46. 135 Mark Martin, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 1, 1988, d4. 134

76

The Farm Stephen Gaskin was a college English instructor who began giving informal outdoor lectures at Balboa Park in San Francisco in the 1960s and attracted many followers. About three hundred of them left the Berkeley, California, area and settled on a thousand acres of land near Summertown, Tennessee. At one point they owned 1,750 acres and had about 550 residents.136 Today the Farm’s economic communalism is much diminished, but the community of about 200 is still functioning and has a book publishing business, among others. Sociologist Bennett Berger, who in the late 1960s visited dozens of communes and studied their children, described the Farm as having a “charismatic leader, a missionary character.”137 They began as strict vegetarians, but in other areas were unlike many 1960s-era communes. For example, “sex roles tended to follow traditional patterns”; Gaskin encouraged marriages and discouraged promiscuity.138 Unlike many rural communes, their goal was never isolation and complete self-sufficiency but to develop ties with and encourage the local economy. In time they developed many successful businesses, including publishing, but as individuals they never became affluent because they took vows of poverty and embraced voluntary simplicity. The Popenoes pointed out that the Farm’s antiprofit motives probably hindered success, even though greater financial success 136 137

Popenoe, Seeds, 89. Popenoe, 28.

77

would have enabled them to do more good works.139 After 1983 the Farm moved from communal to cooperative living and currently devotes any surplus money or goods to helping the poor and needy. Their political arm, “Plenty International,” was founded in 1974. Plenty became involved in international causes in 1976 when an earthquake struck Guatemala.140 Plenty is recognized by the United Nations as an aid organization and has study groups in New York and Washington.141 The Popenoes suggested that outreach was an integral part of the Farm, which is far from being isolated like many 1960s communes were and, indeed, like most earlier utopian communities were. Louis J. Kern noted that the unusual central focus of the Farm early on was birth and birthing; one of their main outreach activities was midwifery, and they took in unwed mothers from the outside community on occasion.142 The midwives also seem to have monitored the state of individual marriages, and actively intervened in those relationships when births were imminent.143 Kern observed that although the community was led by a “charismatic male guru,” and they divided labor along fairly traditional gender lines, the women did not seem to be “oppressed” by the men.144 But the strongest, most powerful women in the

138

Popenoe, 97. Popenoe, 279. 140 www.plenty.org/. 141 Michael Cummings, in Utopian Studies I, 153. 142 Louis J. Kern, “Pronation, Midwifery, and Synergistic Marriage,” in Chmielewski, Wendy; Kern, Louis J.; Klee-Hartzell, Marlyn, eds. Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 200. 143 Kern, 211. 144 Kern, 201. 139

78

community appeared to be the midwives, so Kern and others may have missed the point: if the “traditional” woman has the power and if what the community values most, childbearing, is something only women can do, hasn’t women’s role and value become dominant? Feminists have been fighting for the right of women both to choose nontraditional roles and to gain respect and status for traditional roles. As Zena Goldenburg in Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies wrote, one kind of feminist place would be “where what we have always done is valued.”145 If at the Farm few women did “men’s work,” it may be because “women’s work” was valued, and women did not have to compete with men at the same jobs to gain prestige and power. However, given the strong emphasis on family and birthing, a woman who wasn’t interested in such things would probably not be drawn to the Farm in the first place, so self-selection would have functioned to keep her out and to keep the community emphasis on the family.

Twin Oaks Contrast the Farm with Twin Oaks, and one can see where an individualistic feminist single woman would go circa 1970. From its inception the women of Twin Oaks chose nontraditional roles, perhaps partly because one of its founders was a woman. Twin Oaks, still going strong today, was founded in 1967 on 400 acres in Virginia by Kat Kinkaid and seven others. Its membership was

79

white, young, mostly middle class, and for several years very small — under 20 residents — and it had a high turnover rate. The group rejected hierarchies from the beginning; egalitarianism was the core value. Most members were single and very individualistic. Goldenburg describes several characteristics that indicate whether a group is feminist: work combined with socializing is valued; women like doing “men’s” work; women rise to challenges and change as the group does.146 A separate women’s culture flourished eventually at Twin Oaks, with groups that excluded men: the Women’s Small Living Group, the Women’s Gathering, the Feminist Theory Group and others were the biggest part of Oakers’ society and culture. They helped raise consciousness about “wolfing” — their term for sexually aggressive men’s behavior, including attempts to seduce newcomers and visitors, which was common behavior in many 1960s communes. The women’s groups also convinced the entire community to eliminate sexist language to the extent that all people became “co” or “cos,” not s/he.147

Getting Started Although most communalists were “not usually students of communal history,”148 Twin Oaks was an exception; Oakers even named their buildings after various intentional communities. It began very differently than most 1960s communes, after a national conference on trying to create a Walden Two-based 145 146

Zena Goldenburg, “The Power of Feminism at Twin Oaks Community,” in Women, 257. Goldenburg, 257-258.

80

community. The conference itself was divisive; some seemed to treat it as an academic project, wanting to get grants and people with doctorates before starting.149 Kinkade and her friends were impatient with this approach. In spite of conferences like this, Kinkade supports the idea that the 1960s communities were disconnected from each other. She wrote in the early 1970s that they knew little about, although were sympathetic to, each other.150 Today’s groups, including Twin Oaks, have a huge communication advantage in the Internet; communitarians today are very aware of and can be in nearly constant communication with each other if they want. Cohousers in particular depend on the Internet and have a world-wide cohousing email list, [email protected], where they discuss everything from recipes to million-dollar loans.

Getting in Touch Although some researchers do not think of the 1960s communes as utopian, Kinkade called Twin Oaks a “classic utopian type” because they were trying to remake, not escape from, society. She wrote that “escapist fantasies are bad for communities, but dreams are fundamental to their existence. To be successful at community living, you have to keep adjusting your dreams to reality 147

Goldenburg, 265. Miller, Hippies, 87. 149 Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973), 26. 150 Kinkade, 3. 148

81

without ever quite giving them up.” The primary dream is for “happy, productive, open-minded people who understand that in the long run, human good is a cooperative and not a competitive sort of thing.”151 She remarked that communes would disappear so quickly that by the time you found out what one was like, so you could join it, it was already defunct. Many such 1960s communes were antitechnology, but Twin Oaks was not, and acquired a computer through barter. Their early attempts to connect with others and sort out would-be members by computer failed, however, because most communes were so busy trying to stay afloat that they had no time to network, even if they had computers. Kinkade observed that most groups did not publish anything or publicize themselves152; they had too many visitors and questions from inception, both from those interested in joining and from the merely curious, especially academics and journalists. Twin Oaks residents had their own printing press, as did many old utopian communities like Oneida, New Harmony, and Home, and one of the Oakers’s first new buildings was for the press. One of Twin Oaks’s earliest ventures, also like Oneida, was a quarterly newsletter, Leaves of Twin Oaks, that they started not to make money but to attract new members.153

151

Kinkade, 2- 5. Kinkade, 15-16. 153 Kinkade, 72. 152

82

Who Lives There Twin Oaks did not appeal to many communalists because its members prohibited drugs and had an organizational structure from the beginning. They created a board of three planners, who picked their own successors, there are managers for every conceivable task, and there is a complicated labor credit system that they tweaked over time until it worked to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. These “current conditions … select for a fairly homogeneous population,”154 which is also true of cohousing today. Kinkade remarked, “if there were more choice [of different kinds of groups], there would be less internal trouble in each group.”155 In the early years of a work-oriented community such as Twin Oaks, there is always an urgent need for new members to help do the work, and it was easy for them to become a little desperate and take a chance on a member who might become a serious problem later. The availability of different kinds of groups is what is happening today in cohousing; although all use the same process and have similar organizational structures, there are cohousing groups for everyone — at least on the left of center — from vegans to mystics and from polyamorists to young middle-class Unitarian families.

154 155

Kinkade, 13. Kinkade, 22.

83

Architecture Twin Oaks’ structures began with trailers, a bus, a “typical white farmhouse and a row of weathered barns,”156 which sounds no different than hundreds of rural communes. Unlike many, their first construction projects were practical, such as a big septic tank and a leach field. They started realistically with retrofitting barns instead of building from scratch, because they did not think they could do a good job. Their first new building was Harmony, a dorm; soon they also had two big buildings that looked different than the vernacular architecture of the countryside — not unconventional, only neutral looking. These became workshops and dorm space; one was named Oneida, demonstrating their knowledge of history. Houriet called their architecture “starkly utilitarian.”157 They tried rammed earth building and considered building domes, but they felt “if all you’re looking for is reasonable shelter” they should build simply. They did finally build a huge dome, but never finished it because of the complications of waterproofing it. Although their early buildings were “a hodgepodge,” and “ugly,” both Komar and Kinkade repeatedly say that the beautiful country surroundings more than made up for the community’s lack of architectural interest.158 In their second decade Oakers built Tupelo and Morningstar, both apparently creative, functional and very attractive.

156

Kinkade, 36. Houriet, 290. 158 Ingrid Komar, Living the Dream: A Documentary Study of the Twin Oaks Community (Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1983), 95-99, 246-47. 157

84

Whether or not buildings are beautiful is at any rate not universally agreed on, and varies over time, and what makes a built environment beautiful is not only the architecture but the setting, the juxtaposition of visual elements, the atmosphere of the place that manifests itself in how people act within it, the parks and landscaping, and many other things. But it is not beautiful in the way a painting is. As Jane Jacobs wrote about the city, "[it] cannot be a work of art"159 because it has a different kind of order, a complexity that looks like chaos until you understand how it works, like "the entrails of a dissected rabbit or the interior of an airplane engine."160 Twin Oaks’ early architecture is an argument against how “bad” architecture can negatively affect people, because its residents lived there apparently quite happily and successfully for many years before they began to build more “beautiful” buildings. Yet when they did build something they agreed was beautiful, Tupelo, people were drawn to it and loved it.

Play and Ritual Compared to many 1960s communes, fun was a low priority to Oakers, or so it seemed to outsiders: the visiting Robert Houriet mentioned their seriousness to a resident, who answered, “We’re laughing on the inside.”161 They did have dancing on the lawn; some wanted square dancing, but others thought that was too square. (Since that time contra dancing has swept through “alternative” parts 159 160

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 372. Jacobs, 376.

85

of the population, including Twin Oaks.) Komar’s and Kinkade’s books and many articles in the newsletter Leaves of Twin Oaks describe activities such as life drawing classes, encounter groups, folk dancing, a choir, classes in pottery and jewelry making, a rowboat, fishing, noncompetitive volleyball, film rentals, rope swings over the river, lots of swimming, and a radio station, which was really just an intercom. Some of these activities would be popular for a while, then they would fade away, but swimming and volleyball still remain favorites. In the early years, being a rationalist group, and not much given to religion or New Age ceremonies, they were anti-ritual and felt that holidays were no big deal. Some people wanted celebrations, so they started having sweat lodge sessions and gradually developed some other rituals, although not all participate in them.162 Twin Oaks seems to have far less need to do everything together than many communes, but their strong organization and equitable work system bind them together. Oakers, at least those who stay, have fairly realistic expectations of the place: Komar commented, “If we aren’t Utopia, we are still happier than most people.”163 Something seems to be working.

Commonalities and Differences The intentional communities described above illustrate much of the range of past utopian and intentional communities. At one end of the spectrum are 161 162

Houriet, Getting, 312. Komar, Living, 254.

86

communities with belief systems so much at odds with the dominant culture and society that they had to separate from that society to be able to practice their beliefs, like the Hutterites. At the other end are those that simply wanted to live more cooperatively than the single-family model permitted, like Home with its individualistic freedom and to some extent The Farm, with its voluntary poverty and community outreach. Somewhere in the middle are those with new ideas that they wanted to try out, from education for all at New Harmony to a limited form of communism at Hiawatha Village to behavior modification at Twin Oaks. All utopian communities experimented to find the best way to manage group behavior, and some choices that worked for one group did not work for others. Many of the 1960s communes used or experimented with consensus to make decisions, but it was a trial-and-error process and one that few people had any experience with. One of the most striking changes since the 1960s has been the increase in intentional communities that have learned how to use consensus and are committed to this process. Because as a society we are taught much more about competition than cooperation, these groups are trying to counteract that conditioning. Using consensus is one aspect of cohousing that is different from historic utopian communities, and cohousing groups use this strategy to try head off potential problems. But cohousers are people, and face the same kinds of personal conflicts that other communalists have through history. Chapters Four through Six try to explain how they are managing. 163

Komar, 246.

87

Today’s intentional community movement A recent internet search of “intentional communities” produced four single-spaced pages of links and sources. Included was information on ecovillages, cohousing, intentional communities, communes, student cooperatives, urban housing cooperatives, and other “related products and dreams,” in the form of magazines, articles, websites, individual groups and communities, schools, churches, and email lists. Many of them were from the Fellowship for Intentional Community web site (www.fic.ic.org), but they created a strong impression of interrelatedness, that most of the people involved in these various enterprises at least know of each other’s existence and share many of the same values. Chapter Three explains and develops some of these themes and tries to relate them to what is happening in Central Texas’s intentional community movement.

88

CHAPTER THREE: CENTRAL TEXAS COMMUNITIES AND INFLUENCES For an idea that is dead, the intentional communities movement is surprisingly lively. Kirkpatrick Sale is a writer, bioregionalist, former director of the E. F. Schumacher Society and cofounder of the New York state Green party. His review of the1990/1991 Intentional Communities Directory assured us that the “so-called commune movement is alive and well. We have here a book that attests not only to its vitality and durability but, more, to its sagacity and dynamism, even to its new level of commitment and coherence.”164 The Intentional Communities Directory and Communities magazine are published by the Fellowship for Intentional Communities, which was founded in 1953. Estimates in the 1970s of the number of intentional communities, including communes, ranged from 3,000 to 20,000. Historian Marguerite Bouvard reported that a New York Times survey in 1966 found over 100,000 intentional communities in the U.S.165 Timothy Miller thought there were at least 25,000 communards in the 1960s.166 The Directory listed only 375 communities by 1990, but that included only those who wanted to be in the directory. Seven hundred other groups “declined to provide public listings.”167 As far back as New Mexico in the 1960s, communes were angry about

164

The Nation, March 25, 1991, v252, n11, 391. Marguerite Bouvard, The Intentional Community Movement (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975), 18. 166 Miller, Hippies and American Values, 88. 167 www.ic.org/, April 9, 2002. 165

89

media stories that romanticized them and attracted floods of visitors.168 Too much media and visitor attention taught many not to put the latchstring out. For example, the Christian community Homestead Heritage Crafts Village in Central Texas does not list itself as an intentional community, although it has been one since 1973. Greenbriar Community in Elgin has been there since the 1970s, but chose not to be included, and none of the College House Co-ops or other co-ops in Austin responded except Whitehall. Although I did not find exactly what I was looking for in Central Texas, the more I looked and read, the more I felt something fairly big was slipping under the radar. Others agreed. There were dozens of articles in the popular press of the late 1980s and early 1990s about people seeking and creating new kinds of communities. An article updating communes in USA Today estimated in 1991 that 300,000 Americans lived in intentional communities.169 There might be 4,000 to 5,000 intentional communities of all types in the U.S., said Betty Didcoct of the Fellowship for Intentional Community.170 An article from 1996 on the Intentional Communities website could only confirm that more than 8,000 people lived in intentional communities.171 But about a third of the 375 communities listed in the 1992 Intentional Communities Directory were formed after, or long before, the 1960s and 70s surge, indicating an ongoing process. 168

Houriet, Getting, 134. Craig Wilson, USA Today, Oct. 15, 1991, 1q. 170 William A. Davis, Boston Globe, July 12, 1993, 30. 171 Dan Questenberry, “Who We Are: An Exploration of What ‘Intentional Community’ Means,” www.ic.org/. 169

90

All of these numbers, however unverifiable, are far higher than for any other period in U. S. history. The extreme variation in tallying the communal population does tell us a few things. Some sources might have counted communes only, and some might have included student cooperative housing and all varieties of group living including religious groups like the Hutterites and the Mennonites, so there is little basis to come to any conclusion about numbers. But even the smallest and most narrowly obtained number confirms that the intentional community movement has not died out. What I think has happened since the 1960s is that there has been a burgeoning variety of intentional communities. Utopian communities of the past could, in spite of their variety, be categorized roughly as retreat or model. Groups like the Bruderhof, Hutterites, Zoarites, Shakers, Oneida, and to an extent even Home were essentially retreats. This is not to say they had nothing to offer the outside world, and had no effect on it, but their primary intention was not to encourage everyone else to live as they did, only to themselves be able to live as they wanted to. On the other hand, attempted utopias like New Harmony, Twin Oaks, and Hiawatha Village planned from the beginning to experiment on themselves with certain specific methods, such as behaviorism, that they hoped would succeed and serve as models for the rest of the country. By the late 1990s, however, different kinds of communities such as cohousing had developed that were neither retreat nor strictly model; they were places where people could live as they wanted to with each other but without “escaping” from the outside world. 91

There were common interests among these community members, but many seemed to be able to avoid the pitfall of thinking their way of life was the one true way for everyone else. This chapter focuses on a few Central Texas communities and tries to bridge the gap between the past history in Chapter Two, which included 1960s communes, and the present state of cohousing that is described in Chapters Four through Six. Central Texas has never been the hotbed of community experimentation that, for example, the West Coast of California has been, but the communities described below show an ongoing movement with elements of the past but an eye to the future. The last section of this chapter is about an important theme in the intentional community movement, green building, best manifested in the Center for Maximum Potential, which is a vital link between the 1970s and today in Central Texas.

Central Texas Communities There are presently at least two accessible intentional communities in Central Texas — Whitehall Cooperative House in Austin, and Homestead Heritage Village near Waco. Until recently, there was also a full-fledged remnant of the 1960s, Zendik Farm, in nearby Bastrop. I visited all three and saw that the 1960s mindset has not died out, only become less controversial and therefore less newsworthy. All of these groups are interested in simplicity, cooperation,

92

biodiversity, green building, and recycling, and have direct ties to the 1960s and 70s communal movement.

Homestead Heritage Crafts Village In Elm Mott, Texas, near Waco, Homestead Heritage Crafts Village is a Christian rural craft- and farm-oriented intentional community that has thrived for thirty years. It began in New York in 1973, and moved to Texas about 1986. Its members do not seek or get much publicity, although the Waco Convention and Visitors Bureau website has a page on the community. Texas Highways wrote about them once and the Austin Chronicle’s “Day Trips” November 19, 1999, column was about Brazos de Dios, the town where the Homestead Heritage Village is. The community produced a book with beautiful photographs of their crafts but no information about their lives together. Every Thanksgiving they hold a crafts exposition for three days with demonstrations of old-fashioned skills like blacksmithing, candle making, basket weaving, spinning, metal casting, and weaving. It is a family-oriented weekend with crafts and plenty of food for sale. The group also runs a nonprofit group called The Center for Essential Education to “produce written and audiovisual materials, to conduct symposiums and seminars” and to host people who want to learn traditional crafts.172 Their other businesses include building houses, furniture, and barns.

172

Homestead Heritage brochures, 1998 - 1999.

93

I visited during Thanksgiving in 1998 and found a well-organized, clean, thoroughly professional-looking setup, and ten or fifteen of the least forthcoming members of an intentional community I have ever talked to. They had that insularity that others have noted as characteristic of some religious communities, and were to a person unwilling to talk about the life of the community itself. I did learn that 200 members live there or nearby, and another 500 members live elsewhere, as far away as Austin. They farm their 350 acres full time, do not read daily newspapers or own televisions, but do have air conditioning and modern vehicles.173 They help local single mothers financially and provide teaching about childrearing, education, and job training to the outside world. In their rejection of much modern technology and love of nature, traditional skills and crafts, they are like many 1960s communes; in their professionalism and organization, they sound like cohousers. In their reluctance to discuss their community economy or governance they resemble the communes who, after one too many reporters or researchers, just clammed up. And in their outreach programs they resemble the Farm in Tennessee, the Los Angeles Zen Center with its Greens restaurant and other programs, and any number of farm communities that have learned to support themselves by mainstreaming their products.

173

Gerald E. McLeod, “Day Trips,” Austin Chronicle, www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/1999-11-19/cols_daytrips.html.

94

Whitehall Cooperative House Down the road in Austin is Whitehall Cooperative House, the oldest cooperative house in Texas. Sadly, their history is mostly oral, because a roof leak years ago destroyed their early records. John Joyner’s master’s thesis, “Whitehall Cooperative: Improvising the Good Life,” provided a written account. Whitehall began as a women’s co-op at the University of Texas in 1949, was bought in 1961 by its residents, and became coeducational in the 1970s.174 Whitehall residents compare themselves to Twin Oaks: they say they are “non-sexist, non-racist, noncompetitive,” nonsmoking, and vegetarian; they always use consensus for decisions, in particular who to admit, and they share equally in all expenses. In their words, the residents “want to be part of a significant, non-exploitative socioeconomic movement.”175 Everyone must perform four hours of labor weekly, and they try to rotate jobs; ex-resident Joyner says the labor makes residents feel connected to the community. Whitehall can house about eighteen people and, unlike college co-ops, has no restrictions on age or length of stay.176 One of the members has been there for twenty years, and another over ten; both are older women. This longevity makes for a high degree of continuity, even though some of the faces change from time to time. There are even a few children living there. Joyner’s master’s thesis further illuminates these facts. For example, residents are not the kind of people who wear anti-carnivore T-shirts. Most of 174

John P. Joyner, “Whitehall Cooperative: Improvising the Good Life” (M.A. Thesis, the University of Texas at Austin, 1993), 12-13.

95

them are not full-time vegetarians; there is “clandestine meat activity” away from the house. They only decided on vegetarianism because it made the kitchen “cleaner” and was something they all could live with. No doubt it also keeps the food bill lower. Using consensus came about in the 1970s, and it has created “total respect” for each other. Thursday night meetings start at 7:30 with “Facilitator’s Creative Time,” which can be whatever the facilitator wants it to be; it is followed by three to five minutes each for “Personal Space,” for talking about personal goals, not for therapy. They allow a brief period for “Kudos and Gripes.” Then they jointly figure out the agenda order and time limits from a list of proposed items on a board. Their interpretation of the rules for consensus leaves room for flexibility; as I found with Central Austin Cohousing meetings, even after we learned a “right” way to do things, we kept using those methods that worked for us. The same seems to be true about other cohousing groups — consensus is more a tool than a rule. Joyner said the way it all works is “like an improv band that never stops playing.”177 Whitehall residents are aware of being an institution as well as a house, but they prefer to think of it as a house. Friends from Whitehall are involved in the Sustainable Building Coalition, Treefolk and ReLeaf Austin, and cohousing. Whenever I have visited Whitehall, for a meeting or to see a friend, I have felt free to wander almost anywhere. No one asks me what I am doing, only if I need 175 176

Intentional Communities Directory, 1992, 229. Joyner, 66-67.

96

help. Like most college co-ops I have visited, everyone is too busy with their own lives to worry about a stranger, and reactions are as varied as the individuals. The furniture is funky, but the house is clean. The atmosphere compares favorably with that at Zendik Farm, which I visited in 1995.

Zendik Farm Nearby Bastrop was home for several years to a remnant of the communal spirit of the 1960s, a commune founded in California by Wulf and Arol Zendik in 1969 called Zendik Farm. The founders of the Center for Maximum Potential in Austin, described later in this chapter, were connected to the Farm as advicegivers and friends. The Farm was home to a core group of fewer than twenty members, mostly in their twenties and thirties, and a fluctuating group of about thirty or forty mostly younger people. In 1995, when I visited Zendik Farm, Wulf was in his early seventies and his wife Arol was in her mid-fifties. They ran several community-access television programs to provide a forum for Arol's version of the news and Wulf's philosophy. They went on speaking tours to cities and colleges across the U.S., and had a band that toured the country. They also produced newsletters, comics, and pamphlets about their beliefs and what life was like on the farm, and sold this material on the streets of major cities and at rock concerts across the country.

177

Joyner, 59-97.

