Archive for the ‘News Articles’ Category
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
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City officials in Cleveland, Ohio hosted a workshop with cohousing architect Chuck Durrett to explore the possibility of cohousing in Cleveland. This is a great step for the aging industrial city that is also the home of a burgeoning ecovillage project. Most cohousing is initiated by future residents or more recently by professional cohousing developers, but this is the first I've heard of a major city working to promote cohousing and help coalesce a forming group. They even have economic incentives in place that could help a group get started.
Cleveland officials and Cleveland State University are hosting a workshop today about the cooperative lifestyle in hopes cohousing will be part of the city's future.
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The idea for today's seminar began with Cleveland city planner Kim Scott, who first heard about cohousing eight years ago. The idea sounded appealing, especially as the divorced mother of six struggled to juggle commitments and relocate her aging mother.
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The city already offers some incentives, including 15-year tax abatement and $1 vacant lots for new homes that might attract groups interested in cohousing. Federal grants also are available for green and affordable communities.
Read the article on Cohousing in Cleveland
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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Here's an interesting one from Investment News: a very successful financier who says "his best business lessons came from a commune".
Malon Wilkus now manages a $21 billion private-equity firm but he got his start at East Wind, an income sharing commune in southern Missouri.
Returning to the United States and college in 1974, he joined the East Wind commune in Missouri.
"I think my parents were distressed by that," Mr. Wilkus said ruefully. He spent the next nine years at the commune, where he made hammocks, sandals and nut butters that were sold to food co-ops and Pier 1 Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas.
"I learned most of what I know about business today from that experience," Mr. Wilkus said, explaining that he grew to understand the motivation of customers and investors.
In 1983, he left the commune for a job in marketing at the Calvert Group, an asset management firm in Bethesda, where he learned how to gather assets.
Three years later, Mr. Wilkus launched American Capital from the living room of his two-bedroom condo, which he shared with his wife, Susan, and their three children. He got a $75,000 loan from people he had known from his commune days and maxed out his credit cards for an additional $75,000.
Initially, American Capital focused on helping workers at small- and medium-sized companies acquire their employers by using employee stock ownership plans.
In 1997, he took American Capital public as a business development company, offering debt financing or taking equity stakes in buyout situations. Today the company boasts 700 employees with offices in 13 cities around the world.
"We built a private-equity firm that the average American can invest in," Mr. Wilkus said. "We've democratized private equity."
Its not often you hear stories of a former communard turned high-powered capitalist but he is surely not the only one (maybe just the only one willing to admit it).
Read the entire article
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Monday, June 2nd, 2008
Tina Nilsen-Hodges, a resident of Ecovillage at Ithaca who is also an Ithaca College lecturer, is leading an effort to create a charter school focused on sustainability. The alternative high school, New Roots School, would not be a project of the ecovillage but might hold some classes there and be involved with the organic farm and CSA located at the ecovillage.
At West Haven Farm at EcoVillage they are likely to work on the farm doing things like soil analysis. Produce from West Haven Farm will be part of the school's meal program, she said.
Nilsen-Hodges imagines that students could, for instance, restore wetlands, conduct climate-related agricultural research, bring solar panels to low-income neighborhoods and create small green business enterprises. She sees students becoming entrepreneurs and community leaders, she said.
Read the article in the Ithaca Journal about the sustainable charter school
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Sunday, June 1st, 2008
The Seattle P-I Reader's Blog has a great interview with Cohousing Association Executive Director Craig Ragland on the topic of what cohousing has to offer baby boomers.
Craig gives the following benefits that cohousing offers:
- It brings more meaning to my life. I share leadership of this community with 25 other adults, and we learn from each other and our 12 children constantly.
- It's fun. I'm not a big party person, but I get to enjoy parties here all the time.
- It conserves resources and preserves natural spaces... here, I live in a modest-sized home on 11 acres of property. My home is about 1,100 square feet, but I share a common house (about 4,000 square feet), a barn (about 6,000 square feet), a few other outbuildings, a huge organic garden, an orchard, a forest, and a meadow. We share five meals per week in our common house, which means neither my wife nor I spend our time cooking or cleaning as much as we did before moving into cohousing. Our homes are all clustered on about two acres of those 11 acres... this means that there is lots of open, green space -- you know, the part of the earth that produces oxygen and allows non-human life...to thrive.
Ragland says that boomers are looking for some specific features in their cohousing communities: WiFi, efficient systems including good process, and an adult- and child- firendly environment.
The article does touch on senior cohousing as well.
