Intentional Communities - A Project of the FIC
UsernamePassword

Posts Tagged ‘Chuck Durrett’

City of Cleveland Promotes Cohousing

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to the community buzz via email:

Enter your email:

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.

...

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.

...

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

 
Share this via Hugg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us Care2   Email This Post Email This Post
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

Related Posts

Cohousing Architects Win National Award

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.

 
Share this via Hugg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us Care2   Email This Post Email This Post
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

Related Posts