Native plants and stormwater filtration

Solar parking on the outer edge of cohousing reduces pavement and makes for a car-free living space

Little common areas for relaxing or socializing

One play area reduces the need for multiple lawns

A happy cold frame gardener, extends the veggie growing season!

Large veggie garden

A compost for all

Sharing a large living space

Potlucks and communal meals abound

Contact information

Jon Luvas
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Project description 

Over 15 years ago seven families went in together and bought a decrepit orchard south of Bidwell Park.  The vision was to build a cooperative living situation somewhere between 1969 commune and today’s detached house.  The vision was to share resources, create an economy of time, minimize the impacts on the land, and respect individuality.  The process was long and took energy but what has resulted is beautiful…. And it is working!  The layout of the homes was designed to preserve the oak tree saplings that had begun to grow in the old orchard, so there is a nice winding about of homes and garden.  There are ~30 homes that face inward, towards each other and a drought tolerant native garden that acts as a filter for storm water, creates habitat, and provides a peaceful place to relax.  Parking for cars is limited to the outer edge, and has 1.5 spaces per home compared to the new development requirement of four off-street spaces.  Developing like this takes up less land than typical detached homes, reduces asphalt needed parking and cuts down the heat effect.  Each home is privately owned and includes a little buffer of land around it, but everything else is jointly owned and maintained.
Sharing resources lessens the need for each home to own things individually, which saves money, time, natural resources, and personal energy.  Houses in the cohousing development range from 950-1550sq ft with an average of ~1100sq ft., and are smaller than the average American home of 2200sq ft., because of these shared resources.  Some of the shared resources include a solar powered common house which has a saline pool, a large outdoor and indoor eating area, a huge kitchen, a wall of books, a goof off room (which the teenagers like to hang in), and a laundry facility.  There is also a woodshop, art studio, garden tool shed, and a bicycle shed.  Outside, they share a jungle gym, lawn area, vegetable garden, compost pile for kitchen scraps and yard waste, garbage, recycling, peaceful spaces to relax, 3 detention basins for infiltrating storm water. 

All these shared resources are maintained by an ‘economy of time’.  How this works is each person contributes 8 hours of maintaining the shared spaces a month.  A few people have the job of caring for the garden, while another cleans the pool, and another fixes up the woodshop.  When you want a change, jobs rotate.  What all this sharing amounts to is a lot less time and money struggling to keep up with all the things we want in life and actually have time enjoy them.  Not to mention the real sense of community that comes from sharing labor. 

And that is one of the best results of living here, a sense of community.  Ages in co-housing range from 0-70.  The kids grow up running in packs through the car-free ‘neighborhood’,  common meals are organized a couple times a week, bike pools to schools and carpools to events are common, teenagers baby sit little ones, everyone knows their neighbor, there are meetings twice a month where everybody comes together to make decisions, and bulletin boards exist for exchanging messages.  Of course with 30 houses full of people there will be disagreements and to address this there is a conflict resolution committee with a team of mediators.  This has a genius in itself, where most of us just up the height of our fence and wage war on our neighbor over the fallen tree, at cohousing they recognize that they have to come to agreements to live together – and so they do. 

This cohousing is the ‘small house movement’, the 'slow food movement’, ‘intentional community living’, the ‘sustainability movement’,  ‘perma-culture design’, and individual creativity, all mixed up to create a healthy happy Chico lifestyle.

Because starting a cohousing situation does take a lot of effort, there are now national companies that finance cohousing developments.  There is also rumored to be a cohousing element in the Meriam Park development in Chico.  You can e-mail Tanha at the above e-mail address for more info. or call New Urban Builders.