Housing Concept Aims To Bring Neighbors Close

You've unpacked the boxes, set up the television and even enjoyed your first warm meal in your new home. After a day or two you're outside raking leaves when a maroon minivan pulls up in the driveway a few feet away from yours. You wave to your new neighbor and perhaps enjoy a friendly but superficial chat. But before long you both retire into your respective abodes. Ah, suburban living.

Beatrix Hoffman, 40, of Naperville has seen this ritual play out in her neighborhood. But she has always wanted more since her family moved to the suburbs. "I was surprised at how isolated people are," the Northern Illinois University history professor said. "I've always wanted to recapture that feeling of community from college." She's not the only one. People around the country say they've found the answer to having anonymous neighbors and sidewalks full of strangers. They call it cohousing, a blend of traditional residential cooperatives, townhouse associations and even college dorms.

In cohousing, the future homeowners meet months and sometimes years before their move-in dates. The centerpiece of the neighborhood is a common house that everyone helps design. It acts as a big kitchen, community dining hall, children's play area and rec room all in one. And it's all done by committee. The residents, not just the developer's architects, have shared control.

"Cohousing potentially could revolutionize the way people live in neighborhoods," said Neshama Abraham, a resident of a cohousing community in Boulder, Colo. "It's more like the way people lived in old-fashioned villages." Her husband, Zev Paiss, is the founder of the National Cohousing Association of the United States and an expert on the cohousing trend. Together the couple is bringing the concept to a 2-acre site in eastern Aurora and assisting a growing group of Chicago-area residents, including Hoffman, in developing the suburbs' first cohousing community.

Cohousing originated in Denmark and dates to the 1960s. The concept eventually made its way to the United States in the 1980s. Today the cohousing association lists about 100 communities existing or forming in 33 states, including three in Chicago.

The Aurora development, called HomeTown Village, would be the first in the state outside Chicago. But by design, the community has a long way to go. Creating a cohousing neighborhood isn't as simple as packing boxes and signing on the dotted line at a real estate closing.

At HomeTown, the residents will have a small list of models and styles to choose from like at any typical suburban residential development. The prices are between $150,000 and $200,000. The cohousing neighborhood will include 28 to 30 homes, ranging from 1,100 to 1,500 square feet. You can pick your own color scheme, design your own kitchen. "That is one of the first questions we get," Beatrix said. "What about privacy?" Not a problem. Your home is yours. No one else's. You can sell it and move out whenever you want.

It's the common areas that are done by committee. Most cohousing developments use the common house, included in the cost of your home, to host community meals two to three times a week.

But the residents don't just get a stock clubhouse like those found at a modern apartment complex. Instead they get it custom-built. It could have an extra guest room or two, a child play room, a billiard room or a movie room. "Do we want to have a library? Do we want to have an office space?" Abraham said. "It's their ideal customized common house. A dark room, dance floor - whatever. You get to shape what you want. You learn who is into yoga and build a yoga room."

None of this happens overnight, and in Aurora that step is a few months off. So far five households have committed to the project. The core group already is representative of the diversity typically seen in a cohousing community. They have 25-year-old single woman, a young married couple without children, another couple with a son and one retired man. Ten more people are showing interest, said Sarah Brady of Naperville, one of the first to join the neighborhood.

The roots of HomeTown Village date back nearly 10 years when developer Perry Bigelow took an interest in the cohousing concept. When the 1,300-home HomeTown development was approved, it was specifically designed to accommodate a cohousing neighborhood built within its boundaries. The first attempt failed, Bigelow said, but this one is well on its way.

From the developer's perspective, Bigelow said, cohousing is much more work than the typical suburban development that puts several hundred homes up in one quick subdivision. Once the first buyer signs up, it will take the entire 30-home community at least two years to move in. The business isn't a money loser, but it does significantly add to the workload, one thing definitely keeping cohousing a little-known idea, he said. "I don't think it will be the major business for a developer of our size," he said. "But I think there is an opportunity for a niche or a boutique type of market, certainly. It is that in several of the Western states, in the Denver and Boulder areas and northern California."

Bigelow said he welcomes a chance to help other local developers bring cohousing to areas like Naperville and Elgin. But now the focus is on what could happen in Aurora. As she helps put HomeTown Village together, Sarah Brady, 24, of Naperville already sees the seeds of community growing. Take Brady's future neighbors: Beatrix Hoffman, her husband, Dana Yarak, and their 2-year-old son, Casey. "I know who they are, what they do a for a living and where Casey goes to day care," said Brady, who plans to move to HomeTown with her husband, Matthew. That's the sense of neighborhood she says she's looking forward to. "Your community is already there for you the day you move in," she said. All you have to do is unpack.

