Palo Alto Online

A group of 15 people in East Palo Alto commit to shared living, values and community

On a small East Palo Alto street, just blocks from U.S. Highway 101, 15 people share three houses, a trailer, a diverse fruit and vegetable garden, meals and household tasks.

Like a tightly knit family, they shop for groceries together, make dinner for each other, watch each other's children and support each other.

These 15 people live in what is called an intentional community, where participants choose to "cohouse" together under common purposes: a certain lifestyle, as well as a commitment to each other and their shared space.

Dubbed Greenwave by one of the property's three owners, this East Palo Alto intentional community has many functions. It is one part cohousing community, one part green living, one part social contract, one part support system.

Diana Bloch, one of the founders of Greenwave, says the main appeal of cohousing is not only sharing resources, but also having a built-in social group.

"One of the attractions is the college-dorm atmosphere, where people sit around and casually discuss whatever comes up," she said. "It's also a simpler life. Part of the discussion involved is simplifying and using less space."

Cohousing's Northern American roots can be traced back to two California architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, discovering "bofoe llesskaber" in Denmark in the 1980s.

"Bofoe llesskaber," translated as living communities, became cohousing -- groups of people deciding to live together in an intentional community where activities such as cooking, cleaning, maintaining a garden and purchasing food are shared.

Bloch happened to attend the first seminar that McCamant and Durrett gave on cohousing in the United States, in the mid-1980s at the Friends Meeting House in Palo Alto.

"We then formed a group from the people who went to (the seminar) and various other interested folks around town and tried to figure out how to build a cohousing community, but it's very difficult to find property in this area," Bloch said.

After sharing a rented mansion on Waverley Street for several years with seven people, Bloch and two other residents, George Hunt and Joe Bamberg, found the East Palo Alto property.

"One of the attractions of East Palo Alto was multiculturalism and the lack of pretension," Bloch said.

Bloch, Hunt and Bamberg purchased the 1-acre property, which was previously a family farm with one house, in the early 1990s. They renovated what had become a dilapidated drug den into what Bloch says they call the "farm house."

A few years later, the three owners decided to expand, and they purchased a recycled house from Mountain View.

"They were going to tear it down and throw it in the dump, but they said we could have it for a dollar if we moved it," Bloch said. "But it turned out moving it involved cutting it in half, getting it over here in two pieces and then putting them back together on a new foundation. So that was a lot of work."

The work didn't stop there. In 2000, Greenwave received approval from the city Planning Department to build two more houses -- the main common area, a two-story house, and a third house in the back. The current occupants of the back house do not participate in the cohousing community.

For the new houses, they used manufactured housing to cut costs and stick to cohousing's foundational values.

"The combination of sweat equity, trying to keep the costs down and trying not to spend money hopefully would make the community more affordable to good people who wanted to spend their time relating rather than earning money," Bloch said.

They also acquired a trailer along the way, which is parked on a lot toward the front of the property that was originally designated for a fifth house.

Bloch transformed the space between the original house in the front, the trailer and the main house into an edible garden, with fava beans, citrus trees, oranges, plums, cherries, persimmons, mulberries and more.

"Around here it seems like if you really want a nice house, both people have to be working all the time and you don't have time to enjoy it," Bloch added. "So that was the goal: to keep it affordable enough that people didn't have to be working all the time to live here."

The current residents hold a wide range of jobs, from suicide hotline operator to teacher. Melissa Laughery, who lives in the original front house with her 4-year-old daughter, Bloch and a second family with a 6-month-old baby boy, works two jobs and odd hours to support herself and her daughter.

But she says that without Greenwave, she would not be able to live in the area.

"I'm a single mom. There's no way I could afford to live in an apartment in Palo Alto," she said. "Yet to me, being a parent is such an important thing to be doing with my life, so it's essential that I have this option for living."

All Greenwave residents are expected to pay rent -- $500 to $700 per room -- to the three owners and commit to three agreements.

The first agreement is to doing a weekly chore. In the kitchen of the main house (which Bloch designed herself so that two or three people could cook in it simultaneously), you can find resident's names on a large Dry Erase board written next to assigned household tasks such as cooking, garbage, shop, garden and laundry.

The second agreement? Attend a weekly house meeting.

"Hopefully people will communicate during that time; anything everyone needs to know," Bloch said. "The third (agreement) is to bring up any issues that are causing tension, for yourself or others, and be willing to help out in getting them resolved."

It doesn't sound too unlike any other family's home. And for retirees such as Bloch, whose son is grown and granddaughter lives in San Francisco, or single parents such as Laughery whose daughter's grandparents are far flung, Greenwave does function as a second family of sorts.

"As people are, more and more, like seeds scattering to the wind, you realize how important those support systems are and finding ways to cultivate that," Laughery said.

