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1993-04-08
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SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page 44Looking Forward to the Past
As families change, so will the look of new communities. Is
this the suburb of the future? On Bainbridge Island, Washington,
30 families dwell in a five-acre pedestrian village where doors
are seldom locked, townspeople share cooking duties and even
the children have their own rule-making committee. Based on an
idea pioneered in Scandinavia, the Winslow CoHousing Group is
a kind of commune gone condo that tries to merge the best
elements of two very different styles of community life: the
efficiency and fellowship of a collective with the privacy and
equity of home ownership.
The Winslow group comprises a cluster of small homes
situated around a child-care center, recreation area and common
dining hall. Residents own their individual housing units,
ranging in price from $55,700 for a studio to $160,800 for a
four-bedroom duplex, each equipped with kitchen and bath. But
everything else is communal. Residents try to eat dinner
together in the dining hall five nights a week and brunch on
Sundays. Child-care duty rotates among the residents, with
several retired townspeople acting as part-time grandparents.
Ironically, what this ultramodern community seeks to
re-create is the small-town America of ages ago. "We are people
who are looking for some kind of community again," says
resident Stephen Zunes, a political scientist. The concept shows
signs of catching on. Two other CoHousing villages have been
built in California, two more are under construction, and 100
others are in the talking stages. "By the end of the century,
every major U.S. city will have a co-housing group," declares
Charles Durrett, the California architect who, with his wife,
coined the term.
Among its other plans, the Winslow group is looking forward
to a sort of test of community cooperation next spring: it aims
to plant a vegetable garden in which everyone will share in both
the labor and its produce. "We haven't had any personal schisms
yet," says Zunes. "So far, we're a big happy family."