Brooklyn’s Large-Scale Communal Living Experiment
One big happy family: Maitri House in Takoma Park
I’m still not convinced there’s an actual growing trend of co-ops, intentional communities, co-housing buildings, and other arrangements that fall into the communal living category. But the articles certainly keep coming!
Over the summer, I wrote about Maitri House, a 20-person intentional community that moved into their Takoma Park house in 2008. Then, in early October, the New York Times wrote about burgeoning interest in intentional communities and growing numbers of Craigslist users looking for communal living groups.
Now, New York magazine has a lengthy story on a co-housing community that formed in Brooklyn in 2007. The article doesn’t say the exact number of members, but it says “the group is now at sixteen full-member households and seven provisionals. They could badly use about ten more and would love some from Manhattan.”
Mind you, the community does not live together yet. They’re looking for buildings to renovate. Here’s more on the vision:
In exchange for paying above-standard real-estate rates for one of 30 smaller-than-usual apartments (a 660-square-foot two-bedroom might cost about $500,000), the group’s members will share 11,000 square feet of common areas—including a “great room” and community kitchen, a children’s playroom and an “adults-only lounge,” four guest rooms for visitors, a courtyard, and a wine cellar.
The supersize amenities are all meant to encourage a socially porous lifestyle, with people dropping in and out of one another’s apartments; splitting maintenance and gardening tasks; attending weekly meals in the great room; and reading and chatting in chairs positioned outside their doors, which are envisioned to stay mostly open.
The community has already lost one prospective home in Fort Greene, and it looks like they may have lost another in Park Slope. This sale and renovation deal comes with a projected price tag of 16 million.
Image by Darrow Montgomery
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7:21 pm
Huh?
8:02 am
Thanks for writing about the New York magazine article on Brooklyn Cohousing (and communities in general).
As I commented over on the NY mag site, I’ve visited the group’s meetings and I’m impressed with their green vision. Don’t count ‘em out yet on the second site — having a friendly new owner in place may actually buy them time to get their financing in order, and result in a better deal than they could have gotten with the first one.
You noted that you’re “still not convinced there’s an actual growing trend of co-ops, intentional communities, co-housing buildings, and other arrangements that fall into the communal living category.”
I’ll leave it to the statisticians to define what constitutes “a growing trend,” but there are more than 120 established cohousing neighborhoods in the U.S. over the last two decades, and more than 100 under development, even in today’s challenging real estate market.
I’m on the board of Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), and it is seeing large increases in traffic on its directory searches, and many new listings, as you wrote about in your 10/1 blog post.
The best way to assess for yourself whether living in one of these “intentional neighborhoods” is right for you is to visit one: there are long-established communities in DC (Takoma Park area) and Silver Spring, as well as in the greater Dulles area. A forming group is working on a potential Falls Church project.
Your best local resource to learn more about all these is the strong regional group in the area, Mid-Atlantic Cohousing: http://www.MidAtlanticCohousing.org/
Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach
Planning for Sustainable Communities (Berkeley, CA)