That support system ebbs and wanes every year as people move in and out of Greenwave. They get married, change jobs or life otherwise leads them in a different direction. But the original "bofoe llesskaber" principles remain, Laughery said.

"The importance of (Greenwave) is the importance of community and connection," she said.

Members of the Greenwave intentional community, as well as three guests who were visiting a family member, sit down to eat in the community's kitchen, where they eat once a week together.

Joe Bamberg, a founder of the Greenwave intentional community, checks on his tri-tip while barbecuing dinner for about 13 people on April 2, 2013. Residents in the community alternate cooking responsibilties (along with cleaning and gardening) and cook dinner for everyone once a week every Tuesday.

Cohousing project begins construction in Downtown Santa Cruz

After the recent murders of two Santa Cruz police officers, the builders and future members of Walnut Commons thought about moving their groundbreaking ceremony to a later date, but instead decided to acknowledge the tragedy and stick with their plans.

“It’s so important that we do proceed, because one of the things that is going to get us through this very difficult time is community, and this project is all about community,” Santa Cruz City Councilman Don Lane said at the groundbreaking.

With the recent approval of a loan from Santa Cruz County Bank, construction for the Walnut Commons Cohousing project, a unique residential complex located at the corner of Walnut Avenue and Center Street in Downtown Santa Cruz, begins this week. Project engineers hope to have the building completed by early 2014.

Walnut Commons will contain three stories with 19 independent units, as well as a 3,000 square-foot common area with a kitchen, dining room, entertainment center, and recreational space for all residents to use. Most of the units have been filled, but six remain.

Walnut Commons is part of the growing cohousing movement, a form of intentional community that relies on consensual decision making, which began in Denmark in the late 1960s. The concept was imported to America by people like Charles Durrett, who also helped with the design of Walnut Commons, in conjunction with the building’s future residents and Bob Hightower of Barry Swenson Builders.

“The elevators and mailboxes are typically put in the front of a building,” says Hightower, “but in Walnut Commons we moved them to the core, so that people walk by the common areas and see what activities are going on.”

Walnut Commons planners and residents aim for it to be more than just a building. For people like Walnut Commons member and author Cecile Andrews, it is a community of individuals devoted to a smaller environmental impact and a stronger sense of community.

“We will be each other’s entertainment,” says Andrews, whose upcoming book, “Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community, and the Common Good,” comes out later this month. ”The old-fashioned way of doing things is people getting together with their neighbors, talking, laughing, singing, and playing music. I envision this will be happening more at Walnut Commons.”

For more information visit walnutcommons.org.

The image of several families living together on the same plot of land, sharing facilities, childcare and costs, conjures up one of various ‘alternative lifestyles,’ from hippies through Hare Krishnas to the Kibbutzim of 1960s Israel.

But more and more British families are forming ‘co-housing’ groups for purely practical reasons, rather than for religious or ideological ones. As rents and property prices both rise, and the cost of living outstrips wages, many people now lack both the traditional support structure of the extended family, and the readies to hire cleaning and childcare staff. The solution?

This month the first residents moved into a purpose-built co-housing development, Lilac in Bramley, in west Leeds. The development consists of a mixture of houses and flats with a communal central house, all constructed from ‘ModCell,’ a prefabricated, modular straw-bale construction system.

Meanwhile another group is setting up in a 41-unit zero-carbon development called Forgebank, on the banks of the River Lune in Lancaster. The community there will share an orchard, as well as workshops and office space.

The development is three miles from Lancaster city centre and is close to a small village offering amenities. All Forgebank’s homes are built to the ‘Passivhaus’ specification, 90% more energy-efficient than the average home.

Jo Gooding, co-ordinator of the UK Co-housing Network, says, ‘there has been a stable number of about 14 co-housing groups in the UK for a number of years, but in the past two or three years a further 40 have begun forming.’

And it’s not likely that they’ll be motivated by environmental concerns; worries over the cost of heating traditional homes play a part, as Kate Tunstall, a Passivhaus owner, explains: ‘We were really concerned about fuel bills in our previous house,’ she says, ‘[and we’re] coming into retirement our fuel bills are going to increase; as retired people, our income is going to go down, and we wanted to address that.’

This pragmatism is typical of a Forgebank home; while they range from individuals in their 20s to retired couples by way of young families, what they have in common is that they have bought their own homes, and that they are happy to cook a monthly meal for over 50 people; pragmatism is tempered by an idealism that deliberately tries to transplant a version of the past sense of community into the modern age. But it’s far from a ‘commune’ in the sense we’re used to hearing the word.

Instead of voting on issues and letting majority rule hold sway, the co-house group is committed to finding solutions everyone can live with; more time-consuming, but more inclusive. With its eco-credentials and its mixture of pragmatism, environmentalism and practical collectivism, it’s no surprise to find that these groups are already popular in Scandinavia. But, as house prices continue to rise and traditional communities seem to fall by the wayside, the co-house could be the wave of the future here too.