97

Most of their income apparently came from this source. However, their major enterprise was the farm itself. Zendik Farm had 300 acres of mostly flat land running from one side of a bend in the Colorado River to the other. An absentee owner had the 900 acres that lie at the curve of the river, and there were no buildings on that parcel; the Farm animals grazed on it. The Zendiks had quite a bit of livestock: sixty or seventy goats, a few cows and pigs, some horses, both draft and riding, and dozens of chickens, ducks, and geese. There were also about twenty-five dogs and a dozen cats; all of which appeared well fed, friendly, and quite fearless. They had two dogs guarding the goat barn that were fenced in because they were serious watchdogs; even the Saint Bernard who accompanied me on my self-guided tour of the outbuildings preferred to bark at them from a healthy distance. One of the Farm's purposes was to give disgruntled young people an alternative to the society they came from. Much of their transient population was recruited by Zendik literature they bought at a concert or picked up on a city street. Already alienated from what they saw as a negative or senseless culture, or at least one that doesn't accept them the way they are, the recruits saw hope in the welcoming description of an organic farm on a river in Texas. Two dazed-looking young men who had just dropped out of college in Louisiana told me that they came to the Farm with their van and their last thirty dollars. Once there, people were expected to do their share of chores; there was no free ride. This was no hippie commune where topless young women plied strangers with joints and a pot 98

simmered on the stove for whenever whoever is hungry, as the movie Easy Rider depicted in 1969. The animals at Zendik did not feed themselves. In the time I spent there I could not find out the exact social mechanisms by which the residents were urged to be productive members, but the kitchen was clean and well-organized and the living room and hall were far neater than my own. What was of greater interest was how this venture fit into the general green scheme. On the surface, the Farm appeared to be a fairly motley but utilitarian group of buildings. To discover the principles and dreams behind them, I read a book made for and about Zendik Farm by an architect in California, Daniel Lieberman, of Communal-Ecosystem Architects, Berkeley. Entitled Econstruction, it was "a manual of ecological architecture and planning," and used the term "ecolony," meaning "a self-sufficient community of organisms," a term from Lieberman's associate Lawrence Grown's architecture master’s thesis. The book illustrated and expanded on the principles and techniques the firm used to design a comprehensive community building plan for Zendik Farm. Lieberman described the Farm as "an architectural and agricultural intentional community" of which the members of the firm are members and facilitators. The Farm itself had a "shared life devoted to the expression and development of the talents and emotions of its inhabitants, in harmony with the world's ecosystem." Their proposed architecture was based on sensitivity to the environment, and on using that environment to help heat and cool and shade and

99

shelter the buildings. They also wanted to use salvaged and indigenous materials as much as possible. The book had four sections — Ecosystemics, or planning and environmental factors; Facility Areas, or the specific needs of the group: Building Methods and Technology, experimental earth- and salvage-based instead of conventional; and Building Types, which showed some examples of possible buildings. In Ecosystemics, the designers compiled a list of topics they wanted to explore before building, such as the geology and topography of the site, the amount of wind in the area, the possibility of subterranean building, the use of high roofs for cooling, orientation of buildings to prevailing breezes, and so on. The Facilities section was a wish list of the spaces Farm people wanted: two kivas, or meeting halls, one for summer and one for winter; a reception area and office; a kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator and a freezer; a large area for serving and eating meals together; a storage area for boots, shoes, and outerwear; two bathrooms and two composting toilets; a laundry area; and separate spaces of varying sizes for a library, dancing, a music and recording studio, crafts, editing and publishing, an audiovisual area, and a weight room. (The chapter on cohousing in Texas in this dissertation describes a very similar wish list for Central Austin Cohousing.) The Farm already had most of these things at least in embryonic form. However, they intended to get larger, and the plan allowed for that with a chart 100

that listed all these areas, plus the existing buildings they used for sleeping and sex, with a column showing the existing square footage and the projected square footage needed. For example, the Tree House, where Wulf, his wife Arol, and their daughter Fawn slept, had 350 square feet and would stay that size. The house next to the Tree House, the Farm House, the Little House, and the Mobile Home had a combined 3,750 square feet, which they wanted to double. The space allotted to the "getting together," or sex, house was only 150 square feet and should increase to 400. Parts of the book showed the variety of construction techniques and building types that are typical of sustainable building today, including round and bermed houses; straw bale and rammed earth walls; and cement domes. However, these projected spaces were only theoretical; the reality was quite different. I have mentioned some of the existing living spaces previously. There were also a number of agricultural and work buildings, mostly sheds of no particular architectural merit or imagination thrown up with salvaged lumber. Zendiks, as they still call themselves, were very proud of the horse barn, which had an interesting roof that they built; even the new members boasted of its strength. Clearly they needed even more storage space, because there were many tractors and other mechanical implements that, while not piled about in the usual farmyard jumbles, had seen better days and could have benefited from getting out of the rain. Wood was fairly neatly stacked and sorted in the area near the various workshops, as were any number of potentially useful objects. The overall effect 101

was that of a giant yard sale of farm implements – objects were fairly neatly arranged, but did not appear to be in use. When I visited I was allowed to roam about outside freely, but I did not wish to push this freedom too far. My reception seemed cool but observant, and I felt that if I were too nosy, they would ask me to leave. I was not encouraged to go inside any of the buildings except the Farmhouse and the office, where my guide Chen, a senior member, worked on his writing after he gave me a brief tour. He let me look at various writings including the Econstruction book; he encouraged me to buy the group's publications but let me copy (and pay for) a limited number of pages of Econstruction because there was only one copy. I shot a roll of film of the buildings' exteriors to authenticate my impressions. The Farmhouse, one of two original structures, was a large two-story bright purple house with crisp white trim. In the shade of the several trees around the house the white trim looked pale violet; it was not your ordinary Texas farmhouse, although the main part of the house dated from 1899. On the second floor, above the sheltered entryway in the center of the house, there was a balcony with a large Z at the top. To the left of the entryway there was a many-windowed bay that extended a little past the balcony. This extension, and a one-story lean-to extension to the left of it, on the side of the house that housed the enlarged kitchen, were Zendik additions. The back part of the house was not originally two stories; the upstairs, too, was Zendik work. While a close examination revealed master carpenters did not build it, it was sturdy and spacious. I wanted to see 102

more of the interior but the room that used to be the living area, now used for evening meetings, seemed to be off-limits to me. When I got near it, silent people appeared as if by magic and gently herded me away. There was a small flower garden on the kitchen side of the house; a low tile and cement-block openwork wall enclosed it. The area had some curved brick paths that were beautifully finished, benches, and an inventive ironwork gate that invited walkers in rather than shutting them out. Varying patterns of shade and sun enlivened the space, and cats draped themselves peacefully over the walls. This was the warmest and most inviting part of the Farm to me. Was it only a coincidence that I was alone there, not being herded? The first building past the garden was the Little House, which was a bunkhouse for young people. It was a one-story weathered board-and-batten cabin of some charm, with a fairly wide covered front porch and barn-red trim. It was connected to the garden by more tiled walls that curved to meet the farthest porch support. The wall was only about eighteen inches high and was for sitting on and putting plants on, not for keeping anyone in or out. There was a small cabin extension at the back, and a stovepipe sticking out of a wall just above the side windows; according to one young man, the stove itself was pretty ineffective. There could have been better insulation instead of, or in addition to, the nice little ornamental wall. In the Farmhouse, the needed changes appeared to be strictly utilitarian, and not particularly well done, but the ornamental additions had obviously been 103

thoughtfully and lovingly created. This suggested to me that their work ethic was quite different from, for example, the Shakers, who felt that everything must be done with great care and love, from sweeping the floor to building a barn. Work for the Shakers was an expression of their religion. Perhaps the Zendiks valued creativity more than work. Slightly to one side and in back of the cabin there was an odd little unpainted cement-block building with a rounded purple and white roof, a window or two, and a door; it looked like an unfinished psychedelic hobbit house. This, explained Chen, was the sex shack. Because Wulf did not believe people should have separate rooms, no one did; so privacy was hard to find, hence the sex shack. There was nothing secretive or private about it; being in the middle of things as it was, going into it with someone must have been a quite public declaration. This practice reflects how much control Wulf had over the most intimate parts of Zendiks’ lives. A dirt pathway wide enough for cars ran parallel to the main road, between the sex shack and Little House, and the chicken houses and workshops farther from the road. This pathway connected the Farmhouse to the barn that was farthest away, and to all the other structures between them. The chicken houses were little metal hip-roofed pavilions with chicken-wire walls; some of them had no walls and looked like strange bus stops. Most of the chickens and ducks were walking around outside these enclosures, but those with babies were inside.

104

There was another mostly open barn for goats at the end of the dirt road and a number of very rough buildings that people used for various workshops and storage areas. On the opposite side of the main road were the horse barn and the six-acre vegetable garden. Although their printed material said they were selfsufficient in food production, a new resident told me that the Zendiks not only ate everything the garden produced, they also had to buy much organic produce from California. The dream was not yet reality. Many utopian communities exhibit a disconnect between what people are working toward and what they are really doing. I was unable to tell whether the long-time residents really believed their own press, and whom the disinformation was supposed to convince. Wulf’s health began to fail not long after I visited, and he and Arol moved for a while to Florida, then to North Carolina, to try to start over in a different climate. Although Wulf died in 1999, Arol has kept Zendik Farm going outside Asheville, in apparently a little stricter fashion than at Bastrop. One of my former students told me that she wanted to see what the Zendiks were like, so she took the long bus ride to North Carolina to spend a week there. She was disillusioned after only a few days because guests were subject to many requirements and rules. Some of them, she felt, seemed paranoid and unnecessarily restrictive. As many 1960s communes learned, it is impossible to keep a large community functioning and run a guesthouse simultaneously, and even the most anarchist-sounding community can find itself at odds with its rhetoric because of its need for order and control. 105

Wulf Zendik offended many people because of his strident hatred of what he called the "deathkultur of Amerika," but looking past the tone of the rhetoric to the ideas, what he was trying to create was not very different from today’s sustainable development movement. Zendiks wanted to affect the planet as little as possible except to heal it; to use as few resources as possible, and as many renewable resources as they could; and they wanted to try to live with each other in honesty, while sharing work, space, and goals. Theirs was (and is) also a multigenerational community. They also wanted to provide a haven for alienated youth, although those youth gave a great deal of free labor. It is difficult to judge who benefited the most from the arrangement, Wulf, Arol, and their hand-picked protegees, or the lost children who were mostly just passing through. Zendik Farm may be at one end of the alternative community spectrum, but for a while at least, and for a lost segment of the larger world’s population, it was a viable alternative.

Alternative Groups What I later discovered in Central Texas, or more accurately saw in a new light, were many “alternative” organizations that seemed likely to be linked to the missing or hidden communities that all of the numbers at the beginning of this chapter hinted at. These organizations and entities, including the Austin Sustainable Building Coalition, the Rhizome Collective, the Straw Bale Association of Texas, the Vegetarian Network of Austin, Bikes Not Bombs, 106

College Houses and the Inter-Cooperative Council (student co-ops), independent co-ops in and around Austin such as Whitehall and Sunflower House, and the Center for Maximum Potential, aka Max’s Pot, provided links between the 1960s and the present. They also showed some of the common ideas and visions such as “green” building, permaculture, and voluntary simplicity that have been thriving underground between waves of new intentional communities.178 These ideas are not new; Helen and Scott Nearing practiced and promoted them for decades after World War I, as have many others. Far from being fads that come and go, many of these ideas have become incorporated into well-known movements such as “Smart Growth” city planning and the New Urbanism.179 Today there is much interest in the planning and architectural aspect of largescale communities and cities, but during periods when there is nothing overtly controversial happening in the intentional communities movement, what it is doing gets little serious study. However, the intentional community movement, and in particular cohousing, embraces environmentalism, sustainability, and “green” building. Austin is home to at least one well-known advocate of these principles, known locally as Max’s Pot.

178

For more information and links to these and more groups, see the Austin Progressive calendar at www.austinprogressivecalendar.com/links.htm. 179 See, among others, Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 1993.

107

The Center for Maximum Potential It was not only counterculture people who embraced the environmental movement; many architects designed and built active and passive solar houses and at least one, New Jersey’s Malcolm Wells, has built underground houses and office buildings for many years. Austin has its own equivalent to Wells in local architect Pliny Fisk III, who founded The Center for Maximum Potential, also called Max's Pot, in 1975. The Center was at first an adjunct to the School of Architecture of the University of Texas, but when the Center’s funding was cut, the Fisks kept it going as a non-profit organization.180 Max’s Pot is hard to categorize; Pliny, his wife and partner Gail Vittori and others who work there have their fingers in many pies. Their “earth lab” has experimented with creating new building materials. AshCrete, for example, is made with waste ash, and is twice as hard as cement. They were local pioneers in promoting and building with straw bales, and use the locally plentiful caliche to make building blocks. Their eighteen-acre spread on FM 969 on the eastern outskirts of Austin is a “hodgepodge of odd-looking buildings” and experiments in solar and wind power, cisterns, gutters, and landscaping.181 And they have been a big influence on Austin’s green building community. Many of the elements of the concept of green building have been around since the late 1960s, and some long before then. Vernacular architecture has 180

Milligan and Higgs, 83.

108

always made use of native materials; has tailored buildings to individual sites in terms of sun, wind, and topography; and has adapted buildings to local climatic concerns, such as by using high ceilings in the South and lower ceilings in the Northeast for, respectively, better air circulation and conservation of heat. In the 1960s, the back-to-the-land movement, with its rejection of the culture of materialism and planned obsolescence, and the environmental movement gave rise to experimenting with forms such as domes, scavenging used materials to build houses and barns, building smaller and tighter to make buildings easier to heat, and siting houses for solar gain. All of these principles are important to cohousers. Descriptions of their projects read like a catalogue from the Green Building Program. Cactus, which is an Austin cohousing umbrella group for cohousing, is getting advice from Pliny about building. Pliny has master’s degrees in architecture and ecological land planning and a national reputation. The American Institute of Architects elected him to their Committee on the Environment, and under President William J. Clinton he advised the White House on the environment, also serving on the Presidential task force on Sustainable Construction. He was a speaker at Architecture Week’s “What Makes it Green?” conference in 2001, and at the national Xeriscape Conference in 2002 at Pennsylvania State University. He was

181

Steve Lerner, “Pliny Fisk III: The Search for Low-Impact Building Materials and Techniques,” in Eco-Pioneers. Reprinted in the Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1997, XO8.

109

Bruce Goff chair of Creative Architecture at Oklahoma University in 2001,182 and is “respected as a pioneer in sustainability.”183 Gail was chair of the Solid Waste Advisory Commission, and “was instrumental in starting curbside recycling” in Austin.184 When the Center first started, Pliny’s ideas about sustainable building and saving energy were considered eccentric and on the fringe; in 1994 environmental writer Robert Bryce of the Austin Chronicle observed that “the fringe has become the middle”185 Max’s Pot recently designed new building guidelines for the state during the planning of the proposed State Insurance Building. He figured out how to save the state of Texas millions of dollars by using Texas granite instead of importing it, which resulted in a savings of energy as well as money by not hauling it a long distance. In 1985 the city created the Austin Energy Star Program (AESP) to monitor and encourage energy efficiency. In the meantime, Pliny developed a set of guidelines for building green and saving energy that Lawrence Doxsey, an energy consumption activist, used in developing the AESP into the city’s present Green Building Program. The program rates builders, gives workshops, and offers books, a newsletter and fact sheets that educate the public about green building and energy conservation. The city Green Building Program

182

arch.ou.edu/r-events/010912.fisk/, May 2002. www.ecosainstitute.org/advisors, May 2002. 184 Robert Bryce, “The Mad, Mad World of Pliny Fisk III,” Austin Chronicle, April 1994, www.austinchronicle.com/issues/spec/greenbuild/pliny/html. 185 Bryce, “Mad.” 183

110

won the Earth Summit Award in 1992, and several national green building awards in 2002.186 Max’s Pot has worked with the 200-member Austin Sustainable Building Coalition, Zendik Farm in Bastrop, and Casa Verde Builders, among others. Casa Verde, which is a part of American YouthWorks and an Americorps offshoot, is a nonprofit green construction company that teaches East Austin youth to build while they earn money for school. Casa Verde has worked with over 700 teenagers, 400 of whom have completed their General Educational Development requirements (GEDs). They focus on using the lowest possible embodied energy, something Pliny has long been interested in.187

Alternative Building Green design and sustainable development are new in the way they view energy use and in the way they put all the pieces together. The way green design is different from previous attempts to conserve is the idea of embodied energy: that is the total energy cost of a building, including the energy used to produce the materials, ship them to the site, and construct the building, as well as the lifetime energy expenditure of the building. The movement also tries to make full use of existing and new technology, rather than the widespread 1960s and 70s rejection of the whole idea of technology, which preferred the low- or no-tech way of doing

186 187

www.ci.austin.tx.us/greenbuilder, May 2002. www.ail.org/cvb/greenConstruction/frontPage.htm.

111

things as a matter of principle (even though that way sacrificed some convenience and efficiency). Sustainable development, and green design and building, is development that efficiently uses and conserves energy, water, and resources, reduces and reuses wastes, and uses nontoxic and nonpolluting materials. Not all of these goals can be met in every building; for instance, a house built specifically to be as nontoxic as possible might sacrifice economy or some degree of energy efficiency. The green builders' bible, Green Architecture, published in 1991 by Brenda and Robert Vale, is a recent offshoot of the environmental movement. The helpful people at the City of Austin Green Builder Program told me that the term “green building” has only been in use since 1991, although many of its concepts are not new. Since then there has been an explosion of information on the subject in trade magazines, small publications like Mother Earth and Natural Home, and more recently in mainstream magazines. For example, an article in the November 2001 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, “Home for healthy living,” features recycled construction materials, wood floors for better allergen control, safer paints and finishes, extra insulation, and so on.188 As for design itself, the point is that there is not so much a green design style as there are green design principles. The Better Homes and Garden “healthy house” looks like a Craftsman bungalow. To be green, there are four main areas

112

to focus in designing a building: water, energy, waste, and materials. The building can be traditional or nontraditional looking; the main visual difference might only be its siting, to the sun rather than to the road and its neighbors, and its xeriscaping, which is using native plants that are adapted to the area and use less water. As mentioned earlier, alternative building techniques were a major part of 1960s communalism. Two authors in particular, Brad Angier and Ken Kern, inspired many communes with books such as How to Build Your Home in the Woods, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and The Owner-Built Home about simple, back-to-nature buildings and techniques such as log cabins, lean-tos, and sod roofs.189 (Ironically, Ken Kern died when his underground house collapsed on him in the late 1980s). Drop City built many geodesic domes, as did other communes like Twin Oaks, with varying success. Dome originator, inventor and writer Buckminster Fuller was a kind of counterculture guru who visited a number of communes.190 People experimented with building with old tires, chunks of wood, and especially such recycled materials as old doors and windows, tiles, and plumbing fixtures. (For detailed descriptions and pictures, see Shelter, Bolinas, California, Shelter Publications, 1978.) Some of the more rural cohousing groups have used some of these elements in their buildings. 188

Better Homes and Gardens, Nov. 2001. Brad Angier, How to Build Your Home in the Woods (New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1952); How to Stay Alive in the Woods (New York: Collier Books, 1971); Ken Kern, The Owner-Built Home (Auberry, Calif.: Homestead Press, 1972). 190 Veysey, The Communal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 328-331. 189

113

Straw bale construction has gotten much attention in the past decade. It is particularly popular in the west and southwest parts of the country because lower rainfall makes such buildings more feasible and permits flat or nearly flat roofs, much like pueblos or adobe houses. In Austin, Max’s Pot and Casa Verde have built straw bale houses and have given workshops on building techniques. It is not quite as simple as stacking straw bales and coating them, but although the method can be tricky, it is inexpensive and suited to owner-built housing. Many of the topics above just sound like common sense, and some also sound like voluntary simplicity. However, that does not make them invalid; it only means there are obvious and functional relationships between this green way of thinking and sense and simplicity. The principles do run counter to the messages we are constantly bombarded with in advertising and in the media, but they appeal to people who are interested in economy, creativity, and environmentalism.

Student Housing Alternatives Finally, the New York Times Magazine reported on August 27, 2000 that “the latest campus-housing trend is for students who share an interest.”191 Over a decade ago my niece spent her undergraduate years at Brown with other environmental studies majors in a house with solar panels, intensive recycling, and bulk food buying from coops; apparently this is now a trend. Dickinson

114

College’s Treehouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, limits showers and toilet flushing. (Old hippies may remember the 1960s saying, “If it’s yellow, it’s mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.”) Some schools are “experimenting with housing students according to their majors,” which might run counter to the idea of broadening students’ horizons while at college, but which at least recognizes that there is more to college students than partying. The University of California at Berkeley has an International House with half American and half foreign students, and other schools have followed suit. Some dorms ban drinking and/or smoking, or offer weekly meditation; some others have set up programs for community service. Betty Trachtenberg, dean of student affairs at Yale, criticized these efforts because they further narrow students’ interests and social lives. What is not clear is whether these kinds of dorms are in response to student demands, and if so, what were the specific concerns the students expressed, or if they were merely attempts to innovate from above. At Brown, the environmental studies students self-selected into the environmental house after a year or two in general housing because they were serious about their interests and wanted to live their ideals. I would think the chance to act on what may have been an abstract set of ideas would be excellent training for putting their money where their mouths were, and for learning to respect and get along with people who share their interests — in short, to perhaps create a new crop of cohousers. 191

New York Times Magazine, August 27, 2000.

115

The next chapter will show how cohousers, at least in theory, embrace all of the topics and values discussed above. They also have incorporated parts of Zendik, Homestead, and Whitehall into them, literally in the case of Whitehall: six to eight current Whitehall residents are involved in cohousing groups in Austin. Zendik was farther to the left of mainstream and Homestead was further to the right, but they all wanted to create a community that supported better lives for their residents, regardless of their beliefs. Cohousing is even more inclusive by not insisting on agreement over religion and politics. The next chapter explains cohousing history, describes the consensus process, and shows how the formation of a community from the ground up is different from other kinds of planned communities because of the resident involvement.

116

CHAPTER FOUR: COHOUSING 101 Introduction There are many kinds of intentional communities in the U.S. today, from some communes remaining from the 1960s to the Hutterites in the West, but cohousing is relatively new and has possibilities for broader use. Cohousing has been working in Scandinavia and Japan since the 1970s, and has been worked on in the United States since the mid 1980s. I will define what cohousing is in detail later in this chapter, but briefly, it is a relatively small group of people who decide to live cooperatively for the purpose of sharing company and resources.

History Cohousing came to this country via Denmark, where it began in the 1970s as a means of creating cooperative, affordable communities with more amenities than individuals could afford on their own. In the 1960s and 70s, Denmark had the world’s largest growth spurt in communes, proportional to its size. They were called “collective families” and were “accepted as a logical extension of Danish society.”192 Rural and urban communes abounded in Denmark, although most were urban; their residents came from all social classes, were young but not dropouts, and were not considered radicals. At one point one percent of the population of Denmark lived in communes. This strong interest in and acceptance

192

Ruth Cavan and Man Singh Das, eds., Communes, Historical and Contemporary, 315.

117

of living in community led to the idea of cohousing. Today there are hundreds of cohousing groups around the world, especially in Scandinavia and Japan. There is also a Swedish version called “kollektivhus” that is a more urban model, usually an apartment building with a common floor or two.193 Now married, American authors Katherine McCamant and Charles Durrett met when they traveled separately to Denmark to study these communities and their architecture. They later publicized the concept in their Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (first published in 1988), which has become the bible of the movement.194 It sold 20,000 copies by 1992 and is now in paperback. They also operate a design and consulting company, The Cohousing Company, and give presentations all over the country to educate people about cohousing. Chris Hanson’s Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community (1996) added more specific information about how to get started, and Chris and his wife Kelly, whose last names are now ScottHanson, have a business, Cohousing Resources Development and Consulting. They work with cohousers in a number of ways, for example by helping groups find suitable land.195 By 2002 there were at least 150 cohousing groups in the United States in at least 35 states, mostly on the liberal east and west coasts and scattered around

193

[email protected], March 22, 2002. Katharine McCamant and Charles Durrett, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press, 1994). 195 Chris Hanson, Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community (Washington: Hartley & Marks, 1996). 194

118

the rest of the country in college towns that have cooperative traditions.196 The first was Davis Commons, built in California in 1991. There is no cohousing development in Texas in 2002, but that is changing as I write. Dallas has one underway, Austin has at least two, and San Marcos has one. The process of creating a cohousing project is not for everyone but then again there is probably a cohousing group somewhere that could be tailored to just about anyone's set of needs and tolerances. Blueberry Hill, built on eight acres of an organic farm, prohibits cars inside the development, and residents work on the farm if they want to. Heart Song in Santa Fe is a “psychospiritual” community. There is a cohousing group in Winslow, Washington on Bainbridge Island near Seattle that has about sixty members of all ages, including an older grandmother figure. Winslow’s living units range from a studio to three-bedroom houses, some attached and some not.197 Some groups have younger members, some have more children, and some have subsidized affordable-housing units. If this sounds like a very white middle-class phenomenon, with perhaps some counter-culture types if they have the money, that is probably the case as of 2002. But because it is somewhat mainstream, it may gain acceptance faster than the more unconventional communes of the 1960s and 70s did, and with acceptance may come expanded use. Denmark is a homogeneous country with little room to expand, a strong

196 197

www.ic.org/. www.ic.org/.

