Cohousing

The cohousing model

A cohousing community typically includes:

• Private homes — full single-family or apartment-style units with private kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, living areas; residents own or rent their units like in any other neighborhood
• A common house — a shared building with full kitchen and dining for community meals (typically 2-5 times per week), often also with workshops, laundry, guest rooms, library, children’s play space
• Shared outdoor spaces — common gardens, lawns, playgrounds, fire circles, sometimes farm or food-production areas
• Pedestrian-oriented design — cars typically parked at the perimeter; walking paths between homes encourage incidental encounter
• Cluster site planning — homes face inward toward common spaces, creating natural community-life corners
• Community management — residents collectively own the common facilities; decisions made by consensus or modified consensus

Origin

Cohousing emerged in 1970s Denmark from the bofællesskab (“living communities”) movement. Architect Jan Gudmand-Høyer’s 1968 article “The Missing Link Between Utopia and the Dated One-Family House” articulated the central design problem: how to combine the privacy and ownership of single-family homes with the community connection of older village or apartment forms. The first cohousing community, Sættedammen, was established outside Copenhagen in 1972.

Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant, American architects who studied the Danish movement in the early 1980s, brought the model to the U.S. with their book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (1988). The first U.S. cohousing community, Muir Commons in Davis, [[berkeley|California]], opened 1991. The form spread steadily through the 1990s and 2000s.

Variations

• New-build cohousing — purpose-built from scratch; design is typically resident-driven over multi-year planning period
• Retrofit cohousing — converting existing apartment buildings or housing clusters into cohousing
• Senior cohousing — communities for older adults, addressing aging-in-place and mutual support
• Multi-generational cohousing — explicitly mixing households of different ages
• Rural cohousing — typically combining cohousing structure with agricultural land, food production, sometimes ecovillage features

North American cohousing today

The Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US) lists 200+ established communities. New communities continue to form; the model has steadily proven its appeal even where adoption has been slower than advocates hoped.

Common reported benefits: reduced isolation (especially for seniors and single parents), shared child-care, lower per-household resource consumption, immediate community connection in increasingly atomized neighborhoods, easier access to common facilities (workshops, libraries, gardens).

Why this matters

Cohousing is among the most-replicable and most-accessible forms of [[intentional-community|intentional community]]. It works within mainstream property and zoning frameworks (private home ownership, conventional financing) while delivering the connection and shared infrastructure that conventional subdivisions lack. The form has reached the scale where it is no longer experimental — it is a working, replicable model that any community can adopt.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[intentional-community]]
• Shares approach with: [[gift-economy]]

Sources

• Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant (Habitat Press, 1988; Ten Speed Press updated edition 1994)
• Cohousing Association of the United States (cohousing.org)
• Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, Charles Durrett (New Society, 2011)

Rooted in life.