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Rethinking the Commune
By Barry Yeoman, March & April 2006
Across America bold pioneers are building a new kind of housing for the 21st century
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By the time he was in his mid-40s, Bob Gilby figured he had everything
pretty much worked out. An engineer with a copper-mining company, he had
purchased land situated at the edge of a lush green ridge that sloped sharply
from the desert toward Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains. He and his third
wife, Donna, had met with an architect to design their dream home, where the
couple would eventually spend a quiet old age among the tall mesquite. They
would watch the sunsets and the distant glow of the lights of Tucson from their
canyon perch.
It would be isolated, but that was okay. Seclusion came naturally to Bob,
who was born on a Michigan dairy farm. Over the years he had held a series of
solo jobs, including a stint as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service.
After his first marriage dissolved, he took refuge in a town 60 miles from the
nearest grocery store, "just simmering my brain on the back
burner."
Intentional communities vary as widely as the people who inhabit them.
Then, just after he married Donna in 1994, Bob got together with some
friends he'd met at a men's retreat weekend the previous year. He began
to see just how isolated he was making himself. "I realized that hiding
myself on a piece of property tucked away in the trees would deprive me of a
lot of the more fulfilling parts of being older," says the lanky
56-year-old. "I'd miss the grandfathering. The uncling. Being the male
elder in the tribal sense." He could only have these things, he
understood, if he was part of an extended family.
The Gilbys joined in discussions with friends who were contemplating a
better way: an intergenerational neighborhood where meals would be shared,
milestones celebrated by all, and hardships weathered together. The group began
meeting weekly to flesh out a vision for such a place. With a core of four
households fronting the money, they purchased 43 acres of desert dotted with
saguaro cactus and teddy bear cholla in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains.
Then they went to work, recruiting new residents, planning the community, and
building the houses. They fought a contentious zoning battle, worked to soothe
unhappy neighbors, and, in the process, incurred a lot of debt.
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Despite these hurdles, the first families moved into the first houses in
April of 2002; others soon followed. Eventually the population reached 60
people, ranging in age from infancy to 89 and spanning the ethnic spectrum,
including six American Indians and immigrants from Japan, Turkey, China, Great
Britain, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. To those who had worked on the project
for eight years, it seemed miraculous that their community had finally come
together. So, borrowing the Spanish word for "miracle," they called
their new home Milagro.
It's a sad irony that the generation of boomer Americans who popularized
the commune in the 1960s and '70s went on to live through the most
uncommunal period in the nation's history. As cornfields turned to exurbs
and job security dwindled, more people found themselves drifting far from their
childhood homes, never developing deep roots. "U.S. society has been on a
steady path of alienation and fragmentation," says Laird Schaub, executive
secretary of the Missouri-based Fellowship for Intentional Community.
"People are simultaneously more mobile and more isolated. If you ask the
average adult today if he or she has as much interaction with their neighbors
as they did when they were growing up, nine out of ten would say no."
The founders of Milagro were searching for a sense of community not generally available in this country.
Which explains why a growing number of people are starting to create their
own communities. According to trend watchers, the past decade has seen a
resurgence of interest in collective living—albeit of a more
sophisticated variety than the hippie communes of 40 years ago. "Aging
children of the '60s are coming around for another look at intentional
communities," says Diana Leafe Christian, author of
Creating a Life Together (New Society Publishers, 2003) and editor of
Communities magazine, "although this time, unlike in the '60s, they
want equity ownership, shared cooperative decision making, and clear
structure."
Intentional communities vary as widely as the people who inhabit them, from
rural land-trust properties to renovated hotel buildings. They're often
built around some commonality, such as a religious calling, political
perspective, or ecological imperative. At Ashland Vineyard, north of Richmond,
Virginia, six families live on 40 rural acres with a common commitment to
Quaker principles in conducting community business. In Silver Spring, Maryland,
an 1880s farmhouse called Brindledorf serves as an intentional community for
schoolteachers. An old tin-roofed house, a 100-year-old sharecropper's
shack, and an assortment of other homes once destined for demolition make up
the ecologically efficient Blue Heron Farm near Pittsboro, North Carolina. And
a group of longtime friends who decided to retire together share Cheesecake, an
efficient cluster of shared buildings on 19 acres of California's Mendocino
County.
There are communities of Christians, artists, lesbians, and gay men. In
Columbia, Missouri, the two-house collective called Terra Nova goes one step
further in the sharing department: three of its four members pool their outside
income into a common account. "For me it really has to do with pulling
together, feeling like a team," says 52-year-old Terra Nova cofounder Hoyt
DeVane. Whatever they share, almost all of these communities emphasize the
benefits of living in close proximity to one's friends. "I can't
imagine not living this way, surrounded by supportive people who care about
me," says Peggy O'Neill, 57, one of Ashland Vineyard's
founders.
