Avail. 1 July. One big bedroom and one small bedroom in share household of 20-something creatives (two females, one male). Big room, lots of light, okay for couple. Bond = one month’s rent. Split bills. No smoking. Vegetarian. Tiny permaculture-inspired garden. 3 km to uni and arts college. Close to train station. Text Wendy – 0356 894 352
There is an unsettled temporariness about shared rental housing, especially when joining various strangers in an established household for an indeterminate period and without much formality beyond defining what one will pay and general protocol associated with storing, preparing and eating food, having guests and noise. Most of us have had this experience, typically as a tertiary student, working away from home, or between more permanent living arrangements. While some report great group household experiences – including meeting a life-long friend or partner, or fun parties and conversations – joint households can be insecure, frustrating and lonely experiences, putting up with unkept rules and irritating habits.
When people hear that you live in collective living, experiences of joint households are often alluded to: What about conflicts? How do you share the housework? There is even greater suspicion when you admit that you have bought into such an arrangement, especially if you mention the term ‘intentional community’, often interpreted as ‘cult’.
In fact, ‘intentional’ relates to the aspirational nature of the ideals and purposes of a collective living arrangement, one that involves a level of commitment and clarity unseen in more casual joint households.1 Here, a transparent and responsible approach aims to shield householders from arbitrariness, impermanence and neurotic behaviour. Expectations are spelled out and agreed to, there are clear processes for resolving conflicts, and clearly drawn boundaries between personal and collective space and decisions – strong advances on conventional living with relatives where negative family cultures can be deeply entrenched and psychologically hazardous.
Co-owning a house
Many of the challenges found in more expansive and intensive forms of collective living are raised in a handbook by three middle-aged women who bought a house under a ‘tenancy in common’ arrangement in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and contentedly lived together in it for more than ten years. My House Our House: Living Far Better for Far Less in a Cooperative Household describes how Karen, Louise and Jean decided that this might be a good option, found their house, entered co-financing and legal co-ownership arrangements, and worked out which rooms were for personal space and for whom.
My House Our House spells out successful approaches for tolerance and flexibility, ‘drawing lines’ and interdependence more generally.
‘We’ve had more fun doing household tasks than we ever did before,’
they write. From the start, ‘if something needed doing, it got done ...
by someone’. Their legally binding cooperative household general partnership agreement defines their partnership and its term (‘until dissolved by mutual agreement’); details responsibilities related to mortgage, maintenance and operating expenses; outlines conditions of withdrawal, and options for the death of one of the partners; and summarises processes for addressing failures to fulfil obligations, and irresolvable differences more generally.2
In another example, media consultant Carmel Shute bought a large apartment with two others in an inner suburb of Melbourne (Victoria) when she was in her mid-30s, sharing it for 21 years with her co-owners and, when they were elsewhere, with tenants.3 She has described it as ‘one of the best decisions of my life’. Interestingly, the history of her apartment block, Summerland Mansions (Figure 5.1), dovetails with characteristics of the early history of cohousing in Denmark, which essentially started as serviced apartments.
Figure 5.1 Summerland Mansions, St Kilda (Melbourne, Australia) Source: Heritage Victoria
In the early 1920s, Summerland Mansions replaced a stately home built in the early 1850s on the first Crown Land sold in an inner suburb named after the purchaser’s schooner (St Kilda). Built for gentry – the rent was around double the basic wage at the time – Summerland Mansions was the first European-style apartment block built in an inner suburb now renowned for high-density apartment living. The front wall abutted the street, with shops on the ground floor and servants’ quarters at the back, with separate access. Each apartment was roomy (175–200sq m) with remarkable urban and seaside views, a screened porch, a glazed and fly-screened sleep-out and balcony. Residents only had kitchenettes because they were expected to dine downstairs in the public dining room cum restaurant, ‘a terribly progressive idea for the 1920s in Australia’.
The communally shared rooftop was for leisure and drying clothes.
However, by the early 1940s, Summerland Mansions featured in a Melbourne University student study of slum living conditions. Still, by the late 1980s – when Shute and her two co-owners bought their apartment – the building had been sensitively renovated even if left bereft of shared facilities and services. Over the next two decades, some of Shute’s co-owners sold their share to another person or arranged for a mutually agreed-on tenant as they moved for work or relationships.