This is designed and built with the original group's wishes.

The first person/couple who sells and leaves disrupts the "balance". Then the bickering starts. Also, people's ideals change. If you want to see the larger version of this, look at gated communities built with Codes, Covenants, and Restrictions., CCR's. The obsessive unbusy older resident becomes the de facto dictator of the complex, no matter how small or large.

There is one about 10 miles from my property. A few years ago, one of the self appointed rules checkers decided that the tarps that cover wood piles for fireplaces and wood stoves should be brown instead of blue or green. Overnight, everyone had to change tarps at about 5000 houses. Needless to say, the local hardware stores-all 3 of them- didn't have that many brown tarps, and couldn't get them in fast enough. She wanted fines imposed because people weren't jumping to her new rules fast enough. It created lots of problems.

On the one hand, everyone preaches we should pay anything and let anyone into a school to create "diversity" and then these guys come along and want everyone to act like oreo cookies. Hard enough to have 2 adults using the same kitchen. Wouldn't want a large number of persons using my kitchen. Too personal.

UHHHHHHHHH . . .

At least a couple of points . . .

1) Is there something inherently contrary about so many of us of our values orientation?

2) TO THOSE WHO HAVE EARS TO HEAR . . . SUCH HOUSING SITUATIONS will turn out to be--where ordered, led of and enhanced by Lord God Almighty--life-saving and enormously used to propagate good. And other more conventional housing situations will be much more prone to being overran, assaulted etc. THERE IS GREAT SPIRITUAL POWER IN UNITY.

3) VALUES/PHILOSOPHICAL/SPIRITUAL Diversity in such housing situations will not work well and probably not at all. There should probably be some sort of workable at least mostly legal way to insure that sellers sell only to compatible folks--even if they have to suffer financial loss to do so.

4) THERE ARE ENORMOUS RICHES AND BENEFITS that don't show up on the bank statement from such living arrangements that work. But the people need to earnestly be of one heart, mind, spirit in sacrificial, servant-hearted, humble, 'preferring one another' ways. Greed, selfishness, pride etc. will be more corrosive than cancer in such contexts.

5) Our era is desperate for families that work. Gangs and even a lot of the counter culture--probably most of the counter culture and even environmental stuff is all intensified and solidified by the dynamics which make of such groups pseudo families.

The housing contexts described in this post are healthy ways to design in factors which facilitate being the Christians we OUGHT to be anyway but which we find less convenient and too troublesome or costly to do by the time we bridge the distance and other hassles to reach out to one another.

COMMUNITY, COMMUNING etc. are Christian words which Communism as a heretical divergence from Christianity has stolen. They rightfully belong demonstrated in glaringly wonderful terms by THE BODY OF CHRIST instead of so much of the opposite which we so rampantly seem so easily and persistently given to demonstrating.

The 'having all things in common' New Testament thing will become common place again before Christ returns--at least before He returns to set up His Kingdom emphatically and overtly.

Sadly, it will occur because of desperate necessity instead of aggressive, selfless outreaching charity. It would be more to our individual and local Body credit if we reached out to that level NOW instead of when we HAD to for selfish reasons.

Yes, evidently the poor we will have with us for at least the near term. And yes, there are freeloaders abounding all about. But St Paul said--you don't work, you don't eat. So, we have a standard to hold to at some point.

But we also are to demonstrate first and foremost Love for One another that the world would have a right to call us Christian and thereby be drawn to The Lord's Love. AND IF WE WANT GRACE, WE MUST SOW GRACE. If we need to be forgiven 70 X 7, we must be quick to extend such first.

Not every down and outer is a lazy layabout only selfishly living off of generous hearted folks. Actually, most in unfortunate straits REALLY DO WANT TO EARN THEIR OWN WAY for their own self-respect reasons.

Most have been conditioned very effectively into a state of hopelessness. Experimentally, we induce hopelessness in dogs by training them to get food by say turning clockwise in the left back quadrant of the cage. Then we extinguish that and insist that they turn counter-clockwise in the front right quadrant; then the front left etc.

And THEN, we make very clear that nothing the dog does will result in food. At some point the dog cowers in the corner regardless of the intensity of the electric shock. Most of the truly down and out have been through similar experiences and have ended up in an exceedingly hopeless state.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO JOIN THEM in such a state, then the route of sitting in lofty, self-righteous judgment toward them is a very effective and sometimes quicker than you might guess route to sit right by their side in the gutter. God is exceedingly skillful at giving the most sanctimonious, most financially rich and secure individuals a greased slide to the bottom of the heap.

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