Another community model is "cohousing," an idea imported from
Denmark in the late 1980s. Families in cohousing communities each have their
own private home with a full kitchen. But there's a separate common
building where neighbors can share evening meals, hold meetings, or just watch
movies together if they want. And the residents make all of their decisions,
from marketing to landscaping, collectively. Homes in a cohousing community
cost about the same as similar homes in the surrounding neighborhood. In
addition, each family helps pay for the common house and shared land. The
number of communities using the cohousing model is growing, with more than 80
already in existence across the United States and dozens more in the planning
stages. It's this model that the Gilbys and their friends used when they
started planning Milagro.
Cheesecake residents talked for years about retiring together until 1993, when their dream was realized.
Cradled by five mountain ranges, with broad views of the Tucson Valley,
Milagro has the feel of a desert hideaway, even though downtown is less than 10
miles away. The focus is strongly environmental. The community's homes are
built on nine of the 43 acres, designed to make the most of passive solar energy,
and connected by wheelchair-friendly sidewalks that meander in gentle S curves.
Cars are parked on the periphery. The clustering of buildings allows for most
of the land to remain a nature preserve.
Along the pathways, silvery-leafed brittlebushes sprout clusters of yellow
blossoms. Hummingbirds flock to the pink and orange penstemons. "We chose
these plants specifically to attract birds and butterflies," says Patricia
DeWitt, 69, who heads Milagro's landscape committee. In an area that
averages just 12 inches of rain per year, Milagro residents use a minimum
amount of drinkable water to grow flowers. The houses are constructed of
energy-efficient adobe block, topped with sloping metal roofs that, on many of
the houses, funnel rainwater into cisterns. "What really drew me to this
group was the concern for the earth," says Patricia, a retired
Realtor.
Building a community isn't easy. Locating affordable land, assessing
environmental risks, obtaining city permits, attracting families—any one
of these tasks can derail an effort. Architect Charles Durrett, a pioneer in
the U.S. cohousing movement and author of the book
Senior Cohousing (Ten Speed Press, 2005), estimates that only about a third
of the groups that start talking about creating a cohousing community actually
get to construction.
And those who do succeed ultimately find out that living together takes hard
work. "I've seen wives and husbands nearly get divorced over choosing
carpets," says architect Todd Lawson, whose book
The House to Ourselves (Taunton Press, 2004) explores innovative
housing options for older couples. "Can you imagine the complexity of six
or eight or more people coming together to make decisions about design?"
Add to this the fact that many communities require unanimous consent on key
decisions, which means hashing through issues until everyone feels
comfortable—and agrees. "It can be wearing," admits Terra
Nova's Hoyt DeVane. But it's worth it. "If done right, making
decisions with your neighbors actually helps to build community," says
Durrett. The proof: of the dozens of cohousing communities in the United States
and the world that have survived to construction, not a single one has
failed.
Two autumns ago Milagro's residents gathered in the common house to mark
a milestone for their community, the upcoming birth of the first infant. At a
special ceremony the future parents listened as their neighbors offered
blessings, advice, and stories about raising their own children. To show their
interconnectedness, the community members unfurled a long skein of red yarn,
which each person tied to his or her own wrist before passing the skein along.
Next, those in the circle cut the yarn into individual bracelets, which some
people wore until the material frayed and fell off naturally. "It became
for me a symbol of the cycle of life," resident Sara Kuropatkin says of
her bracelet. "I wore it all the time." The baby, a healthy girl, was
born January 30, 2005.
Then, three days later, another milestone. Sara's brother, Marcus
Cortez, died unexpectedly from complications of diabetes. He was smart,
stubborn, and only 58. His was the first death of a Milagro resident. Once
again, the neighbors flocked to the common house. "I think people expected
we were going to cry or talk about death," says Sara. Instead,
Cortez's mother regaled them with lively stories about her son's life.
To honor him, the community decorated a small mesquite tree with colorful
streamers and a clay mask, an angel sculpture, and candles honoring the Virgin
of Guadalupe. One day Sara's husband, Michael Kuropatkin, was walking home
from tending the tree. Along the way he passed a neighbor pushing a cart of
fresh laundry for the new baby and her parents. At that moment Michael and the
neighbor both realized they were truly part of a community pulling together to
honor death and new life.
For Milagro residents these connections are the most vital part of communal
living. Patricia DeWitt, the retired Realtor, explains it this way: "I
have a pilot's license. I've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I've
parachuted. Living here has been the hardest thing to do—to learn to get
along with people—and the most rewarding. If I was told I had to give up
all but one of these experiences, I'd choose to keep Milagro."
Barry Yeoman, a journalist based in Durham, North Carolina, wrote "Prisoners
of Pain" (September-October 2005).
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