The number of cohousing communities around the world is expanding steadily. There's even a cohousing association here in the U.S. It promotes cohousing and serves as a central hub for people who want to plan, build, or live in a cohousing community. Denis Du Bois interviewed Craig Ragland, executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States, to get a broader view of cohousing trends.

Denis: What typifies a cohousing community?

Craig: It's a little bit hard to say what's typical and what's not. There's quite a bit of diversity in cohousing, depending on the specific group. Some are rural, some are urban, and some are suburban. What typifies it is that it's a type of collaborative housing where the residents participate in designing and operating their own neighborhood.

Denis: When and where did the idea of cohousing get its start?

Craig: The concept of cohousing was brought to the United States by a pair of architects, Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett. They brought it here from Denmark, where they discovered it in doing some architectural studies when they were in school. They wrote a book entitled Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves in the late eighties. The idea spread all over the United States. There are now about 100 built communities.

Denis: What's the attraction of cohousing here in America?

Craig: Part of what makes cohousing attractive is that it specifically attempts to create a model that is close enough to the mainstream. It can be financed by conventional bank financing, and frequently uses production housing to help control costs. It's a part of the broader, intentional communities movement, or can be seen as part of that. But it's close enough to the mainstream that it can actually happen more readily, and that appeals to a large number of Americans.

Denis: I've been researching cohousing communities, and you've told me about the community you live in, Songaia, North of Seattle. There are recurring themes of the not-so-big house, of energy efficiency, and of green building. Are these common considerations in cohousing communities?

Craig: Yes, very much so. There's a strong tendency and attraction to ideas of sustainability. I wouldn't say it's a universal thing -- there are certainly groups of people that have organized to develop pretty conventional large houses on large lots, using cohousing as an organizing principle. The vast majority of them are saying, we want more in the way of community shared resources and reducing some of our individual impact. It's very common to see lots of green values that are realized in a wide variety of ways within the different communities.

Songaia at Dusk

Denis: Are there developers or builders who specialize in cohousing? Is this field open to just any builder to build homes -- or whole communities?

Craig: I don't know that there are many builders that specialize in cohousing. There are a few developers, but very few. Many of them can be found on our cohousing website. We have a section called marketplace that has a Professional Directory. Currently it has about ten professionals on it. Typically, cohousing communities are self-developed. Those communities that work with professional developers typically take quite a bit less time than the ten years that we took.

This is both a movement and an emerging industry. There are cohousing architects listed in the Professionals Directory. There aren't as many developers, and we'd love to find more professional developers that are interested in this. From a developer's point of view, it is an interesting thing to have a number of the units pre-sold.

Denis: What about financing the construction? Do lenders get nervous when you mention cohousing?

Craig: It's not actually been much of a difficulty. They are often excited about the idea. It's easier to get building financing frequently to do the construction, because so many of the units are often pre-sold. In our case, we actually had all of our homes pre-purchased before we started our construction. We didn't have any difficulty finding a mortgage broker that would work with us. That does not seem to be a barrier very often. Since they're legally structured as condominiums, the communities typically are not built unless they come pretty close to the numbers all working in terms of market value.

Denis Du Bois writes the P-I's Energy Blog and consults with companies on bringing their energy innovations to market. He interviewed Craig Ragland in February, 2008. A podcast of the interview is available at Energy Priorities, along with an audio tour of a recently built cohousing community in New Hampshire.