How not to be alone? Cohousing is an answer for some people

The crisis started with a small thing: a bag of suction cups. Rachel Damgen’s four-year-old son wanted one. She said no.

That was a few years ago, in the middle of a pandemic, when it wasn’t uncommon for her to be home alone for 11 hours with her two young children. She struggled with isolation. The small obstacles seemed oversized.

“I ended up on the floor crying too,” Damgen recalled. “I’m holding both of my kids and I’m like, ‘Man, this is impossible.'”

It was a turning point. With their extended families far away in other states, she and her husband, Chris Damgen, began to wonder if there was a way to reconfigure their lives to maximize their support and community.

The answer they found was cohabitation.

Today, the Damgens live in a 30-unit planned community called Daybreak Cohousing in Portland, Oregon. The couple say the decision was a game-changer, both for their own mental health and that of the entire family.

“We wouldn’t have had a third child if we hadn’t been here,” says Rachel Damgen. Their daughter, Caroline, is now one year old. “If we hadn’t felt so much better about the way our lives worked, if we didn’t know that we had the ability to ask a neighbor for help and they would come.”

There are nearly 200 of these cohousing communities across the country – according to The Cohabitation association – designed to facilitate community through shared resources and common spaces. Members admit that living close to their neighbors comes with many compromises, including having to deal with a shared chore list and mutual financial arrangements. But many also say they’ve found a way to overcome the loneliness and isolation that afflict so many Americans — especially today. parents.

Neighbors, not necessarily best friends

The ease with which this community engages was demonstrated recently, as neighbors, representing all generations, dropped in and out of conversation and chatted with children in the community’s shared courtyard, under a towering maple tree. Rachel Damgen’s two older sons played ball with a neighbor while the adults chatted. Another neighbor passed by and offered the children to pet his dog.

Residents here describe these relationships as a sort of third category: not family, not necessarily best friends.

“I think the closest comparison I can make is to a college dorm,” Chris Damgen says. “But this time there’s a wall between you, and we’re all adults, it seems.”

When it comes to parenting specifically, Chris Damgen describes a judgment-free camaraderie that he doesn’t feel in other shared spaces in American culture. “There’s anxiety, there’s frustration,” he says, but fundamentally there’s a sense of struggle together. “This goes a long way to combating any feelings of loneliness.”

Deana Camp, 73, has lived here for more than a decade. Camp lost her husband a few years ago, and while she misses him “desperately,” she says, she is not alone. If she didn’t live here, Camp said, she “wouldn’t be the same person at all.”

“Deana is one of the most outgoing people I know,” says Rachel Damgen.

“I’m pretty damn social,” Deana admits with a laugh. “I bake cakes for almost every occasion.”

An idea imported from Denmark

Cohousing has gained ground in recent decades. Architect Katie McCamant – considered one of the founding members of the cohousing movement – ​​describes importing the idea in the early 1980s from Copenhagen after studying housing in Denmark. She was planning living arrangements for her own young family. “I just thought, ‘Well, that makes perfect sense,’” McCamant says. Upon returning to Berkeley, California, she began working on plans to design such a community in the United States.

After living and defending cohabitation for decades, McCamant now leads a consulting company helping others design and build cohousing communities. The barrier to entry for building a public housing complex can be high, as this type of new construction is subject to the same market dynamics as any new building. “We pay the same costs as any real estate developer,” McCamant says. Finding builders to work on these unconventional housing projects can be difficult. Planning and implementing cohousing communities can take years. Some fail.

Governance takes work

Among the biggest tradeoffs cited by cohousing residents is time spent on governance. Typically, communities resort to consensus decision-making, a process that some say can be costly. Rachel Damgen and Deana Camp say there are too many committees to count. “Processes, facilities, project management,” Damgen points to his fingers. “Security, facilitation, management.” Daybreak Cohousing residents are expected to serve on at least two of these committees and also contribute to shared tasks like cleaning common areas and yard work. Cohabitation tasks can take hours each week.

Much like most condominium associations, fees are typically collected monthly in most cohousing communities and decisions are made together on how to spend the shared funds on things like renovations or improvements in common areas . According to Chris Damgen, this process can also be tedious. “You get to know them, their quirks, their mannerisms, their emotions,” he says of his neighbors. “What makes them brilliant people and what makes them maybe less than brilliant people, in some cases.”

For many, there are also space sacrifices. The Damgen family of five lives in a two-bedroom apartment, approximately 900 square feet. Her two older boys share a room; the baby sleeps in his parents’ room. The family has no plans to move. “Now where the baby is going, no idea,” Rachel Damgen says with a laugh, “a hammock was offered as an option.”

Rachel Damgen says she doesn’t question these compromises. She remembers a recent day when one of her children was sick and taking a nap. She had to get the other one. Waking up a sleeping child who isn’t feeling well and dragging them off to pick up another child could be an ordeal. These kinds of minor but daily emotional upheavals, she says, were exactly the kinds of things that exhausted her in her previous lifestyle.

But that day, it took her five minutes to find someone to sit at her house for a few minutes while she ran out the door. Before living together, she often had the problem of “having to be in two places at the same time”.

It’s one of the many things she doesn’t care much about anymore.

“It’s not uncommon for me to have those moments that hit you right in the heart,” she says, “where my kids will be downstairs kicking a soccer ball with a neighbor and I go out to watch and – you just have to, like, almost pinch yourself.”

Copyright 2024 NPR