Choose Thy Neighbors

Collective and cohousing projects share values and goals, but the former is an endangered species in the Bay Area. First published in the San Francisco Examiner, November 27, 2000 (not available online).

Architect and cohousing advocate Chuck Durrett. (Bart Nagel photo)

The housing board at Rainbow Grocery, a cooperative supermarket on Folsom Street in SoMa, flutters with plaintive ads of newly arrived or about-to-be-evicted vegans, single parents, Yoga devotees, dog owners, and art students seeking rooms in shared houses. The few flyers with spaces to fill have been ripped to shreds in the hunt for phone numbers. It's a monument to the overall lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area, to be sure, but the horrendous ratio of seekers to openings also points to a crisis in community.

With the rock-bottom rent for a San Francisco studio creeping above $1,000, and one-bedrooms almost twice that, few Bay Area residents can afford to live alone. More disturbing is that people who would actually prefer to live in group houses formed around a common vision are increasingly out of luck. Longstanding collectives like the 22-year-old Purple Rose on San Francisco's Fulton Street are fast disappearing, thanks to the vagaries of revolving tenancies, owner move-ins, and landlords who prefer upper-income professionals. Yet the basic forces behind such collectives -- sharing scarce resources and fighting urban isolation -- are driving the rise of a relatively new type of residential development in the Bay Area, called cohousing. Admirable for its environmental and community ethics, cohousing has one main drawback: with a few exceptions, only homebuyers who can afford market rates get to participate.

One good deed deserves another

"We're lucky to be in a good position, but in terms of collectives, the situation here is getting dire," says Aroza Simpson, a retired schoolteacher and 10-year resident of the Purple Rose.

Founded in 1978 as a collective, the Purple Rose is a sprawling ten-bedroom Victorian named for its lavender exterior, not the Woody Allen movie. Inside, it has the feel of the home of a big, extended family, rather than of the typical rooming house where only a few personal belongings might grudgingly be distributed. The pantry of the large kitchen in which residents rotate house cooking duties is crammed with jars of bulk goods, the refrigerator invisible beneath multiple magnetic poems. A piano sits against the wall of the dining room, next to a large cloth-covered table that can seat the whole household; across the way, a small living room with TV and VCR and an adjacent sun porch overlooks the organic garden in the back. The main hall serves as the shrine to the Purple Rose's cooperative mission: a chore board with the nine residents' names holds tags for who is responsible for cleaning the common areas, doing the bookkeeping, and other household tasks, while a bulletin board sports flyers for community events, notices of guests' arrivals (one bedroom is reserved for visitors), a "wish list" for home improvements and repairs, and composting instructions.

The luck that Simpson is referring to is the fact that the Purple Rose is "owned" by one current and one former resident. However, although their names are on the title, neither put up the initial money and thus do not consider themselves the house's landlords. The group is in the middle of a complicated process of trying to formalize a collective ownership structure, either as a nonprofit corporation or a land trust, whereby the house will stay off the speculative market.

"The only thing that holds it together is the vision," says Simpson. "I'm sure they'll give up the title, but in the meantime it's very scary. The legalities are not in keeping with the situation." She and the other residents fear that if something were to happen to one of the deed holders, the house could end up being sold out from under them at its current estimated market worth of about $700,000. (Others in the immediate neighborhood have gone for more than $1 million.)

That vision is a loose one of conserving resources and building community, shared by a diverse group of people ranging in age from late 20s to mid 70s. The paying occupations of Purple Rose residents include chef, mechanic, bicycle technician, housecleaner/student, librarian, and Web site editor. The house has been actively recycling since long before it was as convenient as simply dragging bins out to the curb, and the residents pride themselves on the fact that they rely on one washing machine, subscribe to one newspaper, and at the moment own about 10 bikes to one car. There's a "free stuff" closet where people can stash their cast-offs and rummage for new outfits, and a large basement workshop with communal tools for repairing bikes and building projects. The organic garden produces lots of herbs and lettuces, fertilized by a well-tended compost pile.

Shiny unhappy city

But even more important than "living lightly," as Keith, one of the Purple Rose's more radical members, who preferred not to use his last name, calls this conservationism, is the simple ethic of learning to live together -- and liking it. The decisionmaking method of consensus is key to collectives like the Purple Rose. In addition to group meals scheduled several times a week and just hanging out, members meet regularly to resolve disputes, outline plans for repairs, choose new members when there's a vacancy, and vote on new art for the common areas. Although meetings can run long, by using consensus the Purple Rose ensures that everyone has a voice in the decisions that affect their home.

"We're all such individualists, and learning how to interact with that and still hold your own is important," says Simpson. "You're not giving in to anyone, and you're not using your power over them. If something's bothering someone, they'll talk about it and can usually come to an agreement."