The apartment was an attractive gathering place for political and creative meetings. St Kilda was perfectly located, with parks, the sea and proximity to Melbourne’s central business district (CBD) and local facilities.
These details on Summerland Mansions highlight widespread urban characteristics and trends that prompted the cohousing movement.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, singles had found affordable rental accommodation by informally sharing or submitting to management in boarding houses, serviced apartments or owners of houses who rented out one or two rooms. While broadly seen as
‘non-traditional’ (the increasingly nuclear family was the norm, or ideal, owner-occupier) sharing space, facilities or dining together was commonplace. Urban market forces impacted on such arrangements, with rents going up when house prices and demand was high. Yet living close to secure work and places to socialise was a big drawcard and sharing made this option more affordable.
These co-owning cases were not driven by environmental rationale but by their affordability, and various reasons associated with sociality and support. Still they had flow-on effects in terms of economising on space and other household resources. Much of Karen, Louise and Jean’s
chapter on moving in together centres on cutting all the ‘stuff’ from three households – including five vacuum cleaners and eight couches – into one co-owned space.
Sharing a ‘single-dwelling’ lot
Concerns to be more environmentally sustainable, increasingly unaffordable housing, reduced social housing and limited residential land have contributed to a rise in both secondary dwellings – aka accessory dwelling units (ADU), illegal in certain places, such as Toronto – and three-or-four dwelling developments where connectedness is celebrated along with privacy. This trend, characteristic of the twenty-first century, is another step towards cohousing.
Well before contemporary environmentalists and urban planners recognised the benefits of dual occupancy and infill developments for compact and sustainable cities, renowned United States (US) ecologist Howard T. Odum established an ADU alongside his house in Gainsville (Florida) for future use by his adult children or carers for him and his wife. Similarly seeking ‘resilience’, Odum’s daughter Mary and husband Dugan subsequently met building requirements for a dwelling of more than 2200sq ft (204sq m) on their 1.25acre lot by constructing a two-storey building for a household on each level.
Moreover, Mary and Dugan approached co-habitation along permaculture, adaptability and environmental principles. Although renting out the other floor, they intentionally developed ‘symbiosis’
between their households. Intergenerational households provide com-plementary caring services and supcom-plementary sharing opportunities, including eating together, passing on food, security, social networks and, of course, economic benefits in shared utility and water bills. One of the strongest reasons Mary gave for compact collective living was resisting pressures for economic growth built in by mortgage debts.4
Even though infill development is applauded in planning circles, and progressive cities have paid attention to planning and building regulations to permit the division of existing buildings into two dwellings or building again on initially single-dwelling sites, such proposals face many hurdles. Commercial construction sectors tend to divide into firms focusing on a building type, such as detached buildings in suburban estates or medium-rise apartment blocks. Supply dictates demand.
Legal and financial structures conform to commercial practices. Few
builders develop a name in niche markets, such as two to three dwellings co-located for easy co-habitation with both linkages and privacy taken into account. As a result, small multi-household developments for interested kin and friends are ‘under-catered for’ despite demographic changes in cities that make such developments sensible and in demand.5
Reviews of Sydney and the Australian state of New South Wales more generally suggest that approvals for multi-dwelling sites are more likely in suburbs than the inner city. Even so, careful design is necessary to account for the National Construction Code and state and local planning regulations, which cover sizes of building envelopes, proportions of lots used for buildings, requisite car spaces, distances of buildings from boundaries, limits on sizes of secondary dwellings, and prohibition of triple occupancy. McGee and Wynne (2015) suggest that municipal planners should create particular permits with limits associated with ‘a precinct-scale assessment of needs’, giving apartments first priority and second preference to what they refer to as ‘small-scale cohousing’ (really just a few collocated residences) over single dwellings on one title. They point out that simple subdivision producing two titles has led to perverse outcomes: inflating house prices and inappropriate, profit-driven, developments that do not deliver savings for either the environment, home buyers or tenants.6
A holistically successful example of the type of development proposed has centred on adding two dwellings to a quarter-acre (1011sq m) rural town block with a pre-established 1970s brick veneer. Initially, the new owner improved the sustainability of her ideally situated north-facing house in Castlemaine (Central Victoria) by fully insulating wall and roof cavities, adding double glazing, and solar electricity and hot water.