119

common heritage and traditions that include socialism and cooperation in many areas of life. The U. S., with its heterogeneity and tradition of individualism, does not lend itself to cohousing as easily as did Denmark. But the U.S. has its own strong if intermittent utopian spirit, and a segment of the population leans toward populism, cooperatives, and sharing resources. Combine these tendencies with the communitarian upsurge of the 1960s and 70s and the result is a growing number of people who are not happy with being crowded into the anonymity of apartment buildings or the sameness and isolation of the suburbs. As of 2002, there were cohousing groups in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Of those 153 groups, 100 have land, are building, or are completed; 53 are “forming” or are seeking land. California, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington have the majority of the groups, not surprisingly in or near college towns or large cities. But there are groups scattered across the country in places like Hartland, Vermont and Wichita, Kansas. The number of members varies from five to sixty-eight, with an average of about 30.198

120

Definition As Chapter 1 explained, cohousing has made its way into the dictionary defined as “a living arrangement that combines private living quarters with common dining and activity areas in a community whose residents share in tasks such as childcare.”199 This definition, although incomplete, suggests that cohousing is not seen as threatening or radical in America, merely a little odd, so it may be that it has a chance of gaining widespread acceptance as a standard alternative to inner city or suburban patterns of development. In fact, the book Cohousing describes cohousing as such an alternative, emphasizing it as a housing model only, not as a utopian or even an intentional community. But the goals, desires, and feelings expressed by cohousing residents in the book and elsewhere sound quite utopian, especially if they were to be applied on a societywide level. However, if cohousing was accepted only as a housing model, there might be dilution of the fairly radical notions of cooperation, sharing of facilities, and decision making by consensus that now are strongly identified with cohousing. The dictionary definition of cohousing, as I said earlier, is incomplete. As defined, such a place could include a homeless shelter, a nursing home with visiting grandchildren, or a gated community with a common house for large gatherings. These places may have many of the elements of community that make

198 199

www.cohousing.org/cmty/groups-us.html. American Heritage Dictionary, www.bartleby.com/61/.

121

a place emotionally supportive, but they are not cohousing. Cohousing, as originally described by McCamant and Durrett in Cohousing and as defined by consensus of the American cohousing community after more than a decade of experimentation must include the following six elements. First, residents help design their homes, the common house, and the placement of the buildings and other elements on the site. Most groups hire architects and contractors to design a final plan and to build it, but from early in a group’s history its members discuss what features they want. Not only does this participation help members get to know each other and begin to visualize their future home, it also helps them become more realistic about the costs and the challenges of the project. It also tests their commitment to the idea of cohousing and to each other. Second, cohousing encourages and facilitates community building, by design. For example, even if it is possible to have individual laundry units in resident houses, there is almost always a laundry in the common house, because it is a good place to run into your neighbors and keep in touch with what is going on. Common houses are given high priority for not just expensive amenities like hot tubs and pools but also attractive design features such as skylights and beautiful wood and tile floors. The more attractive the common house is, the more members will be attracted to the building and will gravitate there to mingle with each other. Third, cohousing has common facilities that supplement those of private 122

homes. Individual units have kitchens, but the common house always has a big, well-equipped kitchen, not just so that it can handle people cooking for larger groups but so that it is an emotional center. Most cohousing groups have at least one community meal a week. Takoma Village in Washington, D.C., has a “big extended family dinner” at Easter, and they celebrate other holiday dinners with as many guests as residents.200 Fourth, residents manage their complexes. This is an important part of cohousing. It would be easy to hand off the business details of the group to a professional management company, but the nature of maintaining community demands continued involvement not only in the fun aspects like celebrations and dinners but also in the difficult and sometimes disagreeable aspects like figuring out how much each unit must be charged for improvements or maintenance. The emotional baggage that comes up when people discuss money and space is the very stuff that must not be swept under the rug or ignored in cohousing; it must be dealt with. Cohousers have said that living in cohousing is like being married to all the other cohousers, and if so, the cohousing group is one big family. From what I have observed, many cohousers welcome or at least are willing to struggle with the very issues that caused their families of origin to be dysfunctional and to try to work them out in cohousing. If this sounds a little like Oneida’s complex marriage, it does because it is similar in its members’ willingness to work on personal issues for the good of the group. 200

[email protected], April 2, 2002.

123

Fifth, all decisions are made by consensus or by vote, not by a leadership hierarchy. Cohousing groups do have bylaws and rules that may be similar to those of a condo or a gated community, but members create them after much discussion and after all agree, and they do so before building. According to much of the discussion on the cohousing list, the rules are meant only as guidelines and often are revised to allow more flexibility. Although many cohousers use consensus for all decisions, even in the consensus process sometimes voting is necessary, as the section on process explains further. And sixth, unlike most earlier intentional and utopian communities, there is no shared community economy. Everyone is responsible for his or her own independent income and mortgage, and a monthly assessment for expenses. Some groups build space into the common house for a few offices, as did Ecovillage at Ithaca; some have rental units, and some members may cooperate in a home business, but these enterprises are apart from the community economy. Some cohousing groups find that the simplest way to deal with this separation of economies is, for example, to charge a flat amount apiece for community dinners. This saves time and aggravation in figuring out exactly how much the meal cost and who ate what. These six elements all vary greatly depending on the particular people involved. There is usually also a shared environmental vision, of nurturing and being nurtured by the earth. This vision could be as minimal as using some energy-efficient building techniques and materials and having a communal garden 124

or as all-encompassing as designing every aspect of the buildings with sustainability and conservation foremost in mind, growing most of the community food organically, setting up carpooling to nearby work areas, designing water systems to reuse gray water, limiting participants to those who intend to limit their families, and so on. Donna Spreitzer, a Muir Commons, California cohousing resident, wrote her 1992 master’s thesis on cohousing in terms of “the relationship between ‘community’ and ‘sustainability,’” which she defined as “the viability and continuity of natural, built and social systems.”201 And there is a strong current of pacifism in cohousing that surfaces in such subtle ways as banning war toys in the common house, as Muir Commons does. Cohousing also stressed the security and safety of its lifestyle, and the practical pluses of the system of shared meals. While the authors emphasized the practical advantages of cohousing that might appeal to many people, McCamant and Durrett were concerned about the first principle of cohousing, that of resident design input. They are both architects and initially had an academic interest in cohousing before becoming personally interested in it as prospective residents. They have founded and lived in two cohousing groups in California, Muir and Davis Commons. Their interest in architecture is strong, and their book is certainly about architecture, but they have watched with dismay at developers jumping on the cohousing bandwagon or co-opting elements of cohousing 201

Donna Spreitzer, “Living in My Thesis: Cohousing in Davis, California” (M.A. thesis, School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, 1992), at www.cohousing.org/resources/library/

125

principles and offering to create prepackaged cohousing developments. They foresee cohousing becoming almost a fad, one that developers who are not knowledgeable about what really makes cohousing work will take advantage of. They stress that early resident participation in every aspect of development allows people to get to know each other and build a sense of community while they are working on the project.202 McCamant and Durrett’s buzzwords are community support and extended family; yet they stress that cohousing is not a utopian community.203 The book is really trying to sell to the mainstream, and the authors discuss cohousing only as a housing alternative, not as an alternative lifestyle. But the average American would not only not want to live in cohousing, she would think anyone who did want to was very odd indeed. Even cohousers, for all that they are not nearly as countercultural as the communards of the 1960s were, know that they are not the norm. Rob Sandelin of Sharingwood in Washington said it best: “Well, someone once told me: ‘anybody that does this community thing must be some kind of weirdo’ … Living in a group of people like this is a grand experiment with no guidebooks, and most people have no experience doing so … This makes you a weirdo my friends. Normal people, in America anyway, don’t do these things.”204 Calling it a “grand experiment” is strikingly reminiscent of the optimism and enthusiasm of all previous waves of communitarian impulses in this country. Spreitzer/thesis.html. 202 Elizabeth Hollander, “Community Under Construction,” East Bay Express, August 15, 2001, 4.

126

Cohousers do see themselves as pioneers, and as experimenters and risk-takers, not merely as residents in some new kind of housing. Frank Ricceri , a co-founder of Oceano, California, said, “It’s not like the ‘60s. We’re reinventing the whole thing.”205 As another cohouser observed, cohousing is a dream but it is also a real estate development.206 Luckily for Oceano, which was ten years in the making, the members’ idealism and environmentalism remained strong, and communicated itself to the outside world. Local landowner Gurdun Grell donated five acres of her property to the group because “she was impressed by the group’s dedication to maintaining the area’s rural flavor. I only want to do something good for the land.”207

Pioneering The description of cohousing in McCamant and Durrett’s book sounds quite “normal” and middle-class, with much discussion of cohousing being an alternative to suburbia. But when you also read cohousers’ descriptions of their goals and their desires, they sound utopian. If they were just singular selfish desires for each individual group, then they would not be utopian – but if those goals spread, and the results of living in cohousing are personally enhancing and empowering, a qualitative shift in consciousness might occur. In 2001, someone 203

McCamant, Cohousing, 17. [email protected], Feb. 26, 1998. 205 Eric Lichtblau, “Cohousing: Modern Twist to 60s Dreams,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 1998. 206 [email protected], Dec. 18, 2000. 207 Los Angeles Times, 3. 204

127

on the online cohousing list, [email protected], asked for suggestions for cohousing slogans to put on T-shirts. The resulting list demonstrates the cultural connections, values, goals, and utopian vision better than any one statement could: Building community, one neighborhood at a time Come home to cohousing Building our future on common ground Won’t you be my neighbor? Ask me about cohousing Cohousing connects hearts Cohousing: the next decade “How can thou love thy neighbor if thou doest not know thy neighbor?” Cohousing: the old-fashioned community of the future Cohousing builds dreams Cohousing: building a circle of friends Cohousers build it better Cohousers do it in the common house Borrow it from a cohouser Cohousing: architecture for community Cohousing: the quintessential exercise in delayed gratification Got cohousing? Cohousing: sharing life, daily Community: the caring family I always wanted Cohousing: my chosen family Cohousing: where neighbors are friends Cohousing: where everyone knows your name Cohousing: a life abundant in meetings! Group dishwashing! Cohousers do it consensually Cohousers do it with construction208 Past and Present Purposes The old way of forming utopian communities, especially in the nineteenth century, was often that strangers came together with an idea, belief system, or

128

principle in common but with no method to work out interpersonal problems, even if they had a strong leader. In the 1960s and 70s, this was also often true, although many communes had a core group who knew each other before forming, as Raymond Mungo describes in the autobiographical Total Loss Farm. Often the idea was not so much a principle as a revulsion against the status quo, without any clear idea how to avoid recreating it. In cohousing, the lengthy initial process — up to eight years, for example, for Blueberry Hill in Vienna, near Washington, DC — tends to work out personal and practical difficulties over time, and the individuals involved get to know each other before they live together. Communes and cohousing both have the same goal, to improve life not so much materially as socially. They don’t fight the whole political and economic system, but they fight a battle of consciousness. And cohousers do share a common vision of a cooperative lifestyle that allows privacy without isolation. There seems to be a largely unspoken consciousness among cohousers that to call themselves “utopian” is to label themselves negatively in a way that limits not only public acceptance but acceptance by lending institutions and public entities like planning and zoning boards. For example, in a discussion on “what cohousing is not and what it can become” on the cohousing list, Michael Mariner commented about comparisons with Twin Oaks: “Is there still a need to distance cohousing from other [intentional] communities …? I thought financing problems

208

[email protected], March 12, 2001.

129

were largely overcome by the success of many projects throughout the U.S.”209 But cohousers are leery about being publicly identified with anything unconventional because of continuing difficulty in financing and zoning. The problem is the common house. A bank might readily finance sixteen individual units for individual mortgages, but might not be willing to finance a sixteenth of the value of the common house added to each mortgage. So while cohousing adherents seem to want to change the world and to attract others with similar values, they are also trying to appear as conventional and mainstream as possible so they can get the zoning and funding they need to build.

Change in Family Unit Compared to a hundred years ago the extended family is today much less part of individual daily lives, so the desire to live communally and cooperatively is radical compared to the norm. Many people do not stay in close proximity to their relatives. Older family members are often not cared for at home but are institutionalized, children usually leave home as soon as they are economically able, and adult children who still live at home often are forced to only out of economic necessity. How can we explain these throwbacks to earlier times who can bond with unrelated people enough to want to share much of their lives with them? The same idealism, shared values, and willingness to experiment that earlier communalists had is visible here. 209

[email protected], Sept. 14, 1997.

130

Single-home Mentality One element that would be hard for many Americans to accept in cohousing is the lack of individual lots. Ever since politicians sliced up the west into quarter-sections and dealt them out like playing cards, Americans have wanted their own land, their space, their privacy, their turf. We equate ownership of our elbowroom with freedom. This attitude is what creates the suburban sprawl we have in 2002. Every one of those lots has at least one car, so sprawl adds to traffic problems and air pollution, and creates the expense of building roads to all those little developments. The environment seems to have run out of patience with our wastefulness, and although it would take a massive mental housecleaning to sweep this particular obsession away, cohousing attempts this on at least a small scale. There is a difference between urban and rural cohousing groups. Urban groups typically have much less acreage than rural groups. The Central Austin group is looking for at least an acre, which is hard enough to find within easy access to downtown, but that acre or two might hold thirty units. A rural group might have twenty or more acres. Proximity, in Virginia, has 164 acres; and with residences clustered, there is an especially large amount of commonly owned undeveloped land. Such a setup is similar to the Sea Ranch development in California, where houses and condominiums are clustered in the meadows and in the trees, leaving the waterfront area undeveloped and available to everyone. Sea 131

Ranch was built on a much larger scale than cohousing: it encompasses about 5,000 oceanfront acres, including 2,305 house lots, two recreation centers, and a small commercial center.210 Although landscape architect and planner Lawrence Halprin planned the development in the 1960s to encourage community, and to be ecologically sensitive and aesthetically unobtrusive, much as cohousing planners do, Sea Ranch has an entirely different raison d’être than cohousing. It is far away from any cities, making residents completely dependent on cars; its residents come there to escape from other people. Sea Ranch is a second-home community, which means it is exclusive and upscale. It is qualitatively different from many such places because peace and nature are what its residents value, not ostentation and high visibility. So while there is some commonality among Sea Ranch residents, its size and its purpose determine a far more limited amount of communitas than cohousing attempts to create. Certainly few of the millions who live in the inner city have their own yards; cohousing would be a step up for them. Those powerless millions, if they were living in smaller, closer communities, might also develop more of a voice in political decisions and have a moderating effect on crime. As Paul and Percival Goodman wrote in Communitas, "the community block is a powerful social force. Starting from being neighbors ... the residents become conscious of their common interests. Where there is a sense of neighborhood, proposals are initiated for the

210

Richard Sexton, Parallel Utopias: The Quest for Community (printed in Hong Kong for Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995), 44-45.

132

local common good; and … [can create] a political unit intermediary between families and the faceless civic authority."211 In the nineteenth century the concept of family in America changed from the extended family that may have included unrelated workers and servants to the primacy of the nuclear family, with the father earning a living and the mother caring for the children and the home. That model held its primacy for most of the twentieth century as an ideal, even as it became less and less the norm.212 Suburban housing tends to reify that norm; advertising presents a picture of suburban development as an ideal, safe, and rewarding way to live and raise a family. (Those are some of the very terms used by proponents to describe cohousing.) One thing that makes what cohousers are doing radical, however, is how the concept of family is treated. Although politicians and the media sometimes push for a return to the “normal” nuclear family — for example, President Bush in 2002 proposed that the government push the idea of marriage on welfare recipients213 — the truth is that mobility, divorce, and smaller families create a need for extended families, or communities, that offer more support than the family of origin can or will provide. A prospective member told the list, “I really miss that [communal meal] since the family has dispersed over the continent and/or begun to die …. that’s one of the things I’m looking to re-

211

Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas (New York: Random House, 1966), 55-56. See 2000 census information, Chapter 1. 213 Ellen Goodman, “Marriage as Poverty Cure,” Boston Globe, March 7, 2002, A13. 212

133

establish in a co-housing community: that sense of belonging.”214 From what I saw in the first year of meetings at Central Austin Cohousing (CAC), there existed a spoken and unspoken desire of members to bond with each other. Many of the earliest members have disappeared, but the core group remains and seems committed to each other and to the goal of building cohousing in Austin, for themselves and to serve as an example. This pattern is common in cohousing. But even if a group worked through the problems that came up during the formation, design, and building process, and bonded as a community, that would not mean life would be trouble free after they moved in. Cohousing conferences regularly feature sessions like “Dealing with Difficult Community Members Before and After Move In,”215 and disgruntled cohousers share horror stories online. But they also show personal maturation and a newly realistic idea of what a community can and cannot provide. One person wrote, “sometimes I realize I had a vision of Nirvana, that none of the problems would be there — but all neighborhoods have problems.” Another cohouser said she had had expectations of what a community should be but concluded, “I realize now, this is what a neighborhood is: acceptance, tolerance, compassion.” Some cohousers do leave, but for those who remain, the idea of community becomes less of an ideal and more of a reality they can live with.

214 215

[email protected], March 28, 2002. East Bay Express August 15, 2001, 7.

134

Process In the nineteenth century, "belief preceded experiment,"216 meaning that, with the rise of scientific thinking, people who planned utopian communities thought that by working out many details ahead of time, they would make their communities successful. In reality, that was a kind of magical thinking itself, as if belief in an idea would make it real. Few tried to practice for community by forming small groups first, or having short trial runs. Today's cohousing movement is a real change in the process of forming communities. The timeconsuming and arduous method of getting a group together and making all the decisions necessary in most cases to build from scratch seems to weed out those who would not be happy in the shared environment of a cohousing development and to create the skills needed for the level of cooperation cohousing demands.

Consensus Cohousing groups use consensus in at least some areas of operation. They feel that democracy, or making decisions by voting, is a harsh and abrupt way to eliminate disagreements; consensus is a process of nonviolent conflict resolution in which "the expression of concerns and conflicting ideas is considered desirable and important."217 To understand how this process works, lest it be confused with complete agreement, a definition of consensus is in order. In A Guide to Formal 216

Fellman, Frame, 3.

135

Consensus: On Conflict and Consensus C. T. Lawrence Butler defines consensus as "a decision-making process whereby decisions are reached when all members present consent to a proposal. This process does not assume everyone must be in complete agreement. When differences remain after discussion, individuals can agree to disagree, that is, to give their consent by standing aside, and allow the proposal to be accepted by the group."218

Making a Decision This is a crucial distinction. When a group goes beyond the initial enthusiasm of participating in every decision every step of the way, and wants to accomplish specific things, learning how to use consensus carefully can facilitate action instead of impede it. Let's say a cohousing group has been debating the color of their buildings for an hour at a time for two months and still can't come to any decision. They decide not to vote but to use consensus. Discussion is at an end by mutual agreement because everyone knows that they must pick a color scheme before the painters finish the interiors and move on to their next job. The proposal to use peach and green is on the table.

Objections At this point in the process, anyone who wants to stand in the way 217

C. T. Lawrence Butler, A Guide to Formal Consensus: On Conflict and Consensus, www.consensus.net/, 13.

136

(meaning to block consensus) of the proposal must only do so on the basis of a principled objection, and they must be able to explain their position not in terms of personal preferences but principles (such as, "The peach paint is made by killing millions of insects that are used in the dye, and as a Buddhist, I cannot go along with buying such a product."). If, however, they just prefer beige, they cannot stand in the way, and their disagreement will in essence be thrown out, much as outliers are thrown out in statistical analyses. If no one stands in the way, silence signifies acceptance, if not agreement; if someone wants to register disagreement, they can "stand aside," that is, not give their silent acquiescence to the proposal. This allows those who disagree to express their disagreement without forcing them to keep fighting to change others' views; and those who disagree on principle — if the group accepts the objection as a principled one — can block consensus. The principle must be one that the group, not just the individual, has agreed on as important to and in keeping with all previous group decisions. If blocking occurs, the proposal would be tabled, and alternatives suggested. It does happen that sometimes when there is a serious roadblock the group will resort to a vote and act on it; such alternatives are written into the group's process, because everyone understands that there may be times when the group cannot agree, but absolutely must make a decision. However, there is a serious commitment to working everything out in many groups. A facilitator warns the list, “the word ‘vote’ does not cross my lips unless 218

Butler, 27.

137

it’s in reference to formal voting fallbacks or some other mechanism that the group has deliberately decided to use to supplement or replace the consensus process.”219

More Than a Process for the Group What I have just described may sound like a completely frustrating scenario in which, in the end, the group gives up on consensus because it just doesn't work. But there are many tools along the way to a proposal that a properly trained group can use to understand each other’s way of thinking much earlier in the game, before an issue becomes contentious. There is listing and stacking those who want to speak; controlling the pacing; checking the process; summarizing or reformulating the proposal; polling; taking a break, and so on. And if a group is committed to using consensus, it develops a mindset that helps create understanding, cooperativeness, reason, trust, mutual respect, and willingness to bend so that most issues are resolved during the process before they get to the proposal. What is unusual and important about using consensus in terms of utopian communities is that never before has there been a movement with over a hundred groups of people in different parts of the country with varying beliefs and goals who are more or less simultaneously learning as individuals how to cooperate with others, and how to bond as a group without giving up any of their individual 219

[email protected], April 1, 2002.

138

political, religious, or ethical beliefs, all while living together. This is not just my interpretation of cohousing as a utopian movement, it is what cohousers Mac and Sandy Thompson of Heartwood Cohousing said: “Consensus is a microcosm of life in cohousing. It’s about really listening to and being sensative [sic] to the concerns of others. It’s about achieving common ground. And ultimately it’s about building long term, healthy relationships.”220 Ann Zabaldo of Takoma Village put it another way: “I, for one, am awed that as a ‘movement’ for lack of another word, cohousing groups adopt consensus … as their process. This says a number of things to me: that cohousing groups are ‘different,’ that we are on the cutting edge of discovery and somehow consensus is the key to it. I don’t know what the discovery is yet but I’m willing to keep engaging the consensus process to find out.”221

Defining Group Values During the Process However, Rob Sandelin of Sharingwood Cohousing in Washington cautioned, “a value you have to hold is a willingness to give up what is completely best for you, in order to do what is best for everyone.”222 Individualism can coexist with such a value system, but standing up for what you believe in when one of the things you believe in is being able to give in is walking a fine line. Rob also stressed that “it is in your interest to define your core group 220 221

[email protected], February 4, 2002. [email protected], April 1, 2002.

139

values early … If your group holds eco-values, state them clearly, so people can decide to join your group. That way, when you get to land clearing, you won’t have big conflicts over how it is done, or at least you will have less severe conflicts.”223 Joani Blank of Doyle Street Cohousing in California agreed: “ A decision to stay with a community is a decision to buy into group norms even though they may conflict to a greater or lesser degree with individual desires or preferences.”224 This is the same advice Kat Kinkade gave in the 1992 Intentional Communities Directory, whether a community was a commune or cohousing.

Key roles in the consensus process According to the guidelines of formal consensus, as described in A Guide to Formal Consensus and as Patricia Allison, a consensus trainer from Earthaven Village in North Carolina, stated, most meetings need an agenda planner, a facilitator, a timekeeper, a public scribe, and a notetaker. Some also have an advocate, a doorkeeper, and often a peacekeeper; sometimes there are more than one of these last two depending on the size of the group. The agenda planner or planning committee gathers and prioritizes agenda items, decides who will present them, discusses how to handle debates, assigns time limits, and puts the agenda in writing to distribute to the group ahead of time so everyone can come to the meeting prepared to act. The facilitator conducts the meeting without bias or 222 223

[email protected], Feb. 27, 1998. [email protected], Feb. 27, 1998.