July Lewis, a student at City College and a veteran of several collectives before the Purple Rose, says that most people choose this housing arrangement as a way around the isolation that can arise from living in a big city. "It can seem easier to have your own place, your own car you can control, and just not deal with the people around you," she laments. "It feels good at first, but then it starts to feel hollow, because we need human interaction just like we need food and air and water." Adds Keith, "One of the big problems in cities, aside from drowning in our own waste, is alienation. Technology just contributes to this. Unavoidably we're getting more crowded, so we've got to learn to live and work together. It's not a solution to just ball yourself up in your studio/efficiency."

For living alone in the Bay Area is not just isolating, the Purple Rose residents contend, it forces people to spend more money and thus have to work harder -- leaving less time for artistic and volunteer pursuits. "One beautiful thing about having affordable rent is that you don't have to work all the time. And that's what so much of the cultural life of this city has been about historically: people doing what they love," says Keith. "When that tradition disappears, I'm afraid that people will realize too late that San Francisco has become a hollow place -- shiny on the outside, but empty at the heart."

This commitment to making communal living a reasonable financial proposition is formalized in the Purple Rose's bylaws, which state that "When the Mortgage is paid off, there will be no rent decreases, and rent shall stay stable, linked to inflation, minimum wage and market rates. Excess money shall be used to start other collective houses." In case future residents grumble, the bylaws remind them that "past members have contributed…countless hours of labor to transform this property from a condemned, vermin-infested hovel into the lovely home it is today.…Thus, it would be in keeping with both the principles of the Purple Rose and the intentions of the past members for the future members to use their fortunate position (of living in a house that is already paid for and has no money-grubbing landlord) to continue to fund affordable housing for others."

It's an admirable goal, because few such privately owned collectives remain in the Bay Area today, compared to their heyday in the 1970s. U.C. Berkeley students operate a network of cooperative houses, like a vegetarian haven and a gay and lesbian house, as do Stanford students, and there are scattered private homes like a Victorian on Valencia Street that architect Ken Norwood redesigned to accommodate 8 people in a contiguous group house. Norwood, the director of the Shared Living Resource Center and the coauthor (with Kathleen Smith) of Rebuilding Community in America: Housing for Ecological Living, Personal Empowerment, and the New Extended Family, says that such dwellings are usually bought and renovated quietly, to avoid the scrutiny of city planning departments that don't understand why such houses should be exempt from mandatory parking requirements and other high-density restrictions.

There are also places like the East-West House, a once-dilapidated five-story structure around the corner from the Purple Rose on Baker Street. The East-West house has been a collective since 1957: it was founded as a Zen Buddhism group during the Beat era, and legend has it that Jack Kerouac crashed there for a time.

Working with the now-defunct nonprofit Innovative Housing of Marin and residents, the architects Kathryn McCamant and Chuck Durrett performed a $1 million renovation of the four-story, earthquake-damaged building. Following the demise of the Innovating Housing group, into whose hands the title had been transferred, the ownership of the East-West house shifted to the Northern California Land Trust association. The 13 low-income residents administer the building themselves and are working on forming their own nonprofit collective that will take back the title. "Because of having to get grants for major repairs, it's become a lot more formalized and bureaucratic than when it was just a rag-tag bunch of people," says Gregg Jordan, a music instructor and 10-year resident of the East-West House. "But the group hadn't prepared financially for major repairs, and the building would have been condemned and us out on the street if we hadn't done it this way."

A little more privacy

Jordan says that "I've enjoyed this type of living a lot and really benefited from it over the years, but I may start looking around for an alternative soon." Now married to another resident of the East-West House, he admits that he is considering the need for more privacy than can be offered in a group house, even one with two common rooms.

Cohousing is similar to collective housing in spirit -- residents seek to minimize use of resources and maximize community -- but diverges in its basis in ownership. Although retrofit projects exist (turning an existing condo building or block of row houses into cohousing), usually a group of 6 to 30 families come together to look for a site with which to construct a new neighborhood, consisting of private homes and a "common house," where communal meals will be cooked and eaten, laundry facilities housed, and often childcare provided. Each dwelling has its own private kitchen (although smaller than the norm), and residents frequently outfit the common house with other amenities such as guest rooms, play areas, a workshop, and a library.

Cohousing is gaining in popularity across the United States, with California leading the nation in number of projects built and under construction -- 13 finished and another 13 in progress, according to the Cohousing Network association. Although the real estate market has prevented any from building in San Francisco to date, there are several remarkable examples such as Berkeley Cohousing, Swan's Market and the Temescal Project in Old Oakland, and Doyle Street in Emeryville. Most of them have been designed by the Cohousing Company, which has completed 40 projects around the country to date.

