West Marin, Yes. Co-Housing, No.

It’s been almost exactly one year to the day that we bought our house in West Marin. (Our offer was auspiciously accepted on Friday the 13^th.) After that momentous event, a few things quickly became clear: we were going to stay put in the Bay Area, which felt like a big accomplishment, but we were not going to start a neighborhood farm, which felt like a bit of a bummer. While the latter idea still felt awfully unclear, there was an excitement in the plan that quite frankly was not the same as suddenly having a hefty mortgage payment and zero savings. 

But you will certainly not hear me complain. 

We moved to a semi-rural area where nature abounds and the schools are innovative and we ticked off many of the boxes on the list of what we wanted. Despite being situated on a somewhat small lot, the house has opportunities for garden projects, which I’ll write about as I go. But for now, the main reason that any of this seems relevant, is that the whole reason we ended up in West Marin is because of the permaculture course I took at RDI, and more specifically, a group housing project that I completed at the end of the program. We did not end up in that housing vision, but the project was about sustainable living in nearby Woodacre, so it seems worth describing here.

The project, named “Suburban Conversion,” was to convert three adjacent, single-family home lots into a total of six cohousing units that implement permaculture principles and practices. The idea was purposed by two neighbor/home owners who were enrolled in the course, and the thought of sharing resources and thinking outside of the over-priced housing box intrigued me, so I joined their group.

The premise was rather simple. If you and your neighbor both want to have chickens, why not combine your resources (of time and money) and have one shared coop instead of two right next to each other on opposite sides of the fence? Or maybe you have a dog and your neighbor wants one but can’t commit to daily walks and 100% of the vet bills: why not share yours? Same goes for your veggie plot and fruit trees, from which everyone always has extra yields. Same goes for ride sharing, for that matter. And dinner. And all the other responsibilities that keep us frantically trying to get through each week. And wouldn’t it be nice to garden alongside your permaculture-valuing neighbors and get more done as a group than you ever would individually? 

In the context of our class, this demonstrates the concept of social permaculture, which is an ecological approach to community that focuses on inter-connectivity and relationships, rather than seeing everything in isolation. The goal was to create a community of mixed ages and backgrounds that reduced our consumption of resources, valued the group as being stronger/wiser/more capable than the individual, and provided a model for how others could do this in their communities. 

It also played on one of my favorite permaculture principles, the edge effect. This is the concept that in the places where two ecosystems meet, right along that edge are the areas with the highest fertility, diversity, and productivity. There is a richness in the overlapping, and new life exists in that shared area that cannot otherwise thrive.

Here are the three lots we re-envisioned:

As you can see, the yards were mostly vacant, so we mapped all the existing structures and added in the gardens and other elements that would be brought in once the fences were torn down. It all looked something like this:

It's hard to see the detail here, but we added: solar panels to each of the homes, water catchment tanks, a pond with constructed wetland, a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, multiple vegetable gardens and worm bins, a medicinal herb garden, a food forest, a meditative spot near the adjacent creek, drought-tolerant ground cover, a greenhouse, and central gathering space outside. And a timeline for the stages in which this ambitious plan would be implemented.

Mapping in permaculture involves organizing your area into zones, which identify spaces of most use to least, zone 1 being the area closest to the house and moving out from there. So in zone 1 you would place the elements that require daily attention: your worm bins and favorite herbs/veggies, while in zone 5 you would have unmanaged space, like the meditative spot near the creek and the wildlife corridor that it includes. 

When thinking about zones in terms of social permaculture and shared living, each house has its own zone 1, but the farther away from the homes we mapped, collaborative decisions had to be made about what should go in zone 3, for example. A food forest? Chickens? Or should those stay closer to one of the houses since they need to be tended daily? Which house would that be? What is one family's zone 3, might be another's zone 2, but when the spaces are shared, we had to agree on what each zone meant for the space as a whole. So making the maps was a tiny glimpse into the complications and negotiations of what co-habitating might look like for this particular group.

But placing all of the design elements isn't just about zones and the whims of the site designers. It's important to work with nature not against it, which is where sectors come into play. These are the natural forces coming onto your site, like sun, water, wind, wildlife, and unfortunately fire. Ideally you will inhabit a space for a whole year before designing so that you can take into account how these shift with the seasons and plan accordingly. We had a fairly good sense of this, but I think nowadays in lieu of that year, you can download an app ;).

The idea was half fantasy half reality. While the two home owners could certainly start tearing down their fences and implementing ideas right away, there was also third house for sale next door. Granted, it was $1.2 million dollars (out of our price range, to say the least), but it was a quirky house, already awkwardly divided into three separate units with a large, shared living space, so it was not selling quickly. The idea was to make the three units two, and co-purchase the house with another family. 

If reading that sends shivers down your spine, well, you are not alone! Just about everyone that I pitched this idea to stared back at me with the same red flags waving in their eyes. And I get it. There was considerable financial and social risk involved. But people do it. 

Without going too far down this rabbit hole, I spoke to lawyers, realtors, lenders, county officials, and other co-housing experts to try and unravel how this would all actually work. I met with the founder of Temescal Creek Cohousing in Oakland (near where we lived at the time) to hear about how they were able to acquire multiple adjacent properties with legal protections and build their cohousing community. 

It was quite an eye opener. While I was on the hunt for logistical information, convinced there had to be a way to do this, what ended up being revealed to me was really much mushier, about what we value as a society, about privacy, and the idea of risk.

While I did find a small handful of realtors and lawyers with this specific set of knowledge, for many, it was simply too strange to imagine this type of shared lifestyle. Some people pictured failed communes and bare feet and dirty animals. Others thought this mixing of money and friends was a road paved straight to friendship hell. What I kept hearing was that everything should be kept separate in order to stay safe. There is strength in solidarity, not in numbers. Sharing over-complicates. The bank said it. Our realtor said it. Friends, family, and acquaintances said it. PermacultureNews summed up my quest with these poignant questions: “How do you practice ‘fair share’ living in an economic system that is based on accumulation and inequality? How do you change laws to make permaculture systems legal? How do you learn to collaborate?”

It seems this model of shared ownership is starting to gain some steam, but as of today, the legal structures are only barely there to support it. And don’t even get me started about residential zoning. Eventually, after many lengthy conversations, this social and economic dedication to isolated living started to depress me. I don’t want to over-idealize this cohousing scenario. That has been going on for decades—utopic living and the like—and in hindsight, I'm convinced things worked out they way they should. I knew the arrangement would be messy, and that it would come with huge challenges. But the rewards, to me, seemed pretty big, and people do manage to live together in cohousing around the world with great success. 

More than anything, I guess I was somewhat surprised by everyone’s adherence to a housing and lifestyle paradigm that is failing so many of us in the Bay Area right now. Not to mention the planet. A handful of people were certainly intrigued, but ultimately no one really came close to biting and the house eventually found its safe solo buyer. The two existing owners did implement some of the design. They tore down their shared fence and modified our map to accommodate the two properties instead of three.

And in the meantime, as a family we were sold on West Marin. Thankfully, it’s far enough away from San Francisco that the prices occasionally dip down into the lower/more “affordable” end of the housing market. Now it was time to move forward with what we had. And with the house came a new set of choices and opportunities to explore sustainable living. More to follow about those!