Clarence "Sparr" Risher

The communities we visited ranged in population from one person in the agricultural off-season of an intermittent community to over a hundred people in full-time urban coliving. Most of our stops were more cohousing than coliving; the ones with individual single family homes had as few as 8 to as many as 40 buildings, with one community planning construction of 140 units in a mix of detached homes, townhomes, and micro apartments. The largest community where everyone shared all the non-bedroom space had about 60 members in 8 houses in a larger city neighborhood.

In terms of age and stage, a couple of communities we visited were just plans and empty land, most had been in existence for 1-2 decades, and a few were approaching a century. There are major hurdles in the early years of building a new community, so seeing so many of them well beyond that was refreshing, although I understand survivor bias. My personal experience is mostly with communities in their 0th-3rd years with those challenges still ahead. One community lost their former land to lava and was starting over in a new state, with grand plans and solid prospects to skip some of the growing pains their second time around. Many had only vestiges of their original founding principles and plans, having morphed into something substantially different in the intervening decades. I would love to see a timeline comparing many different communities over their histories, but that would require far more research than I could do on this trip.

I was surprised at the number of communities using some form of sociocracy for internal decision making and governance. The depth and varieties there could be a book or two, so I won’t try to cover it all here. We found a couple of benevolent dictatorships, a few complex governance structures with multiple layers, and perhaps a dozen cohousing communities organized as traditional Home Owner or Condominium Associations with their typical membership and management structures. Community meetings, official or otherwise, ranged in frequency from never (sadly common) to daily, with participation from low (again, sadly common) to near total in more than a few cases. Most communities seemed to have a significant amount of unstated do-ocracy, with a lot of projects taking place simply because some residents were motivated to pursue them.

Community-run businesses were delightfully frequent, appearing about 1/3 of the time. We saw a community with a single business worked by every member that paid the majority of the expenses of the community. Some had large agricultural operations worked by most members, almost all who weren’t occupied tending to the other members. A couple of communities ran multiple local businesses in cities, staffed entirely by their resident members, paying them wages which they might then turn around and spend some of as their membership/rent costs. This was my first exposure to this concept in person rather than just reading about it, and I intend to borrow a lot of ideas for my future projects.

Recruiting and filtering ran a wider range of situations than I expected. I had no idea so many cohousing communities have no power to select new members / owners. When someone sells, they pick a buyer themselves, and the rest of the community is stuck with that new person. This was the case at about 1/3 of our stops and blew me away. A lot of those groups were suffering from dilution of their community goals, with increasingly many residents not participating in community organization or activities. Other communities had various processes, including years-long trial periods, tiered membership, right of first refusal on sales, and some more esoteric solutions. Each of those could be the subject of an article on its own. One stand-out community operates a large farm and welcomes new members by a vote, taking them through two or three layers of trial that can take years. At the end of that process, if someone is voted to the final level, they become a full stake shareholder in ownership of the property with no financial investment; the community organization owns the land and doesn’t take cash from members for shares.

Overall this trip greatly broadened my perspective on the possibilities and actualities of intentional communities. I feel far better equipped to discuss these topics now, and to make plans for my own future projects. I look forward to visiting some of these communities again, organizing more tours of more communities, and eventually doing some international version of this trip as well.