Read the article about cohousing for boomers
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Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Last week a Texas appeals court ruled that the state of Texas had acted inappropriately when it seized 468 children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in west Texas. That decision was upheld Thursday by the Texas supreme court. From the New York Times:
The court said the record did "not reflect any reasonable effort on the part of the department to ascertain if some measure short of removal and/or separation would have eliminated the risk."
It said that the evidence of danger to the children "was legally and factually insufficient" to justify the removal and that the lower court had "abused its discretion" in failing to return the children to the families.
From the Washington Post:
"Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse," the three-judge panel wrote, ". . . there is no evidence that this danger is 'immediate' or 'urgent' . . . with respect to every child in the community."
Of particular interest to other communities was the courts statement that the community did not constitute a single household:
The notion that the entire ranch community constitutes a "household" as contemplated by section 262.201 and justifies removing all children from the ranch community if there even is one incident of suspected child sexual abuse is contrary to the evidence. The Department's witnesses acknowledged that the ranch community was divided into separate family groups and separate households. While there was evidence that the living arrangements on the ranch are more communal than most typical neighborhoods, the evidence was not legally or factually sufficient to support a theory that the entire ranch community was a "household" under section 262.201.
The Mormon Community's families, as well as many child-welfare experts, say that the separation of the children from their families will likely have negative and long lasting effects. From the New York Times:
They say a growing body of research supports the contention of the mothers that forceful removal can have both significant short-term and long-lasting harm, particularly for younger children. Some studies have found that the wide-ranging effects include anxiety, extreme distrust of strangers and, in the future, higher rates of teenage pregnancy and juvenile incarceration.
Legal issues for the ranch are not over as the state will continue to investigate specific cases of abuse. Again the New York Times:
State and federal criminal investigations are under way and could still produce criminal charges.
"It's really unfortunate, because obviously there are some children who have been sexually abused," Ms. McCurley, a lawyer representing some of the children, said. "But this doesn't keep them from coming back and having another hearing. They could get their proof together, for example have a doctor come in and say this child is 13 years old and she has already given birth to another child, and the father of that child is 46 years old.
At this point it is unclear when the children will be returned to their families as the legal process has hit another snag:
Negotiations for the state's release of more than 460 children who were removed from a polygamist sect in April broke down Friday in a scene of chaos and bitterness in a courtroom in this West Texas city. Lawyers for the families said the judge overseeing the release lacked authority to impose restrictions on it, and the judge, in disagreement, ended the proceedings and walked out of the courtroom.
Articles cited:
Court Says Texas Illegally Seized Sect’s Children (New York Times)
Appeals Court Ruling
Court Rejects Seizure Of Tex. Sect's Children (Washington Post)
Sect Mothers Say Separation Endangers Children (New York Times)
Texas Loses Court Ruling Over Taking of Children (New York Times)
Deal to Return Children to Sect Breaks Down (New York Times)
Commentary:
Laird's Blog - Sanity Prevails
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Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Katie McCamant & Chuck Durrett won a Silver Award for Best of of Senior Living from the National Association of Home Builders on Tuesday according to various articles and a press release.
Nevada City architects, McCamant and Durrett's design for Silver Sage Village, a senior cohousing project in Boulder, Colorado, received the Silver Award for Best of Senior Living. Competing against hundreds of firms across America, the NAHB rated McCamant and Durrett's design as one of the country's best senior housing. Firm principal Charles Durrett was on hand to receive the award, "We are excited to see our ideas become working realities in communities shaped by residents, like Silver Sage."
Silver Sage Village cohousing is part of a trend towards less conventional solutions for aging with independence within communities, or as architect Charles Durrett so aptly puts it "the challenge of aging non-institutionally." Durrett coined the term cohousing - people buying homes in a community they plan and run together - for the type of communities he experienced as an architecture student in Denmark during the 1980's. America may be more ready than ever to consider cohousing's benefits, which include about 25% to 50% less driving, 75% less land used for housing, and at least 80% less energy used.
A recent article on McCamant and Durret also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days before the award was announced where Durret speaks to the issue of senior cohousing:
Two years ago my follow-up book, "Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living," came out. In research, I kept asking them, 'Why are you bothering with this? You're 60 or 70 years old.' I marveled at the answers. People talked about things like, 'I'm not going to just sit here in this house and be bored and lonely and curate my furniture. I want to have fun.'
This month, we're starting construction for a 30-unit senior cohousing project in Grass Valley. One of the reasons I like working with seniors is that they are so much more impatient. These seniors tell me all the time, 'Hey Chuck. I don't even buy green bananas anymore. Let's make this thing happen."
Read the press release.
Read the article on McCamant andd Durret in the Sand Francisco Chronicle.
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Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
The environmental news site, Grist, has a great article about how Cleveland is going green. The article highlights the Cleveland Ecovillage a "pedestrian-friendly neighborhood linked to mass transit".
