A Brief History of the Cohousing Movement

For 99 percent of our species history, the majority of humans lived in locally-based, humanly-scaled bands, tribes, or villages. Community is our natural social habitat! But with modern “progress,” it has been withering.

Oneida Community

Recognition of that has led to experiments with utopian communities (like Oneida during the nineteenth century), cooperative apartment housing (starting in New York during the 1920s), countercultural communes (1960s) or, more recently, cohousing.

Muir Commons

The latter started in Denmark about fifty years ago. American architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett were inspired by what they saw when they visited that country during the 1980s. They introduced the concept to Americans with the 1988 publication of their book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. Then they coordinated the development of the first cohousing community in the US in 1991: Muir Commons in Davis, California. Within a decade there were about twenty completed communities and the Cohousing Association of the United States was established.

Currently, nationwide, there are over 200 communities that are fully populated or are in development. Endeavoring to expand the movement, Kathryn McCamant recently launched the “500 Communities” program. Her intention is to train more and more consultants who can motivate and guide the creation of cohousing projects around the country.

Katie says: “Imagine if every state offered a thriving variety of inter-generational and senior cohousing living options.”