CoHousing-What is Community?
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The Vision Community and CoHousing HMC’s Mission Statement includes: To Partner, To Serve, To Design and To Enrich. What is CoHousing? CoHousing is a way for individual and families of all generations to come together, plan an affordable and inclusive community, and live better by sharing more. Housing is created with the design input of the residents, according to common goals such as sustainability, community, and simply living well. It includes individual homes supplemented by shared facilities and common areas. A CoHousing community lends itself to our Mission Statement. In CoHousing, you PARTNER, it is a solution to many problems caused by busy, modern life and can be a great platform for communing with and caring for each other and with that you SERVE. It’s an impactful DESIGN solution, combating the alienation and isolation many experience today by recreating the neighborly support of the past. Through visiting a CoHousing community, in Oceano, CA, we have witnessed firsthand the lives of those involved are being greatly ENRICHed.
Our Story In our two person team, one of us is close to retirement, looking for a lifestyle that offers community. The other is a Widow approximately 12 years away from retirement, currently living alone and seeking a deeper connection with others. We’ve been reminded that when it comes to quality of life, relationships matter more than just about anything else. If selected, we each feel that we can contribute and share an experience that will further expand the community and culture of HMC. We will be living within a shared community, participating in various social activities, understanding how problems are solved, and learning how to creatively incorporate different personalities, cultures, ages and ideologies into everyday life.
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CoHousing What is it? Common Characteristics Relationships:
Neighbors commit to being part of a community for everyone’s mutual benefit. CoHousing cultivates a culture of sharing and caring. Design features and neighborhood size (typically 20-40 homes) promote frequent interaction and close relationships.
Privacy and Community
CoHousing neighborhoods are designed for privacy as well as community. Residents balance privacy and community by choosing their own level of engagement.
Participation
Decision making is participatory and often based on consensus. Self-management empowers residents, builds community, and saves money.
Shared Values
CoHousing communities support residents in actualizing shared values. CoHousing communities typically adopt green approaches to living.
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Spaces within a living environment need to catalyze certain activities, perform certain tasks, and enable the inhabitant to do so. Within the wide range of potential personal and social actions, we would investigate how the above 9 facets are incorporated in the different spatial situations and how their relationships and priorities change depending on living-density. By visiting and perhaps being able to immerse ourselves into a CoHousing community it will help us consider what we need, how we act, and how the spaces we live in can foster positive experiences. By examining where and how those spaces and activities overlap, we're uncovering great, efficient living. CoHousing is a place where neighbors can sit down and share meals several times a week, where children can roam freely from home to home, and where grown-ups can hang out in a communal living room. They plan, in short, to create a village within a single development.
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Project Timeline Where we're going? We would like to visit Washington DC, Massachusetts & New York
Takoma Village CoHousing, Washington, DC
Takoma Village is the first urban cohousing community in the greater metro Washington, DC, area. We have ~85 residents with ~65 adults and 20 children. Those numbers vary but rarely far from that range. We have forty-three attached condominium units that include flats, duplexes, and townhouses, plus the common house. Units range from one bedroom with a den to four bedrooms with a full basement. The common house includ es two guest rooms, children's room, game room, office, living room, laundry room, exercise room, dining room, and workshop. 5
Cornerstone Village CoHousing, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Located in a diverse neighborhood with easy access to public transportation, stores and open spaces such as the adjacent Linear Park, for both pedestrian and biking use. The community design maximizes open shared space, such as gardens and play space. A central common house offers room for shared dinners and other community activities. We also have two dens, an exercise room, arts & crafts room, and a kids' playroom .
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Mosaic Commons, Berlin, Massachusetts
Mosaic Commons includes 34 townhouses and flats, ranging from 1 to 4 bedrooms in size. Our guiding principles include a commitment to creating a supportive, diverse community; affordability; and environmental consciousness. Our homes are super insulated, meet many LEED standards, and are built with as many low-toxicity sustainable materials as possible. We’re committed to open, green space. Almost 30 acres of our land is preserved as conservation land. Clustered duplex and triplex buildings leave most of our remaining 35 acres as open space.
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EcoVillage, Ithaca, New York
Ithaca, New York Located in the beautiful region of New York's Finger Lakes, Ecovillage at Ithaca has two thriving cohousing communities with plans for a third underway. The village features cooperative dining in the common houses, a swimming pond, neighborhood community gardens, hiking trails, p lay spaces, and sixty passive-solar, energy efficient homes in a multigenerational village-scale community.The pedestrian village is surrounded by woods and open meadows. We have a 10-acre organic fruit and vegetable farm on site that provides produce for residents as well as the wider Ithaca area, and a 5-acre CSA berry farm that has delicious organic u-pick berries. Our goal is to build a replicable model of a cooperative, environmentally sensitive village that can also serve as a demonstration site for teaching principles of sustainability and permaculture.
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We will document our experience via Facebook, Instagram & Still Photography and will come back to HMC with an informative and interesting presentation for the entire staff.
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