The project is the brainchild of five local nonprofits, the city, the regional transit authority, private developers, and neighborhood residents. They aim to bring residents back to the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, and to serve as an example to other cities of how to redevelop the inner city in a green fashion.
Near the newly renovated West 65th Street rapid transit station, Cuyahoga Community Land Trust is in the process of building five two- and three-bedroom homes, between 1,226 and 1,350 square feet each, called the Green Cottages. They're designed to be LEED-certified and models of energy efficiency, with projected heating costs of just $36 a month thanks to energy-saving appliances and heavy insulation.
Because mixed-income housing is a key to sustainability, EcoVillage designers wanted to coax both lower- and upper-middle-class residents to return to the inner city. The cottages are surrounded by Craftsman-era homes, many of them carefully restored, painted the colors of Easter eggs and with wide front porches. Down the street, within walking distance to the rapid-transit station that links to downtown, are 20 1,600-square-foot EcoVillage townhouses constructed by GreenBuilt Homes, an eco-friendly Cleveland builder.
"We had a few folks who moved in from the suburbs, some who moved from within the local neighborhood, and some that came from other cities and other states," said Metcalf. At this point, the people behind EcoVillage feel pretty safe claiming the project a success.
The article goes on to describe a number of other ecological projects in and around Cleveland.
Read the Eco-city Cleveland article at Grist
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Saturday, May 17th, 2008
The local paper in Brooklyn, New York has an article on Brooklyn Cohousing's efforts to start the first community in the New York burroughs. The Brooklyn group plans to buy an apartment building in the recently this recently trendy part of the city, sharing meals and common spaces within a condominium arrangement.
The article follows the standard "they're not hippies" line with an emphasis on the inherent cost of New York City condo ownership with the headline, "Wanted: Roommates with money".
"We want more out of life. We want more community. We were lonely and felt too isolated," said Alex Marshall, who started planning the first co-housing dwelling in the city with his wife last summer.
Alas, the 1970s are dead. This will not be a pot-smoking, patchouli-filled, free-loving, anything-goes compound.
"Take a commune and a condo, put them in a blender and this is what you get," said Ben Watts, a likely resident of the building, which will probably be in Park Slope, Prospect Heights or Windsor Terrace.
The article goes on to get some quotes from members of true communes from New York's past and finishes with a mildly humorous comparison of co-housing and communism noting that in cohousing the main source of conlfict is "Hectic, impersonal modern life" whereas in communism it is "Unequal ownership of the means of production."
For the real trash, see the commentary on the article at nymag.com where their only context to comment on the cohousing group is based on TV and movies and they snidely quip, "Something about a bunch of adults living as roommates seems inherently pervy to us."
Read the article on Brooklyn Cohousing.
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Another cohousing community is not big news these days but this article in Delaware Online had an interesting twist, drawing the connection to Delaware's historical Arden Villages. The three villages of Arden, Ardentown, and Ardencroft were founded in the early 1900s based on Henry George's single-tax theory and were part of the Garden City Movement.
While the goals and theories behind the Arden Villages and cohousing are quite different they are both examples of movements to intentionally reshape our human settlements for a greater good. Both foster a sense of community and an attention to the ecological effects of our homes, neighborhoods, and cities.
The article focuses on Empty-Nest Cohousing and Concord VIllage which are both looking for land in Delaware.
Read the article on Cohousing and Arden Village in Delaware.Cohousing in Delaware Evokes Historical Arden Villages
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
The news coverage of the Texas fundamentalist Morman community that was raided by Texas authorities last month has dies down recently. This article in the Dallas Morning News gives a good picture of the raid's effect on the 700 person community, where only a few dozen remain to keep up the physical plant and manage the legal crisis.
Emptiness echoes off this polygamist community's once-lush lawns, now parched and brown.
And the schoolhouse sits frozen in time, its half-finished spelling tests and chalky blackboard lessons a reminder of the religious sect's absent children.
Standing amid Nike Air Jordan sneakers and orthopedic house shoes on the porch of one of the commune's few occupied homes, Kathryn Jessop offers a pained smile. She said she wishes she'd never taken for granted the sound of her grandchildren's voices as they traipsed across the lawn collecting wildflowers or recited their evening prayers."These children have been so happy here," said Mrs. Jessop, who was seized from her own childhood home 55 years ago in the infamous Short Creek, Ariz., raid. "To be taken away from your parents, from everything you know – I didn't think I'd see this again in my lifetime."
The fate of the community and the children still remains open and is in the hands of the courts at this point.
Read the article in the Dallas Morning News.
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