Through simple redesign involving a few walls, she maximised occupancy to three active residents. She established an edible front garden and, to collect rain off the roof, water tanks sheltered from the sun by the house.
The first addition, ‘done on a shoestring budget’ of A$70,000, was for the owner’s adult son. This 50sq m detached self-contained dwelling with a mezzanine bed space was constructed mainly from recycled and upcycled materials, with power, water and sewerage connected to the original house. Its cost was covered by subdividing the block further – for one of Australia’s first hyper-insulated, triple-glazed PassivHaus-accredited residential buildings. Airtight and ventilated through a healthy heat-recovery system, this 40sq m dwelling has been
designed for comfortable internal temperatures, rarely requiring extra heating or cooling.
This homely cluster now shares common use of a chicken pen, and driveway. Good neighbourliness is achieved by incidental contact, mutual support when required and maintaining the privacy of householders.
Not only is this development in accord with best-practice urban consol-idation but also incorporates sustainability features with affordability.7
Another example in Melbourne’s outer suburbs is a ‘micro’ farm – winner of neighbouring Darebin and Banyule Councils’ Sustainability Awards (2012) – where families and friends took down fences between their houses to grow a non-commercial sustainability hub: orchards, some fruit of which is preserved; goats whose milk is turned into yoghurt and cheese; vegetable gardens irrigated from roof-water-storage tanks;
egg-producing chooks and ducks; and bees for honey. Produce made on site has included beer, soap, bread, chocolate, tomato sauce and conserves.
Participants only work for money part-time so they can be rostered on activities at Hibi Farm, doing childcare, and preparing collective meals.
In one month in 2012 they produced 90kg of vegetables. Excess is shared locally with friends and family. In 2012, ‘the hood’ comprised five houses with various households – two couples and one child, a single adult and a couple, a couple with a baby, and two households with a couple and two children – and a network of involved friends in the immediate locale.8
Sharing homes, land and work
Having attended a Quaker cooperative farm school, and happily living at Pioneer Valley Cohousing Community in Amherst (Massachusetts) that she had co-founded, in mid-2012 Rebecca Reid and her husband Michael made a brave decision for a couple in their 60s. They and a younger family left cohousing for condominium ownership of a ‘two-family house with nine acres and two barns’ in Leverett (Massachusetts). It took 18 months for ‘kindred spirits’ (another young family) to purchase a small property over the road with whom they established a successful partnership to progress their farm in a permaculture direction.
Six adults and three children now live and work together. They share food and meals, respectfully maintain houses with open doors, perform caring services and optimise bulk buys. They are financially independent households but their farm is effectively a collective enterprise. They aim for collective sufficiency, self-provisioning as much as possible within
their intergenerational farm community, then bartering and sharing equipment, labour and materials with neighbouring farms and local businesses. In these ways they ‘hope to create a web of interconnections that will be resilient in what may be difficult times to come’.9
Another case shows the importance of demonstration projects of envi-ronmental sustainability as a way of life, rather than simply technologies and techniques that can be purchased and retrofitted to mainstream capitalist society. Aprovecho, near Cottage Grove (Oregon), is a residential community which runs a non-profit sustainability educational organisation from a 16-hectare property bought in 1981 and owned as a land trust. In 2016, they taught courses such as organic gardening and permaculture, appropriate technology (simple efficient technologies for home or farming work), ecoforestry, watershed restoration, bee-keeping, ecological stewardship, food preserving, natural building and green design. Their community education was open to all, offered within a gift economy. They offered small grants matched to an Oregonian’s personal savings to start a career based on Aprovecho’s sustainability principles.