140

personal involvement by keeping track of who wishes to speak, keeping the discussion on target, being aware of and intervening to clarify confusion or discomfort, and constantly orally reviewing, clarifying, and evaluating not just the discussion at hand but the process itself. The timekeeper lets the facilitator know when the discussion gets close to the time limits suggested on the agenda. The scribe helps the facilitator by writing pertinent points on a sheet of paper or blackboard so all are reminded of what is going on and what has already happened. The notetaker keeps track of time, date, place, attendees, proposals, decisions, concerns, announcements, and information about the next meeting. This record is important for those who cannot attend and to remind everyone what really went on at a given meeting.

Optional Roles The advocate is someone who is particularly sensitive to and aware of nonverbal cues and who has the group's permission to intervene as needed when someone is not being heard, or is upset. The peacekeeper, sometimes called the vibes watcher, may be needed when the group is large or when tension is high. Unlike the advocate, the peacekeeper does not help interpret or soothe any one person in particular, but notices the mood of the group when its volatility might be competitive or destructive. They then directly intervene to try to center the group emotionally and intellectually to help return it to its common purpose. 224

[email protected], Feb. 26, 1998.

141

Evolution of Consensus Many other groups use consensus for decision making. Even companies such as automaker Saturn often use some form of consensus, which the business world learned from Japanese management styles. Peace, nonviolent direct action, and civil disobedience groups, housing cooperatives, and other such movements that came out of or were revived in the 1960s, operate out of a level of shared responsibility for decision-making that is quite out of the mainstream way of doing things. Consensus and nonviolence were first used in the 1940s peace movement after Gandhi gained influence in the U.S.225 The Society of Friends used consensus in meetings in the 1930s, and was active in developing formal consensus in antiwar activity and also later on in the anti-nuclear movement.226 The need for formalizing and training people in the process came about when such groups became increasingly sophisticated and efficient in the 1970s. Formal consensus evolved out of these groups' need for a nonviolent, truly democratic, cooperative process for decision making that would work with even large groups and could not be subverted by one or two people who for their own reasons wanted to destroy the unity of the group. In the 1960s government agents regularly infiltrated even the most innocuous of antiwar groups who in their naive

225

David McReynolds, “Philosophy of Nonviolence,” www.nonviolence.org/, March 19, 2002. Caroline Estes, “Consensus Ingredients,” Intentional Communities Directory: A Guide to Cooperative Living (co-published by Fellowship for Intentional Community, Evansville Indiana and Communities Publications Cooperative, Rutledge, Missouri, 1992), 78-81. 226

142

willingness to give everyone an equal voice allowed themselves to be torn apart from within by provocateurs. When a group practices formal consensus, this decay from within is less likely. In spite of the group-enhancing properties of the consensus process, the road to cohousing is an amazingly long one, amazing mostly in that so many people do stick with it to fruition. This speaks to the power of the idea of community in much the same kind of way that the Fourierists of the nineteenth century were committed to its ideas in spite of the lack of even one completed, successful Fourierist community by the end of the nineteenth century. Cohousing, though, does have many successful examples, as well as many converts willing to work through the often five- to seven-year process of forming a group, finding and buying land, and creating all the documents and making all the decisions to finally build a multi-million dollar project. Cohousers love to laugh at this aspect of the process; as Zev Paiss says: "Cohousing is the longest, most expensive, growth experience you will ever have."227

Meetings There is more to the process than consensus, however. Meetings at CAC, for example, often begin with a game that someone is responsible for thinking of and bringing to the table. After the game, which can take quite a bit more time than is allotted to it if the game is confusing or especially fun, everyone goes

143

around the circle telling their name and something interesting about themselves, a kind of checking-in. At any meeting there may be newcomers who would benefit from hearing about the other members, and check-in lets everyone introduce themselves without singling out the newcomers. The meeting itself is facilitated by one person, and others have official roles as timekeeper, minute taker, and other tasks as needed. At the end of the meeting ten or fifteen minutes total are allotted to everyone taking turns saying what they particularly liked about the meeting and how they felt, a process known as evaluation and check-out. To ready themselves for further work on consensus, Salt Lake City’s Wasatch Commons members read Building United Judgment: A Handbook for Consensus Decision Making. They have also used various trust-building exercises and games to work on issues around tolerating differences, using criticism in a healthy way, and developing policies that everyone can live with. There are many books, groups and individuals who teach groups how to use consensus, and most cohousing groups have formal training sessions in the process. They also have periodic retreats and workshops to reinforce what they have learned and to learn how to apply it to new problems. Working with a consensus-based group is a conscious, ongoing process that is very different from how most families deal with each other.

227

Judy Baxter, [email protected], March 13, 2001.

144

Leadership and process Leadership is critical to most intentional communities. Many religious communities like the Shakers and the Hutterites established a system for choosing new leaders and a chain of command that included several elders. Some communities, both secular and non-secular, have had one strong leader who, if he or she did not make every decision, certainly shaped opinion and policy and often had the final say. Examples include Stephen Gaskin of the Farm in Tennessee, Mel Lyman of Fort Hill in Boston, and John Humphrey Noyes of Oneida. But what of the communities that tried to be more egalitarian? What are some of the strategies they used to make decisions and resolve conflicts? Have these communities universally collapsed, or have they created different and still evolving methods to manage power? Benjamin Zablocki, a sociologist who visited over a hundred communes in the early 1970s, found that a quarter of the communities he studied had serious problems involving leadership and power.228 Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson are co-founders of Sirius, a spiritual community in Massachusetts, and have lived in community for 23 years, including in the well-known Findhorn mystical community in Scotland. They wrote in 1972, “Communities which begin with highly centralized authority like Ananda and Stelle often shift over time towards more decentralization, as members become willing to take on more

228

Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma.

145

personal responsibility.”229 Twin Oaks has never had a central leader; it has a planning board that picks its own replacements at staggered intervals, and responsibility is shared by many, many managers. Cohousing relies on a combination of volunteerism, structured tasks like the rotating community meals, and decision by community meetings, as well as mission statements and bylaws. No one person is ever completely in charge of anything. However, it is possible for a person, or a group of people, to effectively “hold group decision making hostage” by blocking, in a situation where group communication has already broken down. This is one of the big issues that prospective and built groups wrestle with in meetings and on the email list. The next two chapters describe the formative process of a cohousing group in Austin, Texas, and the observations of life in cohousing across the United States from discussions on the cohousing list.

229

Corinne McLaughlin, and Gordon Davidson, Builders of the Dawn, (Shutesbury, Mass.: Sirius, 1986), 12.

146

CHAPTER FIVE: TEXAS COHOUSING The first active cohousing group in Texas began in Austin in the early 1990s. The Violet Crown Cohousing Group was named after Austin’s old nickname and an area in north central Austin that is still known by that name. I found out about it by word of mouth; as do many long-time Austinites, I have connections with a variety of people and causes. I had never heard of cohousing before but was interested in the theory, at least, of creating a neighborhood of kindred souls. I attended its meetings for a few months and was part of its architectural design committee, although the other members knew I had no intention of being part of their eventual community. As I have described in Chapter Four, the planning stage of a cohousing group can be very lengthy, and it goes through a period of easy inclusiveness until the group decides on land purchase and begins the process of buying the land, finalizing details of the design plan, and building. At that point, the group often actively searches for new members ready to commit money for enough units for the project to be economically viable. One reason such planning is lengthy and complicated is that buying the land and financing the buildings involves contractual details that just haven't been often done before. Who puts how much money in, how do they get it out if they want to sell their share, how do they get financing, how do they deal with zoning for what will be somewhat unorthodox construction, and many other such 147

questions have to be dealt with before breaking ground. Violet Crown looked like it was going to be approximately a dozen family units and a few individuals, some with children, who were willing to put up with party or common walls — well-built ones, to be sure — for the tradeoff of savings in construction costs, land, and energy. They wanted to have some kind of physical facility for child care built into the physical plant, so that one member could care for the children or they could bring someone in to care for all the children in one place. (I found the emphasis on children and family needs, although understandable given the membership, a little off-putting; I imagined myself as the crotchety lady who yelled at the children to play somewhere else during my naps.) Everyone wanted to have a large communally run garden but space for small individual gardens as well. Cars would be parked in one area near the front of the building or buildings, so only one road would enter, and the road would end at the parking area. There would be a community building with a large kitchen and dining space — a given in any cohousing project — with perhaps a couple of guest rooms for friends, prospective members, or interested visitors. Everything would be planned around the site and its existing features such as trees and terrain, and designed for solar gain and for clustering utilities as much as possible, with a communal laundry but also a couple of units with individual laundries. As for social features, everyone wanted to have a group meal at least once a week, both so not everyone would have to cook all the time and so they could gather and keep in touch with the other residents. They all wanted to work in the 148

garden, to have small private back yards perhaps with fences but to leave as much of the land in as close to its natural state as possible, to encourage carpooling for work and for shopping, to allow pets but with some limitations, and so on. (As someone with four cats and a large dog, I began to realize some of the drawbacks of this process, at least for me. My pets are non-negotiable.) One member of the group devised an exhaustive questionnaire designed to find out what kind of person everyone was and to find out what was essential, what was desirable, and what would not be permitted. (I have been unable to find out if any results were compiled.) No one brought up religion or any belief system other than that of being environmentally aware. Through it all, people seemed to be trying to maintain the consciousness that they were already building a community, not of identical people but of caring people who wanted to live near other people they could respect and trust for mutual support. While I still liked the theory, the reality of making all the necessary compromises and the investment of so much time was too much for me. By the time I dropped out, VCers were at the stage of deciding what kinds of things everybody wanted in their environment so they could find common ground and, having found it, figure out who was going to be in and who was out. The general meetings were still open to anyone who wanted to come, but there were other less theoretical and more practical meetings for the core group. I lost touch with the group and did not find out until 1999 that it had fallen apart. My own neighborhood, Cherrywood, which is in east central Austin, had a 149

rebirth of community activism about the same time, in the early 1990s, and revived a dormant neighborhood association and newsletter, the Flea. I helped edit and deliver the newsletter for a while, and regularly attended association meetings. Several years ago the neighborhood, especially the indefatigable Gordon Bennett of the University of Texas’s Government Department, created a website and an email group list for active residents (and lurkers, who are people who monitor a list’s messages but rarely, if ever, get involved). I became even more interested in this new tool, the email list, and the kinds of debate and interaction it seemed to spark, and was also elected to the association steering committee in 1999. By then I was actively searching for signs of life in the utopian community world. Besides the remnants of the 1960s and 70s described in Chapter Three, I heard through the alternative grapevine about a proposed cohousing group in San Marcos, just half an hour down the road from where I lived in Austin. Hilltop Cohousing, the physical manifestation of the San Marcos Cohousing Association in San Marcos, which is a Central Texas university town of thirty thousand residents and twenty thousand students, had been in the works since 1997. They currently have a website; a newsletter, Hilltalk; and an email list. When I first visited at an early open house, founders Todd Derkacz and Betsey Robertson had recently bought a property on Ranch Road 12 just across the road from the Southwest Texas State University campus near the edge of San Marcos. The twoacre property comprised a three-bedroom house where Todd and Betsey lived, a separate unit with two very small apartments in it, and a few small shop and 150

storage buildings. The couple has exercised the rather unusual but practical option of living on the property until the group could reach critical mass in membership numbers, at which time they could begin to build. By buying the land themselves, Betsey and Todd overcame one of the biggest obstacles a cohousing group must overcome. As is the case with many groups, building Hilltop would occur in stages, with several units first completed for existing members and more completed as membership increases. This scenario might create some discomfort for those already living there while building is ongoing, but that might be offset by getting the place up and running so its residents would have something concrete to show to prospective members. In the meantime the main house served as home and meeting place for potluck suppers for anyone interested, weekly dinners for the group, and various celebrations designed to create community solidarity while attracting potential new members. Hilltop’s newsletter mailing list has three categories: full members, who have put in down payments; associate members, who contribute a certain amount yearly but have not committed to building; and pen pals, who, like myself, support the concept of cohousing and want to keep in touch with the group and its progress. Pen pals receive Hilltalk without charge and can come to any Hilltop social events. Hilltop, like many other cohousing groups, is “environmentally minded; [they] plan to include as many green building techniques as [the] budget will

151

allow.”230 Todd and Betsey’s commitment to cohousing in general, not just their group, is evidenced by their attendance at many cohousing-related events, such as informational meetings for any Austin groups. They also joined 200 others at a four-day National Cohousing Conference — a yearly event since 1997 — held near Boston in 1999. Betsey commented, “Best of all was being on-site in a working community, noticing how the architecture subtly contributed to the social structure.”231 Hilltop held a Christmas party and open house in 1999 called Hilltop Holiday Hoopla, planned to coincide with San Marcos’s own “Sights and Sounds of Christmas” December 2-4. Hilltoppers are careful to be part of and not isolate themselves from the larger community by such strategies as letting cohousers know what is going on in San Marcos, and by letting San Marcos know what is going on at Hilltop. Unlike many earlier utopian communities, cohousing wants to be accepted by the larger community and to encourage publicity about their projects. In December 1999, I posted a message to the Cherrywood Neighborhood Association (CNA) list asking if anyone would be interested in going with me to Hilltop’s Christmas open house. Blake Stephenson, then a University of Texas business school graduate student, responded, and we drove to San Marcos together. Besides Hilltop’s own members, a dozen or more prospective cohousers were also there, some of whom were from Austin. Blake and several of the Austin

230 231

Hilltalk, November 1999, 4. Hilltalk, November 1999, 5.

152

folks began talking to each other about starting an Austin group, and the conversation apparently continued after the party was over. In January of 2000 Blake hosted a potluck in Austin to discuss a new group, the focus of which was to become part of the upcoming planning for the old Mueller Airport site. (After fifteen years of struggling to shut down the airport because of noise and safety concerns, Austin opened a new airport at the decommissioned Bergstrom Air Force Base. A tug of war between the city and the state over the desirable Mueller property ensued.) Although many of the original attendees at the potluck have dropped out, several form the core group and several more have been attending meetings for a year and a half. This was the genesis of Central Austin Cohousing, which was centered in my neighborhood at the home of Becky and Leif Weaver and their housemate Mike Aaron. In spite of this quick beginning for the group, which might indicate strong interest in and awareness of cohousing, it is still not a household word in Texas. Getting a group together and keeping it going is an uphill struggle, even ten years after Violet Crown tried. Of the 150 or more cohousing groups extant or underway in the United States, Texas has only two: one in Austin, and Hilltop in San Marcos. There was a group in Garland that was in the planning and meeting stage and had even bought land, but they collapsed because they could not get enough members to build. The Austin group, Central Austin Cohousing (CAC), has been meeting since January 2000, and because they allowed me to attend and to some degree participate in meetings for over a year, I describe this group and its process in 153

some detail. (Since about November 2001, interest in Austin has spawned two new groups both interested in rural cohousing, and they formed an umbrella group for all of the Austin groups called Cactus, which has its own website and email list. Umbrella groups have sprung up around the country to facilitate sharing information and prospective members.) Of these two, however, probably the closest to becoming a reality is Hilltop, because they have land. What they don’t have is quite enough members to afford to begin building. The economies of scale are such that it is rarely feasible to build fewer than a dozen or so units. One great advantage all current intentional communities have over any in the past is having access to the internet community. Communes, cohousers, and intentional communities in general are aware of and use the internet today to get and exchange information, find new members, keep abreast of trends and changes, publicize themselves, and chat with each other. It is no longer quite true, as Timothy Miller wrote as recently as 1998, that “American Intentional Communities … rarely communicate much among themselves and often are even unaware of one another's existence.”232 While each community has a slightly different take on how to use this tool, almost everyone uses it. Central Austin Cohousing has had an email group since spring 2000, only a few months after they began meeting. Their website has been up since spring 2001 and they have an active e-group. Becky Weaver, who runs the website, was subscribing to the

232

Timothy Miller, review of Fire, Salt, and Peace: Intentional Christian Communities Alive in North America by David Janzen, Utopian Studies. Spring 1998, 285 (1).

154

general cohousing listserve, [email protected], by December 2000. That list serves the global cohousing community; there are frequent posts from Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. In addition to the internet resources, the cohousing list has spawned a yearly conference, supported by Cohousing Resources and The CoHousing Company, which are for-profit groups that cohousers can hire to help at various stages of their development. People on the cohousing list say consultants are expensive but worth it in savings of time, aggravation, and money.

Central Austin Cohousing: A Year in the Life I first became involved in the new Austin cohousing group when a friend of mine in the neighborhood, Mike Aaron, emailed me to let me know that they had been meeting for a month or so and that I was welcome to join them. My connection with Mike was as a neighbor: I had met him on the greenbelt while he was mourning his favorite cat, and a few months later I found a stray cat and played matchmaker between them. My research on other intentional communities around Central Texas wasn’t turning up anything noteworthy, and cohousing seemed like a promising lead. My perspective had changed since Violet Crown from wary possible participant to more open and interested, and less critical, observer by the time I joined the new group. Knowing one of the founders made it easier for me to feel comfortable with the group and, I think, for them to feel more comfortable with me. 155

Cohousing meetings can be lengthy and painstaking. While in the beginning it seemed as if CAC was reinventing the wheel, I began to realize that the process of hashing differences out and working out what the particular individuals in this group wanted to do was the very thing that created group solidarity. If there had been an existing blueprint for every detail, there would have been fewer lengthy meetings at which people learned to gently —sometimes not so gently —feel each other out, find each others’ strengths and weaknesses, and work with each other. This process is one of the differences between a cohousing group and a gated community such as Sun City in Georgetown, Texas, or a developerbuilt community such as Celebration, Florida. In the early months, when the group was struggling with such basic issues as creating bylaws, we discussed reading the two basic cohousing books — Cohousing and The Cohousing Handbook — for advice, and thought about getting in touch with operating cohousing groups for advice and perhaps for obtaining templates for bylaws, mission statements, and financial worksheets. Several of us joined the national cohousing list. To my knowledge no group on the list has turned down anyone’s request for such information, and groups regularly post addresses of archives so that other fledgling groups can look at what has worked for existing groups. As Barbara Lynch of Pleasant Hill Cohousing said, “It was totally amazing how many folks, upon hearing that we had just formed as a group, came up to us and volunteered little nuggets of wisdom that they’d gleaned earlier

156

in their group’s history.”233 This process is very different than founding communes in the 1960s; there is now a high level of cooperation and communication. One of the first meetings of the Central Austin Cohousing group that I attended was a design charette, which is a process of brainstorming, sharing, prioritizing, and visualizing desired aspects of the development. The charette was held one afternoon at Leif and Becky’s house in East Austin a few blocks from my house. It helped that this meeting was a charette, because architecture has been one of my lifelong interests, and I felt that I could contribute something to the design effort as well as learn about cohousing and the group. My second husband was an architect, and I had learned a little about the process of design and how architects worked. There were ten adults and one child at the meeting: Chris, who was the moderator and helped with the timing; Leif, an architect, who presented and facilitated; Becky, Leif’s wife; my friend Mike, who is also Leif and Becky’s housemate; Shanda; Anna; Jeff; Thea, with her husband Marc, who live at Whitehall Co-op, and their one-year-old daughter Cypress; and I. Mike introduced me to the rest and said that I was interested in researching the group and that I would like to be a fly on the wall; however, it didn’t work out quite that way. Everyone was friendly and welcoming; someone urged me into a comfortable chair. Leif and Becky began by handing out a flyer on Leif’s design interests and 233

[email protected], May 17, 2001.

157

experience so everyone would know that he was not just interested in cohousing as a participant and that he could also help with if not actually design the development. I resolved to offer to proofread everything for them, because Leif, although brilliant and creative, is not a wordsmith. They laughed when I offered, and Leif said he was not left-brained. Sometimes I am too blunt, or too enthusiastic, so I tried to be careful about whatever I said. I was also in the odd position of “studying” the group, so I thought I should say little. But several people gave me positive feedback whenever I spoke, and I found it difficult to stay uninvolved. Already set up on the living room wall, a bulletin board displayed samples of what we would be working with — green cards represented space; white, activity; blue, character; and yellow, elements. We each got a stack of some red dots. Leif explained that architectural elements meant things like kitchen islands and skylights. He began with a statement about what a common house represented and should contain, and told us what we would be doing. Four different people were to write ideas thrown out by the group on the four colored cards to keep track of the four categories of design components. In brainstorming, everyone throws out ideas without any explanation or evaluation, regardless of how off the wall the ideas are, as a way to stimulate creativity without stifling it by judging, which comes later. We weren’t strictly brainstorming because there was a little explanation and discussion as ideas came up, but we didn’t evaluate the 158

ideas. First we filled the white activity cards — what did we want to be able to do in the common house? Ideas included eating, children playing, talking, reading, using computers, making music, putting on plays, dancing, having meetings, meditating, doing yoga, presenting lectures, creating art, potting, painting, exercising, doing laundry, and so on. Leif put the cards on the bulletin board for better visualization. By this point everyone including myself seemed to have forgotten that I was to be a fly on the wall; when I made a motion as if to refuse the cards and red dots, Leif, Mike, and Becky urged me to join in. I was torn between keeping my distance and wanting to really contribute and experience the process, and decided that for now I would participate, and that as long as I was not deceiving anyone, I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to become closer to the group. Next we filled the green space cards. Spaces people suggested included a library, guest rooms, bedrooms, yoga and meditation rooms, offices, kitchen, a stage, a studio, a metal and wood shop, a greenhouse, a terrace, a barbecue area, a front porch, a gallery, a theatre, a children’s area, and lecture, poetry reading, computer, messy art, clean art, mud, dance, and game rooms. My suggestions were an outdoor fishpond or fountain made of recycled materials, and a greenhouse. Next we tried matching the activities with the space cards, and as we did so, we saw that many of the activities could be combined in one space. Some activities could not be done in the same room, such as working on computers and throwing 159

pots. This exercise helped people think about what they really needed in a common house and how much space it would take to get all of their wants satisfied. Everyone could see that not every activity could fit in the common house, considering the limited money and acreage the group would have, and so the cards representing activities that might better be in a separate building or area were set aside. These included activities that were less group oriented, possibly noisier, and slightly less must-haves such as an exercise room, a metal or wood shop, and an oversized garage. Chris asked what we were doing and noted that we seemed to be establishing a scale, a hierarchy of wants, and that we should move those lesser activities to a separate place on the board. The initial list of rooms and spaces included the following: library; guest; yoga; meditation; offices; bedroom; lecture; poetry reading; computer; dining; messy or wet art; clean or dry art; mud; baths; kitchen; stage; dance or activity; metal shop; wood shop; car shop; greenhouse; barbecue; terrace; music; front porch; screened music; gallery; game; theatre; children’s play; and teen area. We also had a tangential discussion of guest rooms and extra bedrooms in which Thea said the group might have rental rooms which when not rented out could be used as guest rooms. There was much discussion about the uses and feel of rooms. For instance, the yoga and meditation room’s feel — people wanted it to be peaceful, quiet, and serene — was more important than that of a lecture room, so a yoga room designed with the right atmosphere could also be used as a lecture 160

room. But a lecture room designed only as a lecture room might not create the right atmosphere for a yoga room. By now we had a large piece of paper on the board with white and green cards all over it. Leif used different colored markers to draw lines between most of the cards. The green lines were for spaces that should be adjacent to each other, like the kitchen and dining room; blue was for open spaces that could run into each other, like an entry hall and a common room; red is for those that could or should be visually connected, like the children’s playroom and the common room, so that adults could keep an eye on children; and black was for those that could or should be isolated, like the music room and exercise room. We discussed the reasons for each of these lines as we told Leif what to draw, and he made suggestions. We also discussed how having a two-story instead of one-story design would affect these considerations; for example, would we want a noisy teen room stacked over the common room? Could the rental rooms be upstairs? We also got a limited number of green, blue, and red dots, and had ten minutes to go up to the board and vote for what we considered most important (green), fairly important (blue), and not important (red). We all milled around with a little discussion among us as we put dots up — and a few times rushed back to a card to change or move a dot. There was excitement, crowding, some seriousness, and quite a bit of laughing. Mike is a particularly warm and outgoing person, and with only slight encouragement will change the atmosphere from quiet and serious to silly and playful, in this case by pretending to push someone out of the way and 161

jostling others so he could put his card in a particular place. Chris retaliated by moving Mike’s card. This was about as rowdy as the group ever got. Leif tactfully led us into a discussion of the more exotic spaces a few people wanted. For example, he said, “How often do you think we would use a stage?” Mike said,” All the time!” and several people laughed. So Leif said, “How about something in the dining room that we could fold up when we aren’t using it? Would that work?” He made constant eye contact with everyone and appeared to be very observant; for instance, when someone frowned or looked confused he asked if he could clarify anything. Thea wanted a greenhouse, but was not sure how big it should be or what its use would be; Becky wanted a rather big one for starting seeds, rotating plants, and wintering over hot weather plants. As more people chimed in with opinions and ideas, it seemed we were leaning towards a separate greenhouse, not a lean-to that was part of the common house. We also discussed how to architecturally connect the building to the outside, not just with normal size windows but with ways to get maximum light. By now we had discarded a few cards that had red dots and no green ones, and had combined others, and we had a better idea of what could and must be in the common house and what might go elsewhere on the site. We were beginning a weeding out process, and were trying to think creatively and thoughtfully about what is possible. No one person seemed wedded to any particular idea that everyone else disliked, and in a very short time the group had become more practical about what they wanted. Remarks like “We could do that in our own 162

units” and “It’s more important to have a really good kitchen than a poetry room” demonstrated a willingness to compromise and to think of the best interests of the group. I was relieved, because I had a hard time keeping a straight face when “poetry room” came up. After a break, Leif told us some things few of us knew about the City of Austin Traditional Neighborhood Development Program guidelines and the restrictions for developing a common house at Mueller.234 The building must have an “inviting” street facáde that would include such elements as porches that relate the building to the larger community, and the front door must face the street. We now had a blank paper on the bulletin board that represented the possible two and 1/2-acre site at Mueller, and Leif marked it off so we could get an idea of scale. An acre is about 200 by 200 feet, so 300 by 400 ft must hold the thirty units the group wants to build, a 3- to 5,000 sq. ft common building (as our common house stood, it was about 3,000 square feet), various yard areas, and all the parking that the city requires for a development of this size, regardless of how few cars we might actually own. A one-bedroom unit must have 1 1/2 spaces, a two bedroom gets two, and a three-bedroom unit gets 2 1/2 spaces. Reality was beginning to sink in, and dreams of dance studios and garages for working on cars were fading fast. There was much discussion about where to put the common house, how to landscape around it, where parking should be, and so on. We picked either a small

163

blue or a larger green card representing units of 800 and 1,200 square feet respectively to pin to the bulletin board, and milled around the board deciding where to place our units. I decided not to take one, because that seemed like too solid a step into the design process, but their insistence was too much to resist. (My notes say that they “made” me take one.) There was much laughing as people rearranged their choices around who they wanted to be near — or far away from. My card started out on the edge but ended up surrounded by others anyway. I had mixed feelings about that: part of me just wanted to be alone, and the other part was pleased that people wanted to be near me. I kept an ear out for that part of me that wanted to be “popular” because I did not trust its motives and resistance to seduction. There was also a separate sheet on the bulletin board listing ideas for such site elements as a vegetable garden; a swing and arbor; connecting paths; trees; a volleyball court; a flower garden; and a fenced pet area. Everyone discussed how many units there should be; Thea said 6-80, optimally 12-20; Leif said 16-35 seems to work best in America. Leif told us that today’s construction techniques allow for excellent sound separation, so common (shared) walls are not the potential noise problem they once were. Two-story units that are self-stacking, meaning that one unit is two-story so no one else is over the unit, allow more space in a small footprint. Shanda took pictures of the various stages of the charette. By the time we left, we had a list of activities and spaces that were musts, a better idea of how to combine them, and a rough site plan with 234

See City of Austin website, www.ci.austin.tx.us/.

