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What is Cohousing?

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods.

A Cohousing Community Sampler     The drawings on this page are from McCamant and Durrett's most recent cohousing development in Nevada City, CA.

Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community. The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space. Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house.

Old-fashioned sense
of neighborhood

Cohousing communities are usually designed as attached or single-family homes along one or more pedestrian streets or clustered around a courtyard. They range in size from 7 to 67 residences, the majority of them housing 20 to 40 households.

Regardless of the size of the community, there are many opportunities for casual meetings between neighbors, as well as for deliberate gatherings such as celebrations, clubs and business meetings.

The common house is the social center of a community, with a large dining room and kitchen, lounge, recreational facilities, children’s spaces, and frequently a guest room, workshop and laundry room. Communities usually serve optional group meals in the common house at least two or three times a week.

The need for community members to take care of common property builds a sense of working together, trust and support. Because neighbors hold a commitment to a relationship with one another, almost all cohousing communities use consensus as the basis for group decision-making.

Source: "What is Cohousing," Cohousing Association of America (see below)

The cohousing idea originated in Denmark, and was promoted in the U.S. by American architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, a husband and wife team from Berkeley, after they spent 1980-81 studying in Copenhagen. In 1988, McCamant and Durrett published Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, the book that became the inspiration for the American cohousing movement. Cohousing in America has flourished under the energetic leadership of Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett, Jim Leach, Giles Blunden and others. Worldwide, there are now hundreds of cohousing communities, expanding from Denmark into the U.S, Canada, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere.

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