Living where they train, Aprovecho attracted well-networked permanent residents, adding vibrancy to the Cottage Grove and South Willamette Valley communities, and maintaining strong relationships, including with local schools and two Oregon universities.10
In 2010, when Rosie Kirincic had been at Aprovecho for three years, sharing the space with several other trainers, she developed six guidelines to collective, consensus-based living (with examples), as follows. ‘Create shareable spaces’: Aprovecho trainers held meetings and shared some meals in an area below accommodation for course participants and some coworkers (an area regularly used as storage) and cooked together over summer in an outdoor kitchen. ‘Value privacy’: most full-timers had a personal cabin while those sharing space made sure they got private time by, and for, themselves. ‘Define your mission’: a clear vision helps distinguish priorities, values and clarifies differences. ‘Meet face-to-face’:
a dedicated weekly meeting to listen and decide. ‘Expect disagreements’:
non-violent communication techniques assist in processing and solving conflicts. ‘Choose new members wisely’: fresh enthusiasts can fizzle out fast leaving the collective with unfinished business.11
The growth of collective living
Greater access to universities encouraging youth from family homes, the rise of feminist and environmental movements, and a drift to
experimentation and non-conventional lifestyles in the late 1960s and 1970s, made the emergence of house sharing and other kinds of collective living more visible. Developing non-hierarchical cooperative governance, such households differed from conventional ones, just as intentional communities developed various formal forms of co-ownership of collective property.
The principles of such governance developed on a long history of popular resistance, mutual support and solidarity later embedded, say, in the Occupy movement, through consensual decision-making, sharing and free exchange, inclusiveness and commoning.12 This progressive political culture of collective living attracted many (and repelled others).
Even though formal legal models of collective ownership have developed, they flout certain accepted norms of capitalist societies, namely private property ownership and management.
cohousing
‘Cohousing’ is purposively co-located and connected neighbour-hoods of multiple households, each household with a private dwelling but sharing, with their neighbours, specific common spaces, typically a common kitchen and dining area; resources, such as laundries and gardens; and activities, such as preparing and eating meals collectively.
Cohousing developed in the late 1960s in Scandinavia, especially with the Danish movement of bofœllskab or ‘living communities’, the Swedish kollectivhaus and, a little later in the Netherlands, Centraal Wonen. Such models inspired projects in Northern Europe, such as Germany (nach-barschaftliches wohnen). During the late 1980s, cohousing emerged in North America and Australia, appearing a few years later in the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand and Japan.13 Cohousing settlements have formal, legal, community governance arrangements covering rules for entry and exit, shared access, maintenance, fees and other sets of mutual obligations and expectations. Many US projects were based on home ownership whereas, right from their beginnings, European projects tended to incorporate social-housing tenants.
Invisible scope of ‘cohousing’
Worldwide there are difficulties with collecting reliable data on cohousing and collective living more generally because national housing statistics
have not been ‘grainy’ enough, and policymakers not interested enough, to include them. Another problem with counting cases of collective living is lack of consistency in defining distinct types. For instance, certain cohousing projects in the UK Cohousing Network directory appear in the Confederation of Co-operative Housing directory of over 1000 projects in England and Wales with a ‘cooperative’ legal status. However, cooperative housing covers a large range of styles and types of housing and tenancy arrangements, such as student and social housing where residents exercise more control than in the past over the management, if not administration, of their housing block. However, the vast majority are not as intentional or communal as cohousing proper. Conversely, not all cohousing is formalised as a legal cooperative.
We know that, in the 2010s, around 1.5 per cent of Danish stock was cohousing – the highest national percentage.14 In contrast, just 20 established projects appeared in the online directory of the UK Cohousing Network in mid-2016, with 50 more listed as on the drawing board, demonstrating the upsurge of interest in cohousing this decade. The established-project list indicated diversity, many retrofitted self-contained units within a mansion or similar large building, along with the first UK new-build (Springhill Cohousing in Stroud), initiated in the early 2000s. The UK network defined cohousing loosely as a community comprised of 8–40 households, noting a recent trend away from privately owned cohousing to rental, social and affordable housing – such as the first cross-tenure project, Threshold Centre in Dorset – and even the option of collective ownership.15
Diggers and Dreamers Publishers have produced a range of reviews and directories of UK collective living over several decades, with an historical and radical emphasis, recently highlighting cohousing as a small and special type. In contrast, European cohousing researchers, such as the Chairman of Kollectivhus NU, Dick Urban Vestbro, tend to incorporate a range of collective living models into the term
Diggers and Dreamers Publishers have produced a range of reviews and directories of UK collective living over several decades, with an historical and radical emphasis, recently highlighting cohousing as a small and special type. In contrast, European cohousing researchers, such as the Chairman of Kollectivhus NU, Dick Urban Vestbro, tend to incorporate a range of collective living models into the term