164

all the necessary elements, but with much less open area that most of the group originally envisioned. It was exhilarating and sobering all at once, even for someone who did not plan to live there.

Public Meetings Every few months the group holds an information session, lately at a library, and twice a year has a “membership extravaganza” potluck that is an introduction to cohousing for anyone interested. People of all ages attended an extravaganza on June 25, 2000, and Kimberly Reeves, a News 8 reporter whom we had contacted, briefly filmed it and interviewed a member. However, it must have been a heavy news day, because the footage did not air. This open house, the second meeting I attended, was held at Whitehall Co-op at 2500 Nueces St. from 4-6 p.m. The meeting was advertised by flyers at the popular Wheatsville food coop, at a contra dance venue, at other mildly countercultural businesses and meeting spots, on the online Austin Progressive Calendar, and by word of mouth. Early in the meeting when a signup sheet was going around I counted 27 people in attendance; the number grew to about 45 before the meeting ended around 6:30. Ages ranged from early 20s to late 50s, but a couple of women were in their 60s. There were several families with children. Several people talked in turn about how the group began, what cohousing is, and so on. Becky began the “official” presentation by asking if anyone knew what cohousing was, and everyone did, so she talked about the possibility of this 165

group being part of the planning for the Mueller site. She explained what had gone on at the charette and explained some of the pieces of paper from the charette that were taped to the walls. Leif spoke about the planning and architectural side of the project, how the group wanted to be in the city, not in the country, and wanted to work for “environmentally responsible” density. Many cohousing groups own large tracts of land — more than ten acres — and although all cohousing projects cluster the living units around or near a common house, those with more land can afford as individual groups to have a good deal of land left undeveloped. From what Leif said, I inferred that land as buffer and privacy insurance was not wanted in this group, and that they felt the way to build in a city was fairly densely. Increased density is one of the principles of “smart growth.” Becky then spoke about costs and time. She tried to give rough estimates of what units would cost, pointing out that though per-square foot prices were generally a little higher than for single-family homes, cohousing units were usually a little smaller, so the cost ended up being comparable, and residents shared ownership of the common house. A man in the audience asked when in the process a financial commitment would be required, and she thought it might be as early as October. Leif wondered how many units a group could commit to without all the money from the participants. No one who was speaking tried to pretend they had all the answers, and all were open to comments and questions. Working with a map of Mueller on the wall, Jeff talked for a short while about the site — the redevelopment planning procedure, how long it might take, 166

and what the redevelopment commission was already proposing. Todd and Betsey from Hilltop Cohousing were here to talk about their own group and to help this group with audience questions. There was no sense of competition; they were not trying to lure prospects away to their group, but to promote the idea of cohousing in general. This kind of boosterism was reminiscent of earlier utopianism — the Bellamy Nationalist groups of the late 1800s, the Fourierists of the 1830s and beyond, and Robert Owen and his speaking tours about his experiment at New Lanark and his plans for New Harmony. For many reasons, not the least of them economics, people usually want to share what they think is a good idea, gain cohorts, and no doubt be reassured that what they are doing is feasible and worthwhile. Todd asked what the politics of the design process were at Mueller — what was the city saying? Were they pushing for low-income housing; were they interested in “incubators”? (Incubators are companies that assist new ideas with information, networking, and obtaining financial support.) Jeff answered that 2025% of the housing area was set aside for “affordable” housing, which he pointed out was not the same as low-income housing. Leif said he and one or two others had met with councilwoman Beverly Griffith and were told to submit a plan to the zoning board, but they could also talk directly to the master planning authority. Other people also had questions about the city’s planning process. Apparently the master developer was to answer directly to the city council, which would set general guidelines in line with smart growth principles. But the master developer 167

had not been chosen yet. Chris pointed out that the city had tried to involve neighborhoods near Mueller in the master planning process by holding and inviting them to special information sessions and discussion groups. Jim Walker, the Cherrywood Neighborhood Association president at that time, was also chair of the Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition, so our quarterly newsletter the Flea had for some time been loaded with information about what was going on at Mueller. There was still some doubt that the airport would close entirely, because a politician had introduced a bill to keep it open for small planes. After all of this fairly in-depth information, Becky announced that she should have started with introductions all around. I liked the fact that the meetings were not run by perfectionists who had everything under control. Such informality permitted some spontaneity, and I felt that we could all be on the same plane of expertise, or the lack thereof. We went around the room, old people and new telling their names, their interest in cohousing, and anything about themselves they felt like sharing. Blake informally described meeting Shanda and Chris in San Marcos at Hilltop Cohousing in December and how they began to get together in February to discuss starting a group centered around the newly-closed Mueller Airport site. The opportunity to be part of a unified smart growth development on a large tract of land very close to downtown and to public transportation seemed like a unique and golden opportunity made for cohousing. The rest of us spoke briefly. Participants included Todd and Betsey from Hilltop; consensus and permaculture trainer Patricia Allison, who came to this 168

meeting from Earthaven, an ecovillage in North Carolina; Jenny, who lives in one of the Austin College House Co-ops, German House; Scott, who lived for a while in a big communal house in Germany; Debbie, an architect; Barbara, an older eight-year Whitehall resident, who had been a member of the earlier Violet Crown Cohousing group; Andrew, who had a Casa de Luz connection; John, who went to the recent Oregon Intentional Communities Convention; Vance, who worked with a commune in San Francisco, although he didn’t live there; Shelley, the general manager of the Inter-city Co-op Council; several other Whitehall residents; and Jeff, who had worked on creating low-income housing in Burlington, Vermont. Many people clearly had a long-time interest in group living, and some had very specific interests and wants that this group might not be able to satisfy. Leif addressed this point after the introductions by stressing that this group wanted to build, not dream. By being inclusive and not specializing in any one area such as permaculture or affordability, they sought to avoid narrowing their focus to the point where it would be hard to find serious members. I found myself thinking as I listened to all these people that if the core group could just be convincing enough, the rest would all join, and there would be enough people, money, and momentum to get started. Much later, when I rethought the particular things people were looking for, I realized Leif and I were both right. Too narrow a focus and there would be too few people, or it would take a long time to find the right people. However, a really good sales job might just convince people to keep working with the group until they felt the people were more important than the permaculture. 169

Someone asked why the other Austin groups had failed, and Leif said it was probably mostly zoning problems, and the high cost of inner-city land. I wondered to myself why this group would be any different because Austin’s economy and the resulting price of land was higher than it had ever been, after a slow recovery from the late-1980s recession. Thea pointed out that ten years ago Violet Crown had fewer successful United States models to learn from. There were a lot of competent people at the meeting, as evidenced by the kinds of practical questions they asked: how do we set up a zoning overlay that the city will accept, how is the business organization set up so far, how can they join the listserve, is there a liaison person between the group and the city’s Planning and Zoning Board? But there was also a good deal of serious worry because many of the questions concerned money, commitments, and rules and bylaws. Todd spoke to these concerns by talking about the power of the relationships among the participants and how the process is not just in the written contracts. He talked about Chris and Kelly ScottHansen of Cohousing Resources and the relationships they established that made the process work better. He said people must begin to think in terms of we, not you, and to do what they could for the group. This is classic utopian thinking. To illustrate his point, he mentioned the Whitehall relationships among those present and how those people dealt with each other in this group. Not only did potential members really have to want to be in cohousing, they had to work for it on faith; nothing would be handed to anyone or would come without personal commitment and participation. I felt vaguely guilty, 170

but I was also really enjoying not being part of the action, and not feeling that I had something to live up to. Normally I would have been proactive and vocal, jumping in if I felt clarification was needed. Now my job was to observe, not to become a cohouser. Incidentally, cohousing groups repeatedly report that the people they start out with are not the people they end up with. As of March 2002, in spite of their early involvement, co-founders Blake, Shanda, and Chris were nowhere to be found among the active membership of any of the Cactus groups. I am not sure what this says about the process and the people but suspect that youthful idealism and enthusiasm often do not survive a process that involves long years of meetings, many compromises, and the shift from individual personalities to the interests of the group that occurs as the group matures.

A Typical Meeting The next meeting was on July 2 from 6-8 p.m. The pattern so far had been to have a potluck and informal conversation before the meeting. Later, as other couples with children joined, times had to be readjusted. Sometimes the potluck was earlier, sometimes later, so as many people as possible could make it to the business part of the meeting. After the potluck we played two icebreaking games. One by one we told our names and one unusual thing about ourselves. Nineteen people showed up, and we set up three or four committees. Somehow I found myself on one, to research zoning overlays in other cities to find a model to work 171

from. Leif seemed to be looking at me when he asked for volunteers, and apparently freedom from guilt does not last long, because I volunteered. These people barely knew me but they were so welcoming, intelligent, funny, and yet idealistically earnest, all at once, that I felt somewhat seduced by them, and wanted to help them. I would probably have continued coming to these meetings even if I were no longer researching cohousing because the sense of fellowship was all but palpable. It was an interesting sensation to a confirmed nonjoiner. Yet even after a year I would not really call them my friends, and I never socialized with them apart from meetings. I could envision them as good neighbors all, and people I could probably be my own odd self with more than most, but that was all. That is probably a healthy mindset for being in community, because no one group or person can fulfill all of anyone’s needs. A topic that emerges often on the [email protected] list is the question of too-needy members. People join groups like this for many reasons, and one of them is to make new friends. The problem in cohousing is when a member has no friends but their fellow residents. Although much of the talk in a group is quite intimate and friendships do develop, most people in cohousing have their own well-developed lives outside of cohousing. They want the fellowship of community to add to those lives, not to absorb them. This ongoing problem is one that 1960s communes also struggled with. Anarchist, spiritual, and therapeutic communities tended to be more open to “problem” members, but even therapeutic communities like Synanon had members so in need of help that the community had 172

to admit defeat. More than that, such communes had to find ways to expel such members before they destroyed the group, or drove the more stable members away. At that meeting, one of the discussions was on hiring an architect in August or possibly October. Some felt that was too early because it would require some serious money and no one had put much of anything in the kitty, which was not surprising because the bylaws and conditions for membership were not on paper yet. Leif said that because the lots at Mueller were all flat and similar, which ones we got would not matter, and we would have to have plans well underway to be accepted as part of the redevelopment project. That was why creating a timeline was so important. After the meeting most of us stayed and talked for another fifteen or twenty minutes. People were openly curious about what I was researching and why, and I was curious about what they were like. The first months’ meetings were informal in many ways. One person would more or less, sometimes a little grudgingly, volunteer to facilitate. Few people really knew how to do this, so the job fell to the same two or three people. At the July 16 meeting the facilitator started by asking us to tell our names and one good thing that happened recently. The warm-up game was a variation on monkey in the middle: while we were standing in a circle, one person on the inside would ask people to move to another place in the circle if they … fill in the blank, such as “own more than five t-shirts.” The object was to not be the last person in the middle. One person said, “move if you have ever lived with at least five people” 173

and there were only one or two people, myself included, who did not move. So seventeen of those in attendance already had strong histories of group living. I also found this to be true across the cohousing list. Is involvement as simple as that people inclined toward group living try it and just keep doing it? Or do people get into living in groups for many different reasons, and only those who are willing to compromise, be open, do their share of work, and able to communicate well, actually continue? If the latter is true, and many cohousers have this kind of experience, then cohousing has an advantage over the communes of the 1960s and probably most of the earlier waves of intentional communities. Their residents come from a pool of already converted and experienced communalists, not escapists and unrealistic idealists. The contributors to Co-ops, Communes and Collectives, edited by John Case and Rosemary Taylor, concurred: the value of “alternative organizations” is the “experience and the training they gave their members. …[They] got their first experience of genuine collective work.”235 Many cohousers report long histories of involvement in group living or such alternative organizations. And this pattern has happened before; some detailed histories of past communities show that many members came from another community, or moved on to other such ventures, or started their own. Josiah Warren was at New Harmony, and later founded two anarchist communities. And communalists in the 1960s often moved from community to community until they found or created the right fit.

174

Many of the meetings were about ordinary and mundane problems, but the kinds of concerns that arose and the way in which they were handled were relevant to what cohousing is about. For instance, at this meeting John, who was a new attendee, talked about the group and his emotions and finally told us that he was gay, and was concerned about being accepted. Jeff told John that he himself was a conservative, he loved cars, and was a capitalist — although he was opposed to the death penalty — and if the group accepted HIM and his mostly conservative views, he was sure John was welcome. (However, John either was not reassured or was just in a coming-out mood that night, because he never returned.) I found that I was always surprised by something at each meeting —either the intensity, or the apparent emotion, or the sympathy or sensitivity; and I don’t entirely know what to make of my reactions. When I felt myself retreating emotionally from whatever was going on, more often than not it seemed as if someone noticed even before I did and found some way to reach out to me and include me. Once someone said, “We haven’t heard from Gale for a while.” Another time the facilitator brought up something I had said earlier in a positive way, to call attention to my contribution. I mention these feelings as an example of how a prospective cohouser might react to the people and the process. I tried to pay particular attention to process at the July and August meetings, because I had little experience with any kind of meetings except at work. At the last meeting we had picked a facilitator for this meeting, which became a 235

John Case and Rosemary Taylor, Co-ops, 9.

175

pattern. Again we went around the circle with names and brief introductions or comments, and a short warm-up game. Committee reports were next. Mike was on the membership committee, and suggested that we might want to assign “buddies” for new members. Someone was putting together a proposal for several levels of membership, and there was a discussion on whether new members with no financial commitment should have the same level of input. Some suggested two levels, one being able to vote but both being able to block consensus. They discussed requesting $100 for basic membership. (This did not happen during my tenure; money, clearly, was a tricky subject.) Nothing was decided. Becky was a timeline committee of one charged with keeping track of developments at the Mueller site and coordinating the group’s activities with the redevelopment. She found that the consultants who might be able to help charged $1,200 a day, and suggested that we wait until we really needed this. Almost everyone seemed to grow anxious and a little withdrawn when we brought up money; bodies shifted, furniture creaked, clothes rustled, and glancing around at others increased. Mike told a little story to encourage the group to use consultants. But he said the consultants also had a checklist of things that we had to do before they could help us. This whole discussion provoked much merriment, which started again when Mike, whose hand was raised, quickly dropped it with a little embarrassed grin when Becky asked for volunteers. Jeff, who was one of two on the bylaws committee, announced a meeting the next day, and said we didn’t need an attorney yet. We kept wandering off into 176

discussing Mueller; he suggested some of us should attend the upcoming city council meeting at which the council would review the master plan for Mueller. ROMA Design Group of San Francisco would present its plan then. Mike suggested a proposal requesting there be “alternative” housing included in the plan, and that we should run it by Jim Walker. Leif tried to steer us back to committee reports, because all of the Mueller business was new, and not on the agenda. Mike was bubbling over with ideas and energy, and no doubt because Leif and Becky were his roommates, he felt comfortable letting them fly. Within a few months the group was posting a detailed agenda to the email list a few days before each meeting, but at this stage, no one was dictatorial enough to insist on rules for a process that we had not yet discussed. There seemed to be little impatience with the loose structure. There was no wiggling or abrupt departures or tirades, but again, between meetings there was much coming and going of people who looked and sounded as if they would become members, but did not. There was no way to do exit polls to find out what had really turned them off. In spite of the ritual of “check-out” (which they call “check-in”) at the end of the meetings, I never heard anyone explicitly say that they were not coming back, or why they were leaving. Leif’s zoning committee reported that some other cohousing groups had gotten variances or slack interpretation of existing zoning laws, but that neither would work in Austin. We might be considered a group home or use a condo legal structure, but would have to create a specific plan before we could get any kind of green light from the city. Mike said he had met with Beverly Griffith, who referred 177

him to Jean Mather, a member of the city planning committee. Jean asked Mike if we were a commune, and said she just loved communes. This did not sound officially promising. Chris Hanson and Chuck Durrett were going to call Leif back about designing a specific zoning overlay for Austin; it appeared that all existing groups have built on a case-by-case basis. Leif emailed fifty groups with varying results, but in general no one else had needed an overlay. In spite of the two books on cohousing and the more than fifty projects built so far, there was no clear-cut way to accomplish the group’s goals. This struck me as intensely discouraging and frustrating, and I spent much of the rest of the meeting looking furtively at people to see if they were having a similar reaction. I had not gotten used to the idea that, at check-in at the end of the meeting, I could bring my doubts up without fear of being a wet blanket. Several issues came up during these reports, so we then had new items to deal with. Someone proposed we write to the Council to ask them to give the City Manager a proposal to include alternative housing at Mueller. But Shelley wanted the proposal to include the affordability issue. Jeff said why didn’t we ask directly about cohousing, not the more general “alternative” housing. Mary chimed in that the city manager was not very interested in affordability, although a potential master planner had already proposed that 25% of the housing be “affordable,” and Jim Walker, head of the Mueller Neighborhood Coalition, had proposed 50%. Some suggestions seemed too broad, and some not inclusive enough, for everyone. I could see that Shelley’s big issue was affordability, and that if we didn’t support 178

her in it, we would lose her. (We did, a few meetings later; she simply stopped coming.) It also seemed to me that Jeff was very direct and practical, and the group was lucky to have him. He did a lot of what seemed to me like boring work. A few months later the group lost him, too, because although he knew he was appreciated, his primary interest was housing, not community, and he may have realized the road to suitable housing could be a lot shorter. There was a good deal more talk about Mueller, affordability, and publicity. We also discussed the proliferation of committees, cohousing in general, and the “flavor” of this particular group. Shelly kept bringing up her issue, and said that we were in an identity-defining stage, and that because cohousing was seen as white and middle-class, we could help change that. She had two goals, cohousing and affordability; everyone else was sympathetic to the idea of affordability, but more interested in just getting cohousing going. By the end of the meeting, nothing had been decided, but several people had aired their opinions and concerns, and we all had a vague idea that working with the city around Mueller was probably going to be as difficult as getting cohousing built. The core group was committed to Mueller, but I was surprised at how little they knew about what was going on at Mueller or how long development there might take. Prospects for building at Mueller seemed starry-eyed. If the group was gently trying to focus on cohousing without bringing affordability into it, then why also focus so much on Mueller with so little to go on? I wondered why they didn’t start looking at land near Mueller, before development got underway and drove 179

prices up. But the issue here, and for some time to come, was that the group was not in agreement about much, indeed was hardly a group. Mueller seemed to be a spur, an additional impetus, to get the ball rolling. The ball, however, was group cohesion and willingness to work together, not building. The new member committee of one, David, reported he had bought the name www.austincohousing.org for $30, and was revising the website. Now we had a website and an email list, but there was a problem — one member wasn’t comfortable with email, or even computers, although she used one at work. We spent a half hour or so at one meeting listening to her concerns that we were making assumptions about others’ level of technical knowledge. There seemed to be a digital divide in the group, although her concern was as much about “other” people as herself. One other person admitted he wasn’t comfortable with email either. People offered to teach the technophobes what they needed, but that didn’t help. She wanted to be informed about meetings by phone, not just email. She even felt put down by people using technical terms such as HTML during meetings. Again, the discussion was less about technology than it was about assumptions and feelings. This person was very uncomfortable with anything agreed on too easily, and said clearly that it was more important for everyone to know exactly what everyone else felt and meant than it was to get anything done. Some people expressed a little impatience; others manifested it but did not express it: facial expressions, body language, and various noises spelled “Phooey” to me. As an observer, I was quite willing to adjust to a slow pace and a different goal 180

because I was not invested in building, only in seeing where the road went. If I had really wanted to be in cohousing, I would have been tearing my hair out at the pace. My neighborhood association steering committee had this same discussion about a year earlier, but the tone of the two discussions could not have been more different. At the NA meeting, someone mentioned that not everyone had email for access to meeting information, to which someone else countered that all notices of meetings were also in the quarterly Flea. One person suggested a mass postcard mailing, but when we figured out how much that would cost compared to the possible benefit, we decided against it. The whole debate took about ten minutes, and no one tried too hard to be sensitive. If someone made a disparaging remark, someone else more or less hooted at the comment; chuckles and mutters went around the table, and that was that. It was practical, casual, businesslike, and efficient. Sometimes tension rose, but one or two cooler heads would defuse the tension, and in the long run, cordiality reigned. I suppose a shy person might have felt the process was abrupt or rough, but a shy person probably would not have been on the steering committee. And that was a point the cohousing technophobe made: the group’s process must be accessible to the weakest and least able to fend off slights, however unintended. In the NA only the strong survived; in at least this cohousing group, the meek ruled. Or at least were encouraged to co-rule. At a later meeting, this issue came up again. A couple of people thought that we should have longer meetings, because not much was getting done. Jeff and 181

