Community, Houses, and Church

There are a group of people in the Belfast area who are getting together a cohousing community. This is to be an eco-village, with everything done to reduce the carbon footprint. There will be a walkway to the town center, and the project will actually preserve some farmland in a key part of town where housing development is very likely in the near future. But I feel a little grumpy about it.

On reflection, I know why I'm grumpy. I grew up in a place that had a lot in common with what is now called co-housing. It was a suburban development of small houses on large, wooded lots. There was a community association that owned and managed the water system, the extra lots, and the community house, where there was a cooperative pre-school. There were lots of potluck suppers (Dutch suppers, they called them), at the community house, where people from the community got together to socialize. One of the extra lots was developed for tennis courts. At the winter holidays, there was a tradition of strolling through the neighborhood singing carols. There were paths, so you didn't have to go everywhere on roads. It was nice. As with many suburban developments, the first residents were mostly about the same age--people with kids. And in this case, they were all concerned to build a good community in which to raise the kids.

The first families got to work with the architect to design the homes and figure out the layout of the subdivision. Individual homes, common house, eating together, shared responsibility -- So far, it sounds a lot like co-housing, only in those days they were not so specifically concerned about eco-friendly living and I don't think they insisted on consensus, which is the co-housing standard.

It was nice. But then I think what happened was that it turned out some of the people were really interested in houses. Their incomes rose, and they went off to a nearby hillside to build larger, more elegant, homes, also on lots with trees, but without quite the complete apparatus of the common house, the community suppers, the extra lots, the paths -- the ideological underlay was softened. They did have a community association, and their way of sharing was to have a community swimming pool. (Everybody was older, so the preschool was not quite the draw it had been in the old location.)

A good thing about that new neighborhood: it was there that the Unitarian (no Unitarian Universalist yet) congregation got started. The old neighborhood, where my family had stayed, stressed community-building based on where we lived. Our grownups did reach out: they provided leadership for the Girl and Boy Scouts that inclued others beyond our enclave, they also provided leadership for the League of Women Voters, the Democratic party, and the Parent Teacher Associations first of the grade school, then of the high school. I think the parents of the new neighborhood did those things too, but for me, the main thing they accomplished was starting that Unitarian congregation. Old neighborhood people participated, but it was mainly a New Neighborhood thing. I went there. It was good for me. By not focusing so much on their own housing development as a definition of community, they drew a circle that included me, a kid from a place that tended to draw a circle that left them out.

Both ways are good and important. Whether it's a congregation or a housing development, a community provides a good base for feeling safe in the world. And a person who feels safe in the world can be much more effective in reaching out to help others in the wider world. My mother didn't approve of church. She said it tended to wall people off from the rest of the world. I found that the co-housing-like community I grew up in did that, too. Church worked better for me.

So I feel grumpy about the people who are going back to the housing development as a source of community. I should be saying, "go well, best wishes!" But I suspect they will be sitting on their porches reading the New York Times on Sunday mornings, missing out on the kind of community I have found most satisfying and telling themselves it doesn't matter. The thought makes me grumpy.

I think it does matter. But my mother was right for her, so maybe they are right for them. I'll just have to be in the business of drawing larger circles.