How to be not lonely? 'Cohousing' is an answer for some people

Residents of Daybreak Cohousing in Portland, Oregon, gather in their shared courtyard. It's one of about 200 cohousing communities in the country. Jay Fram for NPR hide caption

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Jay Fram for NPR

The meltdown started with a small thing — a bag of suckers. Rachel Damgen's four-year-old son wanted one. She said no.

It was a few years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, when it was not unusual for her to be home alone for an 11-hour stretch with her two young kids. She was struggling with the isolation. Small obstacles felt outsized.

"I wound up on the floor crying too," Damgen remembers. "Just holding both my kids, and feeling like, 'Man, this is impossible.'"

It was a turning point. With their extended families far away in other states, she and her husband, Chris Damgen, began asking themselves if there was any way to reconfigure their lives in order to optimize for more support and community.

The answer they found was cohousing.

Today, the Damgens live in a 30-unit planned community called Daybreak Cohousing in Portland, Oregon. The couple says the move has been a game changer, both for their own mental health and for that of the entire family.

"We would not have had a third child if we hadn't been here," says Rachel Damgen. Their daughter, Caroline, is now one year old. "If we hadn't been feeling so much better about how our lives were working — if we didn't know that we had the ability to holler for a neighbor's help and they would come."

There are close to 200 of these cohousing communities across the country – according to The Cohousing Association – designed to facilitate community through shared resources and common spaces. Members admit there are many tradeoffs to living in such close proximity to their neighbors including navigating a shared chore list and mutual financial arrangement. But many also say that they've found a way to conquer the loneliness and isolation that plagues so many Americans — especially today's parents.

Neighbors, not necessarily best friends

The ease with which this community engages was on display on a recent day, as neighbors, representing all generations, flowed in and out of the conversation and engaged with kids in the community's shared courtyard under a towering maple tree. Rachel Damgen's two older sons threw a football around with a neighbor while the adults chatted. Another neighbor strolled by and offered to let the kids pet her dog.

Pat Brennan-Arnopol and his daughter Alma, who is almost 2 years old, enjoy the shared playground in the courtyard at Daybreak Cohousing. Jay Fram for NPR hide caption

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Jay Fram for NPR

The residents here describe these relationships as a kind of third category — not family, not necessarily best friends.

"I think the closest comparison I can make is a college dorm," says Chris Damgen. "Only this time there's a wall between you, and we're all adulting, allegedly."

With parenting especially, Chris Damgen describes a nonjudgmental camaraderie that he doesn't feel in other shared spaces in U.S. culture. "There's anguish, there's frustration," he says, but fundamentally there's a feeling of struggling together. "That goes a long way to combating any feeling of loneliness."

Deana Camp, 73, terribly misses her husband who died, but she says she is not lonely. Jay Fram for NPR hide caption

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Jay Fram for NPR

Deana Camp, 73, has lived here for more than a decade. Camp lost her husband a few years ago and despite missing him "desperately," she says, she is not lonely. If she didn't live here, says Camp, she "wouldn't be the same person at all."

"Deana's one of the most social people I know," says Rachel Damgen.

"I'm pretty darn social," agrees Deana, laughing. "I bake cakes for almost every occasion."

An idea imported from Denmark

Cohousing has gained traction over the last few decades. Architect Katie McCamant — considered one of the founding members of the cohousing movement — describes importing the idea in the early 1980s from Cophenhagen after studying housing in Denmark. She was planning living arrangements for her own young family. "I just thought, 'Well, this makes perfect sense,'" says McCamant. When she returned to Berkeley, California, she began working on plans for designing such a community in the U.S.

After decades of living in cohousing and advocating for it, McCamant now runs a consulting company helping others design and construct cohousing communities. The barrier to entry to build a cohousing development can be high, as this kind of new construction is subject to the same market dynamics as any new building. "We're paying all the same costs as any housing developer," says McCamant. Finding builders to work on these unconventional housing projects can be difficult. Cohousing communities can take years to plan and execute. Some fail.

Governance requires labor

Among the most significant trade offs cohousing residents cite is a time commitment to governance. Typically communities use consensus decision-making, a process that some say can be onerous. Rachel Damgen and Deana Camp say there are too many committees to count. "Process, facilities, project management," Damgen ticks off her fingers. "Security, facilitation, steering." Residents at Daybreak Cohousing are expected to serve on at least two of these committees and also contribute to shared chores like cleaning common spaces and yard work. Cohousing duties can take hours every week.

Brenda Jacobs does garden maintenance at Daybreak Cohousing in Portland. The community requires residents to be on at least two committees. Jay Fram for NPR hide caption

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Jay Fram for NPR

Much like most condo associations, fees are typically collected every month in most cohousing communities —and decisions are made together about how to spend the shared funds on things like renovations or upgrades in common spaces. This process, too, says Chris Damgen, can be tedious. "You get to know them, their quirks, their mannerisms, their emotions," he says of his neighbors. "What makes them brilliant people and what makes them maybe less-than-brilliant people, in some cases."

For many, there are also sacrifices of space. The Damgen family of five lives in a two-bedroom apartment, roughly 900-square-feet. Her two older boys share a room; the baby sleeps in her parents' room. The family has no plans to move. "Now, where the baby goes, no idea," says Rachel Damgen, laughing, "a hammock has been suggested to me as an option."

Rachel Damgen says she does not question these tradeoffs. She recalls a recent day during which one of her children was sick and napping. She needed to pick up the other one. Waking a sleeping child who doesn't feel well and dragging him along to pick up another kid — that could be an ordeal. These kinds of small but daily emotional upheavals, she says, were exactly the kinds of things that were wearing her down in her previous living arrangement.

But on this day it took her five minutes to find someone to sit in her house for a few minutes while she ran out. Before cohousing she often had the problem of "needing to be in two places at one time."

It's one of many things she doesn't worry about much anymore.

"It's not uncommon for me to have those hit-you-in-the-heart moments," she says, "where my kiddos will be downstairs kicking a soccer ball around with a neighbor and I come outside to look and — you just gotta, like, almost pinch yourself."

Two residents of Daybreak Cohousing pause for a chat in the courtyard of the complex, which was built around a giant old silver maple tree. Jay Fram for NPR hide caption

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Jay Fram for NPR