Dave countered by saying that many issues could be handled online, either as a group discussion or as a two-way exchange. The technophobe did not want to do any additional online interfacing, period. Glances were exchanged, and I thought we were never going to have consensus on this particular issue, but I would have bet that one person would simply find herself a little out of the loop. After a lengthy debate about having a board of directors, it was time for Dave’s allotted four and a half minutes of the treasurer’s report. He handed out a list of things he thought the treasurer should do, and the comments flew. James was once an auditor, and he said there were not enough controls; there should be multiple signatures on checks, and that the treasurer position should roll or rotate. Mike seconded the counter signature idea, and there was some back and forth between them about details. New members Aleta and John jumped in with comments, and Trish wrote names down frantically, trying to keep up with the exchanges. About a third to half of the people were involved in this discussion, and I couldn’t tell if the rest were bored or just distracted by the many handouts that were going around the room. When James started talking about calling this position the Controller, and having the Treasurer be another job, the natives got restless. The timekeeper was trying to be strict, and the time was gone, so Trish asked for a ten-minute extension. We were crowded into a rather small, hot room, which might have accounted for what seemed like a lack of focus. Even the smallest details came up, such as what name to put on the account. Then we had seven minutes for discussion on consensus training. How 182

much should we have, how often, should it be required, how long should this session be, how should the group reinforce the training? I saw a frown on a woman by the door, and a couple of suspicious expressions, but the owners made no comments. Leif said we could do two days, but a whole weekend would be too much. Trish thought everyone should do it, and wanted a whole mandatory weekend. Leif’s wife Becky suggested a two-day training, with the second day being facilitator training only. Everyone was worried about the cost, and hoped that it would not be more than a hundred dollars apiece. The people from Whitehall were clearly the most sold on the training, and the more the better, while Leif and Becky saw the uncomfortable expressions of those who did not speak and seemed to be trying to voice their concerns and modify the emphasis a little. Nothing was decided, but within a couple of minutes a new attendee got up and rather abruptly left. She had not gotten involved in any of the discussions except to say that a woman should be one of the people to cosign checks. Apparently she felt out of synch with the image and concerns the group was projecting. Once more I wondered why no one had put together a kind of “Getting Started” manual for cohousers, especially considering that many of us didn’t have any idea of how the business end of the thing should work. At the September 18 meeting, the atmosphere was completely different from the previous meetings. We were in John’s carpeted suburban living room, with a note on the door asking people to take their shoes off. There were several children more or less being minded by someone we had hired, and only a dozen 183

adults. There was a sense of mutedness, of propriety, and the size of the room that first seemed an advantage quickly became a disadvantage. People could not make eye contact well because they were spread out. Proximity and a crowd made earlier meetings more intimate, gregarious, and informal. Jeff was looking at his laptop the whole time, making him seem distant and detached, although he may have only been taking notes. The disagreements, when they popped up, seemed more serious, although not acrimonious: two of the couples did not want to be assessed per person, but per unit. Trish helped clarify the issue by pointing out that having only one voting membership per couple was not a great idea, but it was what would happen if couples were considered one unit. Another person reminded everyone that cohousing was a community of individual people, not housing units. This, I felt, was a critical point, and if people could not get past feeling financially taken advantage of at this early stage, the group was in trouble. The October 1 meeting was in the Union building at the University of Texas, which I had suggested as neutral territory. Mike timed the meeting with a borrowed watch, because only two of the fifteen people had watches. If they were yuppies, they were short of the standard accessories. There was a new couple with a child, both in jeans, she in a tie-dyed T-shirt. Two men wore buttoned shirts, and everyone else wore T-shirts. No one had read the finance committee proposal posted to our list, so we took five minutes to do so. It might have been the University atmosphere, but we looked and acted more sophomoric than usual. There was a good deal of joking about everything, including how to pronounce 184

insurance, the Texas way or the dictionary way. When all of Jeff’s proposals were accepted, he said he was about to cry. At one point, there was a proposal to table the proposal on the table, which created mild hysteria. By early October 2000, though, I had noticed a new sense of seriousness during the meetings. One reason was Dave, a new member who was a software professional. He seemed different than the other members at first, and after his first few meetings a couple of the older members wondered if he would stay. But Dave was a just a gung-ho guy, one of those type-A controllers Chapter Four mentions, in addition to being a very pro-consensus and co-counseling person. He pushed for specific proposals and action frequently, by raising his voice a little and repeatedly coming back to unresolved issues. Because Dave wasn’t one of the original gang of nine or ten people who all seemed to know each other, yet had already become an invaluable contributor, the group lost the slight sense of cliquishness that it had in the beginning, and gained more momentum. We had another fairly new member, John, who was also a go-getter, a married man with two young children. He kept trying to bring them to the meetings, but it apparently was a logistical problem. We had one meeting at his house far out in Cedar Park, but it was unfair for twelve people to have to drive nearly an hour so one family could be accommodated. John was even more of a controller than Dave, and they butted heads a few times. Often as I listened to a convoluted discussion — for example, about what constituted a quorum, and how we could adopt a definition of it — I heard what John said clearly, then heard 185

several people disagree with and discuss it for fifteen minutes, only to have someone else in the group say almost exactly what John had said in the first place, to everyone’s agreement. It seemed like learning another language, only to find out that the meaning was all in the inflections, not the words. Within a few months, this person also dropped out. Childcare at meetings was an issue for the parents. Non-parents wanted to be supportive, because safe child space is one of the biggest reasons people wanted to be in cohousing. But what seemed to happen was that some people who insisted that childcare was a problem did not do too much to find a solution, then dropped out. Others who had worked out their own way of dealing with their children stayed, after realizing that the children were welcome at the meetings. One of the new committees was on consensus training. By November the group had decided to hire a trainer and hold a consensus retreat somewhere near Austin. Whitehall Co-op had worked with Patricia Allison of Earthaven Cohousing in North Carolina on training its members in consensus, and she was available for two days in late January. Marc and his partner Thea rented a building at the 7A Ranch in Wimberly, Texas, for the consensus training retreat, and about eighteen people attended, including myself. I wanted to know more about how to “do” consensus, and after six months of attending meetings twice a month still did not understand what was supposed to be happening. People did not all talk at once during meetings, but we seemed to digress a lot. It was not until late summer that one person explained to the rest of us what “being on stack” and other such terms 186

meant — in this case, being on a list of people waiting to speak, like “stacked up” airplanes waiting to land. We had not really been following all the rules, possibly because not everyone knew them, possibly because the membership was so fluid we would have had to explain the procedure to new people every time we had a meeting. It certainly was not very efficient, but it made allowances for shifting enthusiasm and general uneasiness about being too businesslike.

Consensus Training The training was held from January 19 through 21, 2001. It had been a while since I had attended any kind of retreat. My first was a weekend with high school Ethical Culturists in New Jersey. In the late 1970s, I went through the twoweekend, four-day est training developed by Werner Erhard, formerly a car salesman from New Jersey named Jack Rosenberg. Many of the employees at Ginny’s Copying Service in Austin were not-so-subtly urged to attend, but I thought it was only an expensive mind game. So that I could say so with authority, I “did” the training. One thing I learned was that any group of people that comes together with a need and a willingness to listen will generate a great deal of heat, light, and adrenaline. The consensus retreat was no different; the proximity and willingness to cooperate helped create an unusual closeness and vulnerability beyond the ostensible topic. For example, toward the end of the weekend, we had a very emotional session during which Marc confessed that he had made a financial 187

mistake setting up the retreat that was going to cost everyone additional money. His hands shook and his partner was tearful as he went through the math to clarify what had gone wrong and who owed what. Everyone reacted one at a time by reassuring him that anyone could have made the same mistake, it was not much money, and he had done a lot of work to make it happen. There were no angry recriminations. I felt very sorry for the couple because they seemed so contrite, and I could not understand why no one else went to comfort them. The group reactions were kind but not emotional. I was finally so moved by his partner’s tears that I went over to her and hugged her, but she did not respond except to thank me. I am still puzzled by a kind of coolness to the warmth that people were expressing, but it might simply be that the rest of the group knew this couple better than I did and knew that verbal reassurance was enough. Some people are huggers and some are not. I did learn much about consensus, and I better understood some of the people I had formed judgments about. After the workshop the meetings were more organized and on time, no doubt partly because we all had a clearer idea about how to tailor the process for our group and how to get things accomplished while being “sensitive.” We also played many, many games, sang a lot, and had fun at the retreat.

Let’s Get Happy Many historic intentional communities considered group entertainment and 188

recreation crucial to group spirit and to making residents happier. Few were like the Aurora Commune in Oregon, about which Nordhoff remarked, “there is little room for poetry or for the imagination … What is not directly useful is sternly left out.”236 Oneida, in particular, had a sense of mischievousness in addition to a strong interest in more serious cultural pursuits such as performing plays and music. Even the Shakers loved writing hymns and other songs, and of course dancing. Cohousing is no different. At CAC, nearly every meeting began with a game, and those who brought new games or variations on old ones were welcomed gleefully. My therapist friends told me that they used noncompetitive games all the time, to break the ice and to create trust. I found this aspect of group interaction almost addictive, and realized how much I had missed playing. Also, even the routine announcements about meetings usually were funloving. For example, the general meetings always had a potluck as well as a business meeting, and the following was an announcement of what to bring for the potluck. “If you have blue or green eyes, please bring an entree. If you have brown eyes, but not brown hair, please bring dessert. If you have brown eyes AND brown hair, please bring an appetizer. If you do not fit into any of the above categories, please bring drinks.” Members also used the more common alphabetically-by-lastname breakdown, such as “A-E bring appetizers,” but there was no set rule; whoever hosted the meeting would send out an email letting everyone know when and where the meeting was, and what to bring. 236

Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 317.

189

An Average Meeting Plan Meetings were informal at first, but within a year a routine solidified. By 2002, the following meeting format was standard. At 3:30 on February 3 at “Halfpenny House,” Jessica was chosen as facilitator, and the group proposed a revised agenda. Items “No Bozos,” “Community Life Agreement,” and “Living with Children” were postponed; various reports from design, legal, and planning committees were added. The membership, consisting of Jessica, Leif, Jon, Becky, Jay, James, Dave, Doris, Barbara, and Marc approved the new agenda and the previous meeting’s minutes. Leif, Jon, and Becky had been chosen or had volunteered at the last meeting to be scribe, timekeeper, and note-taker, respectively. To open the meeting, everyone did an exercise showing how they got stuck on projects and how to get unstuck. The discussion that followed was lengthy and substantive; the group had made concrete progress. They had decided their needs did not mesh with the city’s timeline for Mueller, and were looking for alternatives. They were working with developers, finding and evaluating land parcels, designing living units, and working with a lawyer to finalize the bylaws after three rounds of reviews.

An Agenda The first agenda item, after a “state of cohousing” update, was the design committee’s evaluation of a 1.63 acre site on Houston St. in central Austin that 190

was close to several good schools and many amenities and shopping. Developer Steve Vinklarek and partner Citysmart Properties had been developing it for 31 condos, but were considering selling it, plans and all. If so, it would have been a unique opportunity, because most cohousing arrangements, especially urban ones like this, are comparable in size and layout to condo developments, so little work would have had to be redone. The second item was about incorporation and the lawyer Jon had been talking to. The third was a proposal to hire Ivan Naranjo, a consultant, to investigate the Houston site and plans and, should the information be positive, to determine a fair price for the land. This item produced a wave of concerns and questions, ending in an amended proposal to hire Ivan only if Steve definitely intended to sell. Jessica stood aside, preferring the earlier action the first proposal would have allowed. The fourth item was a proposal to incorporate, with a timeline of actions and discussions that first had to be addressed; the proposal was tabled, but the timeline was accepted. After a few more details, the meeting ended, as usual, with a meeting evaluation and “check-in” of feelings by each member. Jessica “did not feel good about standing aside” or about the decision, and the note-taker noted her own problems keeping up with everything. After deciding when and where the next meeting would be, they chose a new facilitator, scribe, time czar (timekeeper), and two note-takers, to better handle complex discussions. An appendix to the notes for this meeting described nine parcels of land that several members looked at, and a list of criteria for selection. 191

Since I stopped going to meetings regularly in May 2001, when I went out of state for a few months, I had been following the group’s progress online. I also went to several meetings in the fall of 2001, and to the first public presentation of the umbrella group Cactus at Book People, a bookstore hospitable to local groups, in 2002. Membership had dropped to about ten who regularly attend meetings, but another ten or twelve wanted to buy in whenever there was something to buy. In spite of the decline in membership, they were going to hire consultants to help work with a developer and to find and buy suitable land, and had collected substantial money to do so. The difficulty over committing enough to spend money had apparently been resolved. From what I have read online about meetings and getting a group to the building stage, CAC was as typical as any group of cohousers could be. That meant that, for all their common interest in cooperation, simplification, the environment, and community, individual residents-to-be were individual indeed. In its early days Takoma Village, built in 2000, demonstrated how difficult it must have been to get consensus on anything: their drink list for a meal included “coffee, no coffee; caffeine and decaffeinated; milk (cream is beyond the pale) and no dairy; juice and no sugar; fresh and no cans or bottles; diet coke and no soda (pop); herbal tea and real tea; hot and ice, please.”237 It might be several more years before we see cohousing built in Austin and have a chance to compare its reality with its plans and dreams. At that time more research could be done on

192

existing groups in other parts of the country to find out how they are working and what effect, if any, they are having on their members and on the outside world.

237

[email protected], May 11, 2001.

193

CHAPTER SIX: COHOUSING IN PRACTICE Evaluation and Reevaluation If cohousing’s goals include environmentalism and making the world a better place to live in, what are some specific things cohousers could do to further these goals? One of the common hopes for cohousing is that residents will reduce their dependence on cars because of their commitment to sharing resources. To illustrate, Carol Hunter, an environmental reporter in California, asked the [email protected] list if anyone knew of a group that had a “shared electric car.”238 This value brings up the question, are there fewer cars in cohousing? Are cohousers able to live up to this particular ideal? And that question begs another: do cohousing groups walk the walk, or do they only talk the talk? This is an important question because it speaks directly to the utopian aspect of cohousing, without which it may well become just another kind of gated community. We need a scorecard of quantitative research on how existing cohousing is living up to its goals, not just how good individuals feel — if they do — about living in cohousing. Cohousers themselves are aware of the need to prove themselves and are the first to critique what they are doing. Much like Oneida’s mutual criticism process, the cohousing list airs discussions on these very questions. On the car question in particular, Lynn Nadeau of RoseWind Cohousing in Port Townsend,

238

[email protected], December 20, 2001.

194

Washington, comments that while their group hasn’t gotten rid of cars, they do use them less by carpooling to many events, and they borrow each others’ cars and trucks as needed.239 Because most suburban houses have attached garages, which lets residents practically drive into their houses, putting cohousing parking at the periphery is a small first step in weaning residents from their dependence on cars. One such heated debate about walking the walk on the list was over handicapped-accessible building. Many people felt strongly that, as a matter of principle, everything in a cohousing development ought to be made handicapped accessible. But Pathways in Northampton, Massachusetts, didn’t feel they could afford an elevator to the basement where the shared laundry area was, and public building standards only required areas open to the general public to be handicapped accessible. (Twenty of twenty-four individual units have their own laundry facilities, and the common house itself is fully compliant with state and federal guidelines.) Publicly discussing this decision brought on critically worded comments such as, “What other activities have you decided are unimportant for everyone to have access to?” But because there is no central authority and no “rules,” each group must decide for itself how far it is willing to go to live up to its ideals. Perimeter parking is of course a problem for older and handicapped residents. Which principle is more important?

239

[email protected], December 20, 2001.

195

Lack of Diversity One of the criticisms of cohousing is the lack of diversity of its residents; most are white, middle-class, educated and relatively affluent, and many are in their 30s and 40s. This suggests that cohousing may not be a viable alternative model for most people, so it will have little effect on the country's dominant mode of living together. There is some truth to this observation, and it is one that cohousers themselves are concerned about. They would like to have more diversity, both cultural and economic, in their communities, and would like to see the cohousing model gain wider acceptance. It may be that it will as the idea becomes more commonplace and as more people see for themselves what cohousing has to offer. However, one of the characteristics that stands out in any description of potential and real cohousers is that a large number of them have lived cooperatively before240 and want to live that way on a larger and more institutionalized scale. Unlike many earlier would-be residents of intentional communities, they come to the concept not from theory or idealism alone but because of prior positive experiences with various kinds of group living. Rob Sandelin of Sharingwood asked if diversity in community is a myth, and answered his own question: there is “a great deal of diversity between communities and very little within.” The “act of creating an intentional community filters out diversity in a number of ways”… people who are not

196

interested in community, people who do not communicate well, people who resolve disputes with violence, and so on simply do not join. So “creating cohousing removes diversity, and deep down, this [is] what people want.”241 He pointed out that the intentional communities that have lasted, especially over the past thirty years or so, are the ones that have a strong group vision, whatever its nature is, and for members to have or develop the same vision weeds out diversity at least of feeling and belief. What is interesting about the cohousing movement is that first statement — that although the members of one cohousing community might be fairly similar, another cohousing community a hundred miles away might be completely different. Can the same thing be said about the suburbs? Can residents select a suburban neighborhood whose residents have values and beliefs, not just aesthetic tastes, that are similar to their own?

Lack of Diversity or Dominant Paradigm? Additionally, another way of looking at cohousing's general lack of diversity is to view it as a positive aspect — after all, if this new mode of living appeals to a minority that by virtue of being white, educated and affluent is the dominant cultural paradigm, it may well become influential. Also, as people build and successfully live in more cohousing communities, others may see ways to reconfigure the model to make it work for more minorities and as an affordable

240 241

Murname, “Detached,” 27-30. [email protected], July 3, 1996.

197

housing project. There is discussion in the cohousing community about including rental units, which some groups have already done. Rentals allow those without the wherewithal for a big financial commitment to live in cohousing, which might encourage younger and lower-income potential residents. As Sharon Villines commented, “Rentals are so necessary to housing the 18-30 year olds who are still on the move and looking at life. We miss their energy when we don’t have enough rentals.”242 A woman wrote that she rented a room in someone’s unit at Two Acre Wood; although she would prefer her own space, she wanted to experience cohousing before making the financial commitment of buying. She wrote, “Having [rentals] would make it possible for people like me to create community, even if we are not able to buy a home right away.”243

Pods Central Austin Cohousing wants to include units that can be shared; the housemates would be called cocos, as in co-cohousers. Some call these units pods, and some pods are designed with private baths and minimal shared space, assuming high use of the common house by their residents. They would also be affordable for renters. Including rentals could increase diversity in cohousing, but it could also decrease community because renters might be only short-term

242 243

[email protected], Feb. 22, 2002. [email protected], Feb. 22, 2002.

198

residents, and might be less likely to attend meetings and share in voluntary work. To Screen or Not to Screen Many utopian communities, as noted earlier, failed because new or potential members were not screened. New Harmony sent out a call for members, and in 1824 eight hundred people with little in common showed up in Indiana, but New Harmony lasted only two years. Cohousers are aware of the pitfalls of being too open and of not being open enough. One of the first discussions Central Austin Cohousing had was about whether or not to screen new members. Philosophically most people were against screening but, realistically, some worried that somehow undesirables might join; this led to more discussion about what they considered undesirable. Most people meant simply someone who made life difficult for the group by blocking consensus, creating confusion or disagreement, or simply not being in tune with what the rest of the group seemed to want.

Self Selection When Central Austin Cohousing realized that they couldn’t even agree on what would make someone undesirable, they began to see that intense disagreement would be more uncomfortable for the minority — the person who disagreed — than for the majority, and that that person would self-select him- or herself out of the group. The overwhelming consensus from the cohousing list is that self selection works better than any possible set of rules or requirements 199

because of the length of the planning process itself. It takes commitment and compatibility to work together for so long. Years of weekly meetings tend to produce a cohesive group. As Joani Blank said, “A decision to stay with a [cohousing] community is a decision to buy into group norms,” whatever they may be .244 While individual cohousers may eventually decide to leave a group, that does not mean that cohousing itself has failed; as a matter of fact, such defections prove that the concept is flexible enough to continue in spite of individual changes. Although this continuity is true for many other kinds of groups, it is historically untrue for most utopian communities. Just as a tree loses individual leaves but grows new ones, a cohousing group could end up years after inception with an entirely different cast of characters but still be alive and well, and serving the purposes of its new members. The large financial investment alone is enough to keep members from dropping out quickly or in large numbers, and will tend to maintain membership stability. However, what happens when someone does sell their house in a cohousing development? The new owner would not have been through the purifying fires of years of meetings so would only be able to self select on the basis of a relatively few visits to a fait accompli. Could a cohousing development eventually just become a collection of not too well acquainted people in separate units but sharing a common building? The feeling on the list is that the 244

[email protected], February 26, 1998.

200

architecture, traditions, rituals, communication networks and process combine to pique a new member’s interest and modify her lifestyle in ways that help maintain group solidarity, if not unity. Also, there are hundreds of people around the country who are on waiting lists for space in existing cohousing groups. I asked one CAC member who rarely came to meetings how she felt; I had thought she was interested in cohousing, but she kept disappearing. She said that she was completely committed to living in cohousing but had been through years of meetings at her present living situation, Whitehall Cooperative, and felt that she knew the drill: she had enough experience in group living to be sure that once the building gets under way she would fit in just fine. Many of those on waiting lists may feel the same way — they like and are good at group living, but can do without the years of preparation.

Sample Cohousing Profiles At Cornerstone, a newly built cohousing group in Cambridge, Massachusetts that had been in the works since 1993, the stories of residents are similar to those of other cohousing groups. The “founding mother,” Elizabeth Locke, had lived in communes in the 1960s and 70s, but when she had children, her needs changed. When she had close, friendly neighbors, she liked living with her immediate family only, but when they moved to a new neighborhood, she realized she wanted a community that was more stable and permanent, and 201

thought cohousing was the answer. Members Mike Arnott and Mary White, married and parents of a seven-year-old girl, had been in the Peace Corps and found out about Cornerstone at their local food co-op. Mary Ford, a high school psychologist from the Bronx, took an apartment at Cornerstone after living alone. She, too, had lived communally, at Maryknoll, a female religious community in New York, but wanted something between the two extremes. Cornerstone was designed to be wheelchair accessible and clearly embraces a range of ages. It also has five subsidized “affordable housing” units, indicating a commitment to socioeconomic diversity of the residents. One tidbit of information about membership that deserves further study is from a Cornerstone “check-in ”: 75 % of the Cornerstone members called themselves “painfully or very shy” in fourth grade. Check-in is a ritual common to cohousing meetings in which members share personal insights, sometimes answering a specific question asked of all, in this case randomly about fourth grade, sometimes just letting the group know how everyone feels before or after a meeting. Cornerstone resident Rosemary Kennedy thought this shyness “suggests most cohousers are wallflowers, drawn to ready-made communities where they don’t have to be outgoing.”245 However, since practically everyone who lives in cohousing today had to start building their community from scratch, which involves an enormous amount of perseverance, self-confidence, trust, and commitment, this conclusion is untenable. There may be some other link between

202

personality types and attraction to cohousing, however. Ms. Kennedy is from Ireland, and she did not like the “aloofness” of other American communities compared to Ireland. Fair Oaks Cohousing in Madison, Wisconsin, is unusual even for cohousing because it consists of only two two-story duplexes.246 Owners Kimberly Wilson and Brian Lavendel wanted to sell three of the four units to their tenants as condominiums to create legal cohousing, and when that did not work, they created this informal cohousing group that even includes another nearby renter. Wilson had lived in cooperative houses for five years, during her formative college years and afterward, and she has concluded that “Brian and I see very clearly that’s how people should live.” Members share a garden, yoga classes, bartered services, and a weekly meal. Wilson’s commitment to cohousing demonstrates that, for some, cooperative living is not just a youthful phase but a major learning experience that they want to develop further and make manifest in not only their lives but in others. Also in Wisconsin, the first formal (legal) cohousing group developed similarly. Married couple Kate MacCrimmon and Todd Faulhaber were so impatient to start a group that they bought two houses and an empty lot between them, which now house eight adults and three children. They said Madison’s

245 246

Christina McCarroll, “Instant Community,” Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2002, 3. Pamela Cotant, Wisconsin State Journal, April 13, 2001.

203

“strong co-op tradition” made it ripe, and that cohousing was “the next step.”247 MacCrimmon’s parents, who are retired and Quakers, are also planning on living in a different new cohousing group, as an alternative to a seniors-only community. These two factors, a personal history of involvement with cooperatives and a family interest in cooperation, are common to many who are attracted to cohousing. Another factor is being Unitarian, or having Unitarian connections, which was true of some earlier communalists.

