CoLiving Canada aims to provide courses to promote seniors co-housing

Three individuals — Mark Powell, Kristopher Stevens and Duncan Goheen — have banded together as CoLiving Canada to promote co-housing as a response to the needs of an aging population. (They don’t yet have a website so I can’t give you a link, but you can email them at info@CoLivingCanada.com).

We (the folks at Wine on the Porch) decided to check out their first Toronto information session, yesterday afternoon. About 40 people turned out  to spend a couple hours discussing their interests in cohousing and aging.

Much of our time was spent in small groups with a series of discussion questions. Here’s what the group I was in had to say.

What are your hopes about aging?

• to be healthy and mobile
• to still have fun and laugh
• to lve near people I care about
• to be in a healthy environment
• to be among people wo know me well enough to finish my sentences for me
• to meet new people, go on cruises.

What are your fears about aging?

• being alone
• having increasing difficulty with physical challenges
• being institutionalized
• having difficulty finding the right people to share with

Are you having a good time?

• It gets harder as you get older, there’s more and more disconnection between people
• this [cohousing] involves a kind of business environment, bringing that kind of energy to it. There’s a question about whether we’re ready for that.
• yes!
• it would be great to know there were people you could just have a game of cards or go see a movie with, or be alone if you wanted without it causing comment

What gives meaning to your life?

• connectedness
• mindfulness of others’ needs
• laughter of children
• creative pursuits, community activities
• family, grandchildren
• being there for each other
• being part of a safe and supportive community

What is your emerging reality?

• working toward sharing resources, financially, socially, environmentally
• reducing environmental footprint
• accommodating to physical limitations, diminished capacity

How do we grow older successfully?

• by laughing [Editor’s note: The notes may not convey it, but our small group was doing rather a lot of this!]
• by following the example of those who’ve gone before and shown us how to age successfully
• by staying engaged
• [and there was some discussion, not fully resolved, on the role of dancing and karaoke nights. Its possible a Task Force may be needed. ]

How do we set ourselves up for success?

• open our minds to possibilities and different perspectives
• make it a priority. Invest in it
• give up the delusion of independence for the sake of greater interdependence

What does it look like?

• Like this! [a comment on our rollicking, diverse small group.]
• Interdependence
• A lot of movement, with many points of intersection

Who do we do it with?

• We need to find our group, people that share our values

An extra question, thrown in at the end, was about where our closest friends and family live. For most of us, the answer was “all over the place.” An implication is that, even though our loved ones love us, we can’t expect them to drop everything and take care of us as we age. We need a supportive community where we are.

For the people who make up CoLiving Canada, this free information session was what businesses call “lead generation.” They are in training with Charles Durett and company to become cohousing facilitators. They expect to begin offering paid, 10-week courses during which a group will actively work toward defining their needs for a cohousing community. (As of yesterday, they hadn’t yet set a price; the expectation was about $450.)

Experience tells them they will need about 100 people attending an information session to find 25 who will sign on for the 10-week course. And of those 25, about 14, on average, will proceed to form an actual cohousing community.

For the Wine on the Porch folks, yesterday’s information session represented a fresh opportunity to renew our convictions about why we are on this path, and an encouraging glimpse of how many others are eager to explore it. And for those we spoke with, it was an engaging way of facing some of the questions that we may, sometimes,  try to avoid.

How would you answer that set of questions? Whether cohousing is in your future or not, it’s worth spending some time considering your own response to the decisions you will face as you age.

Gather a few friends, have a glass of wine, talk it over… cheers!

 

Why one kitchen?

In a comment on the preceding blog post, Lisa asks how we came to agreement on the shared kitchen. She’s not the first. It’s a puzzlement and a stumbling block to many. I won’t “give up” my kitchen is something we’ve heard more than once.

And I was startled, in looking back through other posts, to realize that since we started this blog, it’s always been a given — we haven’t really tried to explain it. I guess it’s time to do that!

The shared kitchen goes back to our initial retreat in March of 2016. The four of us drove together to the Inn where we intended to spend the weekend making plans. Along the way, we were still discussing the only model that had occurred to us to that point: that we would all buy condo units within the same building and, when there were enough of us, jointly buy an extra condo to serve as a common facility.

This model had the benefit of simplicity and allowing for growth over time, but when we analysed the costs we felt it was likely prohibitive. Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the matter of cost that changed our minds. It was the fact that, over the course of our weekend together, we realized that’s not the kind of arrangement we want. We’re looking for something that more closely resembles the idea of “intentional community,” which is best served by closer contact.

In my research on existing, traditional cohousing communties (by which I mean those that have self-contained, independent dwellings plus common facilities) I have not yet found one that manages to have a meal together even once a week. (Update: I’ve since learned of a cohousing community in upstate New York where shared meals are common. They seem to be the exception that proves the rule.) A few get together every two weeks; the vast majority seem to eat together once a month or less. And we found ourselves thinking, “Why bother?” Why invest in those extra facilities if you’re only going to use them once a month?

