Choosing your neighbors first

Click photo to enlargeLooking to buy a house? Chances are you’ll call a local real-estate agent or look through the newspaper ads to see what’s on the market. Either you look for an existing house or you buy property and build one.

What about the neighborhood? The odds are you’ll check out the surrounding homes, inquire about the local schools, and research the restrictive covenants.

What about the neighbors themselves? If you’re like many buyers, it’s a roll of the dice. You move in and hope that you have something in common with the folks next door. If not, well, you can do your best to ignore them.

But advocates of cohousing take that familiar American ritual and turn it on its head: You choose your future neighbors before you build your community.

“It’s an idea about housing that’s based on forming a community first, an intentional community where people come together and come up with a common set of values and develop a decision-making process and some common goals for the actual physical design of the community,” says Park City cohousing advocate Darrell Finlayson. “All that happens first, and then they go out and find a site and develop it and build it. Which is kind of the opposite way that people normally go about finding a house.”

The concept isn’t new. It originated in Denmark and was introduced to the United States by architects Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant in the 1980s, according to cohousing.org, the website of the Cohousing Association of the United States. Today there are hundreds of cohousing communities around the world, including one in Salt Lake City Wasatch Commons that was established in the late 1990s.

But it’s new to Park City. If all goes according to plan, residents will be moving into Park City’s first cohousing project by the fall of 2013. The Park City Council has given city staffers the green light to negotiate with a local group, GreenPark Cohousing, for the sale of a city-owned parcel of ground on lower Park Avenue. Darrell Finlayson is the vice president of that group.

“One of the real appeals of cohousing for a lot of people for me, in part is the idea that the community is there first and the houses are almost incidental,” Finlayson says. “You want to have a nice roof over your head, you want to have a nice place to live, but really, the foundation of the community is the people, not the houses.”

The roots of GreenPark Cohousing

The local group traces its roots to a public meeting held at the Park City Library building in February 2011, says Jeff Werbelow, a partner (with architect Craig Elliott) in Elliott Workgroup. Looking for ways to build an affordable-housing project in Park City, Elliott and Werbelow invited Durrett and McCamant to that meeting to explain the cohousing concept.

Cohousing principles call for units to be built to promote interaction between neighbors. Windows face common areas. Some units have front porches. Pedestrian walkways weave between the units. There are open spaces where kids can play and families can picnic. Parking stalls are on the edge of the property. Facilities that you would find in a typical house such as a guest bedroom, a laundry room, or a workshop are located in a community space. That allows units to be smaller than the typical home, so they’re more affordable to build and cheaper to maintain.

“In our own home,” Werbelow says, “I’ve measured off the spaces that we actually live in as a family, that my family uses all the time, and it’s like 1,300 feet. It’s actually about 12 and change. And our house is way larger than that. We don’t even use the living room.”

About 40 people attended a follow-up meeting on cohousing in March 2011, Werbelow says. As the discussions became more specific in later meetings, the group distilled down to seven households that formed the GreenPark Cohousing Partnership in late summer 2011. All are local residents, work in the community, and are looking for ways to keep their roots in Park City.

“We’ve all worked in town for a long time, for most of our careers,” Werbelow says. “We just love this town, and it’s becoming harder and harder and harder for us to find places to live here.”

The distillation process involved identifying common values that all members wanted to see reflected in their new community. Group members expressed an interest in limiting their use of resources, in walking more and driving less, and in the construction of energy-efficient buildings.

At first Werbelow saw his role as the project manager. “But as time went by, Sara my wife and I, we decided, ‘Well, you know what. This is a really cool group of people that we’ve come to know over course of the last eight months. Why don’t we move in?’ So, last spring we decided, you know, we’re going to be part of this group.”

Werbelow says his two children were at first ambivalent about moving out of their current Silver Springs home until their dad pointed out that the Park Avenue property backs up on City Park, which comes with its own skateboard park, among other things.

Preliminary plans call for 10 cohousing units to be built on the east side of the property (the side bordering on the park). Proposed units range in size from one to three bedrooms and in price from about $200,000 to $270,000.

Incorporating historic homes

Occupying the west side of the property (which is made up of eight Old Town lots) are two historic homes at 1450 and 1460 Park Ave. Both homes appear on 1907 maps. One was the home of longtime resident C.D. Clegg who, according to his obituary, was in the mining business for 45 years and was the vice president of the Silver King Extension Mining Co.

The partnership’s goal is to use the two existing houses for common facilities such as guest accommodations, the laundry, and a community dining space.

“The goal is to restore (them),” Finlayson says. “That’s one of the city interests. They want to see those structures preserved, because they’re historic. They’re on the list. And that’s our goal too. And it’s definitely going to add an aesthetic value to the street, I think, because they’ll be really cool-looking houses once they are restored.”

Werbelow says his wife also has an interest in seeing the houses preserved. She’s the chairwoman of the Park City Historic Preservation Board.

The two homes have been vacant for several years. Werbelow says he doesn’t know yet how much work it will take to make them livable, but that the group is committed to preserving them “to the highest standard possible.”

Attracted by community concept

One of the seven “households” in the GreenPark partnership is Ethel Preston, a 10-year Park City resident who works as KPCW’s office manager.

“At the time I was living with my daughter and family, and I was looking for a something of my own,” Preston says. “I went to the first meeting and just kept going.”

She recalls being immediately attracted to the community aspect of cohousing that people know and interact with their neighbors. “That is the most important to me,” she says. “Several people (at the meetings) mentioned that on their street there aren’t even any full-time people.”

Preston also took time to visit other cohousing communities, including Wasatch Commons in Salt Lake City, which is made up of 27 units on 4.5 acres near the Jordan River. She saw that its community center included a large kitchen, a guest room, a laundry, a library, a small yoga room, and even a workshop with woodworking equipment.

“The idea is that you have all the amenities but you don’t each have to have one. So you don’t have to have 10 snowblowers.”

According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, the typical community has between 20 and 40 units. Finlayson says that about 10-12 units is the smallest number possible for a viable communit
y. Anything smaller and you don’t have enough people to handle the responsibilities. Those responsibilities may include jobs normally handled by the homeowners’ association in a typical condominium project.

“So that’s one of the other principles of cohousing,” he says. “It’s collaborative in the inception and design, but it’s also collaborative in the management. Our goal is to do as much of the community management (as possible) ourselves.”

With seven of the 10 Park Avenue units spoken for, GreenPark Cohousing is still looking for three more households to participate. You can find more information on the project, including mission and vision statements, on GreenPark’s Facebook page.