Cozy Living Cohousing

When I get there the parking lot is nearly empty, it being a weekday when many of the residents are at work. It is very cold and no one is outside, yet walking along the pedestrian “street” I could picture people sitting on their front porches watching the kids run around without having to worry that they will be hit by a car or confronted by a stranger. Village seems like a very appropriate name for the place, the absence of regular streets and sidewalks creating a much more inviting atmosphere than that of your everyday housing development. There is a sign indicating where the common house will be and I imagine the finished product to be something like the main lodge of a resort. It almost seems as if the community is designed to make living here feel a little like being on vacation. 

Weatherly greets me at her front door and inside seated at her kitchen table with steaming cups of tea are two other Liberty Village residents, Beth Arnone and Emily Daniels. Weatherly invites me to take a seat and offers me some tea. 

 “It’s absolutely wonderful,” she says. “The idea of cohousing is that you shrink a little bit the size of your own personal house and then you have more community space. It’s a kind of development that really speaks to what a lot of people are looking for right now, which is small, safe neighborhoods where you know your neighbors. I wanna be with people who are working together, doing things together, and children, and having them around. I really like having all ages.” 

“You never feel alone,” Arnone says. “The amazing thing about our community is the depth of friendship and responsibility. We have a community space, a community room, where we have all our meals and we tend to have 20 to 25 people a meal and we have anywhere from 6 to 8 a month.” 

“Then we have smaller groups that get together,” Daniels says, “and sometimes there’ll be spur-of-the-moment of, ‘Oh yeah, I just made a lot of food, do you wanna come on over?’ And that kind of thing. The little sharing of resources, I like that a lot, that we share food and we share other things that we need. My husband and I have both lived communally when we were young adults and there were families with children and we liked that until we saw cohousing 13 or 14 years ago. We really liked it because it was a way to have your privacy and your own individual household, but to be connected with lots of other people. This is kind of a nice middle ground.” 

“We have a closeness in our neighborhood that is very precious and unique,” Weatherly says, “but it’s also a mix because you have your own private home. Some days when I’m in here and I’m just working all day, I can choose to be in here, and then if I wanna go out and find somebody to go walk around, I can do that. There’s a nice freedom in being able to balance and still keep your privacy. Another thing that’s really great about this community is that the houses are semi-custom, so in the same community we have houses that are small like this one, which is essentially two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room, and then houses with a kitchen, a living room, and five or six other rooms. So, they’re very flexible.” 

One of the things I am most curious about is if there is some kind of screening process involved in moving into a cohousing community, but the only criteria seems to be a desire to be a part of the community and a willingness to share part of your life with the other residents. 

“People don’t usually come into this kind of community to live unless they want that community part of it,” Daniels says. “There are definitely people who have come and looked and said, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but it’s not for me.’ We really encourage people to get to know us and so we really try to give them a realistic picture of what it’s like to live here before they come so that they don’t come in with unrealistic expectations.” 

“In the past we’ve had several families or individuals that are interested,” Beth says, “and they’ll hang around for two or three months. We’ll see them at the meetings, and they’ll be at all our meals, and then they decide it’s not for them and then they don’t come in.” 

“The first thing that people see that is the most different is that they can’t park right next to their house,” Weatherly says. “They’re like, ‘How am I gonna get by without doing that?’ But it works out very well. People are looking for safe, secure neighborhoods, and that is what this is. There are some people who know they don’t want to live in this kind of a community—they just want to go inside, close the door, and be by themselves. That’s fine, you know, then this is not for them.” 

“As far as someone selling their house,” Arnone says, “these are your own private homes, so you would just sell it, usually through a realtor. We can’t discriminate who buys houses, but we’re in the process of developing a members pathway to help newcomers incorporate into the community.” 

 The most challenging aspect of cohousing may be that all decisions regarding the community are made by consensus. While this can lead to some spirited debates, the ability to resolve these issues tends to draw the community closer together. 

