Imagine, for a moment, that the forced sense of isolation, loneliness, and stir-craziness of the past year didn’t happen. That, although you may still have to wear a mask to the grocery store, be careful around the elderly, and work from home, you could pop outside and share lunch with others. A playdate for the kids, in this idyllic world, is only a few feet away. Your friends are only one or two homes from you and, with a text, they could join you outside for a chat in five minutes. No need for perpetual Zoom hangouts and Thanksgiving alone in front of the TV.
The secret has been under our noses this whole time: co-housing. And at Emerson Commons, that’s exactly what the past year has looked like.
Emerson Commons, composed of 26 colorful, solar-paneled homes on a grassy plot in Crozet, is one of a handful of intentional living communities in the Charlottesville area. Residents of such communities share decision-making duties, common spaces, and meals. Although many people still refer to them as communes, most modern co-housing communities don’t reflect the free-loving, basket-weaving hippie stereotypes that defined the commune movement during the 1970s.
“A lot of times people hear co-housing and think ‘commune,’” says James Gammon, a resident of Emerson Commons. “I like to tell people that it’s legally a condo association.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic has driven people around the world indoors—increasing isolation and preventing family and friends from gathering together—interest in intentional living communities has increased. Weary of social distancing, it seems, many are longing for a deeper sense of connection with their neighbors.
Reflecting on the pandemic, Gammon tries to empathize with those, this author included, who are suffering from varying levels of cabin fever. “I’m trying to imagine what that would be like, if we lived in our old house,” he says. “I think it would have been a crazy lonely year.”
Common purpose
Co-housing has existed in the United States since at least the 1700s—think of the Christian Shakers, famous for their pacifism, celibacy, and artisanal furniture. Modern co-housing began in the 1940s with the establishment of the Inter-Community Exchange in Ohio, and co-housing and communes gained popularity, and sometimes notoriety, in the counterculture heyday of the 1960s—the modern organizations inherited the Shakers’ anti-war zeal, but passed on the celibacy part. Locally, Twin Oaks in Louisa County was established in 1967 and still follows the almost tribal shared labor model of those early days. (Twin Oaks declined to participate in this story, citing concerns surrounding coronavirus.)
But intentional living communities saw another, different sort of boom in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. According to the Foundation for Intentional Community, listings in the group’s directory doubled between 2010 and 2016. Some of Charlottesville’s more recent intentional communities were founded in that time, including Emerson Commons. Emerson Commons residents aren’t living in ’60s-style yurts or bead-spangled tents—families at Emerson rent or buy a house, sometimes for as much as $400,000, when they join.
Gammon joined Emerson in 2015 and moved into the community in 2019. Gammon and his wife, Rebecca, were drawn to the idea after experiencing a sense of alienation and a lack of community following the birth of their son.
“We were the first couple in our group of friends to have a kid,” Gammon says. “Oh gosh, that was an isolating year. You don’t go out or do things that your friends do anymore.”
Gammon’s wife stumbled across co-housing through a Facebook moms’ group. The young couple decided “that day,” they say, to visit Shadowlake Village, another co-housing community near Blacksburg. They were hooked.
“All the kids were having a Fourth of July parade for the adults and then our son crawled for the first time,” he says. “It seemed like a good omen or something. …It just instantly sounded like, ‘Why didn’t I know this was a thing for my whole life?’”
Five years later, they’re surrounded by friends and support, while many others have experienced a year of unprecedented isolation.
Emerson Commons residents have stayed closer than most of us. Children have playdates outside, and regular online game sessions occur—Among Us is a favorite. A few people have recently started a weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign. When one community member contracted COVID-19, neighbors pitched in to bring chicken soup and walk the neighbor’s dog. They’ve had to adapt to social distancing inside their community, especially because some work in health care, but Emerson has been an almost alternate pandemic world where complete isolation from friends and family isn’t necessary. And others are taking notice. The community has seen an uptick in inquiries from potential new members during the pandemic.
“It’s so easy to take for granted, once you live here,” Gammon says. “It’s hard to talk about the things that aren’t problems anymore.”
Communing with nature
Dave Redding, one of the founders of EcoVillage, was struck for the first time by the intentional-living philosophy while he and his wife were Peace Corps volunteers in Korea. Like Gammon, conventional housing didn’t appeal to Redding. Social interaction in your average neighborhood, he says, mostly involves watching people from your window.