Planning the Development Cohousing uses many physical planning techniques that some old communities used, and some that Jane Jacobs describes in Death and Life of Great American Cities. Unlike the Garden Cities of Ebenezer Howard that Jacobs critiques, the “right to have plans of any significance” did not belong “only to the planners in charge”;248 everyone who plans on living in cohousing is part of the planning process, and their input is not only sought but needed. Cohousing developments are not as ambitious as an entire Garden City, either, and are perhaps less likely to fail because they attempt less. The “Decentrist” followers of Howard theorized that by dispersing the urban population in scattered garden cities the problems of large cities could be mitigated. As Jacobs points out, such groups seize on an idea that appeals to them and ignore evidence that contradicts

247 248

Dean Mosiman, Wisconsin State Journal, Feb. 15, 1998, 1C. Jacobs, Death, 17.

204

its validity — in Howard’s case, the idea that cities are inherently unhealthy and unsuccessful. Although many cohousing groups are suburban or rural, more are urban, often near a university or a central downtown. The only theory behind this acceptance of urbanism is that people can and should live together with less disharmony than exists in an average neighborhood. The architecture itself is important to most cohousers, not just the idea of living in close proximity to other like-minded people. At some point in planning discussions, nearly everyone mentions lots of light, natural materials, good traffic flow, soaring ceilings, access to the outdoors, and beautiful, functional design as things they think are important to include. According to Michael Benedikt, this interest in and willingness to pay for good architecture is in sharp contrast to the American public: “to judge by the ever-decreasing share of the GNP Americans have been spending on buildings and physical infrastructure since the 1930s, the value that clients … place on wonderfulness-in-buildings is not very high.”249 Christopher Alexander’s influential book A Pattern Language (1977) has been a popular tool in the planning process, with its vision of rooms, houses, siting, and relationships to other buildings and to people, and its emphasis on vernacular, natural, and old elements of design. Vashon Cohousing in Washington followed its advice in planning their buildings and developing the site plan.250 Some cohousing communities have received kudos for good architecture and planning; 249

Michael Benedikt, review of Paths, People and Purposes, by Philip Thiel, ARCADE: The Journal for Architecture/Design in the Northwest, V. XV, No. 4, Summer 1997, 3.

205

Duwamish Cohousing in Seattle was one of only six projects on the American Institute of Architects Seattle chapter tour in June 2001.251

Green Building Another value that many cohousers share is environmentalism, including the principle of “living lightly on the earth.” Skystone Solar Community member Phil Bryson effused, “We wanted to live lightly on the planet. We wanted to focus on what is important — relationships and living life.” To accomplish this goal, many cohousing groups use as many green building principles as they can afford. In Durango, Colorado, at Skystone, the fourteen original members, who are longtime friends, each or as couples “designed and built a house that fits their needs and personalities,” the only commonality being that they had a minimal impact on the land and were all off the grid, meaning being independent of public and private utilities.252

Urban Groups Many people think of such commune-type arrangements built on rural acreage when they think of cohousing, but urban cohousing groups can share the same environmental concerns. Sharon Hamer and husband Richard Curran live in a cohousing group in the middle of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that permits them 250 251

Alissa Quart, Washington Post, June 7, 1998, CO1. Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times, June 10, 2001, E1.

206

to save energy by, for example, having a group meal three days a week, which cuts down on individual food shopping trips, saves the use of thirty or forty individual kitchens, and perhaps avoids trips in family cars to restaurants to eat instead of staying in the development. Urban groups can use solar panels, common-wall construction, and off-peak timed heat and hot water.

Planning the Site To return to architectural features, Jacobs discusses the uses of sidewalks, parks, mixed-use buildings, small blocks, and concentration in cities. Pathways and sidewalks, and their uses and placement, are among the first things a cohousing planning committee considers. Generally cars are parked on the outskirts, often in one or two parking areas, rather than in individual driveways or near individual units. Cohousing parking in Denmark is always off to one side, to promote “casual interaction.”253 The idea behind this is to encourage people to walk not just from car to living unit but along walkways that other people use so that there are many opportunities for contact with other residents. This strategy is the same as Oneida’s in forcing some foot traffic to go through communal areas to minimize individual isolation. Past utopian communities have many architectural features that reappear in cohousing. For instance, the Iowa offshoot of the Icarian community Nauvoo in

252 253

Brian Lavendel, “Where Community Matters,” Natural Home, Jan/Feb 01. McCamant, Cohousing, 103.

207

1876 had a dozen small dwellings for several families each, several work buildings and a shared laundry and bakehouse, and a large central building with a kitchen and large dining room. They used their dining room the same way most cohousing groups use theirs, for entertainment, gatherings, meetings, and parties as well as for common meals.254 With parking often on the outskirts of the development, or kept in one part of it, and pathways made the dominant way to get around internally, we see a design principle that the nineteenth-century Inspirationists used at Amana, that of turning the face of the community inward, architecturally speaking, instead of facing the main road and looking outward at the world beyond it .255 Sometimes parking is arranged so that residents must even walk through the common house on their way to their own units. Another reason for putting parking and cars somewhat out of the line of vision is to emphasize the paths and their uses, a primary one being a play space for children. Much like the watchful eyes of the street in Jacobs’s good city, the cohousing units look out on the paths where the residents conduct their lives. The children are not relegated to an out-of-the-way playscape that has nothing that would attract an adult but are integrated into the space that everyone uses to get around, to their cars, the common house, and their residences. More rural groups, or those with more land, often leave much of their land

254 255

Holloway, Heavens, 207. Holloway, 171-172.

208

in as close to its natural state as possible for everyone to explore and enjoy. Sometimes even this causes problems. One resident built a tree house for the children, including his own, but other residents were afraid it was unsafe. He offered to rebuild it to code at his own expense, but he was not allowed to. (He later left the group.) This kind of protectiveness or regulation does not seem to be the rule in cohousing, however. The impression the list dialogue gives is that anyone who wants to do something is welcome to, if it does not impinge on anyone else. It is a question of finding a compatible group and exploring as many potential problems as possible before breaking ground.

Costs and Practical Considerations One might think building twenty or thirty residences at once could cut costs, but it does not seem to work out that way. Avi Friedman’s “Grow Home or Next Home” system claims a $40,000 per unit cost,256 but Chris ScottHanson of Cohousing Resources Development and Consulting thought that the average cost to build cohousing in the U.S. was more like $65 per square foot. That cost included some green building features but not much interior woodwork or new appliances, and was for a standardized unit that was not customized and did not come in many variations. He explained, “Average cohousing dwelling unit sizes in the U.S. seem to be running about 1100 s.f., not including a share of the common house … Therefore, the average … would cost about $71,500 to build, +

209

common house share, + infrastructure, + land, + soft costs” making the total cost about $143,000 for a small, standard unit. Of course, as with all real estate, cost depends on location. In the Washington-Baltimore area, there are at least eight groups underway or built, with costs ranging from $91,500 at Takoma Village to $360,000 at EcoVillage.257 But at Cantine’s Island in New York, a member enthused, “The truth is I could never afford to live like this on my own…This is an incredible piece of property.”258 The cost of a single unit includes the cost of the common house and its amenities and common use of a relatively large parcel of land.

Resale Unlike residents of earlier intentional communities, people considering cohousing wonder about resale value. Because realistically cohousing is a real estate development into which residents put large amounts of money, this concern is not only perfectly reasonable, but could be a sign of maturity and realism. Regardless of a resident’s commitment to the ideas and principles of cohousing, the circumstances of individual lives can change dramatically. Illness, divorce, and job changes are only a few of the reasons one might have for needing to sell a unit and move. And even with the years-long planning process presumably enabling people to know each other well enough to have a reasonable expectation 256 257

[email protected], November 11, 2001. Deborah Dietz, Washington Post, July 21, 2001, p. Ho6.

210

of getting along, daily life creates unexpected stresses. Another problem may be that after the high hopes of the years of planning the reality cannot always live up to the expectations. So people do leave.

Demand for Existing Units Because cohousing is still so unusual, those who want to live in it have less choice than those seeking conventional housing, and the scarcity actually works in some cases to the seller’s advantage. At Cambridge Cohousing, three owners have sold out “at or above the market value” in the three years since it was built. Units are offered to a network of interested people and “friends of friends, etc. during the first thirty days before the units go on the open market.”259 Anyone who has been following the progress of cohousing knows how long it takes to start a new group and to find land, an architect, a contractor, and so on, so to find a unit in an existing group where you may already have friends, a group that has worked some of the bugs out of living closely together, is a boon. This kind of interest from “outside” may not have been as likely five years ago, but as word spreads and publicity gets more accurate, cohousing seems less and less oddball and more desirable.

258 259

[email protected], March 1, 2002. [email protected], November 11, 2001.

211

Ownership One of the aspects of cohousing that is markedly different than most earlier utopian communities is the extent to which people are invested financially. In the 1960s and 70s, the ownership structure of most communes was unequal, informal, and inexpensive. In cohousing, because buying a unit is as or more expensive than a comparable-size house, everyone who moves in has a huge financial stake in making the project work. They also share a big risk, and one common concern is to make the development as attractive as possible to minimize the risk of losing money if anyone wants to sell. This brings up some interesting insights on the cohousing list. Cohousing units have been tricky to sell because of the lifestyle they represent, and most realtors do not understand that they cannot be marketed to just anyone. Although cohousers are not legally allowed to discriminate when selling, they must, for the sake of the group and the potential new member, be careful to sell to someone who understands what they are getting into. Every so often a unit is offered for sale on the cohousing list itself, and that may be one of the few options available. Liz Stevenson of Southside Park Cohousing in Sacramento, California, stated flatly, “Realtors do not understand cohousing, and they will not get your unit sold.” She suggested putting up flyers at food co-ops, liberal churches and cultural events that would attract the kinds of

212

people who are interested in cohousing, listing events in independent and alternative publications, and most of all, using word of mouth.260 Most cohousing groups have a contact list that includes people who have come to meetings or open houses; if the group has a website or an email list, or both as CAC does, all of the news goes out to probably three to five times the number of people who are actively involved in the group. Often these lurkers are interested in cohousing but are unable or unwilling to commit to the long process of creating cohousing from scratch. Some have been burned before by groups that met for months and then failed. Some signed up for more information at an open house, but may have never come to a meeting. After a group acquires land and begins to build, and after the complex is built, this pool of interested people becomes a prospect list, and sometimes even a waiting list, for resale or additional new units. As Judy Baxter said, “people who are serious about cohousing are looking for it … it takes time for people to adopt the idea enough to seriously consider all the changes it implies.”261 The most recent discussions on the list indicated that in most areas waiting list prospects snatch up units as soon as they are available. Given the number of groups that have never gotten to the building stage, which is probably at least double the built groups, there are enough prospective buyers from just those failed groups to populate the existing developments several times over. Most

260 261

[email protected], Feb. 19, 2002. [email protected], Feb. 19, 2002.

213

groups do not fail because the members dislike the process or the people; they fail because of exhaustion, and inability to find land, or financing, or a builder or contractor who understands what they need. Attrition also does not mean disenchantment with the idea so much as inability to stay the course. Once something is built or underway, these dropouts often resurface and eagerly buy in. Common House Philosopher Martin Buber declared that the "essence of community is ... [that] it has a center."262 Cohousing takes this quite literally; the common house is one essential element in any cohousing development and is the figurative if not always the literal center of the plan. Much like the meetinghouse was the center of the New England town, or a common house was at nineteenth-century utopian communities such as the Icarians’ Corning, Iowa,263 the cohousing common house is the place where the large discussions and meetings take place; where people cook and eat together; sometimes where residents do laundry and use peripheral rooms with equipment for crafts and various arts; and where people gravitate to find each other. Cohousers are generally willing, and are advised, to sacrifice some space in their own units to be able to afford more space in the common house.

262 263

Melville, Communes, 184. Holloway, Heavens, 207.

214

Planning for Community the Focal Point One of the principles of cohousing is a commitment to create and maintain intimate and cooperative relationships with the group, not only the members of one’s own family. In my own neighborhood in Austin, any attempt to create this kind of neighborhood consciousness centers on two entities, which are a small but popular greenbelt where residents informally meet each other and almost incidentally discuss neighborhood issues; and a neighborhood association that has quarterly meetings, a website and an email list where the discussions can be widened into a forum for those who are interested. But for anyone without easy access to the greenbelt or to a computer, there is no central place or focal point where residents can meet or communicate with each other. Various churches serve in that capacity, but only for their members, and the local elementary school can facilitate communication between parents. What is lacking is a place just for the neighborhood to gather and use as it sees fit. The common house fills this need in cohousing. The scale of such interaction is different, of course. An average cohousing group might have fifty people; my neighborhood association has 1,500. Cohousing’s small scale, though, both allows and necessitates more individual involvement. Unlike in larger organizations that many people belong to such as the Sierra Club, lack of participation in cohousing does not go unnoticed. Part of being in such a group is the willingness to do a minimum amount of work, whereas in a strictly voluntary organization members’ commitment is as large or 215

small as the whim of the moment dictates. Although this commitment may become tiresome, the length of the process from first meeting to moving into a cohousing development permits members to get accustomed to the level of commitment required, and self-selection reduces the number of people who find that it is more work that they first envisioned. So the process both trains prospective members to participate and reinforces the participatory process for those who are already involved.

Publicity and Press Many of the utopian communities of a hundred years ago and more were generally enthusiastic about and fairly adept at promotion, at least in the initial stages of community. Oneida, New Harmony, Home and many others wrote, printed, and distributed newsletters; Hiawatha’s founders traveled around the area promoting the community. Cohousers are no exception; in fact, they are adept at getting the word out not only about their particular communities but about cohousing in general. Takoma Village got local television coverage of their “good looking” common house and their geothermal heating system. The level of zeal for cohousing on the list, even for those who have not built yet, is striking. It is almost missionary in its fervor. Yet there is a constant current of caution about pushing too hard, especially when a group is trying to sell an existing unit. Those who are already living in cohousing know that getting a resident who doesn’t understand what is involved and isn’t willing to interact is far worse for the 216

community than getting a “difficult” but communally-minded person who will take a lot of toleration and getting used to. Most cohousers seem to start with a fairly sophisticated grasp of the need for appropriate media exposure. Not only is there a need for publicity to reach potential new members, there is a need to create in the public mind the perception of cohousing as a good and not too odd thing and as therefore not a risky investment. Cohousers must also get many different kinds of professionals interested enough in cohousing to be able to help build, create new zoning, and facilitate financing. Several organizations are specifically geared to helping cohousers, including the nonprofit Cohousing Network, based in Colorado and headed by Zev Paiss, who lives in Nomad Cohousing in Boulder. In New England, the most important yearly trade show for the building industry is “Build Boston.” Diane Simpson, a cohousing adherent and resident, realized that this show might offer an opportunity to educate developers to create a bigger pool so future cohousing groups would have more choice among developers. She put together a workshop at the show and advertised it in Fine Homebuilding, a glossy, expensive trade magazine, and Multifamily Trends, which is published by the Urban Land Institute. She pointed out to the list that such advertising is expensive but worth it in the long run and urged others to consider similar strategies to promote and educate not just the general public but

217

the technical professionals that cohousers need.264

Media Coverage After USA Today ran a front-page story about cohousing in 1997, Michael Mariner asked that everyone post news of media coverage to the list, so that cohousers would know of the interest from the outside and could plan accordingly.265 (Few did.) According to the magazine Natural Home, “cohousing is a part of a trend of bringing neighbors closer together” in Boston.266 Sometimes these stories are a mixed blessing, as in this St. Louis Post-Dispatch story in 1998 on the proposed inner-city Culver Way development: “Imagine a commune without a guru, an ideologue or any particular philosophy.”267 But the rest is more positive: “Alderman Terry Kennedy, D-18th Ward, was born and raised in the neighborhood. He has watched its decline and is presiding over its resurgence.” Members include a retirement home administrator, 47; a contractor, 52, and her husband; and the project developer and his wife. John Rebchook of the Denver Rocky Mountain News wrote: “The easiest way to describe co-housing: modernday communes.”268 But four paragraphs later he seems to contradict himself: “But co-housing is not like the communes of the ‘60s.” Just as in the past, from the 1820s through the 1970s, newspapers do not know what to do with nonstandard 264

[email protected], 8/18/01. [email protected], 8/21/97. 266 Robyn Griggs Lawrence, “Best Friends,” Natural Home, Jan.-Feb. 2001, www.naturalhomemagazine.com/current-issues/archive/2001/janfeb01/friends.htm. 267 Deborah Peterson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch story, 1998, C1. 265

218

communities. More conservative states’ newspapers seem to reflect their politics. The Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier wrote, “If you missed the chance to live in a commune in the ‘60s, you can do so now … so-called cohousing communities that emphasize interaction are being formed” [emphasis mine].269 The Topeka Capitol-Journal called a proposed group in East Lawrence “unconventional,” a loaded word, even though the rest of the article was fair.270 The New Times of Kansas City wrote of two founding members that “they ignored jokes about group sex, explaining repeatedly that it wouldn’t be a commune,”271 as if being a commune necessarily meant group sex. Pat Kossan at The Phoenix Gazette smirked, “This suddenly hot housing idea looks like the dirty-faced, well-meaning little commune of the 1960s, all cleaned up, grown up and wised up into something a bit more practical for the 1990s.”272 The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland, had this to say in the midst of an enthusiastic article: “They’re not a bunch of hippies trying to create a commune,”273 even though the previous sentence described cohousing as a “country-wide communal living movement that is trying to bring a sense of community back into the growing suburbs.” Even that statement is only partly true. The Washington Post sensationalized what was a tame subject with this: “For those who think co268

John Rebchook, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 21, 1999, 6G. Post and Courier, March 1, 1998, 2H. 270 Andrea Albright, Topeka Capitol-Journal, January 15, 2001. 271 Kendrick Blackwood, New Times, August 30, 2001. 272 Pat Kossan, The Phoenix Gazette, Feb. 20, 1995, A1. 269

219

housing sounds suspiciously like a hippie commune, advocates of the movement would like to set the record straight.”274 This kind of misunderstanding and misrepresentation bothers cohousers. Carrie Burmaster, who is helping start a group in Baltimore, comments, “What this is, is typical middle-class people who are simply looking for more community in their lives.”275 It is hard to tell if this reaction is disingenuous or not; anyone who has lurked on the cohousing list or been to a cohousing meeting would hardly call the average cohouser “typical.” It is more that the typical communalist in the twenty-first century is aware that there are more options for community than communes. As a resident of Hiawatha Place in Seattle put it to a reporter who called cohousing a “citified Brook Farm with equity”: “It’s Utopian, in a way … but it’s Utopian with a practical twist.”276 The Brook Farm comment is especially odd given that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lawsuit to regain his “equity” in Brook Farm was one of the nails in its coffin. There is misunderstanding on both sides, but the most recent stories about cohousing have been more balanced. Using loaded words like “hippie” and “commune” demonstrate the media’s tendency to trivialize and stereotype anything that is alternative, at least to the left of center. At the same time, some stories call cohousing “communes for yuppies,” an odd mixture of opposing stereotypes. Sometimes local residents object to plans for cohousing in their 273 274

Margot Mohsberg, The Capital, October 26, 2001. Deborah K. Dietsch, Washington Post, July 21, 2001, Ho1.

220

neighborhoods, mostly because of its high density, but perhaps because of fearful and derisive attitudes like the ones the media expresses. Most, if not all, earlier communities have had the same problems throughout United States history. Some sealed themselves off as much as possible from the outside, but others, like the Farm in Tennessee, provided a much-needed service to the outside — midwifery — and eventually won acceptance or at least tolerance. Cohousing is much less separate from the outside world than any earlier form of intentional community and its members of are usually quite active in the larger community. Dorothy Day Cohousing in St. Louis, Missouri, has created a food-buying co-op with nearby neighbors.277 In St. Louis, developer Tom Braford renovated a Quonset hut on cohousing property so it can be used as a community theatre.278 Someone posted a notice about the upcoming Earth Day to the list: “This is a great opportunity to showcase cohousing to the broader community of people concerned about the sustainability of our culture and its impacts on the earth. After all, the sustainability of human community directly affects the sustainability of all the earth’s systems and beings.”279 And The Cohousing Handbook reports that “an amazing number of cohousing people are on citizen advisory panels, school boards or planning agencies, or even are elected officials

275

Jackie Powder, The Baltimore Sun, March 25, 2001, 1B. Kerry Webster, Seattle Times, Aug. 30, 1998. 277 [email protected], February 18, 2002. 278 Florence Shinkle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 17, 2000, 1. 279 [email protected], February 14, 2002. 276

221

in their local government.”280

Makeup of the Community Sources agree that the average cohouser is white, middle class, fairly young, and liberal.281 What else do we know about them? There is a danger that they are seen as new age, politically correct, left wing but not radical, and similar in background, beliefs, and political and social orientation. Just as outsiders in the 1960s and 70s stereotyped those who lived in communes as wild-eyed hippies and flower children, the danger in the cohousing movement is that they too will be stereotyped, and as a result, people who might be interested in the concept of cohousing will shy away from it. This narrowing of new members would create the unwelcome scenario of making cohousing even less diverse than it is now, which is in direct opposition to cohousing’s goals. But what are cohousers really like? Is there truth to the stereotype?

Vignettes At Southside Park, which has “stabilized a deteriorating neighborhood” in California, one member was an experienced communalist and “child of the California liberal lifestyle.”282 The prospective cohousers of Liberty Village, Maryland, included “an accountant, a writer, an architect, a real estate agent, an 280 281

Hanson, The Cohousing Handbook, 16. Handbook, pp. 196-197; Cohousing, 253.

222

artist, a nurse, and a business coach” who were all white, and most had children. (This reporter observed that during a workshop members “discussed issues with intensity, but never uttered harsh words toward one another.”)283 An environmental policy graduate student and his wife, who is a high school math teacher, chose cohousing because the group cooperated fully with the accessibility their wheelchair-bound young son required. My impression of cohousers since meeting the Central Austin Cohousing group had been of a mellow, peace-oriented, cautious group who would rather switch than fight. This is a misconception, according to a resident of Westwood Cohousing in Asheville, North Carolina. She comments, “A lot of us are Type A personalities, people who care a great deal…so we have a lot of intense discussions.” And her cohorts agree. Reporter David Holmstrom noted that cohousers “tend to be middle class, environmentalists, and come from socialactivist backgrounds.”284 This description is similar to some of the progressives of the late nineteenth century, many of whom were writers, educated women in search of causes, and earnest “do-gooders.” At Cornerstone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one member is a “consultant to groups promoting citizen participation” and another is a retired sociology professor.285 Besides reading posts to the cohousing list, which is an obvious way of getting information, I have noticed little quirks in the way that people sign their 282 283

Robert Nusgart, Baltimore Sun, June 22, 1997. Judith Evans, Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1996, 2-3.

223

messages, or their email names, or the kind of language they use and the particular things that upset them. I am not sure how different such personal imprints are from any other such list, but they may be revealing. They give clues about the senders’ interests and personalities. Everyone on the list shows some quirkiness; there is no obvious group mindset. People do get irate on the list from time to time, but someone eventually remarks that the tone of the list is helpful and non-judgmental compared to other lists they are on. Just as in a meeting, if two people misunderstand each other and tempers flare, others step in to try to clarify the issue, or the two go off-list to work things out.

Rituals, Play and Celebrations Housewarmings used to be common a hundred years ago. Liberty Village in Maryland is reviving the tradition, with a “house blessing” for a retired couple. Writer David Dishneau described it: “The non-religious event was as communal as the potluck dinner that followed. People took turns pouring cups of water into a large glass bowl while wishing [the couple] a happy home. After a sing-along, each dipped a paper cup into the bowl and walked through the house, anointing the walls.”286 Several people have died while living in cohousing, and their groups have held wakes and created memorials, such as planting a tree or putting up a plaque and a bench. Groups often celebrate holidays together, but they can 284 285

David Holmstrom, Christian Science Monitor, September 3, 2000. Thomas Grillo, Boston Globe, March 4, 2000, E1.

224

be anything from Christmas to Kwanzaa to the Swedish summer solstice. Some of the hottest debates on the list are around whether to even call December 25 “Christmas,” because the word is tied to Christianity. Pagans, Wiccans, Jews, and atheists argue for the inclusiveness of religion-neutral language, and others just do not want a dead tree in the common house. Instead of the season being one of sharing and giving, it can be a flash point for those with bad memories or strong ideas and opinions. As I waded through page after earnest page of cohousers discussing consensus, nonviolent language, cultural mores, diversity, and other serious issues, I got a strong picture of a very well-behaved, careful, mild-mannered group of people that I wouldn’t want to spend all of my free time with. But what is probably going on is that years of working with groups trains people in patience. They know the dangers of hitting the “send” button too quickly, and the value of a measured response. Happily, cohousers, like the “if it feels good” hippies and the funloving anarchists of Home, are not always serious. There is a Cohousing Olympics, including dishwashing competitions and length-of-meeting awards. There are lots of cohousing jokes, notably light bulb ones: Q. How many cohousers does it take to change a light bulb? A. None; they burn out before the bulb does. Or A. Who knows, we haven’t consensed on that yet. A kid is watching a fly zoom around and asks his dad, “what’s that?” His dad: “It’s a common house fly.” Kid: “Then 286

David Dishneau , Associated Press, December 24, 2000.