“Consensus is a way you make your decisions where you listen and you honor and respect each other’s points of view even when they’re completely different,” Weatherly says. “You make a decision that everyone can live with. It might not be the thing that we each want the most, but it really does work when we listen to each other and we look at what we’re trying to solve. Now that’s for most decisions—there’s some decisions that it doesn’t work for. The secret to consensus is that you don’t sit around making all your decisions together all the time because that takes forever. That’s one of the complaints people have about consensus, so we’re learning to do a lot of delegation. We’re learning to say, ‘Okay, here’s this job, we want you to do it, we’ll let you do it within these boundaries,’ and then we let them go ahead and do it. It’s really a fascinating growth for us all. It’s wonderful to be able to really feel as though we’re working together, even when we’re struggling with something. So that’s the challenge of cohousing. We have things in our community where people get upset with each other, and we’re consciously working at how as a community we can work those out, and that to me is wonderful. That’s not present in a lot of places in our lives.” 

“Sometimes it’s a little challenging,” Daniels says, “because you’re getting to know people pretty well and some people have very different personalities or ways of dealing with things than you do. But it’s really nice though when there’s a bump and you make the bump better. But it does take time.” 

“The longer you’re here,” Arnone says, “the more skills you develop and the bumps seem to be worked out a little easier. It’s time-consuming and it’s a drag, but then the main thing is once you do work it out, you’re at a new level with this person. I’ve never lived anywhere or worked anywhere where there was such a goal to do that. Most people would stop and say, ‘Forget it, I don’t want to deal with you anymore,’ and then that would be the relationship. I never was aware of how much time it takes to build community because of those issues that come up that have to be dealt with. So the amount of time is a drag, but the reward is phenomenal.” 

According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, there are around 80 established cohousing communities and 40 more under construction. While the popularity of cohousing is rapidly increasing, most people in the U.S. are still unfamiliar with the concept. Even so, it has come a long way in the past decade and is gaining acceptance, especially now that misconceptions have faded significantly with its rise in popularity. 

“I think initially the Libertytown people were a little leery about what was going on out here,” Daniels says, “but as we got to know them, they see that we’re normal people that have families and singles and the groups and things. There’s actually been more openness there with people. Even 14 years ago you kind of had to go against that we’re all a bunch of hippie-commune people who have festivals to the sun and nude parties. There’s a lot of stuff that goes through people’s minds because it is a little different.” 

 “That was actually brought up more 14 years ago,” Weatherly says, “and now it’s not, which is good. We’ve gotten to know all the people along here and they didn’t object to us at all. They’ve been very supportive. Socially, people are beginning to realize that people are healthier when they live in neighborhoods that are strong and supportive and that’s what this is. The place where we haven’t yet made an impact is it hasn’t yet gotten to be accepted by government in a way that it can be supported by government. The time will come, I think, when the state government and local governments will realize that it’s to their benefit to have this kind of community, who will be able to help us out through the development process so that we can get more of these communities built.” 

One of the biggest challenges still facing Liberty Village is how the residents will adjust to its eventual doubling in size. With construction having been halted because of the pending sewer line, residents have become accustomed to having a community of 18 homes. 

“That’s one of the big changes this community is gonna have,” Arnone says, “because we haven’t continued to grow. It’s kind of stopped, and then it’s gonna have major growth. I think that some people are a little concerned about how we’re going to adjust to all these new people.” 

“My experience here has been,” Arnone says, “that there’s a group of people that are your best friends and you spend a lot of time with them and you do things outside the community together and stuff like that, and then there’s people that you are a little less closer with, and then there are people that you just don’t interact with hardly at all except at meetings and stuff. I would think that would continue when you do get a little bigger. The interesting thing is that in the past we’ve had major struggles we’ve gotten through and I think many of us have been shocked that we’ve gotten through them and we’re still together and we still like each other and still talk to each other. We still have a lot of challenges coming up with building new homes and bringing in new people, but I have no doubt that we’ll be fine. It’ll be work, but we’ll be fine. And then we’ll grow and get better.”