Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Building a Caring Community: Iowa City Cohousing

Imagine you are arriving home at the Iowa City Cohousing development. Your first stop is the mail boxes in the common house to pick up your mail. You run into two friends and exchange stories from your day. Then you stop in the community kitchen to chat with three other friends who are preparing spaghetti for the group, using tomatoes and salad fixings from the community garden, while kids run in and out. As you stop at your car to pick up your heavy cloth grocery bags another neighbor offers to help you carry them up the hill to your two-bedroom flat.

As you walk and chat you hear excited cries from the community playground and the park next door where kids are swinging, climbing, and playing tag. You are discussing ideas for the Community Life committee meeting that night to plan a community workday to plant some more prairie---to follow the community permaculture plan and avoid use of herbicides. You smile as you see the solar PV panels on all the roofs generating electricity to power the all-electric community, which uses no fossil fuels.

This scenario describes life at Iowa City Cohousing in a year or two when we have finished construction. I am excited to have just moved into my new home here at Prairie Hill. It is a one bedroom flat in a four-plex building dug back into the hillside for energy efficiency. So just what makes this cohousing?

Cohousing is a type of housing development where we are:

  • Designing and building the project ourselves. There is no developer. So we can design, build and manage it to meet our environmental, cooperative and community values. Our buildings and amenities are laid out so we naturally run into each other, building community every day. We will have thirty-six households in twelve LEED eligible buildings---duplexes, town homes and four-plexes---on a hilly, nearly eight-acre site near downtown and campus. Water retention features capture storm water runoff.
  • Seeking diverse, multi-generational families and individuals.
  • Balancing the privacy of individual homes with building a caring community where we cooperate and support each other.
  • Sharing the land, garden, wood shop and common house spaces. Sharing tools and equipment. And sharing the work in the gardens and kitchen, shoveling snow, child care and committee work.
  • Using alternative transportation as much as possible: biking, buses and walking.
  • Making decisions by a type of consensus called sociocracy.
We are excited to be creating a new community of fifty or sixty people, specifically designed to help us live sustainably and build lasting caring relationships with each other.

I believe cohousing can help satisfy the hunger for community in our society today---where radical individualism often keeps us isolated and competitive. And I believe that resilient sustainable communities are one way of planning and coping with the challenges of global climate change---as well as the many other social, economic and political problems facing our society.

Craig Mosher


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