And, conversely, if we each had our separate kitchens, we could easily imagine ourselves falling into the same pattern as all the others. Would you really be able to sustain the effort of cooking together as a group if you had the choice of just fixing something quick on your own? We imagined ourselves in our separate condos, having uprooted our lives for the sake of very little change. If all we want to do is get together once a month, we can do that now.

No, we want something more. As we see it, the dominant forms of elderly housing in North America these days tend toward a harsh choice between life in an institution, or a life of increasing social isolation.

We reject both choices, and a shared kitchen is integral to our view of a better alternative. The kitchen is often the very heart of the house. It’s where people gather — how often have you been at a party and suddenly noticed that everyone has gravitated to the kitchen?  It’s no accident that most religious  and cultural traditions have sacred rituals associated with eating together. It’s part of what binds us as human.

So for us, one kitchen symbolizes the kind of community we want. We’re not completely rigid about this: We will make additional facilities available, either in-suite or between two suites (TBD) so that, as one of us puts it, we can “make a cup of coffee and a piece of toast without going downstairs.”

But for us, the thought of sharing a kitchen, cooking together and, normally, sharing an evening meal together, is part of what we look forward to.  It’s not a sacrifice, it’s a benefit of community.

Setbacks

Well this is some tough stuff. When last I updated our status, we were eleven individuals representing a potential seven units — four couples and three singles.

One by one, we’ve lost our singles. One still had young adults not fully settled and wasn’t ready to give up her home.  One, I think, felt not quite enough affinity in terms of interests and lifestyles. One came to the reluctant realization that her capital resources weren’t sufficient. (Our planning to date has been based on self-financing with a per-unit capital buy-in of $600,000.)

So we’re down to four units, all couples, at the moment, and it puts us in something of a quandary. After the first individual bowed out, we made a decision that we would not re-open recruitment at that point. The difficulty is that each new person puts us back to square one in building relationships. We don’t want to spend months or years in serial dating and never get to the point of commitment.

On the other hand, we’re not sure that a four unit community is sustainable, or that the four of us have the financial capacity to achieve our goals on our own. The continuing steep climb in Toronto housing prices doesn’t help.

It is, as one of our members put it, “a big conversation.”

Fortunately we had already planned a weekend retreat for early June. Here’s hoping we can find a way forward.

Momentum builds

Let me just acknowledge there have been fewer posts recently as our attention has been focused more inward on building our group. We are currently 11 individuals representing a potential seven units. We meet about every three weeks to get to know each other better and continue to firm up our plans.

It’s fascinating to see how much sustained interest there is in what we’re doing. A couple months ago we did a 20-minute segment on Metro Morning just because we’re thinking about co-housing. We don’t have a location, a formal organization or any details, but the program’s producer still thought the conversation was interesting.

Yesterday, a feature on the front page of the Star’s Business section promoted a co-housing/co-ownership session organized by Lesli Gaynor, a Toronto real estate agent.

Overflow crowd for a co-housing/co-ownership session at CSI’s Bathurst Street location, February 8. Affordability was a major concern.

Co-ownership is in some ways a simpler concept than the co-op model we’re promoting, but it still has challenges. Many lawyers don’t understand the intricacies of a co-ownership agreement, and the financing can be challenging (how does a bank foreclose half a house if one of the co-owners defaults on the mortgage?).

Lesli has founded a company to help people learn more about co-housing, have ready access to legal and financial expertise, and make the purchase.

A large crowd turned up for an open session last night. We were among the panellists. Seeing the  relatively young audience, we thought the focus might be exclusively on affordability. It was of course a major concern, but we also found a lot of interest in our project and its goals of community and sustainability.

The cost of housing in Toronto is creating significant challenge and hardship for many people, especially younger people. There’s a small silver lining, perhaps, in what we saw last night. People are bringing energy and creativity to the overlap between housing and community.

Decisions, decisions

A group stands or falls on the quality of its decision-making. Some decisions are trivial; some appear trivial in the moment but loom large later on (or the reverse); some are so clearly fraught with consequence that a misstep here could doom the whole enterprise.

So if participation and collaboration are among the values shared by your group, you’re going to spend a lot of time and energy making decisions.

With that thought in mind, the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) recently took a look at systems to support decision making. After all, as they point out, it’s not always possible to gather everyone in the same place at the same time. And then you find

Should we admit the Death Star into the Galactic Federation? The witty and instructive demo from Consider.It, a decision-making support system.

yourselves asking: “Do we have enough people in attendance to make this decision? Can people weigh in by e-mail if they can’t be at the meeting? What if the person who came up with the proposal is absent?”

Most decision-support software has evolved as business tools, unsurprisingly, and may require some ‘translation’ to work for a co-housing group.  FIC looked at sociocracy, and Loomio, two powerful and worthy systems.

