CoHousing Is Sustainable

Dear Editor:

CoHousing development—is it sustainable? Kathleen O’Brien thought maybe; I think yes. Yes because CoHousing offers another scale of social organization—an intermediate scale between the single family and the town or municipality—thereby expanding the palette of technologies that can be applied. It does this simply by being a successful collaborative micro-community.

Some technologies, such as photovoltaics and solar water heating, work well for single-family units. Others require the large scale of a good-size town—public transportation and inorganic material recycling, for example. But many of the systems and technologies of long-term sustainability work best on the intermediate scale of a CoHousing community. These technologies include central district heating/cooling (including thermal storage), composting, and car sharing, among others. A CoHousing community is an organized, coherent social entity that can construct and operate technologies at this scale all by itself. That’s the difference. The diagram below illustrates this idea.

CoHousing creates new opportunities for recycling and food production. For some years now in many parts of the country, “farm communities” have been forming to produce their own food. These small organic, bio-intensive farms are usually referred to as “community supported agriculture,” but they could as well be called “co-farming.” There is a natural marriage awaiting these type of farms and CoHousing communities. CoHousing communities, by clustering their units, can create sufficient useful arable land for a small farming venture. The farmers will have a secure long-term tenure over the land such that they can confidently invest the years needed to build up the soil. The organic wastes of the CoHousing community are easily returned to the land and made use of. The CoHousing community, as both producer and consumer, is close-by both to provide the casual labor at critical times during the season, and as the guaranteed market for much of the produce. The community kitchen is a convenient and lively setting for the processing the harvest to store it through winter and spring. Again, the community scale facilitates the transformation of a string of individual backyard avocations into a community enterprise.

Another unique opportunity for CoHousing to further sustainability is in the creation of large sunspaces and—eventually—bioshelters. In Europe, CoHousing communities, which began as courtyard arrangements focusing on a common house, have today evolved to become integrated structures. Attached houses face each other across glazed “streets” or galleries that act as spinal, sun-tempered common spaces providing sheltered access to shared facilities as well as play spaces for children and year-round community living rooms. It is a small step to imagining, and then adjusting, these spaces at least in part to work as community bioshelters in which food could be produced, plants started in support of seasonal agriculture, and biological waste treatment processes accommodated year-round.

In the next few years any group will have achieved a major success just by getting a CoHousing community built. However, we can think about what might be in 10 or 20 years—when we are older and have different needs. We can keep options open by not building on arable land, by orienting buildings and by sloping roofs appropriately; by knowing where future cisterns or ponds will be located and how roof water will be gotten to them; by thinking about how access to potentially productive land might be maintained so that a future food raising enterprise can be conducted.

Our high-energy society invented suburbia as its instrument of consumption, and single-family houses are the building blocks of suburbia. The goal of creating an environmentally sustainable society requires that suburbia be reinvented as an instrument of production. CoHousing, and other such living arrangements that connect people are fundamental to achieving such a transformation to a self-reliant, sustainable, productive—the words are interchangeable—society.

Bruce Coldham, Architect (Editor of

Northeast CoHousing Quarterly)