225

shouldn’t we take it back to the common house?” Some miscellaneous fun displayed at a street fair in Tucson included a plaque reading “Mi Casa es Mi Casa.” One person replied on the list to another experiencing sticker shock with levity: “When comparing housing prices in DC w/ Durham, breathe deeply and slowly into a paper bag. It won’t change the price but it does look rather humorous if you stand in front of a mirror while doing it.”287 There is also the Associated Confederation of Intentional Communities with its Intentional Communities Guide 2001, all 1,200 pages of it. When I began reading an article about the Confederation I thought it was real, but it is an elaborate joke.288 The Guide includes the inside scoop on communities including the number of “ogres” who live at each, and the percentage of ogres; the percentage of community time devoted to pet issues; and the number of days it takes to get scraps out to the compost pile. Its articles include “Finding a community toaster that toasts but doesn’t burn” and “Securing your private coffee stash.” Cohousers seem to like to poke fun at themselves. The list, as I have said, discusses everything. One thread that got quite a bit of response was a discussion about television. The average American probably watches television at least several hours a day; children typically watch even more, as much as six hours a day. Are cohousers average Americans in this respect? They certainly are more wired than the average American; groups on the 287

[email protected], Apr. 16, 2002.

226

list frequently discuss their willingness to spend extra money during building to include the latest technology for faster internet access. Those on the list are computer literate; their messages demonstrate knowledge of HTML, netiquette, and how to use links and attachments. They probably spend less time watching television but more using computers. However, it is the children’s use of television that seems to concern them most. Ecovillage in Ithaca, New York, used to have a television and VCR in their common house, but took them out, although some members still have televisions at home.289 One person thought that having a common house television might free him to get rid of his own, so he could “avoid the temptation to watch trivia.” (Does the group function as some members’ superego?) Racheli wrote that when television was introduced to the kibbutz where she grew up it “killed” much of the social activity. Others made points that television is educational and broadening, but being addicted to it is not healthy, when television watching takes people away from human interaction. Some said television content is controlled by a minority and information on it is limited and non-controversial, making it a waste of time. Perhaps what is most significant about this debate is simply that it is occurring. There has never been a comparable debate on the Cherrywood neighborhood email list.

288

Talking Leaves, spring/summer 2001, www.talkingleaves.org/, by Water Wordsworth, which may be a nom de plume.

227

Communication Discussing anything on the list involves lots of talking about psychology, and lots of political correctness. To make the process work, people have to understand the ways in which people are different from each other, and to express those differences in ways that do not insult or alienate others. For instance, in a discussion about conflict, someone tried to simplify the discussion by using “demanders” and “avoiders” to denote those who avoid conflict and those who confront it. These terms stirred up a hornet’s nest of discussion, especially from those who were insulted by being called “avoiders.” Even being lumped together as avoiders, in spite of different styles of and reasons for such “avoidance,” was objectionable to them. Another person looked at the difference in terms of “highmaintenance” and “low-maintenance” people, low being okay with being alone a lot, high wanting constant interaction. He pointed out that neither was “bad,” but that their styles of interaction were incompatible, and that cohousing tends to weed out low-interactors — somewhat obviously, one might think. But low-interactors can crave community also, just not as much of it. This particular discussion brought up my own concerns with cohousing, which were clearer to me after I had spent fifteen months meeting twice monthly with Central Austin Cohousing. Theory and online discussions are entertaining 289

[email protected], February 1, 2002.

228

and informative, but experience with real people creates another level of understanding. The hundreds of people living in cohousing across the country today are involved in a unique experiment in cooperation and understanding.

CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: FICTION AND FACT Utopian fiction is about two different kinds of places: reconstructive utopias (eutopia, a good place), which may look to the past or invent the future; and fantasies (outopia, or no place).290 Fantasies depend on a vision that may ignore the realities of our world or of human nature. The reconstructive utopias envision one community usually in one specific and fortuitous location, and also use most if not all of the elements of the existing world and take into account the author's view of human nature. Science fiction is the only genre I can think of that often envisions a whole world in a new mold, but such visions are rarely utopian, because there would be no conflict and hence no action and potential resolution. (There are many dystopian science fiction novels such as Marge Peircy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.) Even if novels describe a utopian world they do not describe in detail how that world came to be, given present conditions.

290

Mumford, Story of Utopias, 242-3.

229

The reason utopian fiction and communities are important today is the same reason they were important to Lewis Mumford in the 1920s; given present conditions, the idea of trying to construct a better community or a better world is essential, even if it is only on paper. He wrote, "Utopia is another name for the unreal and the impossible," but also "it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us."291 I agree with Mumford's lifelong assertion that we must have dreams and ideals before we can change our reality. To say that we cannot change reality is to ignore the fact that reality has been changing around us ever since the planet began, and the only variable that we can really control is our own participation in that change. To refuse to participate is not just to abnegate control but to die a little inside. According to Holloway, the nineteenth century was the “golden age of community experiments,”292 spawning over two hundred, according to Fogarty.293 If so, then the twentieth century was the platinum age. There were several dozen such experiments founded before the 1960s and 70s, several thousand then, and most recently and identifiably more than a hundred cohousing communities. It is possible to quibble over whether they were all utopian or some were only some other kind of experiment, but I would argue that to experiment with how we live together is the essence of utopianism. Most importantly, using yourself, not others, as the guinea pig in the experiment is utopian. And any attempt to increase 291 292

Mumford, 1. Mumford, 18.

230

the level of cooperation among people in daily life is a utopian belief in, if not human perfectibility, at least improvement. Almost two hundred years ago, around 1820, our young nation was entering the industrial age, and ordinary life changed in major ways. More people began to work in larger-scale manufacturing, and the age of the small business or ship run by almost an extended family of workers and kin began to wane.294 Change was in the air, and thinkers and writers came up with schemes for new societies; all seemed possible. As Emerson wrote about the 1840s, “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform.”295 Not only did all seem possible, but also necessary: uprooted workers and the spiritually unsettled needed places to start over. Some tried living in experimental communities. Most people at the time were already used to living in groups larger than those we live in today, and had grown up in small towns where everyone knew everyone else. Living in utopian communities, however unconventional they were, was not a big change at least in that people were used to living in community and not alone. Privacy was a rarer commodity than it is today, in spite of today’s more populous world. The next wave of utopian communities, toward the end of the nineteenth century, was connected with progressivism, anarchism, and again, ideas for new societies, fueled by frequent panics, recessions and general monetary instability. 293

Fogarty, All Things New.

231

But the people joining these communities had mostly grown up privy to free public education and in nuclear families — although larger than today’s — in which business was no longer conducted in the home. For many, utopian community life was more of a change than it had been for antebellum communalists. But these new communities reflected their residents’ greater independence and desire for privacy; for example, Home was more a collection of individual houses and cooperating families than a commune; so was Hiawatha Village. Through the 1930s, some of the early reasons for joining utopian communities still motivated people, but they were even less likely to be smalltown blue-collar workers, and more likely to be educated idealists or anarchists — in other words, intellectually convinced of the benefits of cooperation or active in fighting the political and economic system. For example, Upton Sinclair lived at Helicon Hall in New Jersey; and Arden, Delaware, was founded by single-tax supporters who included socialist teacher and writer Scott Nearing.296 Nearing’s later book Living the Good Life influenced 1960s communalists to leave the cities and homestead in rural states like Maine and Vermont. Although members of this wave were perhaps less experienced in group living, they were at least as ideologically motivated to try.

294

See Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1986. 295 Quoted in Holloway, Heavens, 19. 296 Scott Nearing, Making of a Radical (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 39.

232

As mainstream U. S. society has evolved away from subsistence agriculture to a technological and industrial economy, and from a strongly religious foundation to a more secular humanist one, so have its dreams of utopia. Some people dislike these changes and design their dreams to separate from the mainstream as much as possible. That last phrase is critical, because given our complex economy, pervasive culture and diminished frontier, how separate can an intentional community be? Most of the 1960s communes failed because they wanted to be self-sufficient and could not be. Even the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites are fighting a losing battle against outside encroachment. And even those groups have never been utopian in the sense of wanting to provide an example for and to change the outside world. They have always wanted only to be left alone to pursue their own beliefs. But they violate their isolation by having economic interactions with the outside. So who were the communards of the latest wave in the 1960s and 70s? What were their family backgrounds and ideological frameworks? More than anyone else, Timothy Miller of the University of Kansas has done much in-depth follow-up work on this subject with his “Communes Project,” which has produced hundreds of interviews with commune ex-residents. What he has found so far relates to what is happening in the intentional community world, and in cohousing, today. The communes of the 1960s did not rise from the earth overnight like mushrooms. Their members, in most cases, came from intact nuclear families whose history often went back to the anarchist, socialist, 233

Communist, or peace and civil rights activist leanings of the thirties and forties. Whether these young rebels were aware of it or not, they had also been influenced by the beats, by alternative and protest music (which itself did not spring out of thin air), and against the conservative 1950s politics they grew up watching uneasily on television. Many writers have dismissed the supposed demise of communes by saying that the communalists simply got older and wiser, put on suits, and became yuppies. There is some truth to that, but what kind of yuppies? There is evidence that at least some of them became yuppies like Ralph Nader, who in spite of his beat-up old car and fairly ascetic lifestyle is admittedly far from poor. But he has spent his life continuing to effectively protest a corporate automotive culture that cares more about profit than safety, and he rejects ostentation, if not money itself. Or like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who co-founded Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream in Vermont and made a bundle, it is true, but who in the process donated 10 % of the company’s profits to environmental causes and paid their workers much more than the going rate.297 Or like Doug Tompkins, cofounder of Esprit, who left the worldwide clothing company in 1990 with millions. He founded the Foundation for Deep Ecology and spent more than ten million dollars on an 800,000-acre preserve he donated to Chile, where he now lives.298 Without these “yuppies” and their causes, we might not have nearly nationwide recycling

297 298

www.benjerry.com. www.deepecology.org.

234

programs, or a still-visible national environmental agenda, or lemon laws for cars. Many of these yuppies are buying into cohousing. Do many well-off, insular success stories — if that is one way to look at yuppies — spend three to five hours every other week in meetings for up to eight years because they want to practice what they preach about environmentalism and cooperation? No, but some do. I am not claiming that cohousing will change the world. I do not even know if it will last as long as Oneida, although it has in Denmark. But it demonstrates that the utopian spirit never quite disappeared, and that being utopian does not mean necessarily being doomed to repeat all the mistakes of past utopian communities. First, the communities that lasted were always selective about new members; so is cohousing. Second, some kind of governance structure is needed, and an egalitarian, not hierarchical, one seems to work better in the long run, except for religious communities. Third, the balance between intimacy and privacy in housing has gone through every possible combination and permutation, and cohousing’s combination of private residences with a large common house is one of the most successful and flexible arrangements. As for its value to the outside world, aside from whatever inspiration others get from knowing that experimentation continues, there are several possibilities. Cohousers build with the latest, which is sometimes also the oldest, green technology, and their success in this area might influence some commercial builders to be more environmentally minded. All cohousing projects are built to 235

be child-friendly; in a decade or two there will be a generation of cohousing children who as products of their environment might be different in some ways. Childcare on the site might be a good model for neighborhoods. And if cohousing adherents indeed find that in the long run their lives are better and richer for living together, perhaps they will continue to contribute some of that richness to the larger society, to contribute to the greater good. Is there something there we all can learn from? Is it a good that crosses over to the larger world, or does it expend itself on the community’s own inner life? The optimist in me says that this training in building community and learning to get along will permeate society; the pessimist says that in a few decades, as the original residents die off or go their separate ways, there will be a few hundred semi-gated communities scattered around the country full of renters who have no idea what cohousing was meant to be about. There are downsides, none of them too ominous. As I suggested earlier, cohousing projects may just become gated enclaves like the Sun City model, but for New Age types. As more old residents die off or move out, and are replaced by a younger generation with different needs, they may indeed just become another housing model. Oneida’s second generation was not happy with complex marriage and stirpiculture, because many of them wanted that forbidden “special love” of only one person, and their own children. That dissatisfaction more than Noyes’s decline caused Oneida’s breakup. Also, the problems of getting along with one group of people for years may prove to be too much for even the most 236

committed to the idea of cohousing. And encroaching development around cohousing complexes may change their planned relationships to the outside world, as often happens, rendering them unworkable. However, I find cohousing to be squarely within the utopian tradition via the 1960s and 70s intentional communities, not just a more suburban mainstream way of getting together but an expression of radical communalism. It has some roots in the cooperative movement in this country, and combines the best of the past with the possible best of the future. As a community model, it is something entirely new and seemingly positive that is solidly based on the past, a way of living together — for some, not all — that may avoid most of the mistakes of past group living attempts. Or at least it may be a transition to who knows what else — not a lull in utopianism at all and certainly not a death knell for utopianism but an alive and well and evolving alternative that is just slightly unlike every past alternative. Anthropologist Susan Love Brown wrote in 2002, “A successful revitalization movement, specifically an intentional community, helps people to learn through experience” by interacting with the larger society, not by trying to avoid it.299 It is possible that cohousing could tip the balance away from competition, violence, and war, or at least toward cooperation among neighbors, caring communities, and better places to live. As architecture professor Michael Benedikt has written, “After all, it is not beautiful cities per se that people want,

237

or nice houses and cars, but meaningful, interesting, sustainable, long, and pleasurable lives. Together.”300

299

Susan Love Brown, “Community as Cultural Critique,” in Intentional Communities, 174. Michael Benedikt, “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information,” lecture at “New Urbanism Symposium,” Princeton University, Oct. 17, 1992, 2. 300

238

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, Philip and Andrew McCulloch. Communes, Sociology and Society. London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Anderson, Olive M. Utopia in Upper Michigan. Marquette: Northern Michigan University, 1982. Andrews, Edward Deming. The People Called Shakers. New York: Dover Publications, 1963 edition. Angier, Bradford. How to Build Your Home in the Woods. New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1952. ———How to Stay Alive in the Woods. New York: Collier Books, 1971. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Virago Press, 1987. Barthel, Diane. Amana: From Pietist Sect to American Community. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Becker, Carl. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961 edition. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: New American Library, 1960. Benedikt, Michael. Book review of Paths, People, and Purposes, Philip Thiel. In ARCADE: The Journal for Architecture/Design in the Northwest, vol. XV, no. 4, Summer 1997. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981. Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. New York: Avon, 1978. Bestor, Arthur. Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

239

Blake, Peter J. No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Bouvard, Marguerite. The Intentional Community Movement: Building a New Moral World. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975. Brown, Susan Love, ed. Intentional Community: An Anthropological Perspective. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Butler, C. T., and Amy Rothstein. A Guide to Consensus. San Francisco: Food Not Bombs Publishing, 1987. Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. New York: New American Library, 1960. Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun. Translated with an introduction by D. J. Donno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Carden, Maren Lockwood. “Communes and Protest Movements in the U.S., 1960-1974: An Analysis of Intellectual Roots.” In Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives. Case, John and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Cavan, Ruth, and Das, Man Singh, eds. Communes, Historical and Contemporary. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979. Chmielewski, Wendy; Kern, Louis J.; Klee-Hartzell, Marlyn, eds. Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.

240

Cummings, Michael S. “On Being Communal and Political,” pp. 147-180 in Utopian Studies 1. Gorman Beauchamp, Kenneth Roemer, Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987. Curtis, Edith Roelker. A Season in Utopia: The Story of Brook Farm. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1961. Delano, Sterling F. The Harbinger and New England Transcendentalism. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983. Diamond, Stephen. What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm. New York: Delacorte Press, 1972. Directory of Intentional Communities: A Guide to Cooperative Living. Copublished by Fellowship for Intentional Community, Evansville Indiana and Communities Publications Cooperative, Rutledge, Missouri, 1992. Donnachie, Ian L. Historic New Lanark: The Dale and Owen Industrial Community Since 1785. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Emlen, Robert P. Shaker Village Views. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1987. Fairfield, Richard, ed. The Modern Utopian. San Francisco: Alternatives Foundation, 1972. Fellman, Michael. The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in Nineteenth Century American Utopianism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. Findhorn Community, The. Findhorn Garden. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Fitzgerald, Frances. Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. Fogarty, Robert S. All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ——— Special Love, Special Sex: An Oneida Community Diary. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Foster, Lawrence. Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. 241

French, David and Elena French. Working Communally: Patterns and Possibilities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975. Gaskin, Stephen. Hey Beatnik! Summertown, Tenn.: The Book Publishing Co., 1974. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. London: The Women’s Press, 1979. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987. Goodman, Paul and Percival. Communitas. New York: Random House, 1966. Grant, H. Robert. Spirit Fruit: A Gentle Utopia. Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1988. Guarneri, Carl. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in NineteenthCentury America. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. Hanson, Chris. The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community. Washington: Hartley & Marks, 1996. Hart, Robert A. De J. Ecosociety: A Historical Study of Ecological Man. Natry Publishing, India, 1984. Hawken, Paul. The Magic of Findhorn. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hayden, Dolores. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976. ———Redesigning the American Dream: the Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984. Hertzler, Joyce Oramel. The History of Utopian Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1926. Hine, Robert V. California’s Utopian Colonies. New York: Norton, 1966.

242

Hollender, Jeffrey. How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990. Hollis, Daniel W. ed. The ABC-CLIO World History Companion to Utopian Movements. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO Press, 1998. Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 16801880. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Houriet, Robert, Getting Back Together. New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, Inc. 1971. Howard, Jane. Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement. New York: Dell Publishing, 1970. Howells, William Dean. A Traveler From Altruria. New York: Sagamore Press, 1957. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Granada, 1977. ———Island. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1961. Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Jerome, Judson. Families of Eden. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974. Joyner, John P. “Whitehall Cooperative: Improvising the Good Life.” M.A. Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 1993. Kagan, Paul. New World Utopias: A Photographic History of the Search for Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1975. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1973. ———Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Kephart, William M. Extraordinary Groups: The Sociology of Unconventional Life-styles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. 243

Kesten, Seymour R. Utopian Episodes: Daily Life in Experimental Colonies Dedicated to Changing the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Kern, Ken. The Owner-Built Home. Auberry, Calif.: Homestead Press, 1972. Kinkade, Kathleen. A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973. Kolmerten, Carol A. Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990. Komar, Ingrid. Living the Dream: A Documentary Study of the Twin Oaks Community. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1983. Kraditor, Eileen. Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981. Langer, Richard W. Grow it! The Beginner’s Complete in-Harmony-With-Nature Small Farm Guide. New York: Avon Books, 1972. Lawson, Donna. Brothers and Sisters All Over This Land. New York: Praeger Books, 1972. Leaves of Twin Oaks. Louisa, Virginia: Twin Oaks, 1973 - 79. LeBlanc, Pamela. “Close-knit country town charms newcomers, old-timers”. Austin American Statesman, September 24, 2000, p. A1. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. LeWarne, Charles Pierce. Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915. Seattle: University of Washington Press,1994. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. McCamant, Katharine and Durrett, Charles. Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1994. 244

McLaughlin, Corinne and Davidson, Gordon. Builders of the Dawn, 1985. Shutesbury, Mass.: Sirius, 1986. Melnyk, George. The Search for Community: From Utopia to a Cooperative Society. Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1985. Melville, Keith. Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1972. Miller, Timothy. American Communes, 1860-1960: a Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990. ———Review of Fire, Salt, and Peace: Intentional Christian Communities Alive in North America by David Janzen. In Utopian Studies. Spring 1998, 285(1), Society for Utopian Studies. ———The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. ———The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America, vol. 1. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998. ———The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Vol. II. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. More, Thomas. Utopia. Northbrook, Ill: AHM Publishing Corp., 1949. Morris, William. News From Nowhere. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking Press, 1922. Muncy, Raymond Lee. Sex and Marriage in Nineteenth Century Utopian Communities in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Mungo, Ray, Total Loss Farm, 1970. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1970. Murname, Mary K. “Detached Desires: Austin Habitat for Humanity and the Creation of a Cohousing Community.” M.A. Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 1993. Nearing, Scott. The Making of a Radical. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

245

Nearing, Helen, and Scott Nearing. Living the Good Life. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Niman, Michael. People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1997. Nordhoff, Charles. The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and Observation. New York: Dover, 1966. Noyes, John Humphrey, History of American Socialisms. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Orwell, George. Animal Farm Oved, Yaacov. Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988. Owen, Robert. Life of Robert Owen. London: W. Pickering, 1993. Parker, Robert A. A Yankee Saint. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1935. Parrington, Michael. American Dreams. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964. Parton, Sara. Ruth Hall. Edited with an introduction by Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Peck, Robert N. “An Ex-Member’s Eye View of the Bruderhof Communities From 1948-1961,” pp. 111-122 in Utopian Studies 1. Gorman Beauchamp, Kenneth Roemer, Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Latham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Pitzer, Donald E., ed. America’s Communal Utopias, 1997. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Popenoe, Oliver and Chris. Seeds of Tomorrow: New Age Communities That Work. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

246

Robertson, Constance Noyes. Oneida Community, an Autobiography, 1851-1876. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981. Roszac, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Rothchild, John and Wolf, Susan Berns. Children of the Counterculture. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1976. Rubin, Jerry. Do it! Scenarios of the Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Schehr, Robert C. Dynamic Utopia: Establishing Intentional Communities as a New Social Movement. London: Bergin & Garvey, 1997. Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Sexton, Richard. Parallel Utopias: The Quest for Community. Printed in Hong Kong for Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995. Shklar, Judith. After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957. Shortney, Joan Ranson. How to Live on Nothing. New York: Pocket Books, 1968. Sington, Pamela Neville and David. Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern World. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1969. Spreitzer, Donna. “Living in My Thesis: Cohousing in Davis, California.” M.A. Thesis, School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, 1992. Available at www.cohousing.org/resources/library/ Spreitzer/thesis.html. Sterling, Raymond. Earth Sheltered Housing: Code, Zoning and Financing Issues. By the Underground Space Center, University of Minnesota, for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Washington, DC: 1980. 247

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Signet Classic, 1960. Veysey, Laurence. The Communal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Ward, J. T. editor. Popular Movements c. 1830-1850. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1976. Weinberg, Steven. “ 5 1/2 Utopias.” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2000, p. 107-114. Weiss, Michael. Living Together. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1974. Wright, Austin Tappan. Islandia. New York: Signet, 1958. Zablocki, Benjamin David. The Joyful Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Alienation and Charisma. New York: The Free Press, 1980. Zeigler, Deborah Ann. In Search of the Good Life: Sociology, Scientific Management, and Utopia. The University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. dissertation, 1996. Zicklin, Gilbert. Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

248

Other Publications, Websites and E-Lists [email protected] [email protected] www.ci.austin.tx.us/ www.goodenough.org www.homesteadheritage.com www.ic.org. www.religioustolerance.org/rajneesh Statistical Abstract of the U.S.: 2001, The National Data Book, 121st edition (U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington, DC, Library of Congress Card No. 4-18089), 48. American Heritage Dictionary, education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary Atlantic Monthly Austin American Statesman Austin Chronicle Baltimore Sun Better Homes and Gardens Boston Globe Choice Christian Science Monitor Denver Rocky Mountain News East Bay Express Los Angeles Times New York Times Phoenix Gazette Redbook Seattle Times St. Louis Post-Dispatch Talking Leaves Topeka Capitol-Journal USA Today Washington Post Wisconsin State Journal

249

VITA

Gale Robin Greenleaf was born on September 1, 1946, in Norwalk, Connecticut, to Ruth and Herschel Smith. She graduated from Milford High School in 1964 and attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, for a year. Gale married, moved to Texas, and became a professional musician, then an offset printer and volunteer editor for local publications. Gale returned to academia at a ripe age and graduated from New College of St. Edward’s University in Austin in August 1989. In 1991 she earned an M.A. in Mass Communication from the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin, then became a technical writer at National Instruments. She re-entered graduate school in American Studies in 1994, and has taught Technical Communication in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas for five years. Permanent address: 1714 Giles St., Austin, Texas 78722 This dissertation was typed by the author.

250