“In traditional communities, you’re isolated. You may or may not know your neighbors,” Redding says. “We have to build community or else we’re just sitting in our houses.”
Redding, a former electrician, contractor, and world traveler, founded EcoVillage, an intentional community, in 2013—but the neighborhood as fully envisioned doesn’t exist yet. The current building plan has room for up to 38 houses and a common house on six-and-a-half acres in Albemarle County.
One of EcoVillage’s core aims is to lessen its environmental impact. Redding is working with UVA to design houses that produce net-zero waste and energy use. The property is designed to accommodate an ample amount of garden space, electric car charging, solar power, and sustainable stormwater management. Residents will share a small fleet of vehicles, but mostly get around on bicycles and an ELF, a head-turning hybrid of a tricycle and a car complete with solar panels, a covered cab, and a rechargeable battery (if you’re lucky, you might see Redding riding an ELF around town). And, although the community isn’t complete yet, residents have already been advocating for sustainability issues in the greater Charlottesville area. In October, EcoVillage co-created a petition advocating for more decisive language in the city’s Climate Action Plan.
Seven people, including Redding, currently live in EcoVillage, in the two houses on the property. But, even with a small number of people, he can feel the benefits of the co-housing community during the otherwise isolating experience of the pandemic. Members do Tai Chi classes and regularly eat lunch and dinner together outside.
Not everything is sunshine and roses, however. Financial donors, something EcoVillage needs to become a reality, have been few and far between during COVID-19. Final approval for building plans have been pushed back, and a set date has yet to be determined.
“I’m definitely looking forward to the end of COVID,” Redding says. Like Gammon, he expects interest in co-housing to increase even more after the pandemic subsides.
“We’re all feeling the strong effects of [the pandemic],” Redding says. “This is not the way that it was meant to be.”
Reaching out
Though all of these co-housers are building on their visions of a brighter future, J. Elliott Cisneros’ vision might be the most ambitious. Since 2018, he’s been working to get Araminta Village up and running. Araminta was Harriet Tubman’s given first name, which she changed as an adult for reasons that remain uncertain. Cisneros chose it to reflect his dream—a multiracial, queer-friendly, multifaith community in Charlottesville.
Cisneros and his two daughters briefly lived in an intentional living community in Colorado, but he was disconcerted by the lack of racial diversity—like many communes, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. While he was living there, Cisneros says, one Black family arrived and left after only a month.
Cisneros moved to Charlottesville in a camper van after the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Since 2006, he’s run a nonprofit called The Sum, which offers to “assess one’s unconscious orientation to power and race, religion, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity” through a written test and one-hour phone call, for $150. The Sum then offers a 45-hour Power of Difference Certification program to schools and businesses that might be concerned about their results. Cisneros has set up a Sum Study Center downtown, and also started planning Araminta Village.
The problem with attracting people of color to co-housing, says Crystal Byrd Farmer, a board member of The Sum and a member of the BIPOC council for the Foundation for Intentional Community, stems from co-housing’s beginning. Founded in the U.S. primarily by white people, co-housing has been exclusionary since its beginning. And it’s a hard problem to solve for already-established intentional communities. Farmer recognizes that people of color often try these communities and then leave.
“Some communities think, “Why don’t people of color come? We’re so nice!” Farmer says. “But it’s so much deeper than that.”
Models of ownership, the steep cost to enter into modern co-housing arrangements, formations for conflict resolution and consensus, and even language in these communities are founded and based on values that often disregard people of color. Farmer has consulted with intentional communities on how to welcome people of color, but says that those institutions are often unwilling to change the structure of their values. She says Twin Oaks, for example, attempted to create a cap on the number of white people that could be community members.
“I thought that was a bad idea, because they were only looking at admission and not at the deeper structure,” Farmer says. “When I talk to communities I often say, ‘If you started majority white you probably will stay that way.’”
The FIC’s BIPOC counsel works to form inclusive communities for people of color. Araminta has events like the weekly Community Circles that ask individuals to examine their underlying attitudes about difference and society.
Nevertheless, Farmer, like the folks at Emerson Commons and EcoVillage, is hopeful about the future of intentional communities. The FIC has definitely seen an increase in interest, she says, and they’ve started online events for those curious about intentional living.
“It totally makes sense to me, why people would be drawn to this,” Cisneros says. Araminta Village has a long road ahead and needs things like development planning, which has stalled during the pandemic. But Cisneros keeps asking questions, keeps imagining. “It all goes back to that question,” he says: “‘What is community?’”
