Working Together - on Common House kitchen cabinets

When we can, our members cooperate on tasks on our work-site that not only reduce costs, but also give us the chance to put our own energy into the formation of Prairie Hill. An example of this is the three consecutive workdays focusing on kitchen cabinets for the common house.

We decided early in our planning to build the common house first, instead of waiting until all the residences were finished. We knew from the experience of other cohousing communities that waiting until the end sometimes results in no common house at all being built. The common house is a unifying factor in cohousing communities, and we have been committed to  prioritizing it, even though the homes would be less expensive without it. So our common house will be the second building to be completed, we hope in April.

We purchased the makings for kitchen cabinets from the IKEA store near Chicago, and one of our hard-working members has driven them in installments back to Iowa City when she's returning from visiting her daughter's family.

IKEA furniture comes dis-assembled, as you may know. So we needed to gain some skill quickly when we put together these many cabinets. We recruited some help from a friend who has done this before, for the first workday:

Following the instructions

Then we worked on our own for the next two sessions. Fortunately, we have a number of experienced woodworkers in our membership. So even folks like myself could find ways to learn and participate. Now our kitchen is full of cabinets waiting to be attached to the walls, and/or to have counters added on top.

It was hard work, sometimes frustrating when we couldn't get the instructions to work with the pieces we had. But we persevered (at least some of us!), and achieved a satisfying success. I know that whenever I work in the common house kitchen in the future, I will feel a strong bond with these sturdy cabinets. And working together created a stronger bond between us workers as well.

NF

Four Happy Residents - Our First!

Over the weekend, our first four residents at Prairie Hill moved into their new homes, in the first building to be completed, a four-apartment stacked flat. Here they are on their front porch:

From left to right: Donna Rupp and Buddy, Craig Mosher, Marcia Shaffer and Michele McNabb & Sadie.


Marcia's home is an 800 square foot unit upstairs. Here's a picture of her sunny bedroom:

Craig also lives upstairs, in a 645 square foot unit. Here's a shot of him in his sitting room (below):

Donna lives downstairs in 645 square feet. She is a person with many talents, and did much work on the floor and on other amenities in her home. Here's a shot of her bathroom vanity, a piece she rescued and refurbished to its present beautiful state:

And last but not least, here's a shot of Michele in her temporary kitchen in the downstairs 800 square foot apartment. She will eventually be moving into one of the townhouse units when it is finished in April or May. In the meantime she is staying in this unsold unit in the stacked flat building.

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

After a Long Hiatus, Back with the Blog!

I laid down the Prairie Hill blog many months ago for a variety of reasons. Our Facebook page had become so popular that it was thought there might no longer be need for the blog. However, a number of people have expressed a desire for the blog to come back. So here it is again! Certainly a blog is a format that provides the opportunity to expand on a topic, rather than a quick post. And I'm hoping that other members will write things to share here.

Here's a brief update on happenings at Prairie Hill. Our first four resident-members moved into their new homes this past weekend, after a long, long wait for construction to finish and especially for the city inspectors to finally sign off on certificates of occupancy. We trust that this process will gradually be shortened as we all learn in this ever-challenging development project! Another 4 buildings are under construction: the common house, the townhouses, and two duplexes. Here is a picture looking east from our land above the construction. The completed stacked flat is the red building on the left:

Here's a shot of the four townhouses (below) with a move-in estimate of late spring this year.

And to the left of the photo below is the common house, with the western-most townhouse unit on the right.

We'll have many more updates, photos and reports here. But let this be sufficient for now. More soon!

Not a "'60's Commune": Iowa City's New Co-Housing Community

See pictures and read the recent River to River interview with Del Holland about Prairie Hill:

http://iowapublicradio.org/post/not-60s-commune-iowa-citys-new-co-housing-community#stream/0

The Road Is Taking Shape!

Exciting to see the road in the finishing stages. This photo is looking southeast from up near where the commonhouse will be. Rather than a practical straight lane, this Prairie Hill lane has lovely curves.

A Bio about our Latest New Member - Craig Mosher

I grew up in Iowa City, went to Antioch College in Ohio to study chemistry (pre-med), then to Columbia in New York for a doctoral program in psychology and anti-war demonstrating. In the early 1970s I helped create a 200-person intentional community in an abandoned candy factory in San Francisco and developed a love for helping create community. Then for 25 years I directed social service agencies, taught social work, did low-income housing development with Habitat and others, and helped raise a family in eastern Iowa. Two of my four children and five grandkids live in Iowa City so I will have lots of time with them!

I like to think of myself as a resilient sustainable community developer. I retired after eleven years teaching social work at Luther College where I taught social policy, community organizing, and systems theory and took students to Des Moines to lobby the legislature, and to Scandinavia to study sustainability and the future that lies ahead—as climate change and a changing economy transform our world.

I see Prairie Hill as a remarkable opportunity to learn how a cohousing project like this can become a resilient, sustainable community, which is ecological and efficient in design and, more importantly, provides opportunities for the growth of a close-knit community where people build relationships and trust so that we care for each other, draw upon each other’s strengths and skills, and support each other’s needs. I’m excited to imagine gardening together, charging our shared all-electric cars with solar electricity, and caring for each other over the years.