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- <text id=92TT2306>
- <title>
- Oct. 15, 1992: Looking Forward to the Past
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Oct. 15, 1992 Special Issue: Beyond the Year 2000
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000
- THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page 44
- Looking Forward to the Past
- </hdr><body>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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