But my favourite, by far, not least for its surpassingly cool demo, is Consider.it, a tool that dares to ask the question: Should we admit the Death Star into the Galactic Federation? Each member of your group can add their pros and cons to the discussion, then rank their overall support or opposition to the idea.

“I don’t trust its manager, Darth Vader,” reads one of the cons. I think he has unresolved daddy issues.” But, counters a pro, “The Death Star and the Sith have limitless resources.”

The pros and cons are arranged in an intuitive visual that lets you easily explore who said what and engage in threaded conversations about any individual item.

I don’t think you’d necessarily want to use Consider.It (or any other formal tool) all the time. That would feel to me like too much energy going into process for most, relatively trivial decisions.

But when you’re facing a potentially world-ending question like whether to get in bed with the Death Star, you need all  the help you can get. Besides, did I mention it’s really cool?

More “epidemic of loneliness”

Another article on the “epidemic of loneliness,” this one focused on the U.K.  In Britain and the U.S., about a third of people over 65 live alone, increasing the risk of social isolation.

Blackpool, England, has developed The Silver Line Helpline to give seniors a place to call and be assured of a patient, friendly ear. It gets 1500 calls a day.

There’s an interesting comment from John T. Cacioppo, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, who calls loneliness “an aversive signal,” like thirst or hunger — in other words, a feeling of loneliness may be a useful warning sign, alerting you to a need for social interaction.

“Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger,” he said.

Why has cohousing been so slow to catch on?

Courtney E. Martin has lived in cohousing for three years and sees it as the solution to a whole host of problems, but it’s a solution that has problems of its own.

Martin is a believer in the benefits of cohousing. Although cohousing communities vary greatly — some are multi-generational, for example, while others focus on seniors; some are religiously inspired, others are secular — she notes:

most groups hold in common a belief that a high quality of life is achieved not through self-sufficiency, but through a village mentality.

So why hasn’t the movement had greater impact? In an article for the New York Times, Martin cites lack of awareness and financing as two factors limiting the spread of cohousing.

She’s right, of course, but I would argue that a third factor is far greater. It’s the flip side of the quote highlighted above. It’s the cultural assumption that independence or self-sufficiency are virtues of such enormous importance that the interdependence of “a village mentality” is something to be avoided, or perhaps even ashamed of.

Awareness and financial barriers can be overcome with a little persistence. Changing our mindset takes longer.

The Age of Loneliness

“What do we call this present age,” asked George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian (The age of loneliness is killing us, October 14, 2014). Looking at increasing trends toward social isolation, he suggests we are now entering the Age of Loneliness.

This is hugely destructive (for example, loneliness has the same impact on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day) because, Monbiot argues, “we were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.”

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time….

See The Great Affluence Fallacy for some thoughts on how to counter this trend.

 

The Great Affluence Fallacy

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times (The Great Affluence Fallacy, August 9, 2016), describes a centuries-old competition between commercial and communal society:

In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.

Reflecting on why “thousands of Europeans,” according to contemporary accounts, might have chosen to reject European ways for a more tribal lifestyle, Brooks speculates: “It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

Fast forward to today.

Brooks notes: “As we’ve gotten richer, we’ve used wealth to buy space: bigger homes, bigger yards, separate bedrooms, private cars, autonomous lifestyles. Each individual choice makes sense, but the overall atomizing trajectory sometimes seems to backfire. According to the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression by as much as eight times the rate as people in poor countries.

“There might be a Great Affluence Fallacy going on — we want privacy in individual instances, but often this makes life generally worse.” (See The Age of Loneliness for George Monbiot’s thoughts on this.)

Brooks finds hope in a new generation who seek stronger social ties.

Maybe we’re on the cusp of some great cracking. Instead of just paying lip service to community while living for autonomy, I get the sense a lot of people are actually about to make the break and immerse themselves in demanding local community movements.

Co-housing, for instance?

Thoughts about Community

Creating an intentional community is the primary motivation behind our co-housing project. Our understanding of community continues to evolve. Our ongoing conversation has been stimulated by some of the following thoughts.

Furthering the common good does not require that we forego self-interest, but rather that we are able to see our own interests linked to those of others. It requires a society that enables citizens to express the very human need to act on our deepest values as well as on our private interests.

Frances Moore Lappé, Rediscovering America’s Values

…Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, “Beware of the Dog.”

Jean Vanier, Community And Growth
[We stand by the ideas, even if we can no longer stand by the man. (In 2020 an investigation concluded Vanier had sexually abused a number of women during a more than thirty-year span.)–DT, July 2022]

There is no such thing at any stage of human development as life without relationships. In this later stage then, the only uncertainty is whether we will decide to live inside ourselves, alone with our past relationships, or trust that the life made glorious by others in the past can be made glorious again — by new meetings, new moments, new spirit.

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years