Certain crises are decades in the making. Housing is one of them. An epidemic of loneliness is another.
While the single family home remains a fixture of the American dream, some people are challenging that picture.
Cohousing is a style of neighborhood where residents have their own private homes but share common spaces and buildings.
Advocates of cohousing say their vision could help fight loneliness while building more housing on less land—which could be good news for the climate, too.
Spokane couple Mariah McKay and Jim Dawson started dreaming up a cohousing community in 2017. Haystack Heights is the fruit of that dream—quite literally, sometimes.
"Pumpkins, squash, cherry tomatoes," McKay says as she points to their communal garden.
In the back of the property, over an acre is filled with vegetable rows and fruit trees.
"We're incredibly spoiled with the fruits of our own labors," she says.
Dawson says that cohousing has a whole lot of goals: more housing, less environmental impact, more community, and less loneliness.
"How can we create real community?" he says. "How can we really counter the isolation and loneliness that is so pervasive in our culture right now?"
Does cohousing actually work?
"Four years into it, we really feel like all of the things we hoped it would be, it has become," Dawson says.
Nancy Musgrove joined Haystack during its planning stages seven years ago.
"I can't imagine myself living anyplace else, to be honest," she says. "I [knew]of no one here. My community of friends were all centered out of Seattle or the Puget Sound Basin. And I wasn't quite sure how to create that community in a new place, particularly at my age. I was in my 60s when I moved over here…And I thought, what a beautiful way to create a community, particularly for someone who had no ties or no roots in Spokane. So I said, sign me up."
The people who live in a cohousing development typically help design it, which makes each community look different depending on the residents’ wants. These residents really wanted gardening, hence all the veggies.
They were also focused on minimizing their collective environmental footprint.
"The average size of a home in Spokane is 2,500 square feet, and our average unit size is 1,000 square feet." Dawson says. "But, what we have instead is we have a 3,000 square foot common house, right, with two guest bedrooms, and a kids' play area, and a giant kitchen, and a lounge, with a pool table.
"We have two acres of gardens. We have an 800-square-foot wood shop. We have a music practice space. We have a meditation hut.
"We share the bigger, more expensive parts of a house that you wouldn't normally use very often, but we make them bigger and nicer, and then we just share them all together."
These are market rate condos, so this isn’t an affordable or subsidized housing project. There are ways, though, that cohousing can save residents money in the long run.
That’s because of how cohousing really differentiates itself from other developments: McKay calls it the software versus the hardware.
Cohousing residents agree to a very intentional and intense communal experience. They share shores and childcare. They share a gym and a KitchenAid mixer and washing machines, plus mountain bikes and skis in every size.
The option to borrow a neighbor’s car means residents have downsized from two vehicles to one–and started paying less for insurance, too.
"There was an anecdote at the co-housing conference we attended in Portland while we were under construction that you could save anywhere from 30 to 40 thousand dollars a year in co-housing," McKay says.
But no one sugar coats it: the type of interdependence that saves money isn’t always fun.
"It's not easy," Musgrove says. "It takes a lot of work, a lot of energy, and you have to be willing to let go of a lot of stuff."
People have forgotten how to live in community, Dawson says.
"[Or] a lot of times people are averse to it because they just have bad experiences with an HOA or they've had bad experiences being involved in a group because there aren't very many skillful people who know how to do that," he says.
Haystack has found one of its best teachers to be food.
The community hosts three to five communal meals a week. They’re not mandatory, but they’re only $5 per plate. That means 20 bucks gets a family of four a home-cooked meal – no prep, no clean up, just way more free time.
You can start to see how cohousing can impact every area of life. For McKay and Dawson, a village of support meant they could actually start a family.
"Co-housing really was inviting the fulfillment of our dream to actually start the family," McKay says. "So I think she has co-housing to thank for actually making it.”
So, is cohousing a great solution for everyone? Its founders say, maybe not.
"In co-housing, there's a bit of hall of mirrors…And if people haven't had enough of an exposure to, you know, social dynamics to withstand that kind of feedback…that can go south really fast," McKay says.
And again, these are market rate condos. Cohousing is often critiqued as an option only for people with higher incomes.
McKay and Dawson don’t dispute that. But they do say that now is the time to build cohousing communities, since development is often the most expensive part. Time might make neighborhoods like this more affordable in years to come.
Mostly, McKay hopes Haystack helps people get more creative about dreaming up out-of-the-box housing solutions.
"I wish there was more ways to have more of a proactive, like housing solutions conversation," she says. "What I do know, there is more people who want to live in co-housing than there is co-housing available to live in."
The garden is on a raised hill, and from the crest you can see the top of the common house.
"A fun little example of how, like, every little detail had to be voted and decided upon," says McKay as she points to the weather vane next to the solar panels on the common house roof.
"We had a vote on, like, was it going to be a chicken, a fish, or a flying pig? And obviously, the flying pig won with 65% of the vote," she says. "A lot of people doubted us along the way. Like, 'Oh, you're going to fizzle out.' 'Oh, you're going to start fighting with each other.' We'd share our enthusiasm and our dream, and people would be like, 'Oh yeah, when pigs fly.' The pig is flying, everybody."
