On Saturday morning, we started our monthly meeting with people sharing Spring memories. Adrian and his family are new members, and Adrian compared how he felt this spring with the previous spring. "Life seems like less of a grind", he said. "It feels good to live in community". Chris was sitting next to him and restrained himself for a little bit, but finally had to comment, "Otherwise known as the Honeymoon period".
We all had a good laugh (including Adrian), because it was both true and not. It was true because Adrian had not yet run into something that disillusioned him about cohousing yet (and it seems to happen to all of us), but it was not true because we all need community, and yes, life is much better there.
Rob Sandelin once came at my invitation to talk to a bunch of environmentalists. Rob, if you don't know him, is one of the "burning souls" in the cohousing movement and has really helped push the movement forward. Rob started his talk with some questions. "How many of your neighborhood children do you know the names and approximate ages? Raise your hands. More than two? More than four? More than eight?". "If you needed to borrow a neighbor's car how many would be available to you? More than one? More than two? More than three?". "If you needed some one to babysit your kid while you handled some emergency how many neighbors would you fell comfortable asking? More than one? More than two? More than three?"
Some hands would go up for his questions, but would quickly go down as the numbers went up. Many people never raised their hands.
Rob went on. "OK, I'm going to talk for a bit about a radical experiment in housing -- don't worry we will be talking about the traditional model, cohousing, afterwards. But first I want to talk about single family housing. It is kind of new, it is kind of extreme, and I'm not so sure it is working out that well. Everyone chuckled because it is true. Cohousing is much closer to the traditional village model.
So when I first moved into cohousing, I had lots of intellectual reasons for why it was the right thing to do. But what surprised me was how right it felt emotionally. This is how we evolved and it just works better for us. It is not normal to live next to people you don't know and don't care about. I agree with Rob. Single family housing is a radical experiment (especially raising kids there), and I also am not so sure it is working out.