Highlights from 2012 Cohousing Conference

Last week over 350 people convened in downtown Oakland to talk about living community.  The National Cohousing Conference drew over interest from across the US and into British Columbia as well as 6 international countries (South Africa, Japan, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom).

As a long time attendee of the conference, I have worn many hats over the years (architect, presenter, board member, forming community member) which has informed the sessions I’ve attended.  While I left the board in December, I found myself following my passions in bringing affordable housing to this movement and participating as a member of a forming group.  Here are the highlights.

Swans Market Cohousing

Berkeley, Temescal Creek, Pleasant Hill, Doyle Street

I started off the conference with my favorite preconference activity – a bus tour of 4 cohousing communities.  While I have been on many a bus tour, this one stood out in the variety of the physical structures.  The first community was Swan’s Market – an adaptive reuse of a historic market in downtown Oakland.  This is a very urban mixed use site covering an entire city block – other uses within the historic building include retail at the street level, a children’s art museum, and a separate affordable housing community.  The next was Pleasant Hill – a traditional cohousing community built from scratch.  The third community was Temescal Creek – a retrofit community in Oakland.  Two existing buildings were purchased and backyards connected to accommodate a community, over time adjacent homes were purchased and incorporated into the community.  And the final stop was Berkeley Cohousing – a retrofit community formed around a farmhouse and few older structures with some new construction.  This community was formed to address a need for affordable housing in Berkeley and is a limited equity condominium model.

Friday morning was the Roundtable on Affordable (Co)housing.  This was a session that I helped coordinate with Katie McCamant and Betsy Morris to bring together affordable housing developers, bankers, and lawyers to discuss the perceived barriers to adopting principles of cohousing into their affordable housing projects.  There was general support of the idea and key discussions about developing partnerships and using language that was familiar to the affordable housing funders.

Friday afternoon I gave a ½ day workshop on Designing the Cohousing Common House, sharing best practices and design principles.

That evening was a fabulous opening keynote address by John Robbins – son of ice cream mogul (Baskin & Robbins).  He shared personal story about giving up his father’s legacy and fortune to live and more authentic life – his heartfelt stories were filled with love and its transformative power.

Saturday was the first official day of the conference.  It started off with an address by Katie McCamant – conference chair, but also matriarch of American Cohousing – she and her husband Chuck Durrett are the architects who introduced the idea of cohousing to the United States in the late 1980’s.

The first session I attended was the one I was moderating on Partnerships with Community Land Trusts.  It was a packed room of people from across the country who wanted to learn how CLTs might help bring affordable units to their forming communities.  Presenters were Dev Goetschius (Founding Board member of the CLT Network and Executive Director of the Housing Land Trust of Sonoma County), Hank Obermayer (Board Member of Northern California Land Trust and founding member of Mariposa Grove Cohousing), and Crystal Fisher (Sales Manager  for Community Home Trust that has 7 homes at Pacifica Cohousing).

session on Community Land Trusts

In the afternoon, I attended another packed room session on affordable cohousing – a report from the task force that I helped to establish 2 years ago.  While some progress has been made on the front of the Association, an exciting development was the formation of a new non-profit organization called Partnerships for Affordable Cohousing.

The day concluded with the Dinner and Live Auction – a major fundraiser for the Cohousing Association of the US, who puts on the national conference.  It was a successful evening.  And a Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Katie and Chuck – so deserving!

Much later, after the after-party, about a dozen people convened in the hotel lobby bar to listen to a wonderful pianist amongst our ranks…in the usual cohousing fashion it turned into a memorable late night of songs, skits, dancing, spoken word and community.  This impromptu gathering was probably the highlight of the conference.

Sunday was a fabulous session with Laird Schaub on delegating work to committees and developing clear mandates for them to enable proposals to quickly be adopted by communities in their plenary sessions.  And I wasn’t able to attend, but heard that Janelle Orsi and Cynthia Hawley presented some great materials about legal aspects of cohousing.  They provided free copies of a Legal Toolkit – which was exactly what my community needed at this moment.

Sadly, it was announced earlier in the day that there would be no conference next year and the next one will take place in 2014.  While my report might sound like all work – there were many opportunities to catch up with friends from across the country and make new friends across the continents.  I was also proud to have Kimberly Scaia from my community – Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing attending the conference with me.  She represented us well and helped out as a volunteer to the Association.  We had the chance to share meals and late night talks. All of these conversations and memories will fuel my community fire until the conference convenes again in 2014.

Biking Bullfrogs: Bike Month in Review

Bike to Work month has come and gone, but it has made a lasting impression on the office. We regularly have more people biking to work now than ever before, and even hold the occasional bike maintenance lunch-time workshops, held by one of our founding principals, Mike Mariano.

We're already thinking about next year's Bike to Work month, and have several goals in mind:

1. 100% Commute Rate.
2. More office participation
3. Encourage more local offices to join, and join our Capitol Hill league.

And finally, here are some Biking Bullfrog team stats:

• Trips: 88
• Miles: 465.4
• Displaced CO2: 456lbs
• Total Calories Burned: 22,803 - That's 73.5 McDonald's Cheeseburgers!

