Green Tour: Sabin Green

It's cohousing, not a commune. Cohousing, an idea imported from Denmark by Katie McCamant, combines "the advantages of private homes with the benefits of more sustainable living, including shared common facilities and ongoing connections with neighbors."

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And they can be green, too: Sabin Green in Portland, Oregon, shows that cohousing can work especially well at a smaller scale -- in this case, it's four homes on what was formerly two small residential lots. This week, we're focusing on what's outside: lots of space to interact with neighbors, attractive paths lined with productive gardens, and green, intelligent touches that aren't immediately obvious to the eye... and if you live in cohousing, or if you'd like to, we'd love to hear from you.

Comments (2)

Welcome to Cohousing! I'm delighted that you found Sabin Green on the Green Home tour... I was there during City Repair's Village Building Convergence last May and got to work on the tea house (very exciting and educational when a small cob wall collapses in front of you, prompting a remix to get a consistency that is wet enough to hold together but thick enough to stand up long enough to dry) and meet some of the folks there. I got to meet with regional organizer Eli Spevak, the developer of both that property and nearby Peninsula Creek Commons, where he lives, and the new under-development close-to-downtown Daybreak Cohousing.

As you've identified, this is one of the smaller cohousing neighborhoods around; of the nearly-100 around the U.S., most are new-build, not retrofitted like this one, and have 20-30 units on average; you get increased levels of efficiency and reduced cost-per-unit for shared amenities like common houses in larger communities. The latest growth area for the movement is "senior cohousing", where people design their own retirement neighborhoods to create alternatives to isolation or institutionalization, preserving independence by building interdependence.

You can find more comprehensive lists of cohousing neighborhoods at http://directory.cohousing.org/ and of the intentional communities movement more broadly at http://directory.ic.org/ (full disclosure: I'm an unpaid board member of Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), which operates and publishes the directory in print and online form.

I've helped develop one and lived in two different cohousing neighborhoods and visited about 75 of 'em across the country over the past decade, some as much as 15 years old, and found (with published research confirming) that they not only start green (the sticks-and-bricks of green building) but get greener over time, as the member-developer-resident-managers learn from each other and support each other in carsharing, composting, and generally living more simply with less travel and waste.

I'll be passing through Portland next month en route to a communities/cohousing gathering with Finding Community book author Diana Leafe Christian in Seattle, and would be happy to stop in and chat if any of your team is based there, or help introduce you to activists and professionals building the movement via email/call if not.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach
Planning for Sustainable Communities
Berkeley (CA) Cohousing

P.S. I have to close with the obligatory Californian-to-Oregonian reassurance: don't worry, I promise not to move there.

P.P.S. Katie McCamant's co-author, business partner, and husband, Charles Durrett, is usually co-credited with bringing cohousing to the U.S.