research-l Mailing List: Re: Cohousing or not?

[Boyer, Robert (rboyer1]

Hi Chuck,

"Co-living" is a topic I've been interested in for the past few months. Although counting and labeling these types of communities is itself an ambitious undertaking, it appears to me that as many self-labeled "co-living" projects have popped up in the past three years as have co-housing developments in the past thirty. You can find a map of some of them here at coliving.org. There are obvious overlaps like space- and resource sharing, and both models embrace the importance of community and cooperation (at least on paper), but my observation is that a large portion of co-living projects are built to attract young, tech-savvy, college grads, and that few (if any) are built by future residents for the purpose of creating permanent communities. They are almost all rental units, and almost all built by developers, and they are marketed for young singles. There are a small number of large companies (including publicly traded developer, Regus) that are buying properties in high-rent markets like Brooklyn and San Francisco and turning them into techie dorms, and labeling them "co-living." With maybe one exception, no article discussing the phenomenon has articulated a connection to the existing movement for cohousing, ecovillages, or a 300-year old legacy of intentional communities in the United States.  I understand that there is debate among co-housing scholars about what makes a "true" co-housing development, but I think a common property of co-housing is that at least some of the residents own the development and/or plan on living there permanently. I've never heard of a co-housing development that is 100% rental.

Nevertheless, I think  co-living and co-housing are both responses to inadequate and socially fragmented housing options in the mainstream. They're both responses to a similar regime for the mass production of single-unit housing in the USA.

I'd be excited to dive deeper into this discussion with anyone, or perhaps write a paper on it. Let me know.

-Robert

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 2:59 PM, Chuck Maclane <chuck.maclane [at] gmail.com> wrote:

​  Friends, I submit the attached Wash Post account of a variation in housing structures that excludes the highly-valued architectural and member-development facets ​of cohousing while focusing on social/personal relationships--the latter being arguably the most valued cohousing characteristic by participants in our most recent survey study.

Do you think this community is on a dimension of cohousing or should be placed on a separate continuum?

Thanks, Chuck

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Robert Boyer

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography & Earth Sciences

UNC Charlotte

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