The Capitol Hill Eco-District

Tuesday night at the Broadway Performance Hall at Seattle Central Community College, and before a crowd of almost 300, Capitol Hill Housing (CHH) rolled-out its Eco-District Vision for Capitol Hill. Prepared by GGLO architects and funded by the Bullitt Foundation, the Eco-District Report (http://capitolhillhousing.org/downloads/Capitol-Hill_EcoDistrict_Report_2012.pdf) outlines a broad agenda for achieving a more sustainable lifestyle on the Hill, and by extension, Seattle and the nation. Setting ambitious -- but achievable -- goals for carbon neutrality by 2050, the Report tracks current consumption of energy and water as well as many other metrics, and sets forth steps needed to hit the 2050 target. Much of what is called for, however, goes beyond tonnage of CO2 and gallons consumption of water. What the Report calls for is really a change in our social constructs and habits. This theme was echoed by the panel discussion that followed the Report's summary presentation. Panelists included (left to right in the below image):

• Llewellyn Wells, President of Living City Block
• Mike McGinn, Seattle's Mayor
• Dennis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation and founder fo Earth Day
• Naomi Cole, Eco-District Program Director, Portland Sustainability Institute
• Rebecca Saldana, Equitable TOD Program Director, Puget Sound Sage
• Ron Simms, former King County Executive and HUD Deputy Secretary (Moderator)

Supportive of the goals of the Eco-District, and presumably of the high-level summary given, the panelists engage in a lively discussion that amounted to a call for a grass-roots effort by Capitol Hill residents to implement the Reports directives. Even the former politicians on the panel noted that the actions needed to achieve a balanced, equitable, and just stewardship of the environment needs to come from the bottom up, and that in fact, politicians need our leadership and guidance to craft policy that will allow implementation of proposals such as those in the Report.

The Report and CHH's roll-out are well timed,  as they came out (supposedly) less than six month's from the date that Sound Transit says they will release the Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Capitol Hill station's TOD development sites. The sites, which figure prominently and are in fact the literal center of the Report's maps, present the best early opportunity for furthering the Report's goals as they will be the largest single assembly of adjacent private development parcels likely to hit the market for the foreseeable future, and are in fact large enough to realize many of the economies of scale required for implementing the Report's strategies. How the Eco-District Report figures into the development TOD parcels are yet to be seen, but there is no doubt that the vision of the Report and the best interests of the community will be served by developers who are responding to the RFP that have both a proposal and track record that testifies to an ability to make the TOD Capitol Hill's first significant contribution to our Eco-district goals.

The Biking Bullfrogs take Bike Month by storm.

May is Bike Month! Schemata has formed a team to compete in the commute-challenge, and is consistenly ranking among the top teams. Bike Month has been a great opportunity to share cycling knowledge amongst ourselves here in the office. Below, our resident bike-nut John Feit shares the finer points of handlebar geometry with Peggy Heim (with a scale, no-less).

Another new commuter in the office, James Underwood, has recently updated his 'trusty steed' for Seattle's tough hills. Check out that snazzy steel:

Bike on, Biking Bullfrogs!

Create Communities of Opportunity

  On March 23^rd, members of Schemata Workshop attended the Housing Development Consortium (HDC) 4^th Annual Luncheon; HDC is a professional association and advocate for providing affordable housing in King County. Schemata Workshop is a sponsor and member of HDC and we are advocates for their cause. At the luncheon we were fortunate enough to have Angela Glover Blackwell, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PolicyLink, as the keynote speaker. Her speech was so inspiring that we were compelled to take notes summarizing the key components to create communities of opportunity.

First, Angela described the St. Louis, MO community where she grew up and how the neighborhood children played together in the front yards and streets without fear of danger. A community where her mother anxiously watched, perched out on the front porch, as she made her way to the corner store for the first time. It was an economically diverse community of doctors and lawyers living next to the single parent receiving food stamps. It was a community that fostered opportunity.

However, not all of our society experienced the same upbringing as Angela and members of our society have children that run the risk of not succeeding to their full potential. As Angela said, in these economic times, this is the first time that children are not expected to have the same opportunities as their parents. In addition, she emphasized that one’s housing determines so much more than we think. It determines the type of education and healthcare one can receive; also it determines what types of jobs are available. Those who work on housing and housing policies are indirectly working on health, education and job policies as well.

After painting the picture of an excellent community and emphasizing the need and importance of successful housing, Angela began to identify the key components to create communities of opportunity.

Creating Communities of Opportunities – 5 steps

1. Place matters

• Creating a sense of place contributes to a sense identity for the community

2. Access to reliable transit

• Provides the opportunity to seek better jobs, health care, and education

3. Integrate income levels and promote racial diversity

• Provides richness of life and opportunity

4. Sustainability

• Provide all 3 components of sustainability – environmental, social, economic equity

5. Inclusion

• Integrate yourself in the community to understand their needs

The key components to create communities of opportunity are not new ideas individually, but we often forget that we need to take into account all components to provide successful housing. Angela ended her speech with the statement “Don’t be nostalgic for a time that never was.” However, I think we can use nostalgia to create goals for achieving communities of opportunity.