Home is where the hearth is

Durrett and McCamant themselves live at Doyle Street. In 1992 they led a team of residents that turned an old cement-mixing factory into a 0.33-acre complex of 12 loft-style units of varying sizes, a 2,000-square-foot common house with a communal living and dining area, workshop, children's playroom, storage, and a flowering L-shaped courtyard flanking the parking lot. The units' prices originally ranged from $150,000 to $240,000; a two-bedroom one is being advertised for sale at $315,000. It's a pleasant, well-designed place, where children in warpaint race outside the common house to throw rocks in the fountain as various adults call warnings from the terrace above. Like the Purple Rose, decisions are reached through consensus, and residents take turns cooking a communal dinner that others can choose to take advantage of (or not) several times a week. The cost of the dinners is subtracted from the cooks' monthly housing dues, which also pay for repairs and maintenance of things like the project's hot tub. And as at the Purple Rose, the founding goal was community and shared resources.

"Before we all moved in we had the mother of all garage sales," says Durrett. "Now we have one waffle iron for 12 families, which works out fine. And together we can afford to implement environmentally friendly things like solar panels." Doyle Street residents share a lot more than a waffle iron: those who go out of town open up their houses to other residents' guests, the eight children percolate freely among households, rented videos make the rounds of several televisions, and having an average of one car per family works fine when your neighbors let you borrow theirs.

"When we lived in Berkeley, if we parked two or three inches into someone's driveway, they would call the cops!" recalls Durrett. "That's the level of dialogue neighbors typically have."

Because of the time-consuming and costly nature of building a cohousing project, the movement's participants tend to be middle to upper income. However, Durrett points out that the Cohousing Company has built projects in part subsidized by state and Fannie Mae second mortgages for first-time and lower-income home buyers. There is also the Temescal Project in Oakland, in which eight families from a church congregation paid to develop nine dwellings. The ninth will be rented to a homeless person in the neighborhood for a few hundred dollars a month.

The motivation for cohousing is to create the sense of community idealized in small towns and urban neighborhoods of a few decades ago. "You could say there's a plurality of people who are overeducated and underemployed -- people with master's degrees who work 30 to 40 hours a week and thus have enough time to think about their neighborhoods in a way that people don't do much anymore," says Durrett. "The last time we were what you would call underemployed was in the 1950s, when moms stayed at home -- which made a big impact on the neighborhood. Now that they're not around to stitch the community together in a helpful way, people are getting together to fix that."

While there's a stereotype that cohousers are all veterans of communal living, it's not necessarily true, according to Durrett. "It's quite a bit different. I've lived in a few shared houses, and when I woke up on a Saturday morning, I didn't want to see anybody else's dishes, but I did want to leave mine," he laughs. "Completely irreconcilable, right? So cohousing is great, because I can have my own place and it can be a total mess, but I can also enjoy the common house, which we all agree to keep tidy. It works great."

Taking to the streets

"The country has gone too far in glamorizing the rugged individual," says Geoph Kozeny, a longtime community-living advocate. "People living in intentional communities are especially aware of that dynamic, and at times overcompensate, finding it hard to take time for themselves because doing good for the community -- for their friends -- is so compelling." A former coordinator for the database of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities -- an umbrella organization serving members of cohousing, collective, and communal developments -- Kozeny has been crisscrossing the country since 1988 working on a video documentary called Visions of Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture.

He is careful to point out that while the cohousing structure is new, "intentional communities" -- groups of idealists gathered around a shared religious or political vision -- have existed since the first monasteries. But along with Ken Norwood of the Shared Living Resource Center, Durrett, and the members of the Purple Rose, he thinks that it's time for city governments, lending institutions, and development groups to wake up to the necessity of lending their active support.

Cohousing and communal houses are aligned with the precepts of the architectural and planning movement known as New Urbanism, in which high-density, mixed-use development clusters around public transit, with lots of pedestrian-only areas and common green space. "People are basically gregarious animals," says Norwood, "Urban and suburban developments fed just by cars deprive people of opportunities for social interaction. You have to get in your car to do anything, which is alienating and insulating. There must be an alternative. Community-based housing and cohousing are at the top of the hierarchy of innovative ways to alleviating the abandonment and isolation of our cities."

For the members of the Purple Rose, the issue comes down to fostering community living all the way down the ownership chain. The group's first attempt at transferring title to the collective by way of a nonprofit corporation established for that purpose -- and to refinance in order to make more improvements like adding a solar energy system -- failed when the bank said a different structure would be necessary. Now the group is looking into land trusts like the East-West House's, whereby the property is taken off the speculative market and held in perpetuity by a nonprofit stewardship organization, but managed by the collective as a nonprofit. "We're round pegs in very square holes," says Purple Rose resident Marc Swan, chef of the gourmet vegetarian restaurant Valentine's in Noe Valley. "Banks want to resell mortgages in packages, and we don't fit into those packages. But at least we're not facing eviction."

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