Cohousing will be part of drive-in project

BOULDER – Veteran developer Jim Leach, 59, has spent his career focused on how to do housing and communities better because, he says, he recognized for a long time that the way Americans build residences was neither attractive nor conducive to community building.

That said, he adds, most suburban residences become tolerable because trees eventually cover up the ugly houses.

Cohousing is different.

Boulder-based Wonderland Hill Development Co., of which Leach is president, has been cited by The New York Times as the most experienced cohousing developer in the United States. Cohousing was a natural for Wonderland, which in 1969 developed one of Colorado’s first master-planned communities.

The residential model of cohousing is characterized by resident participation in the creation of the neighborhood, design that encourages community interaction and extensive common facilities.

The concept was introduced in the United States in 1988 with the publication of “Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves,” which was written by a husband-and-wife team that spent more than a year documenting cohousing communities in Denmark, from where the idea comes. Densities vary, but in general the choice is to leave as much land as possible as open space.

“It’s a revolt against suburban sprawl,” Leach says.

Mass production failure

As much as Leach loves to talk about the wonders of cohousing, he also loves to talk about the failures of mass-produced housing, or tract housing, which originated in Levittown, N.Y., after World War II.

“It was every American’s dream to have their own little castle,” Leach explains of the era. “It was a great dream until you started sprawling it all over the map.”

Leach loves to talk about the failures of tract housing, the history of tract housing and what the average American wants in housing period, which he sees as a problem.

“The average American thinks of housing as a tract subdivision,” he says.

Few know that there’s a choice – cohousing itself accounts for less than 1 percent of the market.

Mainstreaming

The challenge for the developer is not how progressive you are, Leach says, but how well you take the progressive into the mainstream.

And Leach has done well in that regard, says Caroline Hoyt, who, with Tom Hoyt, owns McStain Enterprises Inc., known for taking the progressive mainstream. The Hoyts and Leach attended architecture school at the University of Colorado in the early ’60s, when the program was in Boulder.

Hoyt says Leach has done remarkable work evidenced by the fact that enough cohousing communities have been built to achieve “critical mass.”

“Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to pioneer it, and he’s the guy,” Hoyt says. “It’s overwhelming to me what he does.”

Limiting sprawl

Zev Paiss, whose background is in environmental planning, lives in the Nomad Cohousing development in North Boulder — an 11-unit condominium complex on one acre on Quince Avenue east of the Nomad Playhouse.

Residences there run from 675 square feet with basement to 2,800-square-feet, four-bedroom units as the project was designed to accommodate low- to moderate-incomes as well as offering market-priced units. In November 1997 residents were able to move in.

Paiss works with other cohousing groups nationwide, talking about the effect of this kind of development on local government — and neighbors — in terms of planning strategy. Overall it’s very accepted, he says, because it offers a solution to governments that want to limit sprawl but that don’t want to limit growth.

The biggest challenge in Boulder was finding land, he says. Residents were looking for as long as four years.

Streamlined approach

Wonderland has created a national contingent of cohousing experts to help reduce the associated financial risks and the cohousing development timeline, which has taken from four to eight years historically. It’s called “the streamlined approach” and meshes experts and residents from the onset of the development process.

In the streamlined process, the developer locates the land and determines the economic and political feasibility – often before putting the word out to potential residents. “That can only happen in parts of country where professionals understand the concept and have experience with it,” Paiss says.

Boulder does.

“The unique aspect to me of cohousing are the social relationships amongst the people who are brought together to help design the structures and the level of sharing that takes place in the living arrangement,” says Boulder Planning Director Peter Pollock.

“Obviously that works for some people. It doesn’t work for other people, but it’s a great alternative for people who are looking for that community.”

Pollock says he admires the people who put these communities together, the creativity that’s involved and the cohesion that people seek and are able to get through this housing product.

‘Unique balance’

Paiss says when people think about a more cooperative way of living, the only option they think of is a commune in which everything is shared. But cohousing balances privacy with the advantages of a community setting.

“That balance is unique, and I think (that’s) what attracts most people to this,” he says. “It is also looked at as a solution for urban in-fill, which is exactly what we did here at Nomad.”

Boulder will see at least one more cohousing development, too – on 25 acres at the Holiday Drive-In site, where the New Urbanist concept of mixed-use coupled with a pedestrian focus will be framed. That’s the planning trend cohousing proponents point to now, Paiss says. The core neighborhood in a larger planned development.

The drive-in site is expected to include 20 units while the entire site may reach 262 units. The cohousing will include a mix of incomes with subsidy from the Boulder Housing Authority.

David Barrett of Barrett Steele, which is responsible for the master plan of the drive-in site, explains that the cohousing component will be inclusive – not an island within a neighborhood, which is part of the danger with cohousing: It could become an enclave.

So it is important to weave it into the larger neighborhood, because the master planner doesn’t want distinct lines around any single part of the larger development.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen here,” Barrett says, “but that’s something that we’ve thought about.”

“I think it’s a commitment to community that you get with people that buy into cohousing,” he says of the concept. “They’re activists in that they create their own development. … (Cohousing is) a model that is a wonderful model, but nobody has a corner on all the good ideas. It’s one